Star Quest

by Dean R. Koontz

  Star Quest

  Dean R. Koontz

  "In a universe that had been ravaged by a thousand years of interplanetary warfare between the star-shattering Romaghins and the equally voracious Setessins, there seemed now but one thing that might bring the destruction to an end. That would be the right catalyst in the hands of the right people. The right catalyst could well be the individualist rebel, Tohm… he who had once been a simple peasant and who had been forcibly changed into a fearfully armored instrument of mechanical warfare — the man-tank Jumbo Ten. But the right people? Could they possibly be the hated driftwood of biological warfare — those monsters of a cosmic no-man's land — the Muties?"

  Dean Koontz

  Star Quest

  PART ONE

  “THE QUEST”

  I

  Jumbo ten was pulling out of the ranks.

  “J-10, LOCK ON YOUR TIER: SWING TO ZERO STRESS. FALL IN, J-10!”

  Jumbo Ten swung farther out of the advancing line, whirled and looked to the rear. He had been in the second wave moving toward the battle-scarred plain below. The third was crushing the very stones as it roared down the hill, an irresistible force, ten thousand tons of alloyed steel careening madly on to meet with the immovable object of the enemy front.

  “J-10, ARE YOU DAMAGED? CHECK YOUR SYSTEMS AND MAKE REPORT SOONEST!”

  He had to get away. For the moment, they thought he was simply malfunctioning. Before the truth seeped through their thick skulls, he would have to act. At most, he had only seconds to reach some level area and cant back, bringing his rockets into proper position. Escape was essential, for he had suddenly realized he was not a machine.

  “J-10, REPORT!”

  The tumult below made the plain a bad bet. Laser cannon erupted like acid-stomached giants, belching forth corrosive froth that even the alloy hulls could not withstand for any appreciable length of time. Forty Jumbos were clashing already — twenty on each side — and a hundred and twenty would be lobbing shells and exchanging beams within minutes. A compressed gas bomb sloughed into the earth a thousand feet ahead, exploded, tilting the Jumbos of the third wave, toppling three onto their backs where they lay spinning tread like helpless turtles. That opened a gap in the ranks. If he could move through the breach before the Generals realized he was not just damaged, he could make the top of the ridge and cant on the level brink for a blast-off.

  He could feel the remote control fingers of the Generals probing his circuits to discover why he was not reporting.

  But he knew who he was! And what he wasn't. He wasn't a machine. He wasn't a Jumbo, one of those all-purpose, highly sophisticated weapons systems. He was a man. They had taken away his body and left him only his brain — but that was still a human brain, an individual.

  “RENEGADE! JUMBO TEN IS RENEGADE!” the probing officer shouted.

  So, the seconds had dwindled into nothingness. He shifted his huge bulk into high gear, his atomic-powered engines roaring with only a fraction of the power they could deliver. Five hundred tons of alloyed steal whined and choked, surging suddenly forward and up.

  “THIRD TIER CLOSE ON JUMBO TEN. CLOSE AND OBSTRUCT!”

  He swiveled his cannon about in a hundred and eighty degree arc, fanning the third tier with his heaviest beam. Fomp-fompa-fomp! went his launch tubes as he fired smoke grenades to cover his retreat. The rocks crumbled to dust beneath him, his tread grinding the earth, ripping and gouging at the hill as it plunged him onward. The smoke was now a great blanket over all.

  There was a movement to his left. Jumbo 34 came out of the fog. The red gem eyes of the radar swiveled about, locked on him and began glowing even brighter. A laser cannon came up. Jumbo Ten threw up a shield, struck out with an energy net and overheated J-34 until little wires melted inside the cannon, leaving it without a trigger mechanism. It would take J-34 some time to re-machine the needed parts from the twisted, useless ones and replace them. He rolled quickly on.

  At the top of the ridge, he came out of his own smoke cover, bucked over the lip, crashing onto flat ground. Below, the panorama of combat was impressive indeed. Giant organic brain directed fighting robos tore at each other with a vengeance. Instead of blood, there was molten metal and shattered transistors. The Setessins had attacked the Romaghin home planet, landing with their Jumbos in the Hellfire Desert. Over the last eighteen hours, they had pushed into the plains, but they would not go any farther. Already, the tide of battle was changing.

  But, he reminded himself, he didn't care any longer. He wasn't a fighting machine in the Great Cause of the Romaghin worlds. He was a man. A man from the village of the Giant Trees who had been shanghaied and deprived of his body. And of his love.

  He canted the huge machine with its hydraulic blasting legs, extended the glistening, polished tubes of the rockets, and shut down all other systems but the radar-negative shield that would protect him against Romaghin missiles when he reached the upper strata of the atmosphere.

  Three Jumbos lifted over the edge of the ridge, whirring, swung their head blocks one way, then the other, searching for him. There was a shrill whistle of recognition from one of them just as he flipped the rockets to full thrust and burned the hill away in takeoff.

  Past the missile danger zone, he deactivated the shield and slammed everything into the rockets. He wanted out fast. Very fast. His mind was suddenly overwhelmed with the events of the recent past and with his present position. He was a man without a body. The power of that swept at him like a great dark wave. Reluctantly, he allowed the wave to swallow him. He dreamed:

  Once upon a fateful time, there was a village beneath trees whose leaves were as large as a man, dull red, hiding clusters of luscious yellow fruits that were globular and semi-transparent, misty and sweet and cool. To the left of this village, the clump of trees ended at the edge of a broad grassland that stretched almost out of sight to the foothills of the fabulous purple mountains (which were, naturally, worshiped) where the forests took over. Beyond the mountains were more mountains. Then more forests. Then additional plains. It was a primitive world. But that is not to say an unhappy one. To the right of the village was a beach which dropped gently to a crystal blue ocean. That great mirror of water sank toward the horizon and sparkled every evening with the oranges and pinks, the greens and blues of the sunset.

  Once upon a fateful time, there were people living in this village. They ate of the fruit of the red-leafed tree and of the fishes of the ocean. Now and then, a great god-ship would come from the skies and leave them other and stranger foods. This ship had odd words painted on its side: Science League Ship No. 454/For The Preservation Of Primitive Cultures. That was the only intrusion by the outside world into this Eden, and it was accepted by the simple people of the village as a manifestation of the God of Heavens and nothing else. These people were dark with straight, black hair and eyes like ebony chips that glowed with an inner light Nature had given them. Their skins were bronze, their bodies perfect. The men were muscular and agile, the women gentle and graceful.

  Then came the screaming dragons from the sky, violating the halcyon world.

  Moaning, spitting flame…

  Scorching the plains, blackening the beaches, smashing the trees…

  And bringing the men, the pale, chubby, worm-complexioned men in the strange breeches and the ruffled, starched shirts with plumed helmets and jeweled chin straps.

  And guns…

  Flames…

  Pain…

  Roaring as of gods in death throes…

  And when the dragons, coughing, sped away, there was an empty village behind.

  They had taken and would use everyone. But worst of all, they had taken a certain two: Tohm, the most handsome man in the village, the boy-man with dreams at the tips of h
is fingers and flashing lights in the words that he spoke; and Tarnilee, his love, his only, his sweetest. Tarnilee of the soft form. Tarnilee of the eyes like the velvet of the night and the hair like spun darkness. Tarnilee with the body of pleasure and the soul of the earth, of the flowers, of the moons…

  And even worse than that, they took these two and separated them…

  He had not seen his Tarnilee since. He was “frozen” and taken to a sunless chamber where he waited until one morning they put him to sleep and he died. For all purposes, he had died, for he woke without memory of having ever lived. He woke as Jumbo Ten, that weird metal entity that fought for the Romaghin cause after being educated (in a manner that was really propagandizement) and imbued with a hatred for Setessins.

  But the Fates, those fickle ladies, will often change their minds and lend a hand to those they have so callously crushed before. His web of life had been spun by Clotho who immediately washed her hands of it and moved on to another loom. Lachesis, who measured the length of his strand, decided to fray it down slowly to whittle it to near nothingness. But now, just as Atropos was coming forth with her golden shears to snip it completely, Clotho had a change of heart. Perhaps, she was unemployed and restless that day, looking for something, anything to do. In any event, she stopped Atropos with a kind word and a cold stare, and began spinning again more thread, a tougher filament for the man named Tohm.

  In a giant machine that killed, a vial of narcotics began to run dry before its time…

  An imprisoned brain began to divest itself of drug claws that had latched firmly to it…

  Drip-dripity… dry…

  A slow reawakening…

  He lay quiet a moment after he regained consciousness, straining his aching mind to think. Tohm was his name, but Jumbo Ten was his form. That didn't matter. Jumbo Ten was a small city in itself, a huge, complex structure with micro-miniature components that allowed him to machine, create, build anything. Including a new body. Below decks, chemical tanks rested in a small room, their contents sloshing ever so slightly in the vacuum, waiting for the right seed to be planted before the various elements could come together to form a human body. Next to that room, intricate robo-surgeons were concealed in the walls, ready to transplant a human brain into the tank-grown corpse if the Jumbo ever crashed in enemy territory and the operator needed to escape. Even if the machine were immovable, a man with a sound body could do damage behind the enemy lines. Without further thought, he set the tanks to heating, planted the necessary catalyst, and notified the inhuman surgeons to prepare themselves. He would have a body again, even if it were not his own.

  Opening the exterior lens, he searched all portions of space, staring for minutes through each of the seven cameras mounted in the turret on top of the head block. Blackness was everywhere and through everything. The heart of God?

  He had absolutely no idea where he was. He, of course, had been given no stellar maps by the Generals, for this was not intended to be a space operation, merely a defense against invading Setessin forces. Now he was lost in the confusing starlanes, more alone than he had ever been in his lifetime, drifting aimlessly, thinking constantly about Tarnilee. They were to have undergone ritual joining in another month, after they had loved and proven the goodness of themselves to each other. He would find her, he vowed to himself. He would rescue her. Was she too the brain of a fighting machine? Had they hacked away her physical, beautiful, graceful self and stuffed her gray matter into an electronic monster?

  She would be confused, afraid. He remembered how, although laced with sedatives, he had been afraid as the Romaghins educated him prior to placing him in the robot. His primitive mind had been picked up and shaken violently by the facts that went against all he thought he knew, by the simple understanding that there were hundreds of worlds with billions of people throughout the galaxy. Tarnilee would be in need of comforting. As he slid through the slick emptiness, he decided he would most assuredly get his bearings and then his revenge. Somehow, in some way, he would find her and the men who had taken her.

  He was still brooding about it when the radar screen flashed and spat out a tiny Bleep! Searching the screen with an interior “eye,” he located the small, green dot. It was closing fast. It was better than five times his size. He armed all weapons and prepared himself for the shock of the killing. Although he had killed before, it was under the effects of drugs and beyond his understanding. This would be decidedly different. But, since the dragons had come from the sky to the village under the trees, no one had dealt him mercy, and he had decided to trade like for like.

  Winking on and off as if in warning, the green pickup grew larger and closer.

  Calmly, he fixed the laser cannon solidly on the center of the oncoming bulk, flicked the magnetic heating shields into readiness, and waited. He had seven armed missiles lying in his belly. He would wait one more minute until a few hundred miles of the gap between them had been closed. He wanted to be certain.

  “Ho there!” a voice snapped through the radio receiver in his guts.

  He started.

  “Ho there, I say! This is Floating Library No. 7. Do you wish any information, reading materials, or news?”

  He swallowed imaginary saliva and relaxed a bit. Lowering his defenses, he said, “Where am I?”

  “You don't know where you are?” the voice said unbelievingly.

  “No.”

  “Dear friend, you must come aboard for that information, star charts and all. We can converse more easily in person.”

  “I can't disembark. I'm a fighting machine — a brain encased in this hunk of metal.”

  “Oh dear,” the library said. Silence for a moment.

  “So could we talk by radio?”

  “Look,” the library said, “I have an empty stock room. I'll open the portal and let you in.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked, trying to imagine the dimensions of the library that could swallow a Jumbo so easily. He was slightly astounded.

  “You are a runaway?”

  “I—”

  “Well, there are three radar blips approaching from your rear. Before they pick you up, I suggest you conceal yourself.”

  He swallowed again — as figuratively as the first time— and jetted gently to the giant cube that sparkled like polished brass. The portals swung open like the jaws of a massive alligator, revealing a warm, blue-lighted interior. He cut all engines and coasted in on the built-up thrust, breaking now and then with chemical retro-rockets. He cleared the sill and sides of the door easily. When all of J-10 was in and had grated noisily against the floor plates of the storage room, the mouth he had entered closed, gobbling up the last traces of him.

  “Romaghin, I see,” the library said.

  “Not by birth!”

  “Of course not. Oh goodness, no. They wouldn't use their own people for something like that. Tell me, how did you come to realize what you were — rather, who?”

  “I found, since my discovery, an empty vial and a useless system of narcotic baths. From the looks of it, my vial ran out ahead of schedule.”

  “I see. Oh, this is good. Very good!”

  “Yeah, well, I just want to find Tarnilee.”

  “Tarnilee?”

  Visions of sugary fantasies…

  “Yeah. My woman.”

  “Oh my. Very grand. Heroic quest and all. Marvelous, marvelous.”

  “So I thought you might tell me how to find her.”

  “Well, I wouldn't know about this particular young lady. But you could study up on Romaghin culture, learn something of the truth about them. I imagine you come from a primitive world, for that's how they get most of their Jumbo brains — to the consternation of the Science League. You'll need a great deal of educating to understand what might have happened to this Tarnilou-”

  “Tarnilee.”

  “Yes, Tarnilee. You'll need a great deal of educating, nonetheless, to understand what might have happened to her and what avenues of action might
be open to you. Read the books on Romaghin culture, the History of the the Century, volumes six through twelve, and the daily papes for the past month.”

  “Lead me to them.”

  “You'll be interested in the latest escapades of the Muties. Papes are full of it. Exciting stuff. They say the Fringe is actually beginning to wave negative under Mutie pressure and the shell molecule is rupturing in many cases, though total success has yet been denied them.”

  “What?” That had sounded like nothing so much as doubletalk, trickspeak, or some such ruse.

  The library was silent a moment. “Oh, I guess you wouldn't be interested. You wouldn't know about the Muties and all.”

  “Muties?”

  “We'll educate you. That's it. You'll learn all the wonders of this galaxy. I—” the giant cube said, slipping into a soft, confidential tone, “am secretly in favor of what the Muties are doing.”

  “Yeah, well, if I could find out about Tarni—”

  “REPORT!” a familiar voice snapped, shaking the hull.

  “Oh dear,” the library said. “I think we have guests outside.”

  II

  “What are they going to do?”

  “Leave this to me,” the library said. He thought it giggled.

  “YOU, FLOATING LIB SEVEN, REPORT!”

  “Yes, sirs,” the library said reverently. “Can I help you? Reading material, research, news?”

  “INFORMATION!”

  “Yes, sirs?”

  “WE WERE MONITORING A JUMBO, A RENEGADE FROM ROMAGHIN. HE DISAPPEARED FROM OUR SCOPES IN THIS AREA.”

  “Yes, sirs. Witnessed that, I did. Said to myself, said, now that looks like a bit of chicanery. Doesn't look good, I says.”

  “WHAT DIDN'T LOOK GOOD?”

  “A Setessin freighter scooped him up. Came in behind me, shielding itself from you gentlemen, and took him.”

  There was a moment of silence while the three Jumbos conferred among themselves and with the Generals back home. “WHICH WAY DID THIS FREIGHTER GO?” one of them asked at length.