by Ivan Cat
"Planet Paradise?"
"Correct again."
A few of Patton's glowbuds actually flared back to life.
Halifax was encouraged.
A comset buzzed. "Command for Halifax."
Frowning, Halifax touched his earpiece. "Go for Halifax."
"Colonel," an efficient voice said. "The large Feral force is moving again. Long range patrols four and six report skirmishes."
"Instruct them to fall back, as per orders. No direct engagement. Delaying tactics only."
"Yes sir, delaying tactics only. And sir...?"
"What is it?" Halifax asked impatiently.
"Sir, the Prime Consul is declaring Marshal Law and he requests your presence in the war room. He says he has formulated a plan to take the battle to the Ferals."
Halifax was troubled by Tesla's invocation of Marshal Law, but he was not surprised that the Prime Consul had a plan—although he did not at that moment see a necessity to take the conflict to the Ferals when the Ferals were bringing it to their doorstep very nicely all by themselves. "Thank you. Tell the Prime Consul I will attend as soon as possible."
"Yes, sir."
The comset went quiet.
Halifax refocused his attention on Patton. "This is the situation. We can't stay here forever. There's work to do. But I'm not leaving without you, so that means you've got to pull out of this."
"Never give up," Patton agreed, a little more energetically than before.
"That's more like it," Halifax said. "Cite six examples of commanders who achieved improbable victories through inspired use of tactics."
"Alexander at Issus ... Napoleon at Austerlitz... Kolomgombara at Joolloolabad..." Patton recited, searching, finding the right maps, and answering as more and more glowbuds reignited along his armor plate.
XXXIII
If a Pact has done an evil act,
And is afraid lest it become known,
Then there is still a portion of goodness
In that Pact's evil.
Such a Pact
May yet be Balanced,
And must be shown
Compassion.
But if a Pact
Has done a good deed,
And is eager that the deed
Be proclaimed to all the world.
Then this Pact must be treated
With harshest reprimand,
For only misfortune
Can flow from such unBalanced intent.
—the Judges of Gnosis
Karr retreated from the sticky roadblock and took the first side passage with an upward slope. Thus began a dizzying series of explorations and backtracking in the darkness. A normal human would have been lost after the first few switchbacks, but, calling on his fugueship experience, Karr was able to map the convoluted pathways in his head. Right, right, left. Left, right, left. Reverse if necessary and try a different track. So it went, always choosing upward, warmer tubes in favor of downward, cooler ones, occasionally splashing through trails of bitter, pungent embalming fluid. The entire time, a distant droning grew.
Kekitekitekitekitekitekitekitek....
Karr's path turned sharply upward. The droning became thunder. BRAKA-BRAKA-BRAKA-BRAKA. Ten paces above Karr, the tunnel ended. Erratic beams of vermilion swept into the passage from an open space beyond.
Karr crept up and looked out onto a bizarre sight.
Jenette's boots slipped off a hard object.
Her arms flailed, but she did not fall. Reaching down, she retrieved a machined item. In response to her fingers on its stock, a searing beam of light stabbed out from the object. Jenette's eyes clamped shut and she could see nothing for several minutes.
"Pulse-rifle," she whispered to herself. "Probably Skutch's."
It was comforting to hold the weapon in her hands, and to have a source of light. The only downside was that Jenette could not imagine a Guard abandoning it except under the most dire circumstances. Jenette remembered that she herself was lucky to be alive. Whatever had been following her had been on her heels when she passed Karr in the dark. After he fired something from the Gattler, there had been the terrible screeching and the unsettling, snipping-grinding noises, but his actions had bought her time. Jenette had fled into the darkness with the distinct impression that whatever was following her had turned back to feast upon its entrapped brethren.
When her eyes finally adjusted to the brilliant searchbeam, Jenette saw where pulse-rifle hits had cracked the tube walls around her. Cold, salty water was trickling in. Jenette wasn't surprised. She had already pieced the strange swaying motion of the passage together with what she knew of ring-island growth and concluded that she was in a passage surrounded by water; there was only so far down you could go before the solid portion of a floating island ended. Jenette advanced a few paces and stopped to pick up a medikit. It was Marsh's. It was covered in blood, red and copious, unlike the anemic fluid one would expect from a buzzer, no matter how big it might be. The red liquid instead resembled the blood of a large warm-blooded creature. A hollow feeling in her belly, Jenette clipped the kit to her belt and flashed the searchbeam at the floor of the passage.
Crimson smears trailed up the tunnel.
Jenette followed the bloody trail. The incessant rattling, like gravel on glass, increased in volume as Jenette climbed. Kekitekitekitekitekitekitek.... Jenette shut off the searchbeam as a flashing red opening appeared around a bend. The red pulsing was quite strong, shooting up from below and bleeding through the walls of the tunnel like light through fiber optics. What Jenette could see of herself was thrown into sharp silhouette. She crept over to the opening and looked down. The thrumming increased to a din.
The view made Jenette's skin crawl.
The opening looked down on a roughly spherical chamber about one hundred yards across. It was pockmarked by scattered tube entrances like the one she looked out of and lined with countless, toe-curling buzzers—and not tiny buzzers like the one which bit off Mok's finger, either, but giant albino mutants every inch as big as Arrou had described. Helmet-shaped and over three feet across, Jenette saw organs and fluid pumping under translucent carapaces. Segmented legs, mandibles, and blind, staring eyes protruded from bellies lined with hairy gills. Thousands of the creatures crowded the inner surfaces of the spherical chamber, clinging to vertical and inverted surfaces as easily as they sat upon the more upright surfaces.
In the center of the chamber, supported by root buttresses that splayed from the walls of the sphere, hung a massive machine. It was twenty yards long and consisted of two metal cones whose apexes joined in the middle like a huge hourglass. The object was not level, so one of the cones was tilted higher than the other. Jenette squinted. It was hard to see the machine because of a fluctuating forcefield, which began a few feet from its surface. Rays of the forcefield spread out and traveled down root webs, glowing in the walls like hot coals, or coalesced into beams of high-tech fire and swept across the open chamber onto the malignant buzzers, stimulating them to quiver and pound the roots and walls with their many moving mouthparts. Waves of motion rushed around the spherical chamber, producing a combined thunder that Jenette felt as much as heard.
BRAKA-BRAKA-BRAKA-BRAKA-BRAKA.
As the visual centers of Jenette's brain adjusted to the parting and unparting of the forcefield across the machine, she was able to discern more clearly what was on its surface. She clapped a hand to her mouth.
A male form lay inverted; its head gnawed open. It took Jenette a moment to recognize Corporal Toliver. Bronte hung from the lower half of the machine, eviscerated, glowbuds awfully dull. Dr. Bigelow faced out from the black-pearl metal, eyes bulging in terror, but not blinking. His corpulent, naked bulk quivered with uncontrollable neuro-venom tremors. Crash convulsed not far from Bigelow. A human, female hip—Jenette could not say if it was Liberty's or Dr. Marsh's—protruded from behind the upper cone of the reactor, lying as if on an autopsy table.
And that was not the worst of it.
Frightful sh
apes moved in the carnage, age-withered and hideous, clambering crab-like into view from the back side of the double-coned machine. Sickly flesh, too long in the subterranean chamber of horrors and mottled with scabs and rashes, hung loose from skeletal bodies. Dagger teeth, rotted and grown overly long from lack of use, jutted out of cracked lips. With a gasp of horror, Jenette recognized the creatures as Ferals—the most hideous Ferals she had ever seen. And even more disturbing than how they looked was what they wore: human-skin garments. Baby pink skin stretched over one creature's malnutrition-softened armor plate. Rich sienna skin wrapped around the emaciated arms and legs of another. Their hideous garments came in as many hues as humans came in. Human flesh masks were pulled over skeletal alien heads in a grotesque mockery of human form. So adorned, these vile Khafra swayed in time to the buzzer drumming.
BRAKA-BRAKA, BRAKA-BRAKA.
More buzzers entered the spherical cavity and marched through the sea of hammering carapaces. Most carried writhing white maggots the size of human infants. One swarm, however, lead by another human-skinned Khafra, bore Mok's body up a winding root to the large machine. Still another swarm carried Mok's head. The scuttling buzzers bore their prizes to the metal and affixed them there with ropy strands exuded from mandibles.
It was to Jenette's credit that at no point then or in the trying minutes that followed did she allow herself to buckle over and vomit.
Arrou pulled Grubb's body very, very slowly, his glowbuds imitating the glowing coal color of the spherical chamber, just in case the buzzers weren't as blind as they looked.
BRAKA-BRAKA-BRAKA-BRAKA.
Arrou was far below Jenette, near a path of embalming fluid that glistened from a tunnel opening above him all the way down the curving wall of the chamber and disappeared into another tube opening below the hourglass-shaped machine. Grubb lay at Arrou's feet, unconscious. The human was wounded, but not yet poisoned, so he did not twitch. The blue flood had disgorged the two of them in the dangerous space some time ago and ever since then Arrou had been creeping, dragging Grubb down toward the nearest tunnel exit.
It was tricky, tricky.
Arrou saw from the awful evidence on the large, hourglass-shaped thing—Arrou guessed it was a human machine of some kind—what would happen if he made a mistake. He wished he could rescue the others, too, but he did not know how to get past the horrible Ferals. They made Arrou sick just to look at them. They did terrible things to his friends. They did horrible things to themselves. They had gouged out their own eyes! Under the terrible human skin masks, Arrou saw scars slashed through vacant eye sockets. To be blind, forever away from light, forever trapped in darkness, and to have done it on purpose... Urrrrr! It was horrible to think about. Arrou tried not to look at them as he tugged Grubb toward safety.
Where was Jenette? Where was Karr?
Arrou's heart leapt when he spotted two human figures peeking in from separate tube hole entrances. On Arrou's left, about halfway up the sphere, was a male human dressed in white. Of course that was Pilot Karr. High and to Arrou's right was a thin female human with short, gray-blonde hair. That had to be Jenette. Arrou was overjoyed that Jenette lived and wanted to bound over to her, but that would get Grubb killed, and maybe himself, so he could not.
He had to be smart.
And he had to make the humans smart, too. The horrible Ferals could not see. The buzzers could not see either, or hear or feel very well with all their pounding, but Arrou knew that would not last forever. If Jenette or Karr moved when the buzzers were quiet, the buzzers would sense the vibrations and attack. That was why Arrou had not been noticed or captured; he knew the buzzers' weakness. Arrou had to warn Jenette and Karr. Deciding to take a risk, Arrou let his camouflage fade and flashed at Jenette.
<
Finally, Jenette looked Arrou's way.
<
Nothing happened immediately, then Arrou rejoiced to see a searchbeam flash in Jenette's hands. Too bad it was inadequate for communication. Jenette could not form any words with the single intensity, single color, beam. A one second flash, which was either the first part of the Khafra word concentrate or the end of the word droobleberry, blinked at Arrou.
Arrou stopped dragging Grubb as the buzzers went into one of their quiet, motionless phases. A buzzing null-field swept over Arrou and he had a hard time keeping still as its tingling numbness engulfed him. It made him want to urinate. Of course he could not; that would attract the buzzers' attention. Two seconds later the field was gone. The buzzers resumed twitching and drumming, but Arrou, confused, did not resume moving. What to do? What to do? How to communicate with Jenette? Then it hit him. <
Jenette blinked the searchbeam twice.
Arrou was so relieved that he just about fell over. <
Jenette blinked once.
<
Jenette blinked twice.
<
Above Arrou, the albino buzzer's finished sticking maggots and humans to the big machine. As they did, each subservient buzzer received a deep kiss from an ancient Feral female, who sat like a gargoyle atop the machine in her cloak of human skin. Mandibles and tongues swapped immune venom and the buzzers crabbed away with their reward.
Below the ancient female Arrou saw—and smelled, ugh!— maggots that had been on the reactor for a long time: striated sacks of nacreous tissue, swollen by venom and heat. It was a revolting sensory barrage, even to a Khafra like Arrou, who liked strong smells.
I'm food, Bigelow thought hazily. He was obviously placed on the warm metal, along with the gelatinous grubs, to ripen in the heat. Bigelow supposed, with his venom-impaired thought processes, that the disgusting Ferals would eat him at some point when he became appropriately tasty.
And I'm affixed to a null-fusion reactor. Groggy or not, Clarence Bigelow knew that. It was not just any null-fusion reactor either, but the New Ascension colony's primary null-fusion reactor. Its smaller cousin, which Bigelow worked on all the time back at the Enclave, was merely a backup reactor. This much larger, much more efficient and powerful null-fusion device had unfortunately been abandoned in the evacuation of Coffin Island. It seemed in good shape, Bigelow decided, considering it had not been serviced in two decades. Of course the null-field was sorely out of tune. He wondered numbly if the erratic vermilion pulsations and beams were responsible for the dead island's unexpected, mutated growth patterns. He decided that seemed probable and that he must argue the matter out with Dr. Marsh—if he lived long enough to do so.
The buzzer pounding stopped.
The ancient Feral female, barely more than a skeleton, had shuffled over to a service hatch on the reactor casing, opened it, and used her stained teeth to adjust something inside. The pulsing of the null-field changed slightly. Bigelow did not understand the purpose, but the buzzers somehow detected the change in the null-field and fell silent.
Another of the loathsome Ferals, whose human cloak was ragged and filthy, slunk down to Mok's body and decapitated head. The creature moved, as all the nasty Ferals did, in the gap between the reactor hull and the erratic null-field, which began about three feet out from the metal. To Bigelow's surprise, the creature spoke, in a sniveling voice
, and its words were human.
"Ruined," it mourned, looking at Mok. The ragged Feral crept down and fondled Bigelow's abundant flesh. "Good skin," it cooed, nipping the scientist's arm skin to test its resilience. Bigelow did not feel the pinch on his arm, nor did he feel any of the rest of his body; he was too pumped full of buzzer venom.
"Supple," said the ragged Feral. It reached out for another pinch. As its claws hovered over his eyes, Bigelow wondered if this maybe this wasn't the moment to take up deity worship and to pray very hard.
"No!" snarled the old female, her voice sounding like poison boiling in a vat. She was a strange sight. Her eyes did not flash; her glowbuds did not glow.
"This one's turn," whined the ragged Feral. "This one's skin."
"Wait for the Null. Null makes man bigger."
"Big enough now. This one must hide," the ragged Feral protested, fondling its tattered pink cloak.
The ancient female rattled her claws on the reactor. "Blaspheme! Do duty first! The Null gives all. The Null must be safe."
The ragged Feral scuttled back submissively. It twisted around to Crash's quivering form. It caressed Crash's snout with its arthritic digits. "Must hide, must hide," the fetid creature sniveled, and then abruptly jabbed one of Crash's eyes out with a talon. Crash convulsed. A dull moan rose from Crash's chest as the ragged Feral ate its disgusting prize.
"The Null is safe," the ragged Feral proclaimed.
Fortunately for Crash, injuries on the other side of his head made it look like his other eye was already missing. Bigelow, however, could see that the swollen, bruised flesh actually concealed an intact eye—not that he had any intention of enlightening the blind monsters to their mistake.
"The Null is safe, the Null is safe," they chanted.
The old female reached into the open service hatch and made another adjustment to the null-field. The rhythm of its pulsing changed. In response, the buzzers began to thrum in a fairly quiet pattern: kekitekitek, silence, kekitekitek, silence.