In the Courts of the Crimson Kings

by Stirling, S. M.

  “The towers?” he said.

  “They would provide a little moisture, but not enough, I think, for the observed activity, particularly of late. Even the Mountain does not reap as much water from the atmosphere as it once did. The flying predators would be a source of organics, but in the towers where they nest, not here. Something dwells here below. This may complicate our search and produce delay. Baid, relieve the watch on the Traveler. Jeremy, come; we should investigate.”

  She turned on her heel and led the way, which was perfectly polite in Martian terms, if a little imperious.

  She’s worried, he thought. Which means I should be worried. But I’m not. We’re so close!

  They went through the tunnels the crew of the Traveler had explored. The way was faintly lit by glow-globes—the original ones, cleaned out and given fresh cultures of algae and feeding sludge. But not very many. Granted, Martians see in the dark better than we do, but not that much better.

  “Why so little light?” Jeremy said.

  “Hibernation,” Teyud said.

  “Explicative-Interrogative?” Jeremy replied—actually an expressive sound that meant “expand on your last statement.” In Martian, even the equivalent of “huh?” was precise. You could communicate the same with an inclination of the shoulder and an earflick, but they weren’t face to face.

  “Carnivorous and parasitic organisms in hibernation will be stimulated to full activity by heat, light, the increased moisture brought by our exhalations, and the scent of our flesh,” she said succinctly without turning around. “It is unwise to give them more stimulation than strictly necessary.”

  Which was exactly what you wanted to hear when you were struggling through sand soft as talc, in a dimly lit warren of tunnels in a lost city in the Deep Beyond, with a blasting sandstorm raging above and possible pirates, assassins, and spies waiting for you. Most Martian land animals did hibernate, too—even the hominids could do it if they had to, by a sheer act of will, something that still had the biologists a bit puzzled. Hibernation was logical on a planet with winters longer and colder than anything Earth had ever seen.

  “Screw logic,” he muttered to himself in English, with his hand on his automatic.

  They climbed up a sand drift that half filled the tunnel, then down a spiral staircase that had been shoveled open and from there upward into a great chamber, circular and about a hundred yards across, with a floor covered in waist-high dunes; the walls were of the native ironstone bedrock for fifteen feet, and the smooth synthetic—or digested—stone above that. The roof was intact, a low, seamless dome of the poured-stone material reinforced with organic glass fiber. That had been the staple of Martian buildings since early in the Imperial era. It was deep in shadow; pools of light were scattered here and there where the crew had set up globes on portable stands.

  There was a faint odor, too. Nothing you could really call a smell; it was more of an absence of the utter lack of smells that most of the tunnels had.

  “This was a manufacturing facility,” Teyud said. “I think the repair shops for the warships were located here; possibly a hospital or budding-plant for engines.”

  Jeremy nodded, then gestured agreement. There were glassine pipes along the wall for distributing the noxious waste-sludge that engines ate. Places on the floor where the slow accumulation of sand had mixed with rust and odd eroded shapes marked the location of machinery.

  The leathery faced hybrid with the nose slits came up to them; he had an arrow on the string of his bow, and he was glaring around.

  “Too much,” he said, in gutturally accented Demotic. “Bugs in the sand. All dark here.”

  It took a moment for his remark to register with Jeremy; how could you have a food chain without light? The answer was straightforward; you had to have a rain of nutrients from someplace that did have light, the way life of the abyssal depths of Earth’s oceans survived. Something had to be bringing organic matter to this lifeless place, even if that only meant crapping on the floor.

  The thought seemed to strike Teyud, the noseless one, and Jeremy at the same time. Their heads snapped upward, and Teyud shouted:

  “Elevate the lights!”

  You did that by using a reflective collar. One of the crew rose and used the thin flexible length of mirror to throw a beam upward. At first Jeremy thought the ceiling was merely blotched. Then it began to move, rippling. Eyes blinked open, huge and crimson.

  “Feral engines!” the hybrid shouted, and the string of his bow went snap on his bracer as he shot upward and snatched for another arrow.

  A moment later the shout turned into a gargling scream. A tentacle lashed downward, growing thinner and thinner until it was like a wire loop, hooked around the man’s body and reeled up like a bungee cord recoiling. Only this one didn’t stop until it hit a mouth. The thing had no vocal cords, but the crunching noise the man made as he was smashed in past the circle of horn plates that surrounded the orifice was loud enough. So was the moment of silence that followed the scream’s sudden end.

  And underneath that, you could hear the endless waxy puckapuckapuckapucka as the beasts’ tentacles slapped their suckers on the polished stone and tore them loose while they moved; and the harsh panting as their lungs swelled like veined sacks on either side of their bodies.

  Jeremy threw himself backward onto the sand with his pistol up. “Christ, how many—there must be hundreds of them!” he shouted.

  “Forty-two,” Teyud answered calmly, and opened fire with the dart gun in her left hand, the sword ready in her right. “Doubtless they lair here and climb to the towers above to prey on the birds and their leavings.” In a ringing shout like a brass trumpet: “We must kill them all expeditiously!”

  Everyone started shooting, the sharp echoing brak-brak-brak of Jeremy’s automatic overriding the slower phffft of the dart pistols and rifles, the sharp upward stab of orange-white flame as he emptied the magazine, the smell of the cordite choking-strong in the cold dry air. A huge limp shape fell to the sand next to him with a thud he could feel along his whole body, ripped open and leaking blood that smelled like copper. Its tentacles raised a fog of dust as they thrashed the ground like whips of boiled leather.

  One struck him across the upper thighs with paralyzing force; Jeremy screamed, but forced himself to keep shooting with an effort of will that left his face gray and running with sweat. His eyes stung in the darkness, half blinded by the muzzle flashes, and he wasn’t sure if he hit anything. Then the slide locked back as the last cartridge flicked out, and he fumbled at his waist-belt for the spare magazine, ejected the spent one, fumbled a little again as he strove to click home the next. It finally snicked into place and he started shooting again.

  Another robed figure rose sprattling toward the ceiling, with a shriek that ended in that grisly crunch. Chewing and sucking sounds followed, and bits and pieces rained down. More of the beasts fell dead as the neurotoxin in the Martian dart guns struck; unfortunately one of them fell directly on top of a glow-globe, cutting the light in half. Now there was only one island of visibility in the middle of the great room, and all around it shadows where monsters walked.

  “They are coming down the walls!” a voice shouted.

  “Twenty remain,” Teyud said; somehow her voice cut cleanly through the brabble of shouts and screams. “To the light, but do not look closely at it. Back to back, stand!”

  The pain in his groin had subsided a bit; the tentacle hadn’t struck squarely—he’d be dead or puking and screaming if it had—and the adrenaline washed a bit of the agony out. Harder was standing up when one of those organic whips might crack down out of the darkness above and carry him toward the waiting maw.

  Christ, what a place for an archaeologist to end up! he thought, sweat sending raw pain through his chapped lips. And I asked for it! Goddamn Mars and Goddamn me, too!

  For an instant he felt a paralyzing longing for the sight of green grass and trees and the smell of barbecue cooking.

  It
didn’t stop him moving. The seven remaining Martians and Jeremy stood in a circle around the glow-globe, blades and guns pointing outward. Ripping and crushing sounds came from the night’s blackness as the bodies of the dead beasts were eaten by their pack mates. Hibernation didn’t shut down the metabolism completely, just immensely slowed it, and they were probably very hungry indeed. He could hear their wheezing breath, not much different from the engine that ran Traveler’s auxiliary. But louder, quite a bit louder.

  “Report the status of your ammunition,” Teyud said again, in that living-bell voice.

  They did; most were low, and he was nearly dry.

  “Blades in hand, then,” she said. “Be ready.”

  He tossed his pistol into his left hand and drew his sword. It would be more awkward for him than for the Martians; they were all fully ambidextrous from birth, and he’d only practiced at it. He heard Teyud mutter something under her breath:

  “This situation is of excessive difficulty. Exasperation, frustration, annoyance!”

  That gave him time for just one snort of incredulous laughter before the darkness came alive with waving tentacles, and behind them, scuttling forms the size of lions. Plate-sized crimson eyes shone like lamps, with pupils like S-shaped slits. A crash of shots, the automatic bucking in his hand and knocking a half-seen shape backward, a wild swipe that took the tip off a reaching limb and jarred him from wrist to shoulder. The muzzle flashes were like strobes of lightning, giving him a flicker of nightmare shapes and then plunging his dazzled eyes into a worse darkness.

  Outside the circle of light, feral engines reared, beating at the circle of humans like a storm of whips, the plates of their mouths clacking eagerly as the dust cloud cut visibility to arm’s length. The tentacle that struck the side of his head came out of nowhere. There was a flash of light inside his head, and then something was around his ankles, dragging him over the sand. Huge, unblinking eyes stared at him, growing larger and larger as the robe bunched up around his waist and he slid toward the snapping mouth.

  Teyud leapt, moving with a long-striding grace that made her blurring speed seem deliberate. The blade of her sword punched into one of the scarlet eyes, and the circle around his ankles tightened to just short of bone-crushing pressure and then relaxed. He kicked frantically at the twitching thing and staggered backward onto his feet, wheezing thanks, then collapsed again into a squat, gripping his sword convulsively and panting as the hunting engines had.

  Silence fell. The Martians danced in to stab at the nerve-ganglions of the dead or dying beasts, making sure on general principles. Teyud gazed around keenly, greenish blood dripping from the long blade of her sword, looking almost dark enough to be black in the dim, dust-ridden air. A smell like metal and acid filled the air.

  “Forty-one,” she said. “Furthermore—”

  The shhhsshsh of cloven air as the tentacle came down in a long looping swing was the only warning; Jeremy could feel his own throat tightening to shout, but the cry didn’t have time to begin. Teyud had already begun to leap backward and twist before it struck; the air went out of her lungs in a single agonized whoosh as it slammed across her stomach. Then she disappeared upward, the sword dropping from her hand as the thigh-thick length of muscle twisted around her torso, locking her right arm to her side.

  Jeremy acted before his conscious mind had recovered from the shock. He came up out of his crouch with all the power of his long legs and of well-trained muscles bred in a gravity three times this. The ceiling where the feral engine hung was thirty feet above his head. He was more than three-quarters of the way there when he passed Teyud and threw his left arm around the tentacle above the point where it gripped her. It felt like hugging a thigh-thick length of living cable wrapped in suede; the muscle surged with daunting power as it jerked them both toward the ceiling, and he barely had time to extend the blade in a Flying flèche, some remote fencer’s corner of his mind insisted.

  The great eyes were his target, or rather the patch of darkness between them. If the others had been the size of lions, this was a grizzly bear, and it stank with a hard dry scent that was still stunningly intense. The impact as they struck was like being thrown into a stone wall by a catapult with a large de-boned ox for padding. Pain shot up his arm at the slamming impact of the point in thick muscle and cartilage, and then a harder one as the point struck stone, forcing his fingers to open in reflex. The glowing eyes vanished, and suddenly he was falling with the dreamy slowness of low gravity.

  Even so he barely had time to get his feet beneath him before he landed again, staggering with an ooff as his feet sank ankle-deep in the soft sandy dust on the floor. His head craned upward. Two seconds later Teyud fell downward toward him; he snatched at her and caught her, with another ooff as her solid weight came into his arms—the equivalent of catching fifty pounds on Earth.

  Her arm had gone around his shoulder as they nearly collapsed to the ground. One of his stayed around her torso as she came to her feet again. She didn’t have the fragile, birdlike lightness of most Martians, instead feeling slim but supple-strong inside the curve of his arm. Their faces were close; before he was aware of what he intended, he brought their lips together.

  Teyud’s eyes went wide in surprise for an instant. Then she put a hand behind his head and pressed it firmly closer. Her tongue flicked at his lips—

  Whomp!

  They both sprang backward in reflex at the flash of motion and the heavy impact on the floor not a yard’s distance from him. Teyud landed crouching, her long curved dagger in her hand. Jeremy shot ten feet into the air, fell and hit the sand with his buttocks and one hand, bounded erect and staggered backward, his other hand clawing at the empty pistol holster at his belt.

  They both straightened, looking at the dead creature that lay twitching on the floor of the chamber with the hilt of Jeremy’s sword jammed between its eyes. Its remote ancestor had been a sea creature, a distant relation of ammonites and squid. This looked more like a naked bluish cuttlefish flanked by two purple-red-blue sacs, flaccid now that it wasn’t breathing, but with a body that came to a blunt point and then flared out into a single large sucker.

  “Excessive excitement,” Teyud said. “I feel a strong desire for uneventful days, even unto tedium.”

  “Amen!” Jeremy said, conscious of how his body wanted to shake and overcoming it with an effort of will.

  In Demotic he went on, “Agreement!” together with a posture that added emphatic mode, and a posture that said the same thing. That wasn’t good grammar, but it got across what he felt.

  They looked at each other for a long moment and began to laugh; Jeremy stopped because some of the surviving crew of the Traveler were wounded, and Teyud went forward to nudge the dead creature.

  “This is a breeder,” she said. “There are immature buds. At least one must have been abandoned while not bonded to a crankshaft. The others would have been its offspring. They are parthenogenic and enter the reproductive stage if fed high-quality protein. Very strong, and adaptable—the original form was a small, semisessile predator of caves and cliffs. Fortunately they are not very intelligent.”

  “Why not?” Jeremy said, unable to keep a slight edge of sarcasm out of his voice. “Everything else you people make seems to be.”

  Teyud frowned for a moment, then smiled slightly, more a droop of the eyelids than anything else. Her cool voice went on: “That was found to be counterproductive. There is little environmental stimulation in the existence of an engine with its tentacles bonded to a crankshaft.”

  “So?”

  “They would attempt to escape. Boredom causes engine failure.”

  Sally had given him the hairy eyeball and looked like she could barely stop herself from quoting regulations when Teyud matter-of-factly took him by the hand and led him to the captain’s cabin of the Traveler, under the prow. He’d given her the finger and a big shit-eating grin as he passed.

  Damn regulations, and damn Sally, too. She can go f
ind her own fun, he thought several hours later.

  He stretched contentedly, pulling one of the furs up around his neck and watching Teyud as she bent and twisted just an arm’s length away. It felt a little cold to be naked, now that things were cooling down in both senses of the word.

  Besides, I like Teyud. A lot.

  Teyud wasn’t bothered by the mid-fifties temperature of the room. She was still cleaning herself with handfuls of a soft, absorbent dust that collected liquid, and then something like a damp sponge; not, thank God, a living sponge, which he’d been afraid of before he used it himself. Things were evidently messier with a Terran, but she didn’t seem to mind that, either.

  He admired the sight of her. Naked she looked a bit less like h. sapiens sapiens than she did with her robes on; the differences in proportion were more apparent, the longer limbs and deeper chest, and the near-total absence of body hair. What little there was showed like fine bronze down against the natural pale olive of her skin, and the muscle moved beneath it like skeins of steel wire. There were interesting marks on the insides of her forearms, too. He’d thought they were tattoos, but apparently Thoughtful Grace had natural birthmarks there, like elongated swirling red-and-black signs.

  Martian women didn’t really have much breast, either, just a slight curve like the base of a turned goblet, which made the nipple stand out more.

  Odd, he thought. You’d expect them to look like Eskimos, short and stocky and padded, with the cold here, in spite of the lower gravity. But they stay warm by other means than subcutaneous fat. And I do like slim. Yeah.

  He’d noticed the coolness of her body, one more point of intriguing difference. He grinned; there were other intraspecies distinctions, some of which had been fun to work around.

  She grinned back at him for an instant; not precisely a natural expression, but not forced, either. It seemed more as if she was trying it on for size.

  “Aesthetic-sexual appreciation,” he said in Demotic.

  “Desire for further intromission?” she said, raising one eyebrow. “If so, I express a favorable response.”