Buck had less than fifty double beats.
Vornho looked up in shock, his hands under his armpits, sliding across the deck as the bridge spun and the warning sirens screeched. He struggled to his feet as Buck fell back with the first of the shudders traveling through the deck. Vornho threw himself at the stardrive console’s control surface. He closed his fist around the key.
“No, Vornho! Don’t!” Buck shouted. He didn’t know how long the key had to remain in place, how long it would take for the circuitry to work. He pulled at Vornho’s scarf to drag him away from the console, but the clasps gave way, no strength to them.
Then D’wayn was behind them both. “What have you done?” she cried.
Vornho spun around, his hand still on the key. “Watch Leader . . . this key . . .” He began to yank it from the console.
“Stop him!” Buck pleaded senselessly. But why would she?
D’wayn’s spots were dark with rage. She swung her prod up and focused it to full power.
Vornho pulled the key free. “I did it,” he said, “Watch Leader, I—”
D’wayn rammed her prod under his jaw, and it discharged with an explosive blue arc. Webs of sparking energy crawled up Vornho’s face and scalp. His eyes instantly turned solid white, as if they had been cooked, and blood gushed from his ear valleys and nose and mouth.
The child who had dreamt of sleema females crumpled to the deck, and whatever his last sounds might have been, they were lost in the thunder of the sirens and alarms.
D’wayn pulled the circuitry key from Vornho’s lifeless hand and crushed it in her own. Only then did Buck realize that she hadn’t seen what had happened at the console. She had only seen two boys fighting, and when she had arrived Vornho was the one with his hand on the key, and Buck was the one who was trying to stop him.
“Are you all right?” the Overseer shouted at Buck.
Buck had no words. His best friend was dead, but by dying he had given Buck his life.
“I know, I know,” D’wayn said. She swept Buck into her arms and held him close against her substantial bulk. “I should have realized it at the water hub. The way he hesitated before shooting the worker. Even before you tried to warn him.” She turned toward the tunnel entrance. “The children!” she yelled. “Get the children to the hatch!”
All was confusion for Buck. The transparent dome swam with projected lines and geometric shapes that seemed to spiral into infinity. The stars beyond moved rapidly, as if the ship spun in space, and the bridge deck began to slant, as if gravity was changing its angle of attraction.
Overseers fell from their platforms by the consoles. Uncounted voices screamed with the sirens. The tunnel entrance was jammed with Overseers and Watcher Youth.
D’wayn barreled into the thickest part of the crowd, screaming for the children to follow her. She wielded her prod before her, shocking every adult she saw trying to put himself or herself or binnself before her charges.
The sirens rose to an unbearable frequency. The light panels strobed, sending mad shadows flickering over terror-stricken faces and whitening spots. D’wayn was at the tunnel entrance. She dropped Buck to the moving floor. “Run, child, run!” she begged him. Then she began to pull other children from the crowd and push them onto the moving floor. But the floor was still coming forward, and the frightened, crying children were tumbling together at the end of it, creating even more of a barrier to escape.
The ship trembled. D’wayn swung her prod against a control box on the tunnel wall, and the controls sparked and burst into flame. The floor stopped. She looked behind her. Explosions erupted from the oversize consoles, filling the bridge with fire and smoke. Water began spraying from the walls.
“No!” D’wayn cried, then she picked up a screaming child, grabbed Buck by the arm, and threw herself forward down the sloping tunnel as more and more explosions burst behind her.
The tunnel walls blurred by Buck as his legs thumped in giant, uncontrollable leaps. He cried for Vornho. He cried for the key—how could it have worked in such a short time? And he cried for Moodri and his mother and father and Andarko and Celine and all his people whom he had failed.
And even as she ran, D’wayn heard his tears and lifted him to her again. “Shhh,” she said between gasps of breath. “Shhh, little spotty head. We’ve been expecting this. Everything will be all right.”
But Buck did not answer. He knew that nothing would ever be all right again.
It had been his time, and he had failed.
The ship screamed, and Moodri took pleasure in its dying.
The shudders that ran through the decks and walls filled him with satisfaction. The ship would return to the Mother, and Moodri would go with it.
He looked forward to his fate. Of all that his people would need in the years ahead, perhaps nothing was more important than the knowledge that another ship would not come for them. Moodri could give them that at such a small price—his life.
At the instant the first alarms wailed Moodri stepped forth from an alcove in a deserted corridor and walked purposefully for a hidden access hatch. His quick passage disturbed the thin layer of purple gas that lay across the deck. As the council had planned, the Overseers had been compelled to expend the bulk of their gas reserves to quell a rebellion that had not yet begun. Now there was little gas left with which to flood the corridors and chambers, and when the cargo disk landed, most of the captive Tenctonese would be clearheaded enough to run as far away as possible before the inertial stabilizers failed.
Moodri came to the access hatch and easily touched the hidden surfaces in the proper combination. After almost a century of study there were few mechanical secrets that the ship still held. The access hatch puffed open. Moodri peered beyond it. He frowned. The moving beltway in the sloping tunnel beyond was already in operation, as if someone else was already on his way up to the communications substation.
But this was no time to ponder possibilities. The ship was creaking all around him. Fragile pipes burst and sent streams of water and gases into the corridors, swirling into the purple mist. Moodri stepped through the hatch and onto the moving floor. Just like the tunnel he knew Buck had taken to the bridge, this tunnel sloped up through the cargo disk to another part of the ship’s main section. The maps upon which Moodri based his passage had been assembled over decades of trial and error at the cost of many lives. But he knew they were accurate, just as he knew that Buck would survive the bridge and set foot on a new world.
Sometimes, when Moodri had visions of his great-nephew’s future, he saw himself at Buck’s side, though he knew that that would not be possible in the flesh. His own destiny was to ride the stardrive into superluminal space on an uncontrolled translation. He would broadcast the faster-than-light codes that would indicate an unanticipated breakdown had occurred and that the entire ship had been lost on an untraceable, higher-dimensional trajectory. The Elders had penetrated the secrets of the fleet well enough to know that when a ship was lost in such a way, no search or rescue was possible. If a trajectory into the superluminal dimensions was not carefully plotted before it was undertaken, then no return to normal spacetime was ever possible. As far as the fleet would know, this ship would have vanished along with its crew, beyond any hope of recovery, all because of the messages Moodri would send.
He smiled as he stood upon the moving floor, one hand grasping the railing for safety. Swiftly the floor moved him upward to his final destination. All around him the ship twisted and quaked. Joyfully he sang a peaceful song of Old Tencton, celebrating the dawn that comes on the last day of a voyager’s journey. The dawn of home.
He was almost there.
But when the floor took him to the tunnel’s end, he was not alone.
A step beyond the deep ridge into which the pressure door would seal itself, Vondmac stood. She wore her robes and leaned on her walking stick, though her spots were so dark and her eyes so bright that Moodri thought she looked younger than she had in decades.
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br /> Moodri stepped off the floor and stood on the other side of the door seal. Fine tremors ran through the tunnel walls, and he knew that when they became stronger it would indicate that the stardrive generators had finally reached overload, and the ship would begin to seal each of its sections in preparation for jettisoning the cargo disk. There was not much time.
“It is not right for both of us to go into the superluminal,” Moodri said. From behind Vondmac he could see the flash of warning lights and hear distant sirens scream.
“You are correct,” Vondmac agreed. “Which is why I shall go alone to operate the communications station.”
Moodri smiled at her. “How typical that our last conversation in this stage of our existence should be an argument. Please, your knowledge will be needed on the new world. Our biochemistry cannot possibly be compatible with an independently evolved biosphere. Our people will need food.”
“Our people will adapt. The engineering of our genes that made us such excellent slaves also makes us excellent survivors.”
“This is not the plan that was agreed to.”
“The starting conditions have been changed,” Vondmac said. “Therefore, we should not be surprised that, the results are different from what we anticipated.”
“No conditions have changed,” Moodri answered patiently. He braced his hand against the tunnel wall as a hard tremor bumped the floor sideways. “Everything is proceeding exactly as we had planned.”
But Vondmac bowed her head in disagreement. “One from each family was to have been preserved,” she said. “From each family that took part in the rebellion, one was to have remained untainted to continue the line in the new world.” She looked up at Moodri. “Stangya was the chosen survivor of the Family: Heroes of Soren’tzahh. But Stangya broke through the walls of keer’chatlas and has been lost to the future.”
Moodri felt his hearts stir. Vondmac was right. George’s actions had not been predicted. His loss was indeed a sorrow. “Finiksa will prevail, though. I have seen him take foot upon the soil of a new world.”
“As have I,” Vondmac said, “in the hands of those with tattooed wrists.” She adjusted her walking stick against the shaking of the floor. “It is not enough that a child survive alone. For how can he progress without knowledge of his past and guidance for his future? The Overseers will give him neither.”
The tunnel bucked, and Moodri nearly fell to his knees. “Vondmac, this is not your destiny,” Moodri said.
“Melgil was my mate,” the Elder said. Moodri was stunned. How long had he known them both and not suspected? “And now I seek no other destiny than to return to the Mother with binn at my side.” She raised her hand in a gesture of farewell. “See that the seeds of our people grow well in their alien soil.” Sudden gouts of pressurized air blew out from the edges of the door seal. Vondmac called out over the terrible rumbling that filled the air. She smiled one last time. “We shall meet again in the fields of stars”—the pressure door began to slide across the tunnel entrance—“and we shall finish our argument then!”
The door closed. The tunnel was sealed. Moodri touched his hearts. He had never won an argument with Vondmac yet, and he supposed he never would.
With a sigh Moodri touched a control on the tunnel wall, and the moving floor began to travel back toward the cargo disk. Moodri stepped onto it, knowing full well that the goddess was teaching him a lesson about being certain of what would happen in his life, even so close to its end. “Just let me know if this will be my final planet,” Moodri grumbled in prayer. “My knees are not what they used to be.”
He waited for Ionia’s answer all the way down the tunnel. When it came it might have been a yes, but Moodri, for once, admitted to himself and to her that he couldn’t be certain.
He decided that that was what the goddess wanted him to think, and as he stepped back into the cargo disk he realized that for the first time in almost a century he had no idea what he should expect next.
He rather enjoyed the sensation. It felt like freedom.
The ship screamed, but George did not hear it.
He only heard the thunder of his hearts. The rest of it—the chanting of the crowd, the whine of the wojchek—meant nothing to him anymore. All that mattered was his death, and that was only seconds away.
He was dimly aware of a shaking in the deck beneath him. It traveled up the metal frame of the chair in which he was bound by metal cuffs. But he decided it was only the vibration from the rhythmic stomping of the Game’s audience. The wojchek began to slow. George counted his final seconds of life.
The wojchek was a metal cylinder, edged by six evenly spaced nozzles, that spun in the center of the table George faced. When the Game began the wojchek stopped, and two of the nozzles aimed out directly for the chests of the two players who sat opposite each other at the table.
The players’ chests were bare so that nothing would be hidden from the spectators’ avid gaze. Five of the six nozzles would only spray pressurized air from which water vapor would condense, blasting a player with an icy breath, an intimation of eternity. But the sixth nozzle, different each time, would mix and spray forth the contents of two cylinders plugged into place at the table’s side. One cylinder held water. The other cylinder held salt.
The horror of the Game was that death was not instantaneous. When the deadly nozzle faced its victim, as it could at any turn, there would be a delay as the cylinders emptied and their contents were mixed beneath the table so that the crowd and the loser both could anticipate the Game’s final outcome.
Then a high-pressure blast of salt water would eat its way through the loser’s chest, and the crowd would howl in concert with his hideous death scream.
The wojchek made its final spin. Only two nozzles remained. One held life, the other death.
George prayed for death.
Alarms rang. He didn’t hear them.
The wojchek stopped.
The floor shook, and with a sudden lurch the deck of the Game chamber seemed to change angles. George gripped the arms of his chair for support, though the metal restraints would hold him in regardless.
The chanting of the crowd broke into a dozen whispered conversations. But some among them still shouted, “Push it! Push it!”
The player across from George was the player who had beaten Ruhtra. Coolock stood off to the side, prod in hand and death’s-head grin on his face. The grin faded as each shudder shook the chamber, but George didn’t care.
The other player looked worried. He faced death as surely as George did, but the shaking of the deck concerned him. He turned to look at Coolock.
“Push it!” George screamed. He pushed his own button beneath his right hand, but it was not his turn, and nothing happened. “Push it!” He called for his own death.
Some of the audience members rose to their feet and began to step down from the bleachers that ringed the chamber. Coolock nodded at the other player. The player turned back to George. More sirens sounded. Growing louder.
“Push it, you coopr,” George snarled. It had to end. It all had to end now. Just as it had ended for Ruhtra.
The deck shook. The player pushed the button.
A blast of air sprayed across his chest, and he howled in victory as his restraints popped free.
Some of the audience cheered with him. George slumped in his chair with relief. It was finally over. He could pay the price. He jammed his fingers against his own button, but the machinery beneath the table had not yet reset itself. Nothing happened.
“Come on!” George screamed.
Coolock laughed at him.
A handful of voices weakly chanted. “Push it! Push it!” But most of the audience had left.
George heard a clunk beneath the table.
“Yes,” he whispered. “Yes.”
He raised his fingers above the button.
The chamber jerked violently, back and forth, up and down. The lights flickered. Coolock plunged to the deck.
Th
e wojchek shifted.
The final nozzle no longer pointed at him.
George pressed the button.
The cylinders at the edge of the table chunked into position. Water bubbled out of one. Salt rushed out of the other. He heard them mix together beneath the table.
The nozzle fired.
A stream of salt water arced through the air.
And it missed George.
“Noooo!” George screamed as he rocked against his metal bonds, trying to rip his hands from his wrists so he could throw himself into the jet of liquid death. “I am next! I am next to die! Next to die!”
Warning lights flashed. More alarms. George wept, oblivious to everything except his own failure. And when next he looked up, the Game chamber was deserted. Even Coolock was gone.
“No,” George pleaded hoarsely. “No.” But there was no one to hear him. He was alone.
George never knew how long he remained in that chair, feeling the ship seem to tear itself apart around him. Eventually he became aware of someone standing beside him. George hoped it was an Overseer come to finish the Game.
But it was only Zicree, placid, serene, beyond caring.
He released the metal bands that held George captive. George didn’t move.
Zicree gently tugged on George’s arm.
“It’s time to go,” Zicree said. “We’re landing.”
And George collapsed in angry tears because, Andarko help him, he did not want to be free. He did not deserve it.
But Zicree helped him from the chamber anyway.
C H A P T E R 3
WHEN THE MOMENT of separation came, perhaps only twenty individuals of the three hundred thousand Tenctonese on board the ship truly understood what had brought that moment and what would happen after it had passed.
Moodri was one of them.
He had found a crèche that had been deserted, indicating that the quickly released instructions for the children to be gathered and taken to the lower decks had been successful. Heartened, he had braced himself in a child-sized sleeping platform and prepared for what he knew would follow.
Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent Page 35