Juanita Coulson - [Children of the Stars 04]

by Past of Forever (epub)

  “You... you actually think matter transmission...” Feo gulped.

  “We’ve run out of alternate explanations,” Dan said.

  “We felt it.” Hope’s words were almost inaudible. “We saw it. Topwe’s crew, that poor N’lac... they’re really dead.”

  Resisting, Feo was arriving at a terrifying conclusion. “If... if Dan’s right... my God! Living abominations, controlling the powers that murdering machine wielded!”

  “The robot was crippled,” Dan reminded his cousin. “We can expect its masters to be in full command of their faculties and even more ruthless.”

  “They . . . they must be stopped!” Feo cried. “Even if we must destroy them. They can’t be allowed to invade Terra, the sectors ...”

  Dan eyed Saunder with grudging admiration. He wasn’t sure he could have made such a complete shift in stubbornly held convictions as Feo was doing. “You learn, cousin,” Dan said. “You really do learn.”

  “Let... let me help you with the reconstruction, Rosie,” Hope volunteered. “I have some experience in that discipline.” The older woman was being modest. Hope Belvedere Saunder was the dean of xenoarchaeological re-creations.

  “How can I assist?” Feo offered, surprisingly humble.

  A lingexing suspicion nagged Dan. Was the Saunders’ new attitude genuine or a temporary necessity forced upon them by crisis? Would they revert to their former ways when—and if— they got out of this mess?

  Praedar took Feo’s offer at face value. “Your organizational skills will be most useful. We have much to do. Your work in such matters on the Eridani asteroid dig was superb.”

  “I... thank you. That’s very generous, considering..

  The Whimed shrugged off his rival’s gratitude. “If we survive, no doubt we will have future disagreements. At present, we must deal with our problem as a unit.”

  Problem! Praedar had a talent for understatement!

  As the N’lacs carried Chuss home for the last time, Rosie and Hope began collecting the robot’s components. Dan headed for the domes.

  The reporters tried to be everywhere at once. Ito ran alongside Dan, asking nervously, “What can we do?”

  “You mean you aren’t going to stand on the sidelines and collect vids until the universe collapses around our ears?”

  “If the Saunders are convinced, so am I,” the news hound retorted irritably. “That... the ship blowing up, that native’s death... dammit! Tell us what to do!”

  Dan stopped and spat orders. “Get Kimball busy on the expedition’s com. You two are the only ones here besides me with some background in that technology. Soup it all you can. Borrow from your equipment. Feo will pay you back, and you know it. When you’ve got as much power into it as you can, get a message out. Work with my cousin. Notify anybody and everybody. Warn them.”

  “The Fleet?”

  Praedar was waiting nearby, listening. He frowned at Ito’s question. But he didn’t turn the notion down flat.

  “I think you’d better get word to my brother, yes. If what I have in mind fails, Fleet’s going to have to come up with an alternative—-maybe wiping this planet out of the sector.” Ito’s ashy color revealed her panic. Dan touched the reporter’s arm gently. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance, Rei. Your sister’s never going to cover a story like this one. You can do it.”

  She steeled herself and nodded. Then she and her aide hurried toward the complex.

  Dan glanced at Praedar. “I know. I don’t want the Fleet here, either. I’ve seen what can happen to primitive peoples on worlds administered by the planet developers and their military adjuncts. But...”

  Feo was tagging along with his rival, asking Praedar for guid ance in their organizational efforts and taking notes on his wrist vid. Now he said, “That sort of thing won’t be allowed here, Dan. I do have some influence with both the C.S.P. and the Fleet’s civilian administrators. There will be no exploitation of these little humanoids. They have suffered enough...”

  “If you mean that, thanks,” Dan muttered. “I’ll hold you to your word—assuming we get out of this with our lives and our freedom.”

  The next two hours were an ordeal for Dan, working with the alien lock mechanism barring the way into the main dome. Ruieb-An was close by, offering a stammering, running commentary, translating nonstop, correcting his earlier decryptions, refining and giving the new data to Dan as well as Praedar, who was in and out of the tunnel constantly. Dan tried to ignore the distractions, and he willingly put up with Armilly’s bulky monitoring gear and the Lannon’s huge, hairy, strong-scented presence in these close quarters. The procyonid’s advance glimpses were invaluable.

  Outside, things were happening fast. Injured and family groups being transported onto the mesa—avoiding the still “hot” yacht wreckage—to the Vahnajes’ sulking camp. Everyone knew that if the Old Ones won this battle, there would be no safe spot anywhere in the galactic quadrant for humanoid life. But moving the weak and vulnerable members of the Settlement to a distant shelter was an action both teams felt they had to take.

  The N’lacs refused to leave. In fact, they seemed almost fatalistically resigned. Sleeg’s doom-sayings had come true. Chuss was dead. The robot was “dead,” too, but the N’lacs’ legends warned them the demon was only a prelude to the full invasion— an invasion those same legends told them they couldn’t stop.

  Only Meej exhibited defiance. He crept into the mural room and then into the tunnel. Eyes wide, a brushwood club gripped in his small hand, he squatted, waiting in the shadows a few meters behind Dan, Armilly, and Ruieb-An, for a chance at revenge. He would strike at the masters who had killed his brother—or die in the attempt. Nothing Praedar, Kat, nor any other offworlders said moved him.

  Kimball, a convert personality now, was laboring his ass off and pushing his training to its edges. Like the scientists, he was constantly in and out of the tunnel, setting up vids and relay monitors and interconnecting the complex with what was going on at the door to the temple. Whatever happened, the news hounds were going to capture it all on holos and chips. More, they were enabling every team member to witness the discoveries while they were taking place.

  Feo reported that an initial message had been sent to Adam—or rather to the nearest Fleet base, for instant relay onward with better, faster subspace equipment. There was no answer as yet, naturally. There wouldn’t be one for some time. By then, help from Space Fleet—from anybody—might well be academic.

  Again and again Dan was forced to lean back and take a breather. His eyes burned from unshed tears and memories of Chuss’ death. His hands shook. Tension ate at him. He couldn’t afford to make any mistakes now—better to pause and regroup than do that.

  He had Kimball set up a min-vid scanner on the wall nearby and zoom it in on the lock mechanism. Dan wanted everything he did recorded. He especially wanted tri-di samples of that odd, glistening material that was linking up with the fluidics elements. When he was able, he extracted minute specimens. Teammates took them to the labs for analysis.

  Test! Recheck! Install a fluidic element! And look at Armilly’s monitors. How were the mysterious self-repairing gadgets beyond the door doing? Far too well, it seemed—better, Dan feared, than he was.

  Test... check... recheck... install... and watch the glistening organic repair substance grow, crawling and making connections Dan had only speculated about.

  As often as not, his speculations were right. And the shiny stuff saved him the trouble of repairing that particular damaged part of the smashed lock.

  But he wasn’t sure he wanted to have his tech-mech skills confirmed by a slimy, alien ... thing.

  The more it repaired out here, the more it might be fixing in there. The door into the forever time could be back in full operation and shipping through slave masters before Dan could get them inside where they might have a fighting chance to defend themselves.

  His mind was hurtling down several tracks and options—plan B, in case plan A hit th
e wall. He seemed to hear Adam reciting from Fleet manuals, years ago: “Never lock yourself in a comer. Always have an alternate angle of attack.”

  Then, Adam’s serious sermonizing on military tactics had struck Dan as silly. War plans! Not out here in space, though maybe back on the stagnating Mother World, with all its woes. For spacers, wars were obsolete. Nothing but small-scale skirmishing had taken place in the open sectors for centuries. Distances were too great. The risks of interstellar conflict and mass annihilation too real.

  Those rules didn’t apply to nonanthropomorphic enemies. Who knew how they thought? Would they abide by the sanity that had kept the humanoids coexisting with each other for these past centuries?

  Doubtful! They were alien, totally alien, a species which built scout robots that caused pain, blew up escape ships—and their crews-—and made a helpless humanoid captive dissect himself for their uncaring examination.

  The odds weren’t favorable, not favorable at all.

  And time was ticking on relentlessly.

  A light! Another faceted, inanimate insectoid eye glowed in the recesses of the ancient mechanism.

  None of the people watching—Praedar, Meej, Ito, Feo, Kat— had seen that telltale gleam. But Praedar heard something. And Armilly detected the change on his monitors. Both of them edged forward. Praedar asked Dan, “It functions?”

  For a moment the xenomech leaned his forehead against the door. He boosted his stim patch, shoving dosages into danger zones. He was so damned tired! But there could be no rest, maybe not ever again.

  “Yeah,” Dan said wearily. “It functions. We can open it, and take a look at the past—or our future.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Temple

  The door’s operation was whisper-smooth. That was ominous. This was working entirely too perfectly. That organic material repaired things—with Dan’s help—with terrifying speed. He hoped a matter transmitter, being a far more complicated project, would take it considerably longer. If it didn’t...

  The escaped N’lac slaves had done their part, five centuries ago, by smashing everything in sight. Within the airlock, light panels and cycling mechanisms had been shattered. Like the lock mechanism, they were healing. Not quite up to peak efficiency, but close. The systems woke as humanoids poked their heads into the tight little passageway, then began altering pressure. It shuttled the offworlders and Meej through into the dome, two at a time.

  A bad omen. Was the MT repair equally advanced?

  Inside the main structure, other light panels, facing the upper, inward-curving walls, hung in broken sections. Dan saw more of the glistening stuff “growing,” gluing shattered pieces back together. The same thing was happening in the lower wall sections.

  Cowling, shielding alien circuitry and relays—was growing, healing itself.

  Praedar sniffed. “Air is heavy. Analysis.”

  Dan nodded, shifting some of Kimball’s vidders inside the dome, cueing them. “You get that?” he asked the scientists watching from the complex. “Tie together with the data Armilly’s assembling.”

  “More equipment,” Praedar ordered. “Everything must be studied.”

  “We don’t have time..The Whimed’s burning glare made Dan sigh. The boss was going to get them killed with his felinoid passion for gathering every scrap of the truth! “Okay, okay! Baines,” he said, addressing the vidder’s all-seeing lenses. “Ask for volunteers for a brief tour. Set up the surveyors in here. Move it fast. We might have to get out in a hurry.”

  “Will do.”

  The atmospheric heaviness Praedar had mentioned was more obvious now. “It’s building up,” Dan muttered, “making things cozy for the Old Ones.”

  Kat glanced at him. “They’ll come through themselves, instead of sending robots?”

  “It is a door they have used in the past,” Praedar said absently. He was wandering slowly in a circuit of the dome, trying to see everything.

  He probably could do that easier than the humans. The lighting was too dim for them—dim and hurtful. Ito adjusted her lens pendant, as Dan was doing with the remote vidder, trying to filter out the painful spectra. Praedar’s umbralaca pupils contracted to pinpricks. The humans squinted, unable to screen out all of the alien glare. “How interesting,” Feo murmured. “Fascinating!” Praedar nodded, agreeing completely.

  The offworlders circumnavigated the dome’s single, central object—an enormous octagonal box. On Armilly’s monitors, the thing had been a ghostly form, its dimensions and details mapped by probes, but lacking the impact of this direct contact.

  The chamber was remarkably insubstantial-looking to be capable of doing what Dan was sure it could.

  The central object was freestanding, its top a scant two meters below the dome’s highest point. A noticeable bulge was near the center of seven of the object’s lattice-patterned exterior panels. The eighth side was open. Through that, the humanoids saw tiny, sparkling solar systems, wheeling and orbiting in midair, forming rainbow comets’ tails. Again, the light from those dancing miniature suns and planets hurt the eyes.

  “They are large,” Praedar said. “Consider the capacity of the chamber.”

  “Very large,” Dan amended. “Godawful, in fact.”

  In a faint voice, Kat reminded them, “Sleeg said they were big.”

  The tale-teller’s words rang in Dan’s memory. "Evil Old Ones. No bones. Bones outside. Round. Tall. Tall tall!’’

  Meej had hunkered in front of the open-sided section of the box. “Many-fathers-ago tell us. They like there.” He jabbed a webbed finger at the adjacent panels.

  Kat stepped back, trying to get an overall view of the thing. “It’s... they’re abstract depictions of the Old Ones. Look! The lattices form two-dimensional exoskeletons. You can see the tentacles, suggestions of thrombosed veins in the soft body parts, and... are those eyes?” she wondered, staring at a spot high up on the nearest lacy panel.

  There were more sparkling, hurtful movements and hovering illusions of insectoid optical receptors.

  Dan shuddered. He wasn’t the only one in the dome doing that.

  “Are you recording this, Rosie?” Kat asked the remote vids. Her friend’s affirmative reply sounded unusually soft, as if something within the temple were smothering voices. “What a wonderful find! Now we know the N’lacs’ tales were right! Vivid representations of the Old Ones, apparently in one of their own alien art forms,” the xenosocio crowed.

  “Evil Old Ones,” Dan corrected her. “I don’t care if we’re supposed to be scientific and not make judgments about them. After what they did to Chuss ...”

  “Were desert lizards intelligent, they might feel we are evil,” Praedar said. “We kill and eat them.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Do the Old Ones consider it so?” Praedar wondered. “This is knowledge, to be preserved and studied.”

  Grimacing in exasperation, Dan said, “The knowledge will be lost, if those studying and collecting it—and the civilizations that produced them—are enslaved.”

  For a long moment Praedar considered that, then, with obvious reluctance, he nodded. “Balance. The longer view. Humanoid history and survival must be weighed against the acquisition of new and invaluable data.”

  “Invaluable in more ways than one,” Dan said. “Even if we manage to come through this intact, that’s no guarantee there aren’t other temples or matter transmitters elsewhere in the star regions beyond the known sectors and other ways the Evil Old Ones could emerge from them. Everything we find out might be a crucial defense weapon in the future. As Sheila said, we’re on the front line.”

  “Glad you’ve come around to my side, handsome,” Sheila said, speaking from a monitor. Like Rosie’s voice, the blonde’s was oddly muffled.

  “How’s Loor?” Kat asked.

  “Still in labor, but making progress,” Sheila’s tiny image replied. “The reporters set up a relay link for us here in the hyper-barics chamber, so we’d know w
hat was going on out there.” She hesitated, then added soberly, “We... we didn’t tell her about Chuss yet. I don’t know how we will tell her, when we have to. I don’t... I can’t deal with it myself...”

  Dan and the others understood fully. However, they had little time for grieving. They were circumnavigating the alien chamber, visually exploring, thinking. Those lattice-shaped representations of the enemy kept calling to mind Sleeg’s descriptions of the Evil Old Ones: no bones; tall; round. They were huge, living versions of the robot, enormous exoskeletoned insects—no, probably not true insects. The square-cube law prevented their evolution to such a size, surely.

  At least... such creatures couldn’t have evolved in a terrene environment. Those genetic alterations the captors had made on the N’lacs showed that the Evil Old Ones didn’t inhabit a strictly terrene environment. Yet with appropriate medical manipulation, it apparently was one in which humanoids could live.

  If Dan needed any further proof of the Evil Old Ones’ world, the dome’s self-repairing mechanisms supplied it; they were fast converting the interior into a stone-metalline tank filled with muggy air.

  “Watch pressure and atmo composition closely,” Dan warned.

  A remote observer in the complex responded, “We’re watching. It’s crazy stuff. Heavy on oxygen and some stuff we’ve never seen before. Our analyzers are gibbering...”

  “Can we breathe it okay?” Ito wondered anxiously. Feo eyed her with contempt. He was the scientist, depending on his fellow scientists—though they had been his competitors—and treating a layman’s fears with contempt.

  “They’ll tell us if we can’t,” Kat said. The comment didn’t reassure Ito.

  Neither did the next relay from the labs. “Increasing rapidly in there. At that rate, you’ll have to vacate in ten more local minutes, or risk decompression...”

  “Terrans will do so,” Praedar muttered, unconcerned.

  Ruieb-An was translating ancient N’lac graffiti covering the room’s lower panels and puzzling over a totally unfamiliar language inscribed higher up. The Old Ones’ writings? That possibility set the Vahnaj atwitter. What a scientific opportunity! “Re-cord!”