by Dave Duncan
They were between him and the exit tunnel. He backed against the wall, holding them at bay with the Giantkiller. His own face repeated four times stared back at him in shock and horror.
“Stay where you are!” he barked, but it didn’t work.
At that moment Blade and Feirn sprinted in and dashed for the exit. The guards again moved like one, jumping to block them.
“Stop!”
This time everyone froze. Tableau. Standoff.
“Please, Brothers! Don’t make me kill you!”
Vaun was against one side wall, Blade and the girl against the other. The four brethren blocked the exit—White, Yellow, Red, Brown.
“Who’s Prior?” Vaun demanded. He felt sick. This wasn’t going to work.
“I am,” White said hoarsely. He stuck out his chin. “You will have to kill us, you know!” He sounded younger than he looked.
“I shall if I must. So why die needlessly? I can gun you down and we’ll get away and you’ll be dead. You go ahead of us. When we leave, I’ll not shoot you, I swear.”
If White moved first, it was by only a fraction of a second—all four took a step forward.
“Oh, stop that!” Vaun shouted. Sweat was running into his eyes.
“You can’t shoot your brothers!”
“I can. I did. I shot two on Unity!”
The guards gulped in horror. The whites of their eyes showed all around the irises.
Vaun had never told anyone that before. No one. Not even Maeve. And that time he had been out of his mind with fear. This was in cold blood.
“And I helped mind bleed Prior! I have a design fault, remember? That was what they decided last night, wasn’t it?”
He wished instantly that he had not asked that question. He did not want to know what had been decided after he left the hall.
Yellow took a deep breath, as if surprised. “No,” he said. “Never. We decided you’d been damaged, though.”
Blade tried a move, and Brown sidestepped to block him. Vaun shouted, “Stop!” again.
“Not your fault, Brother,” Yellow went on. He was the youngest, not quite an adult. Eighteen, maybe, but apparently the only one who’d been at the meeting. “But we decided we daren’t risk sending you back.”
“Kill me, you mean.” All this talk was crazy. Time was running out. Someone would come. Dawn would come. But he did want to know, really. Just in case.
White shook his head, and eased forward imperceptibly. “Brother doesn’t kill brother! Sending you back is too great a risk, but we want you to stay and help here.”
There was a jagged lump in Vaun’s throat. “Crap! Either you trust me or you don’t!”
“Listen!” White said urgently. His face was shining wet in the dim light of the glow lamps. “We do trust you, Brother, but we just don’t dare send you back. You’re welcome to stay with us, always! You’re one of us. You’ve suffered out there alone long enough, and been damaged, and we want you here in the hive. We need you here to advise us. Honored, and loved. I swear this on the Brotherhood.”
Krantz! It was so tempting, Vaun wanted to scream. He dared not look at Blade or the girl. His brothers. Really wanting him? Even needing him a little?
“You can’t trust me,” he muttered angrily. “Not now.”
“Tell me what’s wrong, Brother,” White said gently. “Is it Die Day? Armageddon?”
“Maybe,” Vaun admitted. His hands were shaking.
“It’ll happen anyway! We can show you the numbers. Projections. The famines have started. Their whole ecology’s about to collapse.” White was pleading—why did he have to seem so infernally sincere? “I can’t lie to you, Brother, you know that! We’re certain: twenty years, maybe thirty…Total disaster! We can show you!”
“Mortality doesn’t excuse murder!”
“Ah!” Red shouted with relief. “It’s these two randoms! That’s it, isn’t it, Brother? You didn’t say they were your friends! You said to kill them. If that’s what’s bothering you, we’ll not hurt them, I’ll promise you that. I’ll promise my own life. It’s all I’ve got, but I swear I’ll put it ahead of theirs. Trust me, Brother.” The other three chorused agreement.
Vaun moaned. The gun was drooping in his hands, and trembling.
“You can’t put a couple of them ahead of the hive!” Brown protested. “One of them’s a female.”
Maeve’s daughter.
Vaun glanced at the two scared faces of the wilds and then hastily back at the brethren, as all four lurched forward a pace. He jerked the gun up and they stopped.
“It’s obvious that you’ve never been laid by an expert, sonny!”
Brown flinched. “No. No desire to…But if you need that, we won’t mind if you keep her.”
“No!” Feirn shouted. “Not me! I’m not the one he loves. He’s doing this for—”
Blade hushed her. He was clutching her tight with both arms, watching bleakly as their mutual future was decided.
“You can’t trust me ever again!” Vaun insisted. Oh, tell me I’m wrong! “I wasn’t lying about shooting brothers on the Q ship! I’m trying to escape now. How can you ever trust me in the future?”
“We love you, of course,” White said, “and expect you to love us. We’ll put a mark on you so we’ll know—”
“A mark?” Vaun yelled. “How could I be one of you if I had a mark on me? I’d be the One With the Mark, you idiot!” An outcast still. A stranger again. On, no! “An X on the forehead, perhaps? Offer declined! Now turn around and start marching out in good order!”
“We can’t!” White shouted. “We just can’t. You know that! We don’t want to be shot, and we believe you when you say you will, but we must be loyal to the hive. You ought to know that.”
He did know that. He’d known it all along. “Crazy defective artifacts!” Raj, how often must I betray you?
Yellow, the youngest, sniffed loudly. He wiped his nose on his sleeve, but he wasn’t even looking to the others for guidance. He couldn’t shift his feet if that move would hurt the hive.
Vaun gestured with the gun. “I’ll count to three, and then I burn off your legs. One!” He knew that if it were him, he would jump on “Two.”
“Two!”
They jumped. The cave blazed with green light. There was no time for fancy disablement, and a Giantkiller wasn’t a scalpel, and it was not designed for use in a confined space. He flashed them totally away. The explosion recoiled, hurling him to the floor, scorching his face, banging his ears like mallet blows, splattered him with falling gravel, chunks of burning meat, and gravy.
HE WANTED TO scream and tear off his skin. He needed to throw up and cough out his lungs and lie down and weep for a year; but he was driven by the frantic urgency of knowing that he must close the tunnel before anyone else came. He must not kill any more of his brethren.
Blade was barely conscious, half-stunned by flying rock, with his own blood streaming over the unspeakable soup that had sprayed all three of them. Somehow the other two bore him outside between them, staggering and reeling. The remains of the doorway curtains still smoldered, the floor was covered with debris, and the Brotherhood would be pouring up that tunnel like hornets any second now. Vaun could hold them off forever, but he must not. Somewhere in the bottom of his mind he knew he was being illogical about this, that he was planning to wipe out the whole hive before the day was out, but that was different. Mass murder was much easier than killing people you could see.
The night was cold, the ground glinting with frost in Angel’s eerie blue glare. The east was brightening, though.
His face smarted with burns, and he seemed to have twisted his knee again. His ribs ached as if they had been kicked and his ears sang.
Feirn moaned. “Gotta rest, Vaun!”
“No. Too close still.”
“Am awright,” Blade muttered, although his feet were dragging on the rocks.
Feirn collapsed, and he fell on top of her, and Vaun almost on top of Blade
. The tunnel mouth was still too near for safety, but this would have to do, for the Brotherhood would start spurting out of there any minute. Trouble was, all he had was the Giantkiller, and hardbeams were not much good against rock.
As the girl tried to rise, he pushed her down again. “Cover your ears!” he snapped.
Blade made querying noises and she hugged him. Vaun knelt by a sizable boulder. With trembling, sticky fingers, he set up the Giantkiller on its tripod, and flopped on the icy stones to aim it. He set three seconds’ delay and maximum flash. He rolled away and put his head behind the boulder, shouting a final warning.
Maximum flash from a Giantkiller was a major disaster. He really thought he’d killed himself that time. Rocks rattled down like hail. He could smell burning hair, and when he fingered his scalp he discovered why. Ears ringing, ribs worse than ever…He tried to rise and sank back, groaning.
He had won a small respite. Certainly no one would ever come through that tunnel again. He hoped no one had been trying to. Of course, there must be other exits—he had no doubt of that—but at least now he needn’t stand here and hold off the brethren at gunpoint, shooting them down as they marched to destruction like a thousand Abbots. That was what he’d been afraid of.
He hauled himself shakily to his feet, just as Feirn rose also. She’d lost most of her hair, and she had a second-degree burn on her forehead. The rest of her face looked as if it had been punched a few times; her clothes were tattered beyond the limits of decency and even charred in places.
The sky was brightening. He was frozen and shivering uncontrollably.
Blade was on his knees, another nightmare scarecrow of burns and bloodstains, the remains of his uniform hanging on him in rags. From the way he was clutching his right arm, he had a broken collarbone. Could even Blade fly a torch one-handed?
They were a trio of corpses, but apparently all mobile.
Vaun spat to clear dirt from his mouth. “Let’s go,” he said.
A SINGLE, PIERCING point of blue light, Angel stood high to the north. Dead ahead, dawn flared gold on the hills; the fugitives threw double shadows as they stumbled over the rocky ground. The air was still and bitter cold.
Vaun burned with intolerable anger. It hurt much worse than his physical wounds, for his body was numb, too frozen even to shiver. He could no longer feel the rocks under this thin-soled shoes or the sting of his burns; only his ribs still ached. He raged instead at his brothers’ futile deaths.
How could they have been so stupid? The forgotten geniuses who had designed the brethren should have included more pliability. Such implacable stubbornness was a design fault in the whole genotype. Easy to say that a single unit was unimportant and only the Brotherhood itself mattered—he did not feel unimportant! White and Red and Brown and Yellow had not felt unimportant. They had wanted to die no more than he had wanted to kill them, but their chromosomes had insisted that they defend the hive’s interest to the death, as a poisonfang defended its young.
And now he must kill them all. Dice. Bishop. Little 516, and Tan—who would still be Gray until he next changed his shirt. Cessine, whom Vaun had never met…had probably never met. All of them.
He had made his choice. There was no doubt now which side he supported, or where his loyalties lay.
It was not necessarily the winning team.
The same intransigence that had forced his four brothers to die determined that the Brotherhood as a whole would never give up. There was probably at least one other hive somewhere; simple common sense would have made that a priority. Had he been Bishop, he would certainly have taken other precautions also. He would have set up secret depots of know-how and supplies at a dozen places around the planet. As long as even one unit remained operative, he would seek out one of those depots and set to work establishing another hive. In another forty or fifty years it would start all over. Infestation, Roker had called it.
And even if the Patrol was alerted and could act in time to scotch Kohab Hive before it was evacuated, even if it could find the other hive or hives, even if it could hunt down and kill every single unit on the planet, the war would be far from won.
The Q ship was still coming. Yes, knowing it was only a boat made the odds look less impossible, and it must shut down its fireballs momentarily to make a course correction. But a boat was nimble in a way no rock ever could be, and that brief window of maximum vulnerability was going to be very hard to find. Almost certainly that window was also intended to let the brethren signal what action they wanted the missile to take, what target would best suit their purpose. Losing Hiport was not the worst that could happen to Ult, for a meteor impacting an ocean was vastly more destructive than a land strike. What was the built-in default instruction?
He stumbled as a rock rolled underfoot; the Giantkiller banged painfully against his burns and bruises. The stab of pain cut through his numbness and brought him back to the present. Feirn, now, was in the best shape of the three. Blade was leaning heavily on her, and at times seemed hardly conscious, but Vaun’s offers of help had been refused.
He pummeled his wits to work. Something missing?
Two things missing. Pepods, and pursuit. To blunder into either would bring disaster, and yet the fugitives were instinctively staying on low ground, staggering along the gullies between the ancient hummocks of slag. They were still heading toward dawn, a little south of east; that was the right direction, but he should survey the terrain.
Croaking a wordless order, he veered up the nearest slope. Blade and the girl came stumbling after him. Frost-white rocks slithered underfoot. Vaun reeled onto the summit and sank down wearily to sit on a small cairn of rocks stacked there by some ancient unknown hand. He stared out blearily at the barren landscape.
The main saddle lay to the south. Northward was the closer hill, and the mine lay under that. If there were other exits—and there must be other exits—they lay in that direction. Far off to the east, the dawn’s glow shone on the frosty tarmac of the strip, making it shine like a promised jewel. That was the prize. The brethren knew that, too, First to the strip wins.
Blade had sunk to the ground and laid his head on his knees. He seemed to be concussed, and that was worrisome. Vaun needed Blade to take care of the girl if they had to split up. He needed Blade to escape if he got killed. He needed Blade to reduce the odds of that happening.
“Pepods!” Feirn said, pointing. She was upright, but swaying on her feet.
Pepods.
A sizable thicket lay dead ahead—in fact, there were pepods near the base of the slope, too close to the two humans for comfort. That could not be all of the vermin, though. Shielding his eyes from the dawn glare, Vaun peered at the distant strip itself. He decided there was at least one more thicket barring the way, but the range was too great for him to tell whether there were pepods near the hangar itself. If there were, then the two humans would not be leaving. It seemed unfair that the Brotherhood should have such an advantage in this deadly game—that insensate vegetables might thus determine the fate of a planet.
South? “Can’t see any to the south,” he croaked. He could use a drink. And food. And sleep. And his battered carcass ached and throbbed in a dozen places. No time for self-pity…“We’ll have to detour that way.”
“They’ll come from over there, won’t they, Vaun?” Feirn was gazing northward.
Vaun grunted agreement. Pursuit would come from the north; common sense said not to detour north. There were more pepods to the northeast, anyway. That looked like the largest thicket of all, or perhaps they just happened to be displayed there by some trick of topography. The slaggy mounds were alive with them, but of course the brethren could run right through. Pepods were no obstacle to the brethren. Unfair, unfair!
“We’ll have to cut south to get round the pepods.”
Blade had apparently been listening. He looked up grimly, his face a mask of blood with two shocked eyes in it. “Feirn and I do, sir. You go straight.”
V
aun took a dead breath to fuel an admiral’s bellow, and then let it out slowly.
“Pepods won’t notice you, will they?” Blade mumbled.
“No,” Vaun admitted. As much as he hated the thought of separating, there was no possible argument against it. With a world at stake, it was every boy for himself now. “Yes. Devil take the hindmost, I’m afraid. You two cut around that way, and I’ll risk the pepods. Good luck, both of you.”
They were a pathetic-looking pair. If they were his reason for ratting on his brothers, then he had a strange set of values.
The girl had never had eyelashes. Now she had only one eyebrow and half her hair was frizzed away. She must be in considerable pain, but she was bearing up well—for a civilian. Two days ago her body had excited him almost to madness; she was a disgusting sight now.
Blade’s torpor was ominous, especially in a boy who had previously demonstrated such rigorous self-control. Courage could only push physical limits so far. He stayed hunched over to favor his useless arm; his face seemed thinner and longer under its mask of blood. Of the three of them, Blade was probably nearest the edge.
Vaun made a final scan of the landscape, trying to memorize the extent of the nearest pepod thicket, and the locations of the other two. He did not expect to see any of his brethren. They would stay out of sight and run like hell for the strip. First boy there wins. They were fresh and unwounded. They might have farther to come, but brethren were built for speed, as Tham had said long ago.
They would stay out of sight…
Too late that thought registered. He started to rise as Feirn yelled and hurled herself at him. They toppled over together, a sharp explosion snapped the silence of the morning. The cairn he had just left erupted and shattered in green light. He curled up tight as fragments thumped and clattered all around him; he yelped at a couple of sharp impacts.