The Golden Queen - Book 1 of the Golden Queen Series

by David Farland

  They had not gone far into the cloud when Primary Jagget shouted to them, "Our front is collapsing ahead. My men can't maintain it. Can we veer off the road?"

  "Yes," Veriasse shouted. "There is a river to the right. We can follow it north."

  Veriasse alone knew where the gate to Dronon lay. He wondered if he should tell the others its location. Two hundred years ago, he had ordered his men to build the gate. In trying to plant the destination markers at Dronon, he had lost three complete technical crews. Afterward, Semarritte had forbade him from trying to put more gates on Dronon, just as she had always forbade him from building a gate that would lead to her omni-mind. She said some risks were not worth taking. But unlike the gates of old, constructed in simpler times, this one was hidden. He had built it into the arch of a small bridge that spanned the river.

  He pictured the location, sent the thought to his mantle, ordered it to transmit the knowledge to Gallen. Gallen suddenly turned, caught Veriasse's eye, then nodded.

  Two kilometers farther, the black clouds of soot began to thin. Suddenly light flashed across the sky far behind them, brighter than the sun, followed by a second blinding flash nearby. The light continued to glow redly through the sooty sky.

  "They're using atomics!" Jagget shouted, and Veriasse glanced back. Mushroom clouds were forming where the inn had been, and again at a point perhaps nine kilometers behind. "Open your speed up."

  Veriasse's heart raced. They were still ten kilometers from the gate. The atomic bombs would raise a wall of dirty, swiftly moving air as the air superheated. The dust storm would rush away from the bomb site at over a hundred kilometers per hour—a speed impossible to match in such rough terrain. Yet if they did not beat that surging storm of radioactive dust, it would kill them all.

  "Vanquishers ahead!" Jagget shouted. On the highway ahead, two kilometers away, a convoy topped a steep hill. Veriasse swerved from the road into a snow-filled ravine, and the others followed. The airbikes kicked up rooster tails of snow, millions of tiny motes that glittered like slivers of ruby, reflecting the atomic fires behind.

  Veriasse began counting the seconds, listening for the blast, trying to discern exactly how far they were from the detonation site. Fifty seconds later, the air filled with a high-pitched shriek, indicating that the Jagget's shields had collapsed, followed by a deep booming.

  The ground rumbled and rolled in waves. To the northeast, a volcano began to spit a sluggish flow of lava down its sides.

  The airbikes raced over a rise, down a rock-strewn gully, then swept onto a river, skating over flattened stones and lead-gray water that reflected the winter sky and the towering mushroom clouds that filled the heavens behind them like elementals of flame.

  Veriasse glanced at his speedometer. They were traveling at only seventy kilometers an hour—fast over such uneven terrain, but not fast enough. He opened his throttle. "Faster," he shouted.

  The river was an old one, and canyon walls soon rose around them as they surged through a narrow gorge. Veriasse's speed hit a hundred and twenty. Everynne pulled ahead of him. She had her head low to combat wind resistance. She threw a trail of icy water in his face, and he only hoped that she could make it as she raced ahead.

  Time and again she flirted with death, weaving through the rocky gorge, taking corners so fast that she was only a hair's breadth from destruction. For eight more minutes they raced, and whenever they reached a straight portion of the river, Veriasse would glance back, each time hoping anew that the others had negotiated the last turn. Maggie's bike was both slow and dangerously unstable with the bear on it. Jagget stayed at the far end of the train, bringing up the rear.

  The gate to Dronon waited for them somewhere ahead at the end of a wide bend. Through his mantle, Jagget transmitted a message: "We have pursuers behind me." Veriasse glanced back, thinking the saucers would be shooting overhead. He saw no saucers—only a great black wall of dust rushing toward them, the frontal tide of the nuclear storm.

  Veriasse rounded a corner. Ahead, the river stretched straight for a kilometer, its troubled waters winking in the sunlight. At the far end spanned a bridge, a simple monstrosity of gray plasteel arching over the river. Veriasse looked at it, and his heart fell. The gate was built into a bridge, but he could not remember ever having seen this one before. Was this the bridge? "Everynne," he shouted, "initiate your key."

  Everynne reached into the pack behind her, fumbled for a moment, and slowed her bike as she grabbed the key.

  Veriasse slowed, pulled beside her, glanced back. Gallen whizzed past them, followed by the bike with Maggie and Orick on it. Orick's eyes were wide in terror,and the bear's tongue lolled from his mouth.

  Jagget held up the rear, and as he rounded the corner, he looked at Veriasse and Everynne in surprise, slowed his throttle at the mouth of the narrow bend. He whipped out his incendiary rifle with one hand, raised it in salute to Veriasse.

  Everynne took the key firmly in hand, opened up her throttle, and Veriasse followed directly behind, drenched by plumes of freezing water.

  Everynne thumbed the unlocking sequence. Ahead a silver light began to glow beneath the bridge. Behind them, Veriasse heard vanquishers whoop in delight as they rounded the corner. He glanced back.

  Three vanquishers in aircars whipped down the river channel, negotiating the tight turn.

  Primary Jagget fired his rifle, and pure white light shot down the river. A vanquisher burst into flame, and his burning car screamed toward Jagget.

  Another vanquisher swerved to avoid the explosion, and his car erupted into a fireball as it smashed against the canyon walls. The last in line killed his throttle, and his car slowed and bogged down in the water.

  Jagget did not have time to avoid the burning car that hurtled toward him. In less than a heartbeat, his body transformed into a swarm of butterflies that lifted above the collision.

  Overhead, the nuclear winds roared toward them all, a black tumult. Veriasse turned to face ahead. Maggie, Orick, and Gallen plunged through the gate while Everynne slowed to match Veriasse's speed. As he hurtled toward the gate, Veriasse spared one last glance back. The last hapless vanquisher had stalled his aircar. He frantically struggled to restart it as the black storm swept over him.

  Then came the white and the void, and Veriasse felt the kiss of the cold breeze that blew in this crack between time and space. He could feel the fabric of his robes whipped by the gale, but there was no sound, no seeing here. Instead, there was only a rushing sensation. The hand of a god lifted him to a distant place.

  When his vision cleared, a drab plain sprawled before them, filled with pockmarks and covered with rocks. Thin clouds made the sky a dim reddish gray. The air was hot and sticky. He could see no buildings, no roads or any other signs of habitation—only desolation.

  A soft wind sighed over the ground, and Veriasse began to recognize that there was some plant life around, a deep gray-brown fungus that grew in tight knots like rosebuds. Things that he'd first taken to be pale rocks also proved to be fat, fanlike plants of palest blue, and the pockmarks in the ground were so numerous that they could not have been formed by any natural means that he knew of. They could only have been formed by the walking hive fortresses of the dronon.

  "Where do we go now?" Maggie said.

  Veriasse turned to Gallen. "Which way is magnetic north?"

  Gallen consulted the sensors in his mantle, nodded to his right. The sun lay to their southeast. Obviously, winter was coming to this section of the world. The walking hives would be migrating.

  "North," Veriasse said. "Look for fresh pockmarks in the ground. Maybe we can track a hive."

  They hit the thrusters, let the airbikes carry them over the gloomy terrain. They saw only a few animals-often things that looked like a conglomeration of sticks could be seen sunning themselves or dragging pieces of vegetable matter to their burrows.

  Once they came to a cloud of round, slightly opaque gray leaves that fluttered slowly over the lan
dscape; it wasn't until the leaves splattered against the windscreen of his bike that Veriasse saw that they were some kind of winged insect, with tiny red heads attached to a single wing. He could not imagine how the creature sustained flight.

  After two hours, Dronon's sun set, rolling quickly, a dull shield dropping before the onslaught of darkness. In the distance ahead, they spotted a huge black saucer. Massive legs rose in the air around the saucer like hinged towers.

  They drove to it, found a deserted hive city with gaping rust holes in it. The armor was pitted from incendiary fire. The city provided the best shelter they had seen all day, so they stopped to camp. They laid out a few blankets beneath the crook of one towering leg, built a cooking fire, and began heating some food bags.

  Then they sat, listening to the night sounds of an alien world: something on the horizon kept making a noise like a popping bag. Elsewhere, a creature called out, "wheeeee," in a high, buzzing voice.

  Veriasse felt disappointed at not having found a hive, and after he checked the back of Everynne's neck to see how the wound was healing, Everynne lay down on her blanket just staring up, as if deep in thought. Orick grumbled about the inconvenience of always finding dronon where you didn't want them, but not being able to find them on their own home world, then lay down protectively beside Everynne. The poor bear had been listless all day, and his stab wound, although slight, had cost him much. He fell asleep within minutes.

  "Don't worry," Veriasse said to the others. "The chances are good that our fire will attract some attention in the night. Perhaps by morning we will meet the dronon, and then we'll find out how they feel about our intrusion on their world." He lay back and thought. Everynne's scar was mending well, but he somewhat hoped that they could wait a few more days.

  Gallen and Maggie were restive. Maggie wore her mantle, and she fairly buzzed with excitement as she studied the legs to the hive city, talked about the engineering feats of the dronon who had made such a thing. At last Maggie took a torch, led Gallen up into the body cavity of the dead city. There they stood on the black metal of a turret mount and gazed into the deep shadows.

  To Veriasse they looked as if they were peering into the shell of a huge turtle. Maggie shouted and whistled to hear her voice echo.

  The two climbed inside to explore.

  Veriasse watched the light from their torch dim as they entered the recesses of the city, and soon he was alone with Everynne and Orick. Veriasse felt weary, tense, and he laid down beside Everynne. Orick snored; it was getting very dark.

  He had thought Everynne slept, but she said softly, "Well, here we are."

  "At last," Veriasse said, trying to sound hopeful.

  Everynne laughed, not the musical sound of joy, but a derisive chuckle. "At last."

  "Do you regret having come?" Veriasse asked.

  It was an unfair question, he knew, but Everynne answered, "This is the planet where I will die, one way or another. I guess I'm disappointed that it is taking so long. I had myself braced for a battle today."

  "I know that you think you will lose something if I win this battle," Veriasse said, "but I promise you-when your consciousness is subsumed into that of Semarritte's, it will not be a death for you. Instead, it will be a wonderful awakening. I have seen it happen with clones before. It will be such a powerful experience that it will overwhelm you, and you will fall asleep for a few moments. But you will awaken a much wiser and more powerful being. Trust me, my daughter, trust me."

  Veriasse looked at Everynne's face, lit only by the campfire. She was more frightened than he'd ever seen her. She trembled violently. Her lips pulled back in terror, and a heavy perspiration lay on her forehead.

  Veriasse took her hand, caressed it, but Everynne did not turn to him. Instead, she laughed coldly and said, "Father, if I turned around and walked away from here, would you hate me?"

  This was a subject that Veriasse had hoped to avoid-a discussion about other options, other plans for defeating the dronon. He had already considered all of his options, discussed them in depth with Everynne and Semarritte before her, rejected them one by one. She couldn't walk away from this, and Veriasse could not afford to let her be weak. He wanted to warn her against trying to take the easy path, remind her of billions of others who would suffer and die under dronon rule if she quit now. Instead, he only spoke the truth. "I would love you, even if you turned away. You are as much a daughter as I have ever had, and I've watched you learn and grow these past three years with great joy and a great deal of pride."

  "But you will love me more when Semarritte fills me, won't you?" she said bitterly. "I'll bet you can't wait until she succeeds me. How long do you think it will take before you bed her?"

  Veriasse had rarely seen Everynne angry. Never had he heard her say an unkind word, yet he had to remind himself that emotionally she was still a child, and he had to make allowances for that. "Everynne, don't torture yourself this way. No good will come of it."

  "I'm not torturing myself," she said. "You're torturing me. You're killing me! " She rolled away from him and began weeping.

  Veriasse wanted to say something to comfort her, but there was so little he could say. At last he whispered, "If you want to walk away from this, then tell me, and I swear I will do everything in my power to get you home safely. If this is what you want, we can raise armies, take our keys and open the gates. People everywhere love you. They would fight if you asked them to, and in a matter of days I swear I could raise an army of billions to fight in your behalf. They would scream across the worlds in a rampage of blood and fire. Terrors could be unleashed on a thousand worlds. If this is what you want."

  He did not have to tell her that the losses from such a war would be immeasurable. The dronon would begin destroying those worlds they had already captured. The images of mushroom clouds were still fresh in his mind from this afternoon, and images from the terror-burned world of Bregnel lay in his mind like a black clot, but this war would be far worse than anything that had occurred before. The dead would pile up quickly, mountains of corpses so vast that no one could ever begin to count them.

  But Everynne already knew that. She could not turn away from so many in need. She lay crying, and said at last, "Hold me, Father. Please?"

  Veriasse put his arm over her shoulder and snuggled against her back. She gripped his hand, hard. He held her until she stopped shaking, nearly an hour, and at last he whispered, "Are you all right? Do you feel better?"

  "I'm all right," she said firmly. "I just wish it were over. I was frightened for a minute."

  "There's my brave girl," Veriasse said, and he lay with his body cupped around hers, smelling the sweet scent of her hair. After awhile she began to breathe deeply, as if she would soon fall asleep, and he wondered about Maggie and Gallen. Though they had been in the dead hive city for a long time, he reminded himself that it was a huge place. He imagined that they might keep exploring for hours. He gave himself permission to sleep, and soon fell into a fitful dream.

  Maggie rushed through the dead dronon hive city, feeling wild and free. Her nerves jangled in anticipation, and Gallen ran behind her. They would meet the dronon soon, and she fully expected to die, but for the moment, the mantle she wore wanted images of this city. It drove her forward in a mad rush through the beast, gleaning images of an engine room where monstrously large hydraulics assemblies had once driven the massive legs. She studied the power system and the exhaust nacelles.

  Though the city was dead and much of the equipment had been scavenged, the dronon took great care of their equipment; they had even protected the abandoned machinery by coating it with oil.

  The heavy odor of rusting iron and dust filled the city. The corridors were dark. Wind whistled through the hallways high overhead.

  For an hour Maggie and Gallen studied the engine rooms, then found what could only have been egg warmers in a huge nursery. But Maggie's mantle drove her on, ever curious. It fed its discoveries to her in a constant barrage, so that s
he felt as if she would burst at the wonder of it all.

  She ran laughing into the bowels of the city, and Gallen ran beside her, bearing the torch, sometimes touching her shyly. At last they reached a storage chamber and walked down a long corridor. Various implements of unknown intent had been piled along the walls, the machinery of a forgotten age. Enormous capacitor coils rose up for ten meters, sitting like huge thimbles. Spare legs for the hive city were strung from the ceiling. Bits of round, antique flying message pods lay heaped in a pile, and Maggie's mantle warned her to fill her pockets with them so she could disassemble them later. Things that looked like dronon heads made of glass—with three sets of compound eyes-lay in a heap, as if in some distant past the dronon had tried creating androids. Or perhaps, Maggie wondered, there were even now dronon-shaped androids running about in the hive cities. But her mantle whispered that if such things existed, they had never been seen on any world.

  Much of what she saw her mantle could understand-bits of cabling, servomotors, a shelf heaped with mechanical brains, outdated egg-warming chambers. These things she would explain to Gallen. Yet much of it was equally mysterious to her. Most of the dronon equipment was bulky, five times as heavy as anything a human would use. The dronon seemed to prefer their machinery to be durable rather than lightweight or convenient.

  In one vast chamber, they found what could have only been a spaceship. It was a small vessel, eighty feet long, forty wide, shaped like a Y. Maggie didn't know if she could fly it.

  She opened the hatch, went inside, and her mantle whispered to her as she studied the engines. She told Gallen, "This has a gravity-wave drive. We couldn't take it out of the solar system. Still, I'll bet it's fast." She went to the control board. The chairs before the panel were saddle-shaped affairs meant to hold a dronon body, and various foot pedals on the floor looked too intricate for any being with less than four legs to operate. The hand controls were set on a dashboard nearly five feet away and could only be manipulated by something with long arms. Maggie grinned, realizing that this must be an ancient dronon warship, for only the vanquishers with their long battle arms could have worked those controls.