Chapter Thirteen
“I have him!” said Silta with a grunt as he grasped Haufren’s limp arms and pulled him onto the landing. “Get out of the water, Duval. Quickly!”
Duval needed no urging. He climbed out with alacrity, water streaming from his clothes, and knelt with a gasp as Silta rolled Haufren onto his stomach and began resuscitation procedures.
“No, I know a better way,” said Duval. “We’re trained for this sort of thing.”
Moving Silta gently but firmly aside, he rolled Haufren over onto his back and began pumping his arms with skilled rapidity, pausing at intervals to breathe into Haufren’s lungs. Silta crouched there miserably, his eyes never leaving Haufren’s face. Inside, he had to battle down the keening of grief rising within his heart. Not yet, he told himself. He must not give up yet. But, oh, my friend, you look dead. You look worse than dead. And he thought, there is nothing harder to gaze upon than the face of a drowned man.
Haufren’s cheeks were colorless in the glare of the torchlight. His shut eyes were sunk into their sockets. Silta pressed the backs of his hands together, the soggy lumps he had felt within Haufren’s side still impressed upon the memory of his fingertips. Internal injuries…crushed ribs…so little life left…the remaining spark so low. Live! he thought, sending the force of his will into Brith.
At the other end of the landing, Nogales groaned and stirred. Silta turned his head a fraction, and swift anger burned through his veins. “If Brith dies,” he said softly, showing his fangs, “so shall the fat one.”
Duval looked up from his efforts. “Then you negate Major Haufren’s sacrifice.”
Silta spat. “Sacrifices are for humans! Upon me such things do not bind.”
“Even a friend is not worth killing for.”
Silta slitted his eyes and estimated how long it would take to slice the flesh from this human’s bones. “So does your law say. Brith is more than friend. He—” Silta broke off, still unable after all these years to speak of that day of horror and chaos with the palace burning and collapsing around them, the females screaming, the crunch of sword thrusts through the bony chests of young nibs, himself cowering in the rubble—too young to fight, too old to run. Even now his dreams still brought him vividly the strength of a hand grasping his shoulder and drawing him away to safety. Brith’s hand. Silta shut his eyes, biting down hard so as not to utter the wail of grieving.
A faint cough jerked him upright. He stared intently, watching with delight as murky water bubbled from Haufren’s mouth. Then he helped Duval roll Haufren over onto his stomach and held his head as Haufren retched violently again and again. Without a word Duval moved away to the fat one.
“Gently, my friend. Gently,” murmured Silta, wiping Haufren’s face. “You continue. You live.”
Haufren’s eyes flickered open and focused slowly upon Silta’s face. Death hovered within their blue depths. Silta sought to erase it, but Haufren’s hand clamped down hard upon his wrist.
“Leg…gone…” he said with a gasp. “Silta?”
“No, Brith. No!” Silta quickly, seeking to soothe away that terror. “Both are with you. Lost them you have not!”
Haufren frowned at him, disbelieving, still terror-stricken. Silta sent him a light mind touch of reassurance, and smiled when the strain suddenly faded from Haufren’s face.
“Demos,” he said, letting his head fall. “I thought—” Violent coughing racked him, and this time blood splattered the stone landing as well as water.
Worry pierced Silta like a knife thrust. He ran his hands lightly down Haufren’s sides, feeling for the broken bones, and stopped his examination at the quiver in Haufren’s face.
“We can’t stay here,” whispered Haufren hoarsely.
“Agreed.” Silta shifted Haufren’s injured leg and decided that by some miracle it was not broken. “I shall help you.”
As gently as he could, he pulled Haufren upright and slipped a steadying arm around him when the major swayed.
“Some hero, eh, friend?” said Haufren with a grin and coughed.
“Do not talk,” said Silta, letting annoyance mask his worry. “We must turn back. We must go to Settle at once.”
“No.”
“Brith, do not argue. You will die without medical attention. We know where to find the Omcris now. We can come back when you are restored.”
“No!” Haufren’s fingers gripped the thick black fur covering Silta’s chest and twisted it painfully. His blue eyes bored into Silta’s. “We never leave Rangers in the field!”
“Agreed. But you present us with a paradox, my friend.” Silta’s gaze could not meet the intensity in Haufren’s. His voice roughened as he said: “They are not Rangers. You are more important.”
“Don’t be a fool,” said Haufren sharply enough to make himself cough again. He sagged against Silta, fighting for breath.
“You see?” said Silta, steadying him. “What would we do without you? Brith, you are the corps. And you are my—”
“The Rangers can continue very well without the great-grandson of their founder.” Haufren gripped Silta’s arm, his fingers digging in as he struggled to pull himself erect. “As can you.”
“Continue without my spear-brother? My friend? No—”
“Silta, you fool, I don’t intend to die yet,” said Haufren with exasperation. He shoved his wet hair back from his face. “We go on! Commander Janal is too valuable a personage to be left in enemy hands. The girl may not be one of us, but she is worthy of that honor. You can sit here and light my funeral pyre in this water-logged hole if you wish, but I am not through with the Omcris yet. Now get your mental shields up and let us be moving!” He paused to spit blood into his hand, then met Silta’s worried eyes. “That was an order, Captain.”
Silta’s throat closed with the effort of holding back what he could have said. The long years of discipline enabled him to drive down his personal feelings. It was the Zethian way to be inscrutable; it was the Ranger way to follow orders.
He blinked at Haufren, trying to imagine him as a piece of food rather than as someone to whom he owed his life many times over. “Acknowledged,” he said.
“Good,” said Haufren, glancing at the others. He saw Tith staring at him with enormous, frightened eyes and with a wan smile took the nib’s little hand in his.
“Gentlemen,” said Silta for him. “Let us move out.”
Duval took the lead now, and Nogales the rear. Silta greatly disapproved of having the fat one at his back, but there was no help for it. Haufren could barely walk even with his and Tith’s assistance. Silta nodded to himself. In minutes Haufren would collapse. Then he would be free to take command and turn them back. Haufren had always been stubborn, a risk-taker, a defier of odds. Silta, on the other hand, had more regard for the sanctity of a whole skin. He preferred to crawl through these dank tunnels for the blind with a full contingent of men and plenty of deton-bombs.
After several minutes of walking through a low, noxious-smelling passageway dotted with puddles of slime, they came to a door. Duval checked it with the scanner, nodded, and put his shoulder to it. The panel was of a type Silta had never seen before save in archival pictures: thick and hung on hinges that shrieked alarmingly as Duval pushed it open. Beyond was a laboratory.
Silta, who had no interest in chemicals and distillation flasks, did no more than glance briefly around and note that it was hardly a sterile place or an orderly one. He pointed at the far end of the cluttered room. “Another door.”
“Wait!” said Nogales, pushing past Silta and Haufren to kneel awkwardly beside a crumpled heap of metal. “Duval, shine your torch here.” When Duval complied, Nogales gasped. “R7! My daughter’s drone! She’s here! She must be here.” Snatching the torch from Duval’s hand, he began flashing it here and there about the room.
Silta nudged a battered metal arm with his foot and sniffed. “Obviously scrapped for parts.”
Haufren suddenly stirred. “Under the table.�
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Duval dragged the body out. It was the corpse of a tall humanoid resembling the giants of Tamar. The eyes were missing, and one hand was swollen black. Moving it stirred up the smell of death, which quickly tainted the air.
“Pfit!” said Silta, wrinkling his nose. “One of their creatures.”
“Poor devil,” said Duval, frowning in an anguish of his own. “That’s what will happen to Costa, isn’t it?”
“Not if we find her in time,” said Haufren.
“We’ve got to hurry!” Duval turned to beckon to Nogales who was kneeling in a corner piled with objects and tools of every kind. “Come on, Wob. There is nothing here.”
Nogales rose slowly and turned to face them. His face was streaked with tears, and he held something in his hands.
“Her heart-box,” he said, then shook his head. “Her cardio-protection unit. It’s all here. All of her equipment. The suspensors that helped her walk. The thing that prompted her lungs…all of it. Except her. Oh, Jillian! Those devils dissected Jillian!”
“Incorrect,” said a double-timbred voice that made Silta spin and Haufren reach for his strifer. Silta scanned the room swiftly with eyes and mind, and found nothing. Cowering beside him, Tith choked back a whimper. Silta cursed himself yet again for bringing the nib into this.
“Dissection not performed,” continued the disembodied voice. “Human destroyed in explosion. Salvage unsuccessful.”
Silta flattened his ears and flexed out his claws, his muscles twitching in readiness to pounce. For a moment there was only silence in the room, broken by the faint hum of Haufren’s strifer as it charged to maximum.
Then Nogales let the device in his hand fall to the floor. His eyes widened in horror. “I set those explosions. I ordered them to get rid of those damned Kanta worshipers once and for all. I…killed Jillian! No!”
Duval reached out for him. “Wob, try to—”
“No!” Thrusting Duval aside, Nogales ran for the door at the opposite end of the room and wrenched it open.
“Follow him!” said Haufren hoarsely. “Clear this room before it—”
But Nogales had taken the torch, leaving them blind in the dark. Tith suddenly screamed. Snarling to himself, Silta pulled another from his pack and snapped it on in time to see an Omcri vanishing through the door with Tith struggling in its arms. Another Omcri waited before Silta, hovering a few centimeters off the floor. Silta stared into that void beneath the cowl, felt himself going mad, and howled in fury, lashing out with swift strifer fire as the thing reached for him. Haufren fired, too, and the Omcri crumpled at Silta’s feet into an uninhabited pile of cloth.
They stared at each other for a second, panting.
“Go!” said Haufren.
The three of them moved, aiming for the door that Nogales had gone through. Something shoved a table aside behind them, the legs scraping on the floor.
The fur prickled up Silta’s spine. He paused, glancing back, and spat in fear as he saw the dead humanoid coming after them, arms outstretched, head dangling at a crazy angle, the sightless sockets aimed at him.
“Sistat isk surrur!”
Silta fired at it, saw the bolt hit the body squarely and cut it open. The stench of burned flesh filled his nostrils, but the thing did not falter.
“Silta!”
With a cry, Silta whirled and ran after the others, catching up and seizing Haufren’s arm as the major stumbled and nearly fell. Haufren clung to him.
“Strengthen your shields, Silta,” he whispered, his face gray. “They’ll try that next.”
“Run,” replied Silta, his heart pounding wildly within him. “Run!”
But Duval balked at the mouth of another tunnel. “This is a trap,” he said, looking back. “They are trying to force us down there. We must go back.”
“No!” The scream of protest tore from Silta’s throat. He whirled, panting, and could see the dead thing slowly, relentlessly stalking them, coming closer with every ponderous step. “Not past that thing! Don’t you see it? We have to go forward.”
“Silta.” Haufren gripped him by the arms and shook him. “Silta! What is it? What do you see? Silta, there’s nothing following us.”
But terror had become a tangible thing coiling about him. Silta felt himself shaking violently.
Haufren stepped back, bracing himself against the wall. His eyes met Silta’s and widened. “They’ve got him, Duval. Demos, they’ve got him!”
Silta opened his mouth, but no sound came forth as he watched Haufren slowly raise his strifer and aim it at him. In horror Silta thought: He thinks I am possessed! He tried to reach out to Haufren, to stop him, yet all the while the dead thing was coming relentlessly closer. Silta threw back his head and screamed as something within his mind snapped, and all his shields came crashing down. Every thought and emotion in all its violence poured from him in a powerful onslaught that sent Haufren reeling back and wrung a cry of pain from Duval.
Then suddenly the Omcris were there, six of them robed in sickly white, the color of decay. Still screaming, Silta felt an invisible, powerful pressure push him back against the wall and hold him there despite his thrashing struggles. Haufren fell to his knees with a groan, but managed to fire in a broad sweep at the Omcris. One staggered, and for an instant the pressure eased off Silta. Then it slammed back in full force, and not one of them collapsed.
“They’ve adjusted already to absorb the charge,” said Haufren as though in disbelief. “Damn it, how did they know? How do they communicate?”
Duval shouted something and snapped open the blades of his cutter, hurling it with all his might. An Omcri lifted its hand, and the cutter was deflected in midair, passing within less than a centimeter of Silta’s face before clattering harmlessly against stone. The Omcri stepped forward, and twin flashes of green light blazed from the void that should have been its face. Duval screamed and crumpled to the ground.
“Brith! Run! Run!” shouted Silta, but the words were only in his mind. Nothing came from his throat but those constant, terrible screams.
The green lights flashed again, and Haufren fell.
Something cold and incredibly loathesome squirmed deep into Silta’s brain. Silta writhed violently, struggling with all his might, but the mental power of these creatures was too great to resist. Pain ground through him.
“Serve us,” it commanded. “You will serve us.”
“Never!”
“Then watch how we create playthings from your companions. They will make you wish to die.”
An Omcri hand stretched out, and Haufren jerked puppetlike to his feet. His eyes were open, but there was no life at all in them. His face had the slackness of the dead. Duval joined him, and then suddenly the corpse thing stood between them. The three of them reached out to Silta, who panted and jerked to no avail against his invisible bonds. The touch of their flesh was cold and slightly moist, leaving little trails of slime upon his fur from their fingers, slime which seconds later began to burn his skin like the fires of hell.
He screamed, maddened with the pain.
“Serve us, Silta.”
“No!”
Haufren approached him again, curling cold fingers loosely around Silta’s throat. He made no further move, but soon that continued touch became an agonizing heat that scorched Silta’s throat and mouth and seemed to flame up through the bones of his skull.
“Silta? You will serve us!”
Tormented beyond endurance, Silta beat his head back against the wall in an effort to crush his skull and thus die. Zethians served no one as slave. Zethians could not beg for mercy. What was demanded he could not give. No! He was an officer, a warrior trained in the strictest, the proudest, the most elite corps of service in the Fleet. He would die before he let himself be broken. He would die before he betrayed his race.
“Then die,” said the voice in his brain and laughed. “You will still serve us.”
Chapter Fourteen
Costa huddled next to a delicat
e geometric structure no taller than her shoulder. The chilly, rarefied air cut through her body, making her shiver, and whipped away the final vestige of cloudiness from her mind. Suddenly alert, she blinked and leaned forward slightly as she gazed upon the wonder of alien surroundings as fragile and lovely as glass sculptures. She was sitting outside with a silver-colored sky arching above her. A dim, barely seen glow radiating from that cloudless expanse told her the sun was either dying or far, far distant from this world. She had no more than the faintest outline of a shadow, blurred and indistinct, around her. The muted light seemed only to add to the hushed quality of the air. She frowned, unable to understand what was missing, then caught her breath. On Playworld there were always sounds; nature was never quiet, and Beros—especially its slums—roared with activity. Here, nothing moved. Nothing made sound, save for an occasional, far away tinkling as though wind chimes were stirred by the gentle brush of a hand.
She sat enclosed by a webbed mesh of hand-length crystals, eight-sided, rectangular with pointed ends, and no wider than her finger. The enclosure was shoulder height and perhaps two by eight meters in size. The interlocking crystals were open enough for her to slide her fist through at any point, yet despite the seeming fragility of the formation, she could not snap it. Climbing out would be easy, but she hesitated, staring at the buildings nearby. Dotted in seemingly aimless patterns of circles and triangles rather than in intersecting or parallel lines like the cities she was used to, the buildings were all small but unique examples of breathtaking architecture, built with a delicacy of scale and a brilliance of geometric design. One which her gaze kept returning to again and again as though she were mesmerized was directly across from her enclosure, and larger than the rest. It was a conglomeration of domes, spires, and pyramids formed from tiny blocks of pale blue quartz.
Her gaze narrowed as a piece of memory fell into place. Somewhere inside there was the access point through which she had been brought. She must go back.
The Omcri Matrix Page 18