Karthenor said to Felph, in discussing the Dronon invasion, "This is a rather unprecedented move of solidarity. to fly all the hive ships of the Golden Queens here in unison. But the Dronon see the wisdom of combining their strength. Once they conquer mankind, they'll share human technology equally. With both our species working together, we will begin a new era of prosperity."
Felph looked out through the central viewport near the ceiling, where Ruin seemed to float above their heads, a ball of red sand blotched with hazy purple seas. Hundreds of brilliant objects floated around the planet, but Thomas could see they weren't stars-they were Dronon warships, along with technical support crews.
Nearby several technical support crews had already begun creating a passive ring of black metal in space, a new
gate that would let the Dronon fly their ships back to their ships back to their own home worlds once they'd found Gallen and Maggie.
"Marvelous, marvelous." Felph mouthed the words without enthusiasm as he studied the construction of this massive Gate to All Worlds. "But I have to wonder, Lord
Karthenor. Wouldn't the golden age you speak of be just as grand if humans stood at the helm? What if we took control, discovered the secrets of Dronon technology?"
Karthenor studied Feiph with an appreciative smile. "The Tharrin would never do that;" Karthenor said. "The notion of dominating another species would offend their principles."
Felph shrugged. "Well, the Tharrin aren't human, are they? I ask you again, what if humans took control?"
Karthenor stared down at Cintkin and Kintiniklintit, Lords of the Seventh Swarm. In the center of the dome, the Golden Queen lay in a huge pit, her bloated body filling a remarkable portion of the room. Hundreds of small, white worker Dronon scurried around her, constantly feeding her some obnoxious milk, or grooming her body by cleansing it with their mandibles, or hauling off the sickly yellow eggs that dropped from her egg sac every two minutes.
The sheer number of Dronon in the room invited a sense of claustrophobia. Yet more intimidating than all this was Kintiniklintit himself, the Lord Escort who stood at the queen's side, receiving his own ministrations from fawning attendants. Dozens of Vanquishers surrounded him, enormous, deadly creatures with their black carapaces. Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies.
Lord Kintiniklintit dwarfed all his counterparts.
Karthenor nodded toward Kintiniklintit, considering Felph's treasonous attitude. "Marvelous specimen, isn't he? He's one of the first Dronon Lords who has been modified through genetic manipulation. He outweighs his rivals by sixty percent. Most of his exoskeleton has been reinforced, so he can withstand greater damage in the arena. I believe if he wanted to, he could seize control of the whole Dronon empire. But he's biding his time, wisely I might add. He's a young Vanquisher, and is studying the battle techniques of his enemies."
That was all Karthenor said, but the implied message was this: we can't conquer the Dronon unless a human can survive in the arena with this monster. I'm backing Kintiniklintit.
Felph.did not answer. He just eyed Kintiniklintit with an amused twinkle in his eye. "We share an unhealthy fondness for eugenics, I see." Felph glanced at Karthenor.
"You've met my beautiful daughters. When you find Gallen and Maggie, you'll meet my son, Zeus. I hope you find him admirable. Sometimes, there is more to a man than
meets the eye."
Thomas heard the threat under those words: don't back Kintiniklintit until you know the competition.
Lord Karthenor smiled affably. "A son? You have a son?" he waved expansively at Kintiniklintit. "Then we both have sons, for though he was born to the Lords of the Sixth Swarm, Kintiniklintit is as much my son as his father's." Thomas was stunned by the admission. "So, our sons will do battle. How amusing."
"Fortuitous," Felph said, "I hope."
"Amusing, whatever the outcome," Karthenor said. As if to change to a safer topic, he added, "It's odd, don't you think, that a species as advanced as the Dronon never considered the benefits of genetics till they met man? You'd think any self-aware species would instantly recognize the benefits of genetic manipulation-to cure disease, improve intelligence. But the Dronon never saw it as anything more than a curiosity.
"You see, they knew what to do with those who were deformed or sickly. They killed them. Threw them away."
“The result is that for millions of years, the Dronon have
been almost free from genetically transmitted ailments. So they never considered the possibility of improving themselves…”
Karthenor waited for Felph to respond. Clearly he wanted to know what "improvements" Lord Felph had made to Zeus. There was a dangerous glimmer in Karthenor's eyes, a stern tightness about his mouth. If Thomas weren't wearing a Guide, he'd have warned Felph of the dangers of revealing too much.
Perhaps Lord Felph was smarter than Thomas credited. With a grin, he simply said, "Hmmm ... interesting."
Around the room, a rhythmic, pounding hum reverberated as Dronon technicians kept up constant chatter. But suddenly Kintinrklintit began loudly clacking his mouthifngers over his voicedrum; the other Dronon quieted.
Karthenor seemed to have no difficulty understanding the Dronon's words. "Ah, it looks as if you have steered us correctly, Felph. For that, I thank you. The Dronon located the ship precisely where you said it would be."
The central screen, which took up nearly a third of one wall, displayed a three-dimensional image of a glowing blue spaceship buried deep beneath the tangle.
"I suspected he'd be there," Felph said. "I had some work for Gallen in this region."
"Work?" Karthenor asked.
"Searching for ancient ruins. The natives on this world once stood or, the verge of creating technology. It's rumored that an ancient city lies there somewhere, but it's the devil to get to-local predators, you know."
"Hmmm." Karthenor shrugged, uninterested in the matter.
Dronon technicians in one sector of the dome suddenly began humming loudly, and Karthenor spun on his heels, watching the monitors they tended. The Dronon cleared
away from several screens. Klaxons began screaming a warning in the distance, while brilliant blue lights flashed along the floor of the dome.
In space, all around the planet, Dronon battleships suddenly began to dive landward. Felph wrung his hands nervously and shouted, "What's happening? Where are they all going?"
Karthenor studied the ships, his dark eyes darting from monitor to monitor. "The other Swarm Lords know we've found Maggie's ship, and they're trying to get to her first. They're sending in Vanquishers-their own search parties."
Thomas almost grinned. So his niece was a treasure, and all the Dronon were going to fight for her, fight for the chance to challenge Gallen O'Day.
Karthenor waved to a screen at the far right. "See, the Lords of the Fourth Swarm are sending down six full Flights-over forty-six thousand Vanquishers. I should have. anticipated this!" he grumbled. "With thousands of worlds at stake, the opportunity to loot mankind's technology, I should have known!"
As the Lords of the Fourth Swarm launched six battleships toward the planet, the others were forced to deploy their own troops in ever-greater numbers. Sixty thousand Vanquishers from first swarm, ninety from second.
Within minutes, over half a million Vanquishers departed for Ruin. Thomas wished he could talk, at least enough to hurl a curse at the Dronon. He hoped the Vanquishers would do more than merely race toward Gallen and Maggie. He hoped they would fight over their prey. At least that way, if Gallen and Maggie died, some Dronon would be lost, too.
Thomas could think of nothing to do-no way to help his niece, but to pray silently. "Hide, Maggie. Hide!"
Chapter Thirty Four
Maggie hurried to keep up, terrified beyond her ability to tell. Distantly, the earth rumbled from the sound of the mistwife flailing in her anger.
Gallen ran ahead of Maggie, following crazy trails, trying to go upward when possible. Time and again as she climbed, Maggie found herself grabbin
g wildly at ancient roots in the ground, all of them cold as ice and hard as iron.
The landscape had no color. Everything was washed in shades of gray, covered with the same dark molds and slimes.
Dully, almost constantly, she heard wild thrashing, the terrible cries of the mistwife. They were getting closer to it as they climbed.
They came to a cavern filled with iron gray molds, standing like inverted trumpets, which felt like foam rubber beneath her feet. Nothing lived here except for the odd blind insect that skittered off when it felt the ground tremble at their steps. Beyond the occasional trickle of water, she could no longer hear any sounds. The air smelled fetid, full of rot and mold. The stillness, the heavy, oppressive air weighed her down, made her feel as if she would suffocate.
For nearly two kilometers, they found no sign of sfuz or pair of prints in the humus, crossing their path. "A young sfuz," he said. Maggie was no expert tracker, but even she could see detritus filling the prints; the edges around the tracks had crumbled. The sfuz that made them could not have passed this way within weeks or months. Still, it wasa good sign. A juvenile had passed this way, exploring the tangle, hunting.
Gallen tried to follow the tracks back to a lair, but they led around the lip of a dangerous sinkhole, then climbed directly up a steep tree. Still, they were getting near the lair.
"Maggie," her mantle whispered. "I have just received a message from the ship. The Dronon are making a powerful sensor sweep of this area. They've discovered the
ship's location." Gallen turned and frowned at Maggie. Apparently, his mantle had just relayed the message to him.
It had taken Gallen and Maggie two hours to fly their ship into this mess. They'd snaked through dozens of passages, gone up almost as much as they'd gone down. Even if the Dronon knew their ship was here, it could take them hours to find a path to it. Once they did, they'd follow Maggie's scent.
She imagined Dronon Vanquishers, thousands strong, hunting through this tangle. She wondered what would happen when they met the sfuz.
"Gallen," she hissed. "We have to stop!"
Gallen halted. The light from her glow globe cast enormous shadows, shadows that frightened her because for a moment she thought she saw something huge and black struggling toward her from a passage.
She went to Gallen's side. "The Dronon will be hunting here she whispered, And the sfuz. Maybe we shouldn’t try to get so close to Teeawah.”
Gallen looked up toward the passage that had frightened Maggie. "We don't know how close we are, yet."
"Close enough so their children play in these passages."
Gallen looked forward eagerly, then frowned as he glanced at the trail behind. "I don't know what else to do."
Maggie's heart pounded. Her mouth felt dry. She unstrapped the canteen from her back and took a swig. She didn't know what to do, either. The tension in the air was so thick, she could hardly swallow. She nodded, let Gallen lead them forward.
He can't do it all, Maggie thought. He can't lead us. He can't fight for us. He can't do it all. Think.. Think. She didn't want to go forward, could barely force herself to keep up.
They hurried up the passage, came to a bend. Gallen halted. To their left, a great hole opened, perfectly round. This one was twice the diameter of the one they'd encountered earlier. Another mistwife. Huge. Huge.
Maggie's heart pounded. Gallen and the others tiptoed ahead.
Think, Maggie told herself. She reached into her pockets, shoving her fists in to get warm; her fingers closed around glass.
She pulled it out. The bottle of scent from the perfumery. She stopped, considered it for a moment.
The Dronon would follow her, chase her with their Seekers. She couldn't let them find her.
She motioned with her hand for Gallen to come back. He had already gone fifty meters ahead. He returned reluctantly.
Maggie didn't dare speak. Instead, she reached up, fumbled with his robe. Its nanoscrubbers could hide her scent,' clean it from the air as she walked. If she wore his robe, she hoped, she'd be almost undetectable to the Seekers.
Gallen frowned at her, confused, tried to pull her forward. Apparently he thought she was only cold, and he considered this a poor place to give her the loan of a cloak, but Maggie refused to be led away till she had the cloak off him and over her own shoulders. She pulled the hood up over her head, then took the bottle of scent, carried it to the lip of the great hole in the ground, the mistwife's passage.
The dirt here was slippery, loose. If she got too near the edge, she'd fall in. But she had to do this, had to reach out over that dark hole and pour a few drops, a few precious drops of her scent down.that hole.
When she finished, she put the stopper back on the empty bottle and dropped it into the thick humus at her feet, covered it with dirt, then fled.
Every second, she listened for the sound of something rushing up that shaft, something shrieking and tumbling. If this monster came after them, they might not escape.
When she'd gone a few hundred meters, she sighed in relief. Yet her relief was short-lived.
If I made it safely, won't the Dronon? she wondered. She'd hoped the mistwife would kill any Seekers that came after her. She'd imagined the machines hurtling over. the lip of-that pit, and the Dronon buzzing away, crashing into .the jaws of the mistwife.
But what if no mistwife lived down that hole? The pit was vast, twenty meters in diameter. Perhaps its maker had died centuries ago..
Maggie couldn't know, might never know. She only knew she had to keep running. By now it was late afternoon. The sfuz would be waking, leaving their chambers. The group needed to find a place to hide.
Chapter Thirty Five
Gallen glanced back down the trail behind him, watching for sign of pursuit, then looked ahead again. Before them was a small pond, water pooling from a rock cliff, that stretched up into the darkness. The pool appeared deep and still. Tiny blind fish and insects swam in it, yet Gallen dared not drink that water, for it had an unhealthy green tint to it. Besides, it was not the solemn pond, with the sound of dripping from above, that interested him. It was the cliff.
The weathered yellow stone had been swept smooth eons ago by wind and rain, yet here in the tangle, it looked as if wind would never touch it again.
Still, on the cliff before them faint pictographs could be seen in dim green characters. A bird, with both wings spread, looking up to its right. Lightning bolts seemed to be flying from its eyes. Zeus stared at it, mesmerized, mouth open in wonder.
"What is it?" Orick asked.
"A Qualeewooh," Zeus said, "who wears no spirit mask."
Gallen wanted to say something in response, but he, too, suddenly felt a sense of wonder. Even the most ancient depictions of Qualeewoohs he'd seen portrayed them with spirit masks. But if the masks were created to be receivers so the Qualeewoohs could hear the voices of their ancestors, then there would have been a time before the ancestors spoke, a time when no Qualeewooh yet wore a mask. A time before the Waters of Strength.
Gallen shook his head. This particular chamber in the tangle was fairly large, but had no openings to either side. It came to an abrupt stop at the cliff face. Here, the trail ended.
The last fork in the trail that Gallen had seen was hundreds of meters back. Even if he knew where an entrance to Teeawah was, he knew he wouldn't reach it easily. That in itself made him uneasy, but he faced another challenge. It had been three hours since the Dronon had pinpointed his ship.
The Dronon were now hunting them, deep in the tangle. His mantle picked up their radio chatter-the incessant clicking of Dronon mouthfingers over a background of static. It wasn't coming over just a few channels, but over hundreds or thousands.
The Dronon must be crawling through here en masse, he realized. More of them than he'd imagined possible were ifltering through the tangle. It was only a matter of time before they found him. Gallen couldn't afford any more blind alleys or delays.
"Come on," he whispered, leadi
ng the party back the way they'd come. Maggie turned and hobbled, neck bent, nearly stumbling with fatigue. For the past four hours they'd been climbing up and down, seeking routes through the maze. They'd found few "signs of sfuz-excrement here, a hole dug there.
Gallen realized that they'd come too low. The entrance to the city must be higher up the cliffs. Down here, where nothing lived, the sfuz did not bother to hunt. That's why he'd found so few tracks.
Gallen walked with Maggie, holding her hand. trying to give the comfort she needed. He watched her face bobbing, unsteady light; saw that more than the energy had drained from it. Her hope, too, was going.
"Don't worry, darling," Gallen whispered,emphasizing the brogue accent he’d all but completely discared in the last months. “I’ll not let nothing bad happen to the prettiest girl her Clere.” He clenched her hand reassuringly.
Maggie smiled, but kept her mouth shut. None of them really should be talking, even though it looked certain that no sfuz were close by.
For another hour they hiked, backtracking from one.cavern to the next, climbing up higher whenever possible. In one passage, they finally found a trail that had seen some use, and Gallen tried following it-climbing vertical trees as if he were a sfuz, squeezing through a tunnel so narrow Maggie feared she wouldn't be able to make it.
When they reached the end of the tunnel, they found they hadn't come to a sfuz lair, but had reached something vast yawning pit filled with the shells of some crab like animals, along with hundreds of skeletons. At first Gallen imagined that the sfuz had disposed of bones here, but movement in the pit caught his eye. It wasn't shells, but
actual crablike insects, each with a dozen thin legs, climbing among corpses-sfuz corpses. In this graveyard, scavengers fed.
The fact that some sfuz died at all suggested that not all of them were allowed to drink from the Waters of Strength. Gallen wondered. Like any great treasure, some would horde it, deny it to others. Gallen guessed that these were the lowest of the sfuz, the wasted, those who did not merit immortality.
Lords of the Seventh Swarm, Book 3 of the Golden Queen Series Page 29