“I’ve buried a few buddies,” he said. “Never had to dig any up!”
The good thing was that he wasn’t alone in the work now. Cowling, Wu, and Lopez-Herrera had been unearthed — perhaps un-Leeled was the better term. Cowling was already down in another pit, digging. And while Lopez-Herrera was seeing to Wu and her hyperextended arm, she was using her armor’s sensors to help locate the remaining four soldiers beneath the cold debris in the dark.
“I think I’ve got O’Herlihy,” Leah Cowling said. “I need more light down here!”
“Star shells, embed mode,” Bridget ordered. From wherever they stood, her troops above the ice adjusted their rifles. Together, they fired gleaming red shots toward the ceiling.
Driving into the frozen wall, the hissing munitions made like the ancient projectiles that were their namesake. The star shells glowed, blazing and crimson, giving the hall beneath an eerie cast. Now she saw more clearly the surviving Leelites, flitting past like insects around a bug zapper — and the jorvil, still after them.
Her armor did the counting. Just twelve Leelites left in the atrium. The rest had already closed and sealed the door leading down into their underground home. She’d joked about it before, but now needed to worry: What would the behemoth do when it finished off the hors d’oeuvres?
* * *
“I can’t believe we just let them leave,” Trovatelli said, standing in the broken-down passageway leading into the Black Butte. “Your Xylanx, I mean.”
“Not my Xylanx,” Jamie said, leaning against the wall as a load of snow went past. Surge Two had brought in the tracked cargo tenders Indispensable had transported to help deliver the bauxite with; now the soldier-driven vehicles were hauling away the debris blocking the entrance. Q/A had established that the tunnel was structurally sound and had concocted the plan to remove what had fallen. But nothing, it seemed to Jamie, could lift the woman’s spirits.
“We really should have done something,” she said, clearly unhappy. “They were in our depot. And now here?” She looked at Jamie. “Too coincidental. It doesn’t feel right to you, does it?”
Jamie shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I haven’t felt right since I started eating cheese from a squeeze bag.”
Trovatelli frowned. She was beautiful and smart, as he’d always known, but she hadn’t seemed this worried before. The young woman he’d met on Altair had seemed very casually driven, certain her talents were up to any technical problem. Bridget had been the overserious one. Since the fight aboard the Dragon’s Depot, however, the Xylanx had concerned her greatly.
Oh well, Jamie thought. Securing their base was partially Lissa’s responsibility. No one likes having their turf invaded.
“Al…most…there!” Gideon called, rearing back with his arms to swing a great pick again. The squad leader was out ahead of the vehicles, chopping the hell out of the roadblock. Jamie imagined how happy Gideon must have been to find the heavy implement in with the freight.
“Think you’ll start carrying one of those, Vic?” Trovatelli said, brightening with amusement.
“Yeahhh,” Gideon said lustily, smashing the pick into the ice. “I’ll take two!”
Jamie rolled his eyes. The jorvil was about to have its turf invaded, too.
* * *
Michael O’Herlihy crawled out of the hole Cowling had dug. Seeing Bridget, he staggered toward her and pointed to the rifle in her hands. “I think that’s mine,” he said.
“Finders keepers,” Bridget said, holding the weapon and watching above. “Mine blew up.”
“So much for getting your deposit back.” Arms sagging and clearly exhausted, O’Herlihy took a deep breath and straightened. “What’d I miss?” he said gamely.
Bridget stared into the space overhead. “I’m wondering what I’ve missed.”
Near the ceiling, the count of Leelites had held steady in the last few minutes. And the jorvil had seemed increasingly agitated. Again and again, it facepalmed — an old slang expression that was exactly descriptive here — against the high wall of the atrium, missing its prey. The wispy aliens would appear a split second later, hovering close to the still-burning star shells. The jorvil would then twist and writhe, brushing the Leelites back into play with the ridged fins of its long “neck.”
But the Leelites were tiring, she could tell, and the jorvil’s movements were growing more frenetic. Was it hungry? Had it been above the surface for too long? Or…
The answer reached her literally in the form of rays from above. “It’s the star shells!” she said. Nothing else they’d fired had hurt the jorvil. But it was moving in such a way that it did not expose its “face” too closely to the sizzling red-light sources. “Mike, what’s in those things?”
O’Herlihy knew fireworks like no one else, having caused the evacuation of a chicken restaurant in his teens. “Basic tracer — strontium nitrate and magnesium. Burns redder than hell’s own damnation,” he said. “Give the old worm heartburn?”
“Maybe,” Bridget said. She lifted her weapon — his weapon — and swore. “Out. Anybody else?”
“I fired all mine,” Dinner said.
“My Spraecher’s still under all that somewhere,” Wu said, nodding to the ice pile from which Bridget’s last team member had just been retrieved.
Another rumble shook the room. Bridget switched back to live ammo and spun — just in time to see a cargo tender punch through the darkened hole that had been the entrance. Against the faint light from outside the tunnel, she saw the tender’s driver disembark.
“Surge Two reporting,” Gideon said, standing outside the cab as his other troops filed in. He picked up his weapon from inside and looked up at the jorvil. He whistled. “Wow. The dink wasn’t kidding.”
Bridget clambered over a pile of ice to address him. “Gideon, do you still have any of your star shell charges?”
“I’ve got all of them,” he said. “Never use ’em. They’re noncombat items.”
“Today’s different. You’ve got four charges?”
“Eight,” he said, pointing to the homebrew multi-rifle.
She turned back and looked up. “I think we can blind the thing if we can hit it in the face somehow,” she said. But looking up, she realized that the jorvil’s head was never lower than fifteen meters above, and there was no good angle on it from below. “How do we bring it down here?”
“Don’t worry about that,” Gideon said, slinging his rifle and pulling a pick from the cab. “I’ve got this.”
As the man clambered over an icy obstacle, Bridget looked back to see Jamie and Trovatelli entering.
“He’s crazy,” Jamie said, face white. “Certifiable. A loon—”
“Careful, he’ll hear you,” Bridget said.
“I don’t care. He nearly brought the cave down on us twice. He’s twisted like a bag of bread!”
“I know,” Bridget replied, grinning. She turned to see the leader of her second team charging up a large, slanting slab of upturned ice. Thanks to the internal servos, HardSHEL armor wasn’t hard to run in, and the lower gravity was also working in Gideon’s favor. But anyone else would have looked at the sheer ramp as forbidding — not to mention what awaited at the end: the enormous tubular trunk of the jorvil.
Not Gideon, who launched himself from the end of the makeshift ramp. Positioning the pick in front of him, he drove its head into the stone-encrusted body of the jorvil. Prying open a spot he could use as a handhold, he grabbed on with his free hand and swung the pick again.
“Stay ready,” Bridget said to her team on the ground, most of whose guns were trained on the creature.
“Ready for what?” O’Herlihy said, weaponless.
Bridget blinked. “Well, I don’t really know,” she said as she watched Gideon chopping his own ladder up the massive freestanding spine. “But stay ready anyway.”
Beside her, Trovatelli marveled. “It’s like Jack and the Beanstalk,” she said.
“Yeah,” Jamie said, likewise spellbou
nd. “Was Jack a homicidal maniac?”
Bridget chuckled — and then raised her rifle again as Gideon approached the top of the creature. “We’ve got to give him a second when he gets up there,” she said. “Lasers, Spore nucleus package. Target the facial claws — and don’t hit Gideon!”
Around her, the members of her team focused on the top of the jorvil. It might have sounded like a tall order, but this was a surgical-strike team accustomed to firing with pinpoint accuracy at tiny moving targets. The lasers were really only designed for slicing open Spore nuclei — they hadn’t bothered using them against the Xylanx, whose armor’s refractive coating would have diminished their power. Bridget didn’t really expect them to do anything to the monster now either, but she hoped they might get its attention.
They watched as Gideon shimmied toward a gap between two of the six fingers splayed around the creature’s facial orifice. Another moment and the pick fell from his hand. When the man reached the writhing creature’s facial level, Bridget saw the facial talons begin to flex faster than any Venus flytrap ever moved for a kill.
“Fire!” Bridget yelled. A dozen beams appeared in unison, two targeting a finger each. That breakdown was just luck, but Bridget’s hunch was correct. The claws stopped moving for a moment, short of the armored body of the man now crouching on the jorvil’s face, gun pointed into its maw.
“Eat this, ugly!”
Gideon fired one star shell charge after another into the creature. A cavernous-sounding pop-pop-pop followed, resonating through the creature’s mouth. Bridget imagined what was happening inside: as designed, the missiles were seeking walls to bury themselves in — and instead were finding themselves nice niches in the alimentary canal of a giant alien serpent. By the fourth popping sound, she could see Gideon wrapping his body around one of the facial fingers.
It was a necessary move, because in the next instant one of the final blasts went off deep within the jorvil — almost at Bridget’s ground level. All around the circumference of the creature, the stony rings crackled and crisped, and chunks of its exterior started to fall off. When Bridget saw the jorvil swaying in her direction, she wasted no time in shoving Jamie and Trovatelli into motion.
“Go! Now!”
But the jorvil did not fall like a mighty tree. Rather, it crumbled from the base, sinking like an imploded building under demolition. A colossal din echoed through the atrium. From her position safely away, Bridget saw Gideon riding the corpse down, a man on the strangest elevator ride ever. When the last section tipped over a few meters from the ground, Gideon finally released the dead “hand” and dove away. He landed in a somersault that quickly ended in a chest-first splat on the soft but jagged ground.
The giant jorvil was now a pile of gigantic, ashen Christmas wreaths, the interiors of some still glowing with the blazing star shells. Whatever drove the body of the great worm, the surge team had found something it could not handle. From above, the surviving Leelites floated gently to the ground.
“Medic!” Bridget rushed around the debris to Gideon’s side. “Don’t try to move,” she said, looking at his armor, even more banged up now.
“Ow,” Gideon simply said. But she could see him smile.
24
Bridget shook her head as Lopez-Herrera helped maneuver Gideon’s stretcher out of the auction hall. The other members of the team didn’t know, but she had found Gideon in an Argentinean prison, serving life for his behavior at a football riot. He hadn’t even known what teams were playing, a fact that had given him a wider range of targets. In eight months of confinement, he had brought the penal system to its knees. To settle complaints lodged by her guards, Gideon’s final warden had agreed to give him over to Quaestor for deportation off world.
It was a miracle that he’d survived as long as he had. Bridget had only put him in charge of the second team to make good on a threat two years earlier; she was trying to wake up a third-class, inattentive squad. It had worked pretty well. She’d convinced him to secretly agree to never order anyone else to do what he was going to do, but his squad mates didn’t know that, and it had kept them on their toes ever since. It was hard to resent getting a dangerous job when the squad leader was taking all the rough assignments himself. The things I have to work with, she thought.
And now here’s another, she thought, seeing Jamie approach through the disarray. He had recovered his briefcase, she saw, and was accompanied by one of the Leelites.
“We’re back in business,” Jamie said, pointing back to the Q/A, who was kneeling next to a pair of large dodecahedrons while another Leelite floated nearby. “Trovatelli brought in the spare knowglobe, and Vremian here’s got us patched back into theirs so we can talk.”
Bridget brightened as she heard the auctioneer’s name. “I’m glad you made it,” she said. “But I’m sorry about the others.”
Vremian shimmered. “I am too,” he said, his voice again filtered and translated. “But this is why we always conduct our business here in a short window, to avoid the jorvil.”
Bridget nodded. “If I can ask, why didn’t you fly closer to the ground to get away from it?”
“Why,” the Leelite said, “we were trying to keep it away from you. It may not have cared for the taste of humans, but you weren’t having a good time of it when it was down there thrashing around.” The creature expressed something that the knowglobe audibly interpreted as a sigh. “I know now that it was the act of those scurrilous competitors of yours, those Xylanx, in firing at our hall that awakened the brute. This kind of activity is simply unknown around here.”
Trovatelli stepped up, accompanied by the other floating alien that had been helping her. “It looks like Jamie was right about our squatters,” Trovatelli said.
“What?” Jamie gestured as if he was adjusting his helmet’s audio volume. “Excuse me? Did someone say I was right?”
“Yeah,” the Q/A said, smirking. Her expression didn’t last long. “These Xylanx are definitely aliens,” she said, her tone serious. “Vremian’s aide was just showing me some things on their knowglobe’s monitor. The Leelites encountered them more than sixty years before any humans went through the whirlibang. That’s why they had a file on their language.”
“Sixty years?” Bridget asked. “That means—”
“Yep,” Trovatelli said. “Bipedal aliens. That pretty much settles it.”
It was almost too incredible for Bridget to accept. For thirty-five years, humanity had been looking for anything that looked remotely similar to itself. And now they had not only encountered such a people, but fought with them?
“Who were they, Vremian?” she asked. “How come you haven’t shared anything about them with anyone who’s come around?”
The hovering jellyfish seemed to blush. “I’m…ashamed to say that nobody really ever comes around much anymore. You’re the first bidders to arrive here since the last time the Xylanx appeared here. We’ve had no one to share the knowledge with.”
Trovatelli interceded. “But who are they, Vremian? Your data over there doesn’t say much.”
“We don’t know much,” Vremian admitted. “Our encounters with anyone are necessarily brief. And they shared almost nothing about themselves — as they did this time.” His tone changed. “Did they really do all this just to steal your knowglobe?”
“It looks like it,” Bridget said. “But I can’t understand why.”
Behind Trovatelli, the Leelite who had assisted her chimed in. “Vremian, that sounds like the Luk’a.”
“Don’t be silly,” Vremian replied.
Trovatelli’s interest was piqued. “Wait. Who are the Luk’a?”
“The Luk’a were another bipedal species like yours,” Vremian said. “Back even before my time. Forty thousand years ago, it must have been.”
“They were thieves,” his aide said.
“Don’t be unkind, Torquin.” Vremian’s shreds wriggled. “It is true, though, that they had a poor grasp of how commerce worked.” H
e gestured to the humans’ knowglobe. “I’ve instructed my aide to provide you with all our information about the species we’ve encountered. I don’t think we even have a language file on the Luk’a, but you can have what we do know on them — as well as our files on the Xylanx. The next time you encounter those reprehensible people, perhaps you can talk them into behaving better at public events.”
Behind the alien, light appeared from the doorway leading downstairs. Vremian noticed it. “And now,” he said, “we can conclude our business.”
Bridget looked around the devastated atrium. “What business?”
“Did you forget?” Vremian said. “The auction. In fairness, I’m going to declare the Xylanx’s bids null and void — so we’ll accept your opening amount. Congratulations.”
Jamie looked up. “Wait a minute. Our opening bids on everything? Every lot?”
“And more,” Vremian said. “Remember, we haven’t made any sales lately. There are quite a few superconductor columns in stock. More than will fit on your ship, to be sure.”
Bridget and Jamie looked at each other. “Is there time to send another transport back?” Jamie asked.
“If you’ll supply the forces to guard against another jorvil rising—”
“Another jorvil?” Jamie blurted.
Vremian seemed to shiver at the words. “Distasteful, I know. But you seem to have the answer for them. I was going to say, if your firm would be willing to put a trading post here with a garrison protecting us, we could trade year round. And you would have the best terms in exchange, of course.”
Jamie’s eyes seemed to bulge. “Can we do that?” he asked Bridget.
“We do it all the time,” Bridget said. “We can detach the bauxite ’boxes, encamp Surge Two here temporarily, and send another transport back with permanent staff from the depot.”
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