by V. B. Larson
Behind his sun-goggles the skald’s eyes were even wider now, although this would have seemed an impossibility a minute before. Fryx worked Garth’s muscles, jerkily raising one hand to point at the hose. Was it not obvious that the man was a bandit? His throat made a rumbling croak, but he couldn’t afford to release the vocal cords. If he activated enough of Garth’s mind to permit speech, the human would have to be conscious and aware. If he allowed that, his control over the nervous system would be in jeopardy.
Fryx felt fear wash through him. He was facing the unimaginable indignity of exposure-possibly, and even more unthinkable: death. The stimuli of the outside world after so many years of quiet inner peace were too much. The urgency of his mission regarding the demons that stalked the heavens combined with these filthy thieving creatures of the hellish exterior world, and the final effect was simply overwhelming. His gelatinous mind shivered, causing his spines, planted deeply in the cerebral cortex, to jolt various neurons.
Garth’s body wheeled to the passenger door, fumbling with the levers. He thrashed convulsively, a wild bucking horse with a mad rider. Desperately Fryx tried to get out of the car, but he couldn’t control Garth’s motor responses closely enough to open the door. Lurching back the opposite direction he found that the driver had produced a gun and pointed it at him.
“You’ve got to be the craziest bastard I’ve ever robbed in this godforsaken desert!” He whistled in amazement at Garth’s alien demeanor. “Rolf, open the door for him, will you? Before he does something disgusting in my car.”
Fryx was beyond hearing and interpreting the primitive grunts and warblings of human speech. The world had narrowed to that black-barreled weapon that confronted him and the oblivion it represented. Contemplating his possible exposure to the open air and radiation, sensing the nearness of death, Fryx loosed a terrible scream, a long chilling shriek of mindless fear. The sound was inhuman in nature, and its passage made the skald’s throat rattle eerily, as though he was indeed already dead.
Garth was dreaming. Deep in the ocean of the subconscious, the glowing ember of his personality still glimmered, trapped in twisted memories and imagined fantasies. He dreamed that he was at his confirmation again, the ceremony that had elevated him from the lowly position of a shrine-sweep to the exalted status of a skald.
What he remembered best about the experience was the odd combination of terrible pain mixed with a sense of ultimate fulfillment. The rider had been extracted from the skull of a dying skald and placed into his shortly after completing his manhood rites. Although he was a bit young for the process, his mentors had decided he was the most fit of the current candidates to bear Fryx. He was very fortunate indeed to gain such an aged and wise rider, who was of great size for his kind. Fryx performed expertly, this being his fifth such mounting over nearly three centuries of life. The skalds marveled at the rider’s clean style. There was no hesitation, no shivering in the unfamiliar cold air of the external world, nor did he have to hunt for the appropriate opening.
With startling rapidity, a dollop of spiny gray jelly slid into young Garth’s nostrils. Quickly burrowing through the thin lining of the sinuses, Fryx took up residence in Garth’s cranium in less than a minute. Wrapping itself around the base of the brain, Fryx slipped thread-like nerves into the brainstem and tapped into an artery to feed.
For Garth it was the lancing of his nerves that hurt the most, even more than the bloody rip in his nasal passages. In fact, the pain had driven him into a frenzy, during which the hard, ready hands of his fellow skalds had firmly gripped him, lest he injure himself or the venerable Fryx.
Before the involuntary reactions had lessened and finally subsided all together as Fryx released chemicals through his spines to ease the young skald, Garth had been in a state of total panic. Thrashing wildly, eyes rolling and tongue gripped in bloody teeth, he had wanted nothing but to get away from the horrible pain in his head.
That feeling of mortal terror gripped him again now, reaching down deep into his dream and pulling him up to the distant surface of his mind.
The scream that Fryx had allowed to bubble up through Garth’s dry throat had been half-human.
Garth came awake with a lurch, finding a gun with an alarmed-looking man pointing it at him. The man had a round belly, a bald pate and a scraggly gray beard. Without thought he grabbed at the gun, trying to wrest it away from the shocked bandit. The gun fired, the windshield starred and tinted safety glass sprayed the interior. With the wild scream that had awakened him still echoing in Garth’s throat, the two wrestled for control of the weapon. The filthy service man outside the car had his blade in clear evidence now. He swiftly stepped around to Garth’s side of the car. Murderous intent was evident in his stance.
Fryx made a play to regain control of Garth’s brain, sinking his spines deeper into the nerve tissues. The attempt was unsuccessful, but managed to goad Garth into a frenzy of activity. Maniacal strength powered the skald’s slim arms. Ripping the weapon away from his opponent’s grasp, he tossed it to the floor and reached for the man with sunburned, claw-like hands outstretched.
Then the self-proclaimed archaeologist lost his nerve, popped open the door and tumbled out of the car onto the hot sand. Garth had enough of his mind left intact to engage the car’s transmission and slam the power rod down. The car lurched forward, engine coughing then roaring as the great balloon tires churned up an enormous cloud of dust. He soon found that the car was far more delicate to drive than the power-sweeps he had rode about the monasteries as a boy. He careened through the desert, barely able to steer the wildly accelerating car with sudden twists of the wheel that vastly overcorrected. Eventually, he got the hang of it and eased off the power rod to the half-thrust point. The door and the hood closed themselves automatically, and the bandits were left dumbfounded in front of their shack.
Behind him the two men argued, one waving the severed belt he had pretended to pull from the car’s engine, the other gesticulating with his canteen, which spilled liquid into the red blowing dust.
Garth was free of his rider’s reins at last. He brayed wild laughter, spittle flying from his quivering lips. Freedom tasted delicious, like cool sweetmeats set on a catered platter. Grit swirled into the hole in the windshield and pelted his exposed tongue and formed a thin dusty film over his teeth, but he ignored it all and went on laughing.
Three
The Parent spent the days before planetfall analyzing incoming data from the passive sensors and planning her strategy. Studying the planet with enhanced optics, she decided to invade the larger of the two continents. The majority of the aliens were concentrated near the southern pole, indicating that the high temperature of the surface was generally not to their liking. This helped her decisions in designing the genetic make-up of her offspring.
Breaking out the feeding tubes, she stimulated her ovaries and prepared her birthing chambers for use. In less than a day, she would internally hatch and then birth several larvae. Using the ship’s precious supply of protoplasm judiciously, the larvae would grow to adult offspring by the time the invasion began.
Laying back in a bath of simmering mud and earth salts, the Parent felt her body quake with excitement. The combination of the hormonal stimulation of the conception process and the mud bath was most pleasurable. Ovulation after so long was a real treat. It would be good to have offspring about again.
In this state of near-bliss, with her ovaries working and her glands producing a steady stream of delicious secretions, she recalled the long war with the Tulk. At first the Tulk, an ancient and powerful race of fading glory, had fallen easily to the hot aggression of the young Imperium. They were a shy race of philosophers, seemingly evolved beyond the crude machinations of warfare. They still retained vast wisdom from their past, however, and cleverly used other beings to fight for them. Eventually the tide had turned and despite all their early victories the Imperium had been driven back.
The seedships were part of the last
effort of the dying Imperium to perpetuate itself. Sent out into the unknown to start new colonies at the end of the losing war with the Tulk, the seedships had slipped quietly through the interstellar void for millennia, dropping into any inhabitable system. Sadly, she was the only Parent in this system, possibly the only Parent of her kind currently alive and active anywhere. She had to assume that the future of her race had been left to her alone.
With intense interest, the Parent studied the datastream coming in from her long-range optics. It appeared that the enemy was quite well entrenched on the hot water-world. Within hours, she had located all the major spaceports open to local system traffic and identified the largest one at the southern pole where the huge ship orbited.
Ah, the ship! What a fantastic vessel she was. Her incredible size could only mean she was built for interstellar travel. The ship was a great blot that must have shadowed a significant portion of the gleaming watery surface a thousand miles below her. The Parent considered the capture and control of the ship to be one of her primary strategic goals. What was more incredible than her size, suitable for transporting hundreds of thousands of offspring, was her apparent lack of weaponry. In a way, this was a sad note on the disintegration of the Imperium. Surely, if the Skaintz Imperium had still been a viable military force in the region then no such ship would be without escort. The Parent’s dim hopes of support from her own kind were all but extinguished by this one logical conclusion.
But not all the data was bad, not by any means. For one thing there was no sign that her presence was suspected. Equally important, there seemed to be a simple method by which she could secretly pilot the ship down to the planet surface. By studying the traffic patterns, it seemed clear that small ships the size of her own seedship were regularly landing and departing without official sanction. As many as one in twenty landings were accompanied by tiny shadows, the small ship riding close in the slipstream of the larger, merging their radar signatures. The ground controllers and almost certainly the captains of the shadowed ships should have been able to detect some of the activity, but never were any of the perpetrators apprehended. These actions and other elaborate efforts to escape detection by a veritable fleet of small ships that flittered about the system baffled the Parent. Her ship’s sensory enhancement systems were unparalleled, but it was difficult to believe that these obviously advanced aliens couldn’t match it. She had no real concept of graft and corruption, at least not on such a broad scale. She briefly entertained the idea that the aliens were already being invaded by a third party, or perhaps that they were staging wargames to train their pilots.
Shuffling her sensory fronds in a gesture equivalent to a shrug, the Parent decided that the rationale behind the comings and goings was of trivial importance to her plans. What was important was that this practice represented a path for her to make her landing undetected.
She sat back from the optics interface and slurped a liquid refreshment into her digesters. Inside her fourth birthing chamber she felt the stirrings of an offspring. It was an umulk, the largest of the offspring she was currently gestating. Very soon, the larvae would break out of its capsule and be born, soft wet spines hardening, mouth open and mewling with ravenous hunger. The prospect of having a shipload of suckling larvae gave the Parent a deep sense of satisfaction.
She slurped more refreshment before returning to the optics. She enjoyed the slippery, slightly bloated feeling of having the offspring inside her. It would be good to see her larvae grow and mature into fine Imperial warriors.
Sergeant Borshe, out of uniform and off-duty, sat outside the Renaldo Hotel with two New Manchurian gunmen. Inside the hotel his plants pretended to clean the lobby, their weapons stashed in the utility carts which had been provided by the intimidated hotel management.
Ari Steinbach had quickly tracked the Governor down to the Renaldo and sent Sergeant Borshe out to take care of things. The Renaldo was a very nice, but not quite elegant hotel along Black Beak Avenue. The Governor had checked in about an hour ago and then left alone, either to make contacts or to eat, as it was dinnertime.
“This will be an easy one,” said one of the gunmen. He wore a suit of the most elegant style with neck ruffles of indigo silk. He fidgeted with a Wu rattler, keeping the sleek black barrel pointed at the car door.
“Don’t count you’re swimmers yet,” said Sergeant Borshe, checking his watch and thumbing the safety off of his Wu hand-cannon. He was a big man with heavy jowls and hands the size of rayball gloves. He looked all wrong in his clothes, like one of the great bald apes yanked out of Garm’s southern jungles and shoved into a suit. “They’re due any second now, boys.”
The New Manchurian toughs looked at him in disgust. Borshe was always finding a way to call them boys or monkeys. Borshe noticed their expressions, but didn’t bother to acknowledge them.
“Just because they’re giants doesn’t mean crap,” spoke up the younger one in back. He also wore a sharp-cut suit so as to pass for a hotel guest, but had kept his cloth headband. He put the barrel of his rattler on the driver’s seat headrest, inches from Borshe’s ear. “This gun will cut any giant in half, no matter how big.”
Borshe didn’t bother to reply. He pulled a second hand-cannon from his rucksack and checked it thoroughly. Then he glanced in the rearview mirror. “Governor is coming in.”
The two toughs wheeled in their seats and they all watched as the cab slid up to the lobby doors and sank down on its skids. Borshe hit the dimmer and the windows went dark, shading the inside and hiding their faces and weapons. Goosing the power rod, he followed the cab up the drive.
Governor Droad wasn’t pleased with what he learned from the files he had purchased from the Captain of the Gladius. Nexus Cluster Command’s worst fears concerning the progress of Garm toward corruption and decay had apparently been surpassed since he had left Neu Schweitz three years before. Graft, smuggling and factionalism amongst the ruling elite had the colony teetering close to anarchy.
Equally disturbing, the previous governor had lasted only a few weeks into his term before experiencing a deadly accident over the red hork jungles in New Amazonia. The new governor was of the worst sort. Hans Zimmerman was a self-serving inbred crony of the ruling families. Spineless and unconcerned, he apparently left the job of rulership completely up to the aristocratic Senate, coming out of his permanent vacation only long enough to perform the most perfunctory duties of state.
As he climbed out of the cab, Lucas Droad saw the car coming up the drive out of the corner of his eye. The car was coming a bit too fast, but he wasn’t really ready for an attack yet, so he didn’t respond. He paid the driver and mounted the steps into the hotel lobby. The car pulled up behind the cab and the doors slammed shut behind the three men who piled out. Lucas looked back and noticed that the car had the windows dimmed even though the sky was entirely overcast. Then he saw the shape of a sleek black weapon and threw himself at the glass hotel doors.
Tossing the confused bellhop out of his way, he plowed into the lobby, drawing a slim-barreled pulse-laser. Bullets shattered the glass behind him and the bellhop was cut down, blood welling up from a dozen holes in his blue vest and staining his silver epaulets. Surprised to find himself still breathing, Droad sprinted into the marble-walled lobby.
Tapio Kuosa, one of his giant bodyguards, sat in the lobby reading a newsfax and sipping hot caf. He looked up as Governor Droad came running in. With one moment of eye contact the giant was up and drawing his weapon, but it was already too late. The Manchurian janitor behind him fired thirty rounds into the back of his huge head. The Finnish giant toppled forward. His body destroyed a rich horkwood table while the red ruin of his head crashed between two shouting guests on a silk divan.
Another assassin came out of the restroom with his weapon raised. Lucas dove over the front desk, flattening a clerk. The clerk’s hairpiece skittered across the floor. Bullets streamed over the desk and a woman screamed.
From outside there was a
heavy crump of a high-powered weapon. The car the assassins had come in exploded into melting fragments. Lucas darted up over the counter and burnt away the throat of the man who had come out of the restroom while he hesitated, looking at the burning get-away car.
Then a big Anglo man pushed through the glass doors, holding a hand-cannon in each of his beefy fists. Lucas threw himself to one side behind the desk, taking a spray of plastic splinters in the face and arms as the hand-cannons barked in unison.
The assassin approached the desk, blasting head-sized holes in it as he came. Then the glass doors behind him simply disintegrated. His hand-cannons barked once more before he was seared by a direct hit of plasma from behind. As soon as the echoes of the plasma blast had died down, the sounds of the street outside could be heard through the opening. Charging into the breach came Jarmo Niska carrying a recoilless plasma rifle big enough to mount on an armored personal carrier. Two more black and silver dressed giants backed him up. More giants sprinted from the elevators and gunned down the last of the assassins in the hotel.
The remainder of the governor’s bodyguards thundered down the stairs and into the smoke-filled lobby. Jarmo made a quick inspection, then whistled and gave a quick hand-signal. Lucas still crouched behind the front desk with his pistol in his hands while the terrified clerk eyed him with dread.
“Do you think they’ve gone?” asked the clerk.
“Only until the next time,” said Lucas, giving the man a grim smile. He tried to get up and found that his leg had been injured.
“Are you hurt, sir?” asked the huge, moon-like face of Jarmo Niska as he loomed over the desk.
“Yes, my leg caught a few splinters, I think. Pull me up, will you?” While the hotel clerk gaped, Jarmo bent over the desk and gently lifted Lucas Droad into the air.