Mech (imperium)

by V. B. Larson

  The leader alien had the killbeasts march them all out of the pool and lined them up. Sarah leaned on Bili heavily. He walked up and down in front of them, clearly inspecting them with his waving sensory stalks. In particular, he seemed taken with Daddy. His mandibles drooled noticeably as he examined Daddy’s vast belly. This filled Daddy with a great unease.

  Finally, the leader stood erect and the three of them were hustled out of the house by the killbeasts. Sarah and the remains of Mudface were borne away on trachs, while Daddy and Bili were forced to march. Daddy had to be forced to enter the open mouth of the tunnel. Stumbling along in the darkness, he was soon heaving and puffing with exertion. The way back to the nest was long.

  “Great Lady,” the Captain of the Gladius greeted Mai Lee, bowing slightly toward the video pick-up. The glare of the ships running lights reflected from his shiny bald pate. “To what to I owe the honor of the call?”

  “Your word choice is most accurate,” said Mai Lee dryly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You do indeed owe me,” she said with sudden vehemence. Her lined face broke through the pancake make-up in a fine network of a thousand wrinkles.

  “I–I do not understand,” quailed the Captain, taking an involuntary step backward from the leering holo image of Mai Lee’s horrific face.

  “Let me explain,” hissed the ancient mask of powdered leather. “First, you withheld the fact that Droad had a bodyguard of combat-trained giants. Second, you delivered information concerning myself and my assets to Droad, for a liberal gratuity, I have no doubt. Third, you have failed to mention the cargo of mechs in your hold that you have transported for Droad, with the express purpose of removing me from power.”

  A sudden change overcame the Captain. He no longer crouched and simpered. Instead his stance became erect, almost swaggering. A hint of a smile tugged at his lips. “Ah, it seems you have become acquainted with the subtler points of our arrangement. I beg to differ on one point, however, milady. The mechs are to the best of my knowledge charged only with the protection of Lucas Droad, not with your destruction.”

  Mai Lee became agitated. Her claw-like hands gripped her seat and she leaned forward, snarling. “It amounts to the same thing. You owe me.”

  “What do you suggest?” asked the Captain, a bit ill-at-ease again. His eyes wandered away from the holo-plate and he frowned.

  “You will destroy the mechs in their cargo pods. You will provide me with full holo-video of the event so that I may feel confident in your actions.”

  “Your plan has merit… For you, anyway,” he said, drumming his fingers on his generous belly. “There is the small matter of increased payment, of course. Just enough to reward me for my efforts.”

  “You will be paid the stipulated amount, nothing more,” said Mai Lee emphatically. “You owe me.”

  “Hmm. Yes,” said the Captain, appearing to be in deep thought. “I must say that I find your attitude less than endearing. What if I simply let them go, perhaps with the financial blessings of the new Governor?”

  “Then I’ll have you killed and be done with it,” said Mai Lee with absolute certainty.

  The Captain blinked and made an alarmed, gasping sound.

  “My agents left with you from Neu Schweitz and more have infiltrated the Gladius since you arrived. Don’t believe for a moment that I can’t do it, or that I won’t.”

  “But such an action amounts to nothing more than petty revenge,” sputtered the Captain. He smoothed his nonexistent hair with a sweaty palm. “There would be no profit in it for anyone.”

  Mai Lee shrugged. “My reputation is based on such actions. I find that my reputation is worth much in business dealings and I am therefore quite willing to take something of a loss here to enhance the aura of cooperation my name engenders. You have forfeited your life to a good cause at least, Captain. Let that be of some small comfort to you during your last seconds. Now, if you would excuse me,” she said, reaching for the cut-off button.

  “Wait,” cried the Captain, his voice rising up and cracking. “I will comply!”

  Mai Lee let him stew a moment, looking down as if she hadn’t heard, pretending to fondle the cut-off button. Finally, she looked up in disgust. “You agree to halt the exodus of the cargo?”

  “Yes, immediately,” gushed the Captain. He wrung his reddened hands and attempted a sickly smile. “Your Excellency,” he added.

  Mai Lee let play a long moment of indecision. “Very well. Your assassination is stayed,” she said and moved again to cut-off the connection.

  “But wait, we haven’t yet discussed our new terms.”

  Mai Lee made a gesture of exasperation. Her lips curled back in a grotesque snarl. “There are no terms, worm. You will stop them or die.”

  She pounded her fist on the cut-off button and the screen went dark.

  Inside the aft hold of the Gladius a twelve-foot tall shipping polygon of gray foam suddenly ruptured. A massive bio-mechanical hand, called a gripper, extruded from the breach. The gripper swiftly tore away the top of the foam, like a spoon topping a boiled egg. The mech lieutenant stepped out of the cocoon, swiveling his optics. As the hold was pitch-dark, he switched to infrared mode and quickly moved to activate his platoon.

  This was the moment that the security forces had been waiting for tensely. The Captain had been emphatic about waiting for the leader of the mechs to reveal himself before taking him out. The others would then never be activated and that meant they could be salvaged. The salvage value of the combat-ready mechs would be much greater if they were still intact.

  Unfortunately for the security team, however, they had failed to consider the fantastic sensory apparatus of a mech manufactured for combat. The mech lieutenant heard the ambushers breathing and sensed the heat of the sighting lasers playing on his head encasement. Instantly, he bounded away behind an immense carton containing a power-dozer.

  Shouting to one another in alarm, the security team broke cover and tumbled forward in pursuit, snapping off shots at every flickering shadow. A sergeant roared in alarm and fired wildly into another of the gray cocoons, which had also extruded a bio-mechanical arm. The mech’s second gripper shot out to grasp the Sergeant’s shoulder, which was instantly crushed to jelly.

  “Turn on the floods!” screamed a green-suited security woman. She ripped off her night-goggles and opened up on the cocoons as well, as many of them were now popping open.

  A hailstorm of exploding bullets and lancing laser beams turned the gray foam coverings into a disintegrating cloud of particles. One mech’s arm was blown off. Unconcernedly, he reached out with his remaining gripper and squeezed the head off the nearest rifleman.

  The floods went on, removing the mechs’ advantage of superior night-vision. The lights also revealed the dark towering form of the mech lieutenant who now stood in the midst of the humans.

  Moving with berserk speed, the mech lieutenant yanked a rifle away from a man, his claw-like steel gripper taking a good portion of the man’s arm with it. Wielding the rifle first as a club, he swept it around at head-level, dropping three more security personnel. With fantastic dexterity he flipped the weapon into his cradling arms, found the trigger and fired into the fleeing pack of humans.

  After that it was a rout. Leaving most of their people behind, the security forces escaped through the huge pressure doors into the ship. They hit the emergency pressure-loss toggles, shutting the doors with explosive force in the faces of the pursuing mechs.

  A hurried meeting was held in the Captain’s briefing room.

  “The aft hold is over six miles long and is an absolute maze of cargo,” began the Security Chief. He had been involved personally in the attack on the mechs and his right hand was damaged, crusty with dried blood and coated thickly with nu-skin. “I suggest we open the primary bay doors and space the entire hold. We can then recover most of the cargo with the tug fleet. Even mechs can’t operate in vacuum for long.”

  “I won’t he
ar of it,” rumbled the Captain. “Your team’s incompetence has already cost me dearly. I certainly will not dump a billion credits worth of trade goods into orbit to rid the ship of a handful of crazy robots. This trip has too slim of a profit margin to suit me already.”

  “Sir, these aren’t crazed robots,” explained the Chief with a hint of exasperation in his voice. “They’re highly intelligent and ruthless beings built for warfare. All we’ve managed to do is get them to classify the crew of this ship as hostiles.”

  “What are our other options then?”

  “Well, we should remember that the mech lieutenant doesn’t really care about us. I mean, he has a mission to do, to get down to the planet surface, I assume. We disabled their jump-flitters before they woke up, so he can’t get down without improvising.”

  “What exactly are you suggesting?”

  “Why don’t we just let them go? Give them the flitters they need, and let them out one of the airlocks.”

  The Captain rubbed his chins and glared at the Chief. He puffed out his cheeks and threw his arms up in a gesture of exasperation. “I positively fail to understand your cowardice in this. We have a full combat-ready company of marines and several hundred security people on this ship. There are only sixteen of these pests in the hold and some of them are damaged. What you’re going to do is go in there and hunt them down and blow them apart.”

  Fifteen

  After hunting the rogue for three days, the inquisitors were exhausted, and even their riders grew tired of the chase. Fryx had given them no further telepathic hints and Garth was leaving behind him precious little in the way of spoor. They had tracked him back to the highway where he had apparently caught a ride to the next village, then proceeded on foot. In the muddy jungles of the river basins they lost him again.

  The man whose turn it was to watch fell asleep in the bole of a stink-vine tree. In the night, with Gopus only a dim sliver of light barely discernible through the jungle canopy, an odd figure entered the camp. Wearing a black hat with a wide low brim and a black cape, the figure moved with infinite care lest he awaken the men or in some way alert their wary riders. After a few minutes of slinking in their midst, the dark figure discovered the man in the stink-vine tree. With a delighted fluttering of the fingertips, the figure stalked the sleeping man, coming up behind him.

  Gathering up a handful of pebbles, the figure flicked them, one by one, onto the sleeper’s back. After the third such attack, the man snorted and half rose up. Suddenly, he lurched upright, his rider goading him to wakefulness. The figure behind him pranced forward, cape swirling. A length of steel glittered and the inquisitor slumped back down.

  The commotion awakened another of the men, however, who climbed from his bedroll. Not aware that anything was amiss, the tall, slender man wearily opened the tent flaps and rummaged in the cooler for a squeeze-bag of refreshment.

  There was movement in the back of the tent. The man startled, then peered more closely. “Jed?” he mumbled, still half-asleep. His rider, withdrawn into unknowable private thoughts of its own, did nothing to warn him.

  The shadowy figure loomed up. Beneath its low-brimmed hat blue eyes blazed with insanity. The figure pounced.

  This time the kill wasn’t a clean one. Staggering from the supply tent with his throat bubbling fresh blood, the inquisitor fell dead on top of his companions.

  The others leapt up, drawing their guns and turning on the floodlights. The jungle was illuminated by a harsh glare. There was a ripping sound at the back of the supply tent. Rushing to the spot they saw a gaunt figure dive into the underbrush. A storm of gunfire broke out. Howlers protested their loss of sleep from the treetops, pelting the inquisitors with sticks, fruit, feces and other offal.

  As they reached the edge of the jungle, knee-deep in ferns and sucker-plants, their quarry rose up before them. Clearly visible in the harsh glare of the floodlights, Garth stood in full view. The eyes of a murderer burned from within the broad red stripe his rider had left when mounting him. In one hand he gripped a hand-cannon, in the other he brandished a bloody knife. His lips formed a ghastly rictus for a grin. Only a few feet from this apparition, the three men halted and raised their weapons.

  Fryx chose that moment to loose a desperate, pleading howl for mercy. A keening wail, not of sound, but rather of thought, washed over all the men and their riders. The cry caused the other riders to pull back on the reins of their skalds, digging in spiny nerve-spurs to halt them. For a full second the inquisitors, intent on killing, slackened. Their arms drooped, their muscles rubbery, their weapons suddenly too heavy to aim.

  As the figure advanced the riders realized their error: the keening was desperation on Fryx’s part, even treachery. Incredible though it seemed, the revered one wasn’t in control, the rogue was. With great urgency, the riders goaded their skalds forward again, demanding that they kill the rogue quickly.

  But it was already too late. The hesitation had been enough, Garth leapt forward and stood among them. He blew the skald on the left’s head from his body. Closing to an arms-length, he planted the gun against the second man’s chest and fired again. With his other hand, he drove his knife into the throat of the third inquisitor.

  After they had slumped down in the ungraceful postures of death, he waited a tense few moments. From the nasal passages of two of the skalds rose quivering liquid jellies. Wet spines shivered in the night air. With cold precision, Garth blasted the riders repeatedly. Scraps of spiny jelly and white skull fragments showered the jungle floor.

  Weary to the bone, Garth spent a long night at the camp with only stiffening corpses for companions. Corpses, and the vile presence of Fryx in his head. Overall, he thought he preferred the dead men.

  While facing the inquisitors he had felt a wild strength run through him, had taken maniacal glee in killing them. He seriously questioned his sanity in these matters. It seemed that whenever he was acting in direct conflict with the desires of Fryx, he could do so only as a madman.

  Upon reflection, he decided that if insanity was the only path through which he could control his own destiny, then so be it.

  He shuffled around the camp aimlessly, his desire for revenge sated. He had no further immediate purpose, as Kris’ killers and his own hunters were dead. More may follow, but they would most likely be a long time in coming. It was quite possible that he would be allowed to move about now with greater freedom, as long as he avoided the strongholds of the skalds. Riders, he knew, were more akin to emotionless accountants than vengeful demons. A rogue that could dominate Fryx and kill five of their inquisitors was probably best left alone.

  Listlessly, he chewed a wad of dried howler meat and drank the juice of a goy-goy pod. The meal tasted uncommonly good, being the first relaxed, halfway civilized meal he had had in days. Fryx was silent in his mind, probably mourning his fate and the deaths of his fellow riders.

  Something did nag at his mind, something dark worried at him, doubtless the tickling of Fryx. But it seemed as though he had forgotten something…

  Then he had it. The threat from the skies. The horrid aliens that danced through his nightmares. The very reason that Fryx had gone to incredible lengths to take over his body and direct his every action personally, an unthinkable abasement for one of his kind except in situations of grave danger.

  Standing erect and removing his hat, Garth drew his hand-cannon. Placing the barrel to his head, not at his temple, but rather at the base toward the back, where he knew Fryx resided, he spoke aloud: “Fryx, it is time we talked.”

  He shut his eyes and concentrated. Beneath his forefinger, he felt the cold hard surface of the trigger.

  “I have nothing to lose anymore,” he said, speaking to the chirruping jungle creatures. Somewhere in the distance a great ape grunted heavily. “At least my death will bring about yours as well. To be free of you, even in death, would be a great pleasure.”

  His mind was silent.

  “Come now, there will be no skir
es tonight, no self-hypnosis, nor dancing, nor mating. Exert yourself! Come forward and speak with me directly, or be forever silent.”

  There was a tickling sensation in his head. At first, he thought it was only perspiration, or perhaps the coldness of the gun barrel pressing his hair against the thin skin of his head. Then it became more pronounced. Soon, it seemed to him that he heard words.

  You must repent.

  Garth laughed. He laughed long and loud, the wild mirth of an unbalanced man. It was all he could do to keep the gun barrel against his skull. A howler hooted and tossed a hail of sticks down, protesting the noise. Garth said, “You are indeed arrogant, jellyfish.”

  It is you who are arrogant, rogue.

  “Ah such petulance! You are a sore-loser, as well as arrogant. But I would suspect such traits go together,” said Garth. As he spoke, he pranced across the campsite and sprang up onto a lump of granite that protruded up from the jungle floor. Hardly aware of his body’s actions, he danced an odd jig without rhythm.

  You waste my energies. You are a foolish and uncontrolled thing, a host-being without the comforting guidance of its rider. In short, a pitiful rogue.

  Garth grew impatient. He tapped the barrel of his hand-cannon against his skull. “Let’s recall that I’m in charge here. Dispense with trying to regain the reins to my mind. They are forever out of your grasp. Should you regain them again, even for a few moments, I assure you I will kill us both. I have no desire to live further as a slave.”

  His mind was silent.

  “Good,” Garth said, “now we can discuss your warnings of death from the skies. Why have you repeatedly tried to convey images of alien invasion to me? Was this simply another failed control technique?”

  It is absurd that you should question me. Interrogation of a rider by a lowly skald is an unheard of insult. You will refrain from further questions or I will induce great pain in your extremities. Even as Fryx communicated, Garth became aware of an excruciating sensation in the arm and hand that held the hand-cannon. It was as if flames engulfed his arm. He struggled to retain his grasp of the gun.