The Namura Stone

by Andrews, Gillian

  Ledin hesitated. It seemed to him that the most dangerous part of the mission would be providing the distraction. Finally, he shook his head.

  “I’m sorry, but I think I had better do that,” he said slowly. “As soon as you two hear the small explosion, get close enough to place those charges.” He passed his explosive and fuses to Diva, leaving himself with only two fuses and a small quantity of explosive. “Grace, you leave the fuses to Diva – she will be able to manipulate them more easily. Your job will be to place the explosives, all right? Make sure that the charges are in place, even if you are able to communicate with Arcan; we aren’t going to get a second chance.”

  Grace nodded, but her eyes were worried. It seemed to her that this might be the last time she would see Ledin, and she tried to burn the impression of his face on her retina. Then she smiled at him, and nodded. “Keep safe.”

  After a short, interior struggle, she turned away from her husband and gently took the explosive from Diva’s fingers, leaving the handful of fuses behind. “Let me take those.”

  When she turned around, Ledin was gone. The two girls crouched behind the stack of machinery, and waited anxiously.

  LEDIN HAD SPOTTED a useful area some corridors back, on their way in. He made his way there with minimum pauses as Dessites swept past, and it only took a moment to set a fuse.

  He had chosen this spot because it was right in the centre of the island; he hoped that it would attract Dessites from both sides, and that it would be loud enough for Six’s group to realize that they had found Arcan.

  The room itself was some sort of computer storage area. He had seen bank upon bank of what looked like memory discs. They were made of a mixture of carbon nanographite with something like rexelene; Ledin was hopeful that it would burn with copious amounts of smoke.

  He ducked out of the chamber just before the charge went off, and secreted himself in another storage room opposite. He would have had more chance of escaping detection if he had set a longer fuse, but he knew that they didn’t have any time to spare.

  He flattened himself to the wall to one side of the opening, and the explosives detonated.

  Instantly, the whole area seemed teeming with Dessites. Clouds of billowing black smoke were spilling out of the computer room, and Ledin could smell and hear the crackling of flames, quickly getting out of control.

  Then there was a rustle in front of him, he felt some sort of fine mist permeating his hiding place, and he looked up to see the huge body of one of the Dessites in the archway to the room he was in. He froze, to escape detection, but it didn’t seem to work, for the large eyes turned in his direction and seemed to be examining him in great detail.

  Ledin swallowed. There was nothing for it. The time for hiding had passed. He drew his sword in one fluid movement and gave the first battle cry which occurred to him.

  “For KWAIIIDE!”

  The words seemed to rattle around the enclosed room and bounce back to his ears, enhanced and metallic, before the point of his sword found the soft tissue of the Dessite in front of him, and cut into it.

  THE SMALL EXPLOSION, when it came, was big enough to move the floor they were standing on. Even the girls, who were expecting it, jumped.

  The Dessites in the laboratory moved towards the corridor in their strange gliding shuffle.

  As soon as they were out of the laboratory, Diva and Grace raced forwards. Grace ducked behind the large tank and began to push the putty-like explosive flat underneath the raised base. It was impossible to see, because the orthogel inside was dark and opaque.

  Grace stopped suddenly. She thought she had heard a distant battle cry, thought she could make out her husband’s voice. She struggled with herself for a short moment. She mustn’t think about what might be happening to him. She had a job to do.

  Quickly, she dipped to secure more explosive at each of the corners, looking back over her shoulder in case one of the Dessites should return. Diva was following her around, setting the fuses carefully in each pack of explosive and priming them for detonation.

  Grace placed the last pack, and turned; Diva was only one behind her, and was already finishing the placement. She checked that the way was clear, and then moved up to the tank, placing both hands flat against the surface.

  “Arcan? Can you hear me?”

  There was no answer. Grace repeated the question, this time more insistently.

  Diva had fixed the last fuse, and now she was beside Grace; her own slender hands flat up against the container holding their friend.

  Grace looked sideways. “Use your fingers! Like we used to … sign it!”

  “What?”

  “I can’t, because I lost my fingers. You have to, Diva. Sign it!”

  Diva shook her head. She couldn’t see what use signing would be; there was a thick barrier of some sort of rexelene spotted with carbon nanographite between her and Arcan. However, she obediently began to sign the words.

  “Arcan? Can you hear us?”

  To her great surprise, there was an immediate flash of colour inside the tank. Grace squeaked with pleasure, and motioned her to go on.

  Diva obeyed, signing through the material. “We have put explosives. Can we get any part of you away before they detonate?”

  The colour inside the transparent cylinder seemed to improve. Close to where the girls were, a small area of the orthogel cleared, leaving perhaps a few hundred litres which looked like the Arcan they were used to.

  “Thank you for coming.” Now his voice, very quavery, sounded inside both their heads. It clearly took him all his energy to get the sound out of the nanographite trap, for the result was almost a whisper; they had to concentrate hard to hear him.

  “How could we not?” Grace said firmly. “You are our friend. What can we do?”

  Arcan flushed an uncomfortable greenish tinge. “There is nothing you can do,” he said. “I am unable to escape the nanographite; and although the canths are managing to stop the Dessites from dragging any more of me over, the part of me which is already here is trapped. I don’t have the energy to escape. I am doomed; the best thing you can do is to blow up any trace of me.”

  Grace looked at the dullness of the orthogel in front of her, and found herself thinking about all they had been through together since that first moment when Arcan had terrified her by pushing back at her fingers, when she had laid her hands on the lake. She looked at the magnificent lake now, and felt a tear run down her cheek. She gave a sob.

  “Please, Arcan! Help us to help you! There must be something we can do, surely?”

  But the orthogel in front of them went dark. “There is nothing,” he said in a flat voice.

  Diva had been examining the transparent walls under her fingers. “You know,” she said slowly, “I think we could force our way through this, with only a small charge.”

  “That will not help me,” Arcan told her. “It will not affect the outcome. You should set the fuses and get out while you still can.”

  Diva straightened her neck imperiously. “No!”

  Both Grace and Arcan stared at her.

  “Well, what? I am not going to tamely walk out on Arcan. Not after all we have been through together! Not going to happen!” The Coriolan girl glanced around her. “Come on, Grace, quickly! Let’s at least free Arcan from that awful tank he is in. We have time!”

  “You hope!” But Grace obeyed, grabbing a small piece of the explosive from the last placement and jamming it up tight against one of the corners of the tank, where two of the walls met.

  Diva put one of her last fuses into it and activated the fuse. “Let’s just hope it doesn’t set off all the others!” she said. “We would all be blown to smithereens.”

  “Now you tell me!” Grace ducked behind a nearby box and covered her head with her hands.


  Diva joined her hastily, and they waited for about three seconds before a dull crump told them that the charge had detonated. There was a pause, and then a sharp crack told them that their efforts had met with at least some success. Diva was glad that the Dessites had no exterior hearing; that would certainly have alerted them.

  Grace poked a cautious head out from the box. Sure enough there was one large crack in the material and, as she watched, several others ran out from that central crack, traversing quite a long way around the cylinder.

  Diva grabbed a piece of solid rock from one of the work benches and began to attack the material, chipping away at the crack frantically. Grace took the hilt of her catana and tried to help.

  The material was resistant, but gradually more and more cracks were criss-crossing its curved surface; at last they heard a satisfying snap of the Dessite-made material, and the best part of a square metre separated from the rest, and gaped open. The two girls hung back, panting.

  Arcan edged out from the rent sides, slowly allowing his bulk to stream through the opening and re-amass on the other side.

  He shimmered faintly as he turned towards them.

  “Thank you.” His voice was much stronger now. “Thank you very much. But I will still not be able to leave the installation, you know. The whole island is permeated with the carbon nanographite. It won’t change anything.”

  Diva nodded. “But you won’t die as a trapped being; you may be able to inflict some damage before you go! Take the explosives, and position them inside you. This is the detonator; you can use it yourself if it becomes necessary.”

  Arcan flashed suddenly, right through his body, and they blinked at the fierce light. While their eyes were recovering Arcan implemented Diva’s suggestion. “You are right, Diva! It is good to get some control of my future – I can move the explosives around inside me. They will never find them now.” His whole body shimmered with outrage. “They were going to dissect me into small sections, and then use bits of me as spaceships! They thought to conquer the entire Ammonite Galaxy that way.” The whole mass of the orthogel in front of them began to vibrate with anger. “Let’s see just what damage we can do! I never thought I would say this, but I have no choice; I am forced to go to war.”

  Diva grinned ferociously and dragged her Coriolan dagger out of its sheath. “I am with you, Arcan. War!”

  Grace stared from one to the other. Her face was pale, but determined. She was still holding her catana the wrong way round. Her eyes registered this, and she slowly turned it between both hands, so that the blade was facing out. She thought back to that one war cry she had heard, and her eyes filled with hot tears.

  She lifted the catana up in front of her. “To war!”

  SIX, BENNEL AND Tallen raced towards the source of the explosion; they had drawn their swords and were more than ready for action. Each of them knew that the time to creep around unseen had passed, that the battle was going to be here and now.

  Tallen could feel euphoria taking him over; it was a heady sensation. Although he could have wished to die taking Tartalus with him, he knew that his sister was very close to him at that moment. He could feel her energy pulling him on, her breath on his cheeks as he ran with the others towards the source of the explosion. He lifted the sword and began to shout the words he most needed out loud.

  “ … I will not pause, I will be light.

  I will not waver, I will be the earth …”

  Bennel heard him, and half turned to give a faint smile. He himself was thinking of his wife and children. It seemed unlikely that he would see them again, now. He thought back to the few days he had spent with them at his brother’s farm, on Mount Palestron, and his heart fell. He hated to leave Lannie like that, with her allergy making her wheeze and cough until she resembled an old hag doubled over with spacebone disease. How long would she survive in those conditions, without him? And what would become of his children? He knew that his brother would do the best that he could, but the meritocratic laws did not allow their subjects more than the bare essentials of life. The farmer would have to take food from his own children’s mouths to feed those of his brother. He would do it, but it would make life hard for everyone.

  Slowly, Bennel shook his head to clear it. None of this mattered. What mattered, here and now, was that the orthogel entity, the wonderful being who could transport him clear across the galaxy, needed help. He was not going to be the one to let him down; that much was sure. Bennel charged on, his eyes determined, his sword arm high, his heart leaden.

  With one thump, Six’s heart had leapt out of his chest. He had just heard the faint echo of a battle cry; and he recognized the voice it belonged to, and the words of the cry. Ledin was fighting. A cold shiver ran all the way down his spine. Not only were Ledin and Grace in danger; Diva might need him.

  He was galvanized into motion, adrenalin flooded his body, his brain. He was no longer thinking at all. His whole body had transformed into a weapon, and it was eager to taste action. His fear for his friends’ safety disappeared, blotted out by an expectation which had to be met. He careered on along the corridors, flinging himself in front of Tallen and Bennel.

  The first Dessite they came across was moving almost as fast as they were themselves, heading for the source of the explosion. Even though it had been alerted mentally to the presence of at least one intruder, it wobbled to an incredulous stop as it detected a tiny flash of movement nearby. The ultraviolet vision prevented it from getting a good look at the intruders, but it now knew that the flash of shapes was real. It connected hurriedly with its superior.

  “Foreign shapes! Here!” Its membranes stood straight out from its body in shock, and it radiated a sharp fear which transformed all of its listeners into automatic participants. The surprise in its mind left it broadcasting inadvertently to the whole of the Dessite empire, and so 595 billion souls realized at the same time that their floating island had been breached.

  Those listening could not help but react. Even the travelers —some of them thousands and thousands of light years away in distant constellations— added their few strands of neurons to the mass of brain power aimed at finding the culprits for the scare. Slowly, a wall of Dessite minds began to take shape, building gradually in size from a few nearby individuals, to all Dessia, then to the small spaceships, far out in space.

  The prognosticator, who had been resting in the elite chamber of the tanks of the twelve, struggled to disassociate himself from the mindmerge, overwhelmed by sensory perception. He was needed physically here on the island; the wall could help, but couldn’t protect his workforce from direct attack.

  He directed sharp flares of anger towards those who dared to approach him mentally, and transmitted blazing orders to all those in the facility to avoid being caught up in the wall. Dessites could function while in a merge, but their actions were very slow with their attention focused elsewhere. No, thought the prognosticator, they had to leave the mental part of the attack to those not actually present on the Island of the Forthgoing.

  Gradually, the prognosticator overcame the natural temptation to sink into the protective wall, and was able to sharpen his senses into the space around him. He sped over to the three nearest workers, and used his membranes to snap them out of the reverie of mental merge. Their outer fronds rippled in worry and fear; the Dessites had not faced physical danger in millennia.

  The prognosticator had realized at once that this was an attempt to rescue the orthogel entity. He wished that the Ammonites had agreed to give more support than simply the location of the orthogel entity. Their help would have been invaluable now.

  “Leave the explosion site!” he screamed mentally at all those on the island. “It is the alien they are after. Go there! Go to the alien!”

  As the wall began to feel the desperation of the prognosticator, he let go of his hold on those wh
o were still actually inside the facility and began to concentrate his mental weight on the intruders, allowing his own mind to act as a spearhead for the mindwall’s true power, directing the whole massive structure to one very well defined position.

  Six, one of the first to feel the full force of the billions of Dessite minds, gave a shout, and nearly fell over. He had the strangest sensation of running on cloud; the corridor had almost disappeared, and his feet seemed to be moving automatically, as if in some sort of dream. Meanwhile, his mind was reeling; he was aware of the enormous wall looming over him. Even though it was only a sensation and he was unable to see anything physical, its effects were stronger than he could have imagined.

  His cry of alarm must have nearly reached Kwaide itself. It certainly reached the two trimorph twins, up in the New Independence behind the Dessite moon. They began to spin furiously, and contacted the canths to bring in what small residual mental push they had left from defending Arcan. Then, together, they aimed their protective blockade to where the tiny minds of the transients were under such oppressive attack.

  Instantly the heaviness against Six’s mind eased, allowing him to concentrate on running. He was still aware of the wall, and he felt strangely isolated from his legs and arms, but he was back in his body, could control his own thoughts again.

  ALL THIS HAPPENED in the time it took Bennel, Tallen and Six to cross to where Ledin had set the explosive device. In the meantime, Ledin had been fighting for his survival. He was overwhelmed by towering Dessites; although they were by no means soldiers, their sheer mass put him at a huge disadvantage.