Vetch walked behind and clapped them both on the shoulder. “Welcome to Chimera Company.”
* * * * *
Chapter Eight: Tavistock Fitzwilliam
Secret Planetoid Base, The Redoubt Line
Three Months Earlier
Bronze had a woman’s hands, his cool skin smooth and creamy. It was a surprising detail about the man that Fitz had never noticed before.
But then, he hadn’t previously sat cross-legged with his eyes closed, holding the former Special Missions operative’s hand while an ancient immortal droned on.
“…which is why calling us mutants is closer to the truth than you think. The changes were instigated at the behest of a race obsessed with change. They forced mutation and bio-reengineering upon their subject races and insisted on the ritual culling of unsatisfactory results. I used to think this race was sickening, but I’ve experienced many alien civilizations since them. Now I see that change was just their thing. An all-consuming obsession that drove everything they did.”
Darant was sitting to Fitz’s left. His hand felt lighter, calloused and slightly sweating. Why was Bronze’s so cool and smooth? Was his skin artificial? He sometimes spoke of having been reconstructed after the Battle of Station 11, but Fitz had assumed that had been showing off to impress the ladies.
“Eventually, what had once been a single alien race changed in so many ways, they no longer possessed a single form. There were crocodilians who couldn’t breathe the air, cloven-hooved devils, and blobs of gloop who ate the quantum foam of deep space and excreted glimpses of the myriad futures of the multiverse.”
While he listened to Indiya’s words, Fitz’s awareness had been spreading, passing through the linked hands in the circle. A flash of confusion hit him, and he was no longer sure whether Darant was to his left and Bronze to his right. Had they switched?
Then he struggled with even the concept of distinct individuals in the circle because the minds had merged. They were now a single disc of super awareness orbiting Indiya’s central hub.
“They’d long-since passed being what we would call a single species, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that their genetic code could embed itself in Humans. From there, it crossed to other races.”
Heat!
The sense of oneness in the ring of hands collapsed, undermined by the sudden pain.
Darant’s hand was impossibly hot, almost burning his flesh.
Then a spike pierced both their hands, linking them in the most brutal way.
Fitz’s eyes opened and stared in horror at his wound.
The pain was at the limits of what he could bear, but there was no spike. No blood. His hand was not charred flesh.
Everyone else had remained calm, sitting cross-legged like meditating mystics. Indiya was in the middle, her bony ass resting on a plump cushion, and a rare smile on her lips. She partly obscured Izza’s body, but his wife’s face was tilted up, and her beautiful eyes were closed. She was a paragon of serenity.
He followed Izza’s example and closed his eyes once more. He noted in passing that Bronze’s hand was heating up, too, but he ignored the pipe smoker and concentrated on Indiya’s words.
“The aliens who changed us didn’t take a single form, and neither did we mutants. Take my husband, for example. His change came in the shape of a strategic warfare planner in his head.
“He was never good at battle tactics. All he wanted to do was lead the charge. Couldn’t help himself.” Indiya laughed. “He said battles were won by heroes and small unit tactics, but wars were won by logistics, production, and morale. He won the last big war, so I’m taking his advice for the next one.
“I’ve been beefing up the Smugglers Guild for a while to handle my logistics. You mutants are to be the morale part, in case you haven’t worked it out. Still working on how exactly to use you. Your freak powers are an additional wildcard I want to play.”
Indiya transformed.
Instead of the ancient woman who refused to die, a creature stood before them.
‘Stood’ was a loose term because it took the form of an eight-foot-tall transparent blob inside a jar filled with orange liquid. The container reminded him of the display cases in Nyluga-Ree’s hearth room, but this thing was inside a rocky cavern illuminated by harsh overhead strip lights.
It spoke, words of recognizable Human Standard coming from speakers in the base of its tank. “Your oath. Will you swear to protect my species?”
Fitz sensed the others here in this cave, unseen, but their presence was with him.
Not that any of this could exactly be described as seen. Fitz’s eyes were firmly closed.
“Who are you?” Fitz asked the thing.
Bubbles and silver streamers coursed through the blob’s insides. At first, Fitz thought they were a circulatory system, but the bubble currents seemed to alter course in answer to his words. Maybe they were a form of communication?
“Why am I here?” Fitz asked it.
The metallic streamers inside its body twisted in response to his words.
Or had he imagined that?
None of this was real. Indiya was perfectly capable of planting ideas like this in his mind. She talked as if they all possessed mutant superpowers, but this was going too far to be believed. On a handful of occasions, he’d managed some mind-meld magic with Izza, but all that had achieved were hints of things they hadn’t understood, which had dissipated like a fading dream when they parted.
What he did have were hunches, a certainty that a specific path of action was the right one to take. Izza thought she’d experienced that once, too, but there was nothing visual about it.
Why was he seeing this alien? What did it mean?
I am in you. The thing placed the words directly into his mind. The speaker in its base remained silent.
“Are you talking to me?”
We are bound forever.
“No, you’re not,” Fitz told it firmly. “You’re a creation of a very naughty person putting ideas in my head.”
He felt Indiya’s laughter. She giggled like a 12-year-old girl.
Did you know they used to pray to me? Indiya’s words weren’t spoken either. What? Was he a telepath now?
I always detested it, her words said. The Littoranes started it, called me the Chosen One. The Flesh of the Goddess or some such. I can’t remember the details of that drent. And no matter how often I said, “Look, I’m just a mortal Human being with a little genetic rewiring,” the Littoranes could twist any random event into proof that I had divine blessing.
I promise I won’t pray, Fitz replied. Then he remembered the times he’d asked for guidance in Azhanti’s name. He hadn’t even known Azhanti was another name for Lady Indiya.
You see what I mean? Indiya thought. After I’d been away for a millennium or two, I thought the galaxy would have forgotten all that crap. But what do I hear when I come back? “Oh, we’ve been praying for your return.”
Fitz probed the others in the circle. They were still with him in this cave. Some of them, anyway. But he sensed the conversation with Indiya was just between the two of them.
It used to be just the Littoranes who thought I was a religious figure, she went on. Now everyone’s at it. But you called me naughty, Fitz. She laughed again. That’s better. It makes me sound Human again.
I’m glad to hear it, he thought in response. Why are you making us see this cave?
I’m not. We’re all forming this vision, all of us in combination.
Okay, but this is one of your memories, isn’t it? I know that somehow.
Interesting. No, it’s not my memory, but I think it might be…someone else’s. As for what this alien is, I guess you could call it our godparent.
The thought of being connected to the big blob in a jar was suddenly so abhorrent that Fitz shouted out and opened his eyes. So did everyone else at the same moment.
Collectively, everyone gasped.
Indiya looked supercharged, her eyes wider
than a coffee junky after their first hit of the morning. The experience had taken 2,000 years off her. She was still a collection of bones in brittle parchment skin, but her eyes held wonder.
“You all saw that thing, right?” Kanha Wei asked.
“Yes,” Izza replied. “When we linked hands, I thought we might be about to experience foresight, but I had the sense that that scene in the cave was both happening now and in the past. The deep past. I think…yes, it was the creature who was foreseeing. We were the vision of its future.”
“I didn’t get any of this,” Darant said. He pulled his hand away from Fitz.
So did Bronze. “Me, neither. Guess we don’t have enough purple in us to qualify for this club.”
“No, no that’s not right,” Indiya said. Her voice had shed a few thousand years, too. Fitz had always sensed that she was wrenching every single word from a deep well of struggling to give a shit. Now, not so much. “Darant, Bronze, you didn’t see the vision the others did, but did you feel changed in any way?”
“I felt a tingling,” Bronze replied, “but with all this mystic voodoo business, I could easily have made myself feel that.”
“I felt like I was on fire,” Darant said. “It hurt. No one with any sense is gonna tell me I imagined my pain.”
“Perfect,” Indiya said. “Your observations match my sensor readings. The findings are preliminary, of course, but I think you two acted as some kind of battery. Whatever it was we saw, it wouldn’t have been possible if you weren’t here with us to power it.”
“But what does it mean?” Izza asked. “Do you know what we saw?”
“I do. The creature is called a Night Hummer. It’s their genetic material that was spliced into your ancestors’ DNA. I thought we’d left its kind behind in the Orion Spur, but its reach is greater than I thought. As for what it signifies, Chimera Company leaves on its mission in four days. That means we have more experiments we must run. Rest now. I’ll summon you again this evening.”
* * * * *
Part 2: Hexworld
Chapter Nine: Urdizine
Rho-Torkis
“Lima One, you are cleared to proceed.”
“Roger that, Whiskey Sierra Five. Commencing Operation Stink.”
Urdizine hesitated before breaking cover, taking a moment to check that the two Littorane companions providing overwatch were alert and in position, concealed within snow-covered undergrowth.
It was bad luck that for the first time in weeks, the skies above the Great Ice Plain were crystal clear. To a Zhoogene’s sensitive eyes, the moonlight was so bright, they might as well be doing this in the daytime.
Even so, it took him a few moments to make out his amphibious comrades in the bushes.
If this had been a Legion op, he wouldn’t have wasted time checking up on them, but this was not the Legion. Trust was taking a long time to build.
He broke cover and crunched through the snow, dragging the little sled carrying the cable, generator, and his other gear.
He grunted in pain.
Any exertion more adventurous than a gentle stroll reminded him that his abdomen had been cut up by chunks of hot metal. He would never be truly fit again.
His eyes, ears, and mind, though—they were still sharp.
He was still Legion.
Still holding the line.
And still able to chuckle when he imagined what his best Human friend, Tavarius Stryker, would say if he ever discovered Urdizine’s role in tonight’s op against the occupying forces. Stryker would probably die laughing.
Urdizine ignored the discomfort and covered the ground quickly, heading for the target zone where the snow had already been marked out with UV tags. He dropped to his belly and took the four-inch snow-borer off the equipment sled. It was all set, ready to go. After twisting the activator, he screwed the device into the snow. The miniature tunneller disappeared beneath the white, spitting out slushy spoil that Urdizine shoveled away.
When it reached the ground, the borer backed up to the surface. Urdizine replaced it with a different borer, this one set for chewing through Rho-Torkis soil that had frozen iron hard.
Job done, the second dirt chewer gave a flashing audiovisual chirrup before melting itself out of the way.
Urdizine inserted the flexible cutting torch and used its tip to burn his way through the outer layers of the buried sewage pipe.
“Melting metal,” one of the Littoranes said over tight beam microwave, speaking in guttural Terran Standard. “I can smell your burning tool, Legion One.”
“Acknowledged, unidentified newt.” Urdizine stowed the torch and pulled on the hose reel. “And it’s Lima One, fish for brains. Anyway, what do you expect me to freaking do about the smell? Gurgle you a lullaby to put your mind at ease?”
“All call signs, Sierra Whiskey Five, we do divine work here tonight, so cut the fucking chatter.”
Urdizine smiled at the irony. He’d been posted to Rho-Torkis to build a drainage system for the melting ice near Camp Faxian. Before long, he’d been fighting Littorane insurgents.
Now here he was in the dead of night, not only part of a Littorane resistance squad, but working with drains again—this time of a smellier kind.
When his hands reached the UV mark on the cable, he knew he’d played out enough. He brought the generator up to minimal power and switched on the waterjet.
He’d adapted his gear from a commercial drain-cleaning kit. Backward-facing pressure jets propelled the hose tip along the drain faster than Urdizine could have sprinted before his injury. He’d added a bias to the jets that nudged the cable toward the right-hand wall.
The hose stopped snaking through his gauntlets. It had hit resistance. The reel reported that it had played out 30 meters.
Perfect. If it had snaked farther through the drain, he knew it would have missed the turn where the drain from the Panhandler garrison building connected with the town’s main sewage network.
“Patrol spotted,” a Littorane hissed over the microwave beam. “Four Humans. I think…one has…IR goggles.” In the excitement, their Terran Standard had become barely intelligible, but Urdizine understood the sense of warning and filled in the words he was unsure about.
He unfurled the concealment sheet over the sled and pulled a similar white covering over his head, trusting to its ability to shield his heat signature.
Would the hole he’d bored show up as a hotspot? Possibly, but not one that looked like an intruder. And though he could smell the burning metal below the ground, there was no risk of Humans doing so.
Opening up the side flaps in his hat, he strained his ears to listen in on the Humans’ chatter, hoping to learn something to use against them.
They talked of lovers left behind on homeworlds, and of a dozen conflicts across the Federation that had no obvious end in sight. They were wary, isolated on this ice world, but far from beaten.
Urdizine would have preferred this wariness in their enemy from the beginning. When his resistance brigade began operations, the Panhandlers had been overconfident. That had led to a few easy victories, but the resistance had become sloppy with costly results.
He shook his head the way Humans did when the universe made no sense to them.
Urdizine was a sapper of the Legion, but he was fighting for the resistance, and against the Rebellion. The men and one woman walking past about 20 yards away now were regular PHPA, part of a so-called liberation brigade.
Rebellion. Resistance. Liberation. Words meant whatever you wanted them to these days.
He preferred the Littorane attitude. They were carrying out the divine bidding of their goddess.
For them, it was as simple as that.
Even his squad’s Terran call signs began “Whiskey Sierra” for the Wrath of Saesh, their principal goddess.
Despite passionate arguments about the means, not a single Littorane on Rho-Torkis questioned the ends. They wouldn’t rest until both the Panhandlers and the zombies had been kicked t
he hell off their planet.
The Littorane view of the galaxy had a lot going for it.
“…which is why, of course, we have to log everything. Place is flooded with Cora’s Hope Division. Probably watching us right now.”
“Dido’s right. I was in town this afternoon. Raemy-Ela is thick with them. Always staring. Judging.”
Worldies. Soldiers from Cora’s World. Specifically, Cora’s Hope Division’s pacification battalions.
Urdizine didn’t understand rebel politics, but as far as he could make out, a large part of the Cora’s World military had been expelled from their homeworld, either because they were too ideologically extreme, or not extreme enough. Either way, the Worldies had joined the Pan-Human Progressive Alliance and were now spreading their tentacles through their new host, removing moderate Panhandler leaders one by one.
If history were to repeat itself, the death camps and execution plazas of Cora’s World would be spreading to occupied PHPA territories before long.
And that included parts of Rho-Torkis. His part.
The Human patrol disappeared into the night. Urdizine whispered a warning across the tight-beam link. “This is Lima One. I heard the patrol talking about an increase in Cora’s World presence in central Raemy-Ela.”
“Whiskey Sierra Five. Increased Worldie presence. Copy. I’ll pass it up the chain, sharp ears. Operation Stink proceeds as planned.”
The smile came to Urdizine’s lips. Whiskey Sierra Five was the squad leader, Hrish-Ek, a young Lael clan hot blood who adored the commander of the resistance in the Raemy-Ela region. Hrish-Ek was young, but she was experienced now. Urdizine obeyed without arguing and activated the hose’s primary function.
He’d gotten the idea from his Legion squadmate, Hines ‘Bronze’ Zy Pel. Bronze had told him of an animal native to the Human homeworld called the spider. It could extrude sticky strands of a gossamer material with incredible tensile strength.
As it retracted into its reel, the tip of the hose fired out strands of artificial spider silk, leaving behind thick webs as it retreated back up the pipe.
Hold the Line (Chimera Company Book 5) Page 6