Stinger

by Robert R. McCammon

  Tom said, “I feel like we’re getting ready to go play hide-and-see…damn!” He jumped, because what had seemed like a thunderbolt had snapped along his spine. He opened his eyes but the light was a brutal shock, with a hard yellow-green underglow, and he shut them again.

  “Tom? What is it?” Jessie asked. To him her voice was a slow, underwater slur, and he thought, My brain’s getting scrambled.

  “Silence,” Daufin whispered, and in her voice chimes echoed.

  Jessie kept her eyes closed, waiting for she didn’t know what. Though the hand she held seethed with heat, cold currents were beginning to run through her arm and up her shoulder, an electrical power being generated within Stevie’s body, steadily gaining strength and entering Jessie through the connection of flesh.

  The cold pulse had entered Tom’s bones too, and he shivered. He thought he could no longer feel the floor beneath his feet; he seemed to be drifting, his body slowly skewing to right and left, held only by Daufin’s grip. “What’s happen—” He stopped speaking, because the harshness of his own voice, the alien quality of it, terrified him.

  Jessie had heard a hoarse grunt that may have been the semblance of a human voice. The cold had enfolded her, from scalp to toes, like a breeze from the Ice House on a blistering July day. Another sensation was coming upon her: movement at a tremendous speed. She thought that if she could force her eyelids up, she might see the atoms in the wall in motion like patterns of static on a television screen and her own body moving so fast it found an opening between them and slipped through. There was no panic, only exhilaration. It was what she thought a night sky-dive might be like, freefalling through darkness except there was no up or down—just out, beyond what she knew of life.

  Something glinted on her left, on her right, above and below. Blurred points and clusters of light passing at incredible velocity. But her eyes were still closed—or at least she sensed they were. Stars, she realized. My God… I’m in the middle of a universe!

  Tom had seen them too. Constellations wheeled across the heavens, ringed worlds luminous with distant sunlight, gas clouds rippling like the wings of manta rays.

  And then they were almost upon it: a world as white as a pearl, surrounded by six white moons that crossed each other’s orbit with unerring precision. The planet loomed before them, citadels of clouds covering its surface and in their midst storms spinning with silent ferocity.

  Too fast! Jessie thought as the clouds came up at her. Too fast! We’re going to—

  They pierced the clouds, descending through whirlwinds. A smell of ammonia filled Jessie’s nostrils. There was another breath-stealing shock of cold, followed by utter darkness. They were still traveling at high speed, slanting downward. Warmth touched Tom and Jessie, chasing away the cold. The darkness lightened to royal blue, then a rich, aquatic blue-green. Silken liquid pressed at Tom’s face, and claustrophobia gripped him. We’re going to drown! he thought, and tried to pull free from Daufin’s hand but her grip strengthened, would not release him. He wanted to thrash loose and get to the surface, but he realized he was still breathing just fine. We’re not really in an alien ocean, he told himself as they continued down. This is a dream…we’re still standing in the apartment building, back in Inferno…

  With an effort, he twisted his head to look at Daufin for reassurance.

  He was no longer holding the hand of a little girl.

  The hand was ghostly gray, as transparent as mist, with two slender fingers and a short, flattened thumb. It was a small thing that looked as fragile as blown glass, and attached to that hand was a stalk that trailed four or five feet to Daufin’s real form.

  Beside Tom in the gliding aquamarine was a body shaped like a torpedo, perhaps eight feet in length and full of iridescence like trapped stars. More stalks—tough, tentaclelike arms—drifted with the motion of the liquid around them, each with a similar two-fingered, single-thumbed hand. The body ended in a thick flat paddle of muscle that effortlessly propelled them onward, and attached to a protrusion just short of the tail was a silver filament that linked the body with its small black sphere.

  Electrical energy sparked through Daufin’s translucent flesh. Organs were visible in there, anchored by a simple framework of gray cartilage. Tom looked at where he thought Daufin’s head should be, and saw a curved knob with a sickle-shaped mouth and a trunklike appendage about two feet long. He could see one of the eyes: a yellow orb the size of a baseball, with a vertical green pupil. The eye cocked in his direction. There was peace in its gaze, a languid power. The head nodded, and Tom inhaled sharply at the sign of recognition; air filled his lungs instead of liquid. The ghostly, electric-charged fingers squeezed his hand, and another arm drifted up and touched Tom’s shoulder in a gesture of comfort.

  Daufin took them deeper. Warm currents slid around their bodies and the light was growing stronger, as if this planet’s sun lay at its center.

  Rising up from the depths like flickers of moving neon were more of Daufin’s tribe. Jessie recoiled, felt Daufin’s strong grip, and then she looked and saw Daufin as Tom had. Her first impulse was to pull away from the spindly hand, but she checked it. Of course Daufin was a different form; what else could she have expected? Daufin was a creature designed for an oceanic world, even though the “ocean” might be composed of ammonia and nitrogen.

  The other creatures propelled themselves in joyous spirals, leaving phosphorescent wakes and their pods weaving at the ends of the tethers. They were oblivious to the human presence, but both Tom and Jessie knew that this was Daufin’s memory—her inner eye—and they were only visitors here, the alien ghosts of the future. Hundreds of the creatures made a formation around Daufin, sailing with the precise movements of birds through untroubled air, and Jessie realized Daufin must be a leader of some kind to merit such an escort.

  Now the impressions of Daufin’s world, filtered through her inner eye, came in rapid succession to Jessie and Tom: shimmering outlines of Everest-sized mountains and deep valleys between them, huge orchards where rows of kelplike vegetation were tended, crevasses showing cracks of fierce white glare—a glimpse into the immense power source that lay at the heart of this world. The vermiform towers of a city—sloping, curved, and ridged shapes that resembled the intricacies of seashells—stood beyond the mountains, and thousands of Daufin’s tribe moved in currents above their walls.

  Time shifted, or Daufin’s memory skipped tracks. In a valley below was a miles-long chasm of white fire that shot up whiplashes of electricity. The tides had changed too; they were no longer gentle, but swirled with restless energy. Daufin began to roll over and over, still gripping Tom and Jessie, and underneath what might have been the throat a series of small gill-like flaps vibrated; from them issued a compelling chiming sound.

  In response came Daufin’s tribe, struggling against the currents. They rolled like Daufin, and from the underside of their bodies emerged round pink nipples. Other shapes, also summoned by Daufin’s song, rose from the valley’s chasm; they were disk-shaped creatures, blue electrical impulses sparkling around their rims and at their centers a knot of pulsing fire. As Daufin’s song continued, the new creatures began to attach themselves to the pink underbelly nipples. Dark fluids jetted, shimmering with iridescence. Wheels of creatures danced, rose, and fell in the turbulence. Three of them fixed to nipples on Daufin’s belly, spasmed, and spun away like dead leaves. It was a mass mating ritual, Jessie realized; a ballet of life and death.

  Another blink of time. Something was approaching from beyond. Something alien, and horribly cold.

  It arrowed through the sea with a chatter of circuits, expelled a black harpoon, and sped downward into the valley of fire. More came, following the first. The new arrivals were connected to long clear hoses that snaked up to the surface. Machinery began to grind and pumps hissed, and through the hoses were drawn hundreds of the disk-shaped creatures that lived at the center of Daufin’s world.

  Down came more dark spears, more greed
y hoses. The brutal harvest continued, suctioning up seed-giving creatures older than time itself, that were a vital part of the planet’s power source. When the wild currents called Daufin and she sang again, there weren’t enough seed-givers to impregnate even half the tribe; they were being harvested faster than the unknown creation processes of the planet could produce them.

  Daufin’s inner eye revealed the first stirrings of fear, and with them the knowledge of balances in decay. And now a clear sign of crisis: the planet’s central fires dimming, the great engine of light and warmth wearing itself out as it tried to manufacture more seed-givers to replace those being lost. Tom and Jessie saw the image of a peace mission—four of Daufin’s tribe swimming the long distance to the surface, to communicate to the aliens above why the harvesting must stop. Time passed, and they did not return.

  Death had come. Daufin swam with her new calf amid the forest of hoses; her study of mathematics, used in the building of the tribe’s cities, would allow her to calculate the time remaining from the number of seed-givers being suctioned up a single hose, but that was a statistic she didn’t wish to know. The orchards, the city, the entire tribe—all had been sentenced to death by a cold executioner. The calf played innocently between the hoses, unaware of the terrible reality—and the sight of that blind innocence amid the carnage cracked something within Daufin, made her thrash and wail with anguish. Aggression was evil, buried in the long-ago legends of a war that had evolved the tether and sphere as part of the tribe’s natural defenses, but a chasm of fire had opened within Daufin and wild tides summoned her. Her wail became a song of rage, like the urgent tolling of alarm bells—and then her body hurtled forward, and her fingers gripped the nearest hose. Too strong to tear, which further enraged her. The sickle-slash mouth opened, and the flat teeth of a vegetarian clamped on the hose and ground into it. A shock of agony and shame coursed through her, but the song of rage powered her on; the hose ripped, and seed-givers spilled out, whirled around her, began to drift downward again into the valley. The next hose was easier, and the one after that easier still. A storm of seed-givers flowed from the tears.

  And through that storm Daufin saw two of the tribe, hovering, watching with a mixture of horror and reawakened purpose. They hesitated, on the verge of sacrilege, and as Daufin’s song rose in intensity they propelled themselves forward and joined her task.

  A dark cloud approached from the city. Adrift in the inner eye, Tom and Jessie saw it just as Daufin had: thousands of the tribe, responding to this almost-forgotten song. Many saw the violence and stayed back, unable to give themselves to aggression, but many more attacked the hoses in a frenzy. A timeshift: more machines and hoses streaked down from the surface, harpooning into the planet’s heart, but swarms of Daufin’s tribe followed as she sang—a turbulence of rage as raw as a scream.

  Finally, the battleground lay silent, and broken hoses drifted in the current.

  But the peace was short, the nightmare just beginning. A blink of the inner eye, and Tom and Jessie felt a vibration in their bones. From the surface’s darkness descended four rotating metallic spheres; they roamed over the city, issuing sonic blasts like Earth thunder magnified a millionfold. The walls and towers shivered and cracked, shock waves destroyed the towers, the city crumpled, and the bodies of dead and wounded spun in the debris. Daufin’s calf was torn away from her, she reached for it, missed, saw the calf instinctively withdraw into its lifepod in a shimmer of contracting organs and flesh. The pod sailed away, mingling with hundreds of others buffeted in the savage tides. A piece of jagged wall flew out of the murk at Daufin. There was a crackling of energy, a shrinking of flesh and internals, the skin turned to smoke, the organs merged into a small ball of electrical impulses, and in the next instant there was nothing but the black sphere, hitting the fragment of wall and ricocheting away.

  A current took them—Daufin, Tom, and Jessie, bodiless and floating in an armored shell—and the darkness closed in. There was a rapid ascent, as if they were being hurled upward in an Earth tornado. Something glimmered ahead: a blue webbing—a net, full of entrapped creatures from the upper regions, things that resembled fluorescent starfish, flat gasping membranes, and aquatics with eyes like golden lamps. The sphere hit it, was enfolded in the webbing. And hung there, along with the other helpless life. A thudding of machinery came from above. The net was being hauled up. The sphere broke the surface like a sheet of black glass, and in that realm between the ocean and the low white clouds spidery structures squatted like malignant growths. Nightmarish figures stood on them, watching the net come up. One of them reached out a talon, and gripped the pod.

  Daufin’s inner eye cringed. The power of memory was not strong enough to hold her, and she fled.

  Stars swept past Jessie and Tom—an outward journey, away from Daufin’s world. Each had glimpses of hallucinatory scenes: massive, scuttling creatures with voices like doomsday trumpets; space machines bristling with weapons; a gargantuan pyramid with mottled yellow skin and two scarlet suns beating down on a tortured landscape; a floating cage and amber needles that punctured the pupils of Daufin’s eyes.

  She moaned, and her hands opened.

  Tom and Jessie were grasped by an abrupt deceleration, as if they were aboard a high-speed elevator shrieking to the bottom of a mile-long shaft. Their insides seemed to squeeze with compression, their bones bending under gravity’s iron weight. And then the stop came: a whisper instead of a crash.

  Tom lifted his eyelids. Three monsters with bony limbs and grotesque fleshy heads were standing before him. One of them opened a cavity full of blunt little nubs and grunted, “Yu-hoke, Mstyr Hamynd?”

  Jessie heard the guttural growl, and her eyes opened too. She was supported on unsteady stalks, the light was glary and hostile; she was about to topple, and as she cried out the sound daggered her brain. One of the aliens, a thing with a horrid angular face topped with coiled pale sprigs and a totem of some kind dangling from a flap on the side of its head, moved forward and caught her with snaky arms.

  She blinked, momentarily stunned. But the creature’s face was changing, becoming less monstrous. Features—hair, ears, and arms—became familiar again, and then she could recognize Cody Lockett. Relief rushed through her, and her knees sagged.

  “I’ve got you,” Cody said. This time she could understand the words.

  Tom wavered on his feet, his palms pressed to his eye sockets. “You okay, Mr. Hammond?” Tank asked again. Tom’s brain ached as if deeply bruised. He managed to nod. “If you’re gonna puke, you’d better do it out the window,” the boy advised.

  Tom lowered his hands. He squinted in the light and looked at the three Renegades; their faces were human again—or, in Tank’s case, nearly so.

  “I can stand by myself,” Jessie said, and when Cody let her go, she sank wearily to her knees. She didn’t know if all of herself had returned from the void yet, and maybe it never would. Cody offered to help her up, but she waved him off. “I’m all right. Just leave me alone for a minute.” She looked to her side, into the face of her little girl.

  Tears had streamed down the cheeks. The eyes were tormented. “Now you know me,” Daufin said.

  Tom lifted his left wrist, had a few seconds of difficulty in deciphering the numerals, as if he’d never seen such symbols before. It was two-nineteen. Their “journey” had taken less than three minutes.

  “You two look sick!” Nasty observed. “What happened?”

  “We got an education.” Jessie tried to rise, but still wasn’t ready. “The chemical,” she said to Daufin. “It’s reproductive fluid, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” Daufin’s gaze was impassive, and a final tear trickled slowly down her left cheek. “What the House of Fists calls ‘poison’ is the same chemical that gives my tribe life.”

  Jessie remembered the jetting of dark fluid during the mating ritual. The same chemical vital to the reproduction process on Daufin’s world was a weapon of destruction for the House of Fists.


  “I have to get home,” Daufin said firmly. “I don’t know how many are still alive. I don’t know if my own child still is. But I led them. Without me, they won’t fight. They’ll slip back into the dream of peace.” She drew a long breath, and for a few seconds she allowed herself to feel the caress of the tides again, rising and falling. “It was a dream that lasted too long,” she said, “but it was a wonderful dream.”

  “Even if you could get home, how would you fight them? They’d just keep coming, wouldn’t they?”

  “Yes, they would, but our world is a long way from theirs. We have to stop them from building a permanent base, and destroy everything of theirs we can. Their treasury isn’t bottomless; they spend all they have on weapons. So there has to be a breaking point beyond which they can’t go.”

  “That sounds like wishful thinking,” Tom said.

  “It is, unless I can get home to act on it. We know the planet. They don’t. We can strike and hide in places they can’t reach.” Her eyes shone with a glint of steel again. “The House of Fists has been studying me to find out why my body resists the ‘poison.’ I’ve escaped Rock Seven before. This time they’ll kill me. I can’t give myself to Stinger—not yet. Do you understand that?”

  “We do. Colonel Rhodes might not.” Another glance at the wristwatch. “Jessie, he’s going to be waiting for us by now at the Brandin’ Iron.”

  “Listen, I don’t get all this,” Cody said, “but I believe one thing for sure: if we let Stinger take Daufin and leave here, that won’t be the end of it. Like she said, he’ll send those House of Fist sumbitches after us—and that won’t be just Inferno in deep shit, man! That’ll be the whole world!”