Deathstalker Rebellion (48 page)

“It was bad inside the alien ship. All those insects, all sizes, all around us and no way out. Enough to give anyone the creeps.”

“You’re about as subtle as a flying half brick, you know that?” said Frost. “But thanks for the thought.”

Silence looked back at her. She was smiling, but it didn’t touch her eyes. He shrugged. “If you ever need someone to talk to …”

“I’ll bear it in mind. But any problems I might have are mine, and I’ll handle them.”

”That’s what I thought when the booze was drowning me inch by inch. You helped me out anyway.”

“You didn’t know how to ask for help,” said Frost.

“Neither do you,” said Silence.

They looked at each other. There was a closeness between them that was more than just the link they always shared now. Frost’s eyes softened slightly, and Silence thought for a moment that she was closer to opening up to him than she had ever been before. But the moment passed and the softness disappeared, and Frost was an Investigator again, cold and focused and quite impenetrable. Silence looked away.

“You have to make allowances for the insect representatives,” he said finally. “According to the files, they have little concept of time as we understand it, but they respond well to firm behavior.”

“I don’t have to make allowances for anything,” said Frost. “That’s what being an Investigator is all about.”

Silence had to smile. “Useful though the files are, however, they don’t have anything at all to say about how you get the bloody insects’ attention in the first place.”

“We could kill a few,” said Frost. “Hell, we could kill a lot. Nobody’d miss them.”

“Let’s save that for a last resort,” said Silence. “There must be something a little less drastic we could try.”

And then he broke off as a wave of insects came surging toward him, thick and black like a living carpet. His hand dropped to the disrupter at his side. Frost already had hers out, and was sweeping it back and forth, searching for a meaningful target. The wave crashed to a sudden halt a few feet short of them and began piling up into a tall, thick pillar of squirming bodies. The twitching legs folded around each other and were still, the small bodies fitting neatly together like the interlocking parts of some more complicated machine, and gradually the pillar took on a humanoid form: a dark, shiny shape that mocked humanity as much as it duplicated it. The square, flat-sided head turned jerkily on its thick neck to look at Silence and Frost, though there was no trace of anything that might have been eyes. It buzzed briefly: a short, ugly, and completely inhuman sound. It buzzed again, and suddenly, though the sounds hadn’t changed, Silence and Frost somehow understood it.

“Empire,” said the dark human shape, though there was
nothing that might have been a mouth. “Interrogation. Respond.”

Frost put her gun away and tried to look as though she’d never drawn it in the first place. “Yes, we represent the Empire,” she said flatly. “You’ve been informed why we’re here?”

There was an Empire Base on Shanna IV, populated by a handful of scientists and a small force of guards who’d all managed to upset someone really badly to get themselves posted here, but they had as little contact with the resident aliens as they could get away with. They might have arranged this meeting, or they might not have. It was that kind of Base.

Silence stared at the humanoid figure, and it stared right back at him. Though there was no trace of eyes on the flat shiny face, Silence had no doubt the insect representative was watching him. He could feel the weight of its stare, like an icy breeze in the boiling heat of the day. The insects that made up the human shape twitched suddenly, hundreds of legs flexing briefly so that a shimmer seemed to run through the figure, and then it was still again. Silence winced as a headache blossomed slowly between his eyes. It was as though he could almost see or hear something that was being hidden from him. He concentrated on the feeling and realized it felt something like the link that he shared with Frost. He glanced at her to see if she felt it, too. She was scowling, but there was nothing unusual in that. Certainly she didn’t seem as disturbed as he felt. He tried to grasp the vague feeling and bring it into focus, but it slipped away like water between his fingers and was gone. He still had the headache, though.

“Rebels,” the alien representative said suddenly. “Avoid. Punishment.”

“Got it in a nutshell,” said Frost. “Anyone tries to contact you, rebel or alien, you tell them to go to hell and then report them to the Base immediately. Understand?”

“Rebels. Avoid. Punishment. Chemicals. Interrogation. Respond.”

Silence would have shivered, had he not been boiling alive in his own sweat. There was something about the way each word seemed to emanate from different parts of the dark human shape that upset him greatly. He made himself concentrate on his job.

“Yes, we’ve got your chemicals,” he said curtly. “They’re being unloaded in the usual place. The regular supply ship will be along to pick up the compounds you’ve produced.” A question occurred to him, and he decided to ask it before he could think better of it. “We have a use for those compounds, but what do you get out of the deal?”

There was a long pause, until Silence assumed the construct wasn’t going to answer him; then it said two words and fell apart before Silence could respond. The human shape disintegrated from the top down, tumbling into hundreds of its respective parts, which hit the ground running and scuttled off in different directions. In a few moments they were indistinguishable from those who were already covering the ground, and Silence wasn’t at all sorry to see the back of them. Particularly, after the two words the figure had spoken.
Chemicals. Addictive.
He looked at Frost, who was still staring thoughtfully at the insects scuttling around her on their inscrutable, incomprehensible missions.

“Do you suppose they have any concept at all of themselves as individuals?” he said finally. “Or only when they gather together like that?”

“No one knows for sure,” said Frost. “They’re supposed to have a single hive mind for the whole species, but no one’s been able to prove anything, one way or the other. Our instruments can’t detect anything, and espers just get really bad headaches when they try to listen in. The constructs are our only way of communicating with them, and they tell us as little as they can get away with.”

“What about the scientists at the Base?”

“They spend most of their time trying to get themselves transferred somewhere else, and I don’t blame them one bit. This place gives me the creeps.”

Silence kept his features under control, but it was a near thing. He couldn’t have been more surprised if the Investigator had admitted to secret pacifist leanings. For Frost to admit that the place made her feel uncomfortable, it must really be getting to her. And that wasn’t like Frost at all. He decided to do them both a favor and change the subject.

“Did you know the chemicals we supply these insects with are addictive?”

“No,” said Frost, “but it makes sense. If the insects are a single hive mind, they’re scattered far too widely for us to
be able to hurt or control them. But withholding chemicals to which they’ve developed a dependency should do the trick nicely. A junkie will do anything for his next fix.”

“Very efficient,” said Silence. “But then, the Empire’s always been a great believer in efficiency. And if it can work a little cruelty into the deal, too, so much the better.” He looked around him at the thousands of small scuttling forms, working blindly and obediently in the blistering heat to meet the Empire’s needs. If he saw any connection between them and him, he kept it to himself.

Chroma XIII was a singular planet, in more ways than one. The original survey ship almost missed it completely, as technically it should have been impossible for any form of life to survive in a planet so far from its burned-out, dying sun. But something about Chroma XIII caught the Captain’s eye, and he sent down drones to gather information. And what they sent back was enough to make even a seasoned survey officer’s jaw drop. Within the giant gas ball that was Chroma XIII, there was life without form or substance. Intelligence separated from physical existence. A planet of inherent contradictions, whose very existence was theoretically impossible.

Silence kept the
Dauntless
in as high an orbit as he could get away with, and he and Frost watched the main viewscreen as the ship’s drones dropped toward the impossible planet. Strange images came and went on the viewscreen as the scene switched from one drone’s instruments to another, and all the time the comm channels threatened to overload on the sheer intensity of what they were relaying.

There was no planetary surface, no solid area at all, and the drones dropped endlessly through shades of color and fields of light, blindingly bright, in which strange hues shifted and stirred without any purpose or meaning that could be fathomed by human eyes. There were planes of dazzling color, separate and distinct and thousands of miles long, and whirlpools the size of moons, blending slowly from one color to another, and oceans of blue mists as dark as the color you see when you close your eyes at night. And everywhere, the colors and the shapes and the shades were shot through with sudden blasts of lightning that came and went almost too fast for the human eye to follow.

“And these flashes of lightning are the aliens?” Silence said finally.

“We think so,” said Frost. “It’s hard to be sure of anything here. Certainly the lightning bolts share some of the attributes we associate with life. They react to outside influences, they consume light on some wavelengths and release it in others, and they appear to communicate with each other, though our translation computers have had nervous breakdowns trying to make sense of it. They reproduce constantly, and they also disappear suddenly, for no discernible reason.”

“All right,” said Silence, determined not to be completely thrown. “How do we communicate with them?”

“We don’t,” said Frost. “We’re not even sure they know we’re here, which might just be for the best. Why give them ideas?”

Silence looked at her and raised an eyebrow. “And the Empire’s content to just leave them be?”

“Pretty much. They don’t have anything we want, let alone need.”

“So what the hell are we doing here?” said Silence.

“Keeping an eye on them. We have no way of knowing what they’re capable of. They’re life without form, which could also be life without limits, as we understand them. Who knows what they might do if they became aware of us? If they decided to leave this planet and journey to some populated world, we could be in deep trouble. Those flashes of lightning contain billions of volts, theoretically, and we’re pretty sure there are other forces at work down there, too. The bottom line is, we don’t have anything that could stop them if they decided they were mad at us. What use is a weapon against something that has no physical existence?”

“Great,” said Silence. “Just wonderful. Something else to worry about. So we can’t talk to them, let alone threaten them, and we’re not even sure they know we’re here.”

“Got it in one,” said Frost. “All we can do is drop a hundred or so security drones to keep an eye on things, and then get the hell out of here.”

“ Join the Imperial Navy and see the universe,’ ” said Silence heavily. “Meet strange and interesting new forms of life, and run away from them. Navigator, get us the hell out of here. My head hurts.”

* * *

The last planet they visited was Epsilon IX, and that meant hard suits. The gravity was five times standard, the air was a mixture of extremely noxious gases, any one of which would have been fatal on its own, and the air density was uncannily like the pressure of water you find at the bottom of a deep ocean trench. On top of all that, the entire world was a mass of goo; thick, slimy mud that covered the planet’s surface from pole to pole. In some places it was only a couple of feet deep, and that was called land. Either way, it was messy as hell. There were hills that rose up suddenly overnight and then spent the rest of the day collapsing and sliding away.

There were huge artificial constructs here and there that might have been buildings or machines—or both or neither. The native intelligent species created them when they felt like it, though they declined to explain out of what or what their purpose might be. The muck itself contained a handful of extremely rare and useful trace elements, and these were refined from the goo by specially designed automated mining machinery from the Empire. People couldn’t live on Epsilon IX, even inside a fully Screened Base; human-built structures inevitably sank, and had to be constantly retrieved, which cost money.

The mining equipment worked only because the natives looked after it. No one knew much about the native species. They appeared to be the only living things on Epsilon IX, which raised some interesting and rather unpleasant questions about what they ate. They had a mysterious link to their mucky environment that allowed them to thrive and prosper, but they weren’t big on explaining that, or, indeed, anything else. They kept to themselves and did really nasty and inventive things to trespassers.

Silence and Frost journeyed down to what passed for the planet’s surface in a pinnace, which ended up hovering in midair while Silence and Frost dropped awkwardly out of the air lock in their hard suits. They landed knee-deep in the sludge, and slogged slowly through the thick mud, slipping and sliding and holding onto each other for support. There was something vaguely solid under their heavy boots, but it rose and fell unpredictably beneath the covering goo. The slime came in varying shades of gray, much like the sky above, which was disorienting, to say the least. Sky blended into surface almost imperceptibly, which did strange things
to Silence’s sense of orientation. Things like up and down, left and right, forward and backward ceased being absolutes, and became more like matters of opinion. The last time Silence had felt like this he’d been drunk for a week.

He slogged along beside Frost, the hard suit’s servomechanisms whining loudly as they struggled to overcome the planet’s heavy gravity. Silence took a quiet satisfaction from the obvious difficulties Frost was having in plowing through the thick mud. It was good to know that even Investigators had their limits. They waded on for some time, while their surroundings rose and fell without any obvious meaning or purpose. Frost led the way with dogged determination. Silence supposed she knew where she was going, but didn’t ask, just in case she didn’t. He liked to think that at least one of them knew what they were doing.