Hunt the Heavens: Book Two of the Shadow Warrior Trilogy (16 page)

Wolfe knelt, held his pistol in a two-handed grip, and sent bolts smashing into the first. It shuddered, sidestepped, came on.

The one behind it reared as a ray from Taen’s weapon took it head-on, and his second burst seared its belly open, revealing multicolored circuitry.

Wolfe sent a grenade spinning at the first, and the blast went off under it, seemingly harmlessly. But the robot froze in midstride, then sagged to the rocks.

The last spider was on Wolfe, cutting at him. Wolfe ducked, had its metalloid arm in his hands, trying to twist it. Inexorable force twisted, sent him down, and the scythe inched toward his faceplate.

Breathe … fire, burning all, blazing, wildfire, firestorm, beyond control …

He felt muscles tear, and the robot’s arm bent, metal scraping. Wolfe rolled forward, came to his hands and knees under the nightmare, then stood, lifting against the greasy underside of the spider, pushing up, and the robot flipped onto its back, legs flailing.

Joshua saw his pistol, had it, and sent the rest of the magazine smashing into the robot as its legs flexed and died.

Taen was beside him. “It is gone. And you are hurt.”

Suddenly Wolfe was aware of pain in his side, looked down, saw the black where a blast had burned his suit, and felt his suit’s air hissing out.

He fumbled at his waist, but Taen’s grasping organs were ahead of him, opening the patch and sealing the suit.

Wolfe swayed, and the Al’ar pulled him into the shelter of some boulders as another turret opened fire. The fire spattered harmlessly against boulders.

Breathe … breathe …

“Are you injured?”

Wolfe
felt
his body, shook his head, then realized Taen could not see the gesture.

“No. Not badly. Burned a little. Sorry. But I just lost my fondness for goddamned spiders.”

“Those devices surprised me,”
Taen said.
“I had heard no stories of their development. I would guess they were completely experimental, since it was so easy to deactivate them.”

“Easy for you to say,” Wolfe said. “All right. We’re inside their first line of defense. Let me see what I can discover.”

He sat, awkwardly.

Breathe … welcome the void … there is no pain … there is no fear … earth and water combine, restore your body … now reach beyond, find
hei,
let
hei
surround you.

Without realizing it his gauntleted hands touched, tried to link fingers.

He was above the planet’s stony surface, looking down, looking at, looking through.

Here are weapons stations … here passageways … here there are …

Wolfe came back to his body’s awareness, felt the flush of strength, energy, peace wash over him.

“Now we shall enter their fortress.”
For some reason, it was natural to speak in Al’ar.

He took another, longer tube from his pack and got to his feet. Taen began to say something, fell silent.

They went between boulders, Wolfe dimly aware of something shooting, no awareness of where the blasts were striking. He went flat and crawled for almost fifty yards behind the cover of one of the mounded passageways.

Joshua came to an open space, hesitated, held up one hand for Taen to wait, went across the open space very fast.

Nothing happened. Wolfe beckoned, and Taen stumbled after him. He’d barely gained the shelter of a low cluster of rocks when a laser-blast shattered splinters behind him.

Taen looked at Wolfe and saw eyes staring, fixed on some strange invisible eternity through the faceplate.

Joshua’s fingers moved automatically on the tube, and one end extruded until it was nearly four feet long. He opened a tiny compartment on the side of the tube, took what looked like a jeweler’s eyepiece connected to an electrical lead, and positioned it in the center of his suit’s faceplate.

He moved Taen out of the way, then stood, tube on one shoulder. It swept back and forth, then held steady on an open, completely unremarkable rocky patch.

Wolfe touched the firing stud and the rocket blasted out, flame spouting from the rear of the launch tube. The rocket exploded, smoke and flame gouting. Through the boil, they saw where the hidden hatch had been ripped open.

Wolfe tossed the launcher tube aside.

“Come,”
he ordered, and Taen followed.

The hatch was only open about a foot, exposing a ramp, blackness. There wasn’t room to squeeze through.

Wolfe took the hatch, hunched, and lifted. Metal shrieked, but the ramp did not move.

Taen was beside him, grasping organs beside human fingers. Wolfe felt resistance give, and the hatch shrieked open another foot.

Wolfe half pushed Taen through, followed him down.

Joshua
saw
clearly, led the way down twenty feet to where the ramp ended at a T-intersection, pulled Taen into it just as an automatic hatch slid across the rampway.

The silence came like a curtain of rain across Wolfe’s mind.

He unsealed his faceplate, sucked clean, sterile air,
knowing
the fortress’ atmosphere was still present.

“Welcome home,
Taen,”
he said.

Taen opened his suit, as well.

“No,”
he said.
“I am not home. But I have reached a waystation on the journey.”

His voice echoed down the cold metal corridor.

They started down its curving length, moving carefully, weapons ready. They’d gone about seventy yards when, without warning, the deck fell away below them.

Joshua rolled until he was falling facedown, then used his suit’s steering jets to stabilize out of the beginnings of a spin. Craning his neck to the side, he saw Taen floating about three feet above him.

The Al’ar drew level with him and Wolfe realized their rate of descent was slowing. They’d dropped about five hundred feet and were falling at no more than a few feet per second when Joshua saw a deck looming below. He kick-snapped erect and bent his legs for the landing.

No impact came as the fortress’ antigrav caught, held them. As they touched down, a metal roof crashed across, sealing off the tunnel they’d fallen down.

“Alice, and friend. Canned for the feast,” Joshua said. Taen did not respond, but scanned the walls and decks of the oval-shaped trap. Both still had weapons ready.

“I see nothing that suggests weakness that might be cut away,”
Taen said.

“Nor I,” Joshua agreed. He tried to
feel
out, beyond. Through three-quarters of the arc, he could
feel
nothing but metal, rock. On the fourth, his
vision
went beyond, but only into emptiness. Then it met something and was hurled back.

Joshua shuddered, as if he’d been struck.

“What was that?”
Taen asked. “Somebody out there doesn’t want to be watched,” Wolfe said.

“Lay down the weapons,”
came a voice. It filled his mind and the tiny room.

Wolfe hesitated, noticed Taen had knelt, set his weapon down, did the same.

He
felt
someone, several beings,
watching
him, and squirmed, not comfortable.

The section of the wall slid open, and five Al’ar were in the opening. Two held long, slender weapons identical to Taen’s. The other three wore dark ceremonial robes. The one in the center wore a Lumina stone on a metallic headband. He
knew
all of them to be Guardians.

“Name yourself.”

“Taen.”

“The One Who Fights From Shadows is the name I was given many years ago by another Guardian,”
Wolfe said.
“In Terran,
Joshua Wolfe.”

He felt his own Lumina warm as the Al’ar
reached
toward him.

Then the stone became cold as the Guardian turned to Taen.
“My senses did not tell me that another of us had remained behind.”

Taen made no reply.

“Why did you not make The Crossing with the others?”

“I do not know. Perhaps I was unworthy.”

The Guardian began to speak, stopped, as if rethinking his words, then went on:
“You have spent time among these others, these groundlings. You have let your
mind become corrupt. There was no ‘worth’ to those who have gone, no ‘shame’ to those who have remained here.”

“And how was I to sense this?”

Wolfe blinked, thinking for an instant he’d detected impossible pain in Taen’s words.

“If you did not go, then we must assume there is intent to your remaining. Perhaps it has to do with this one who accompanies you.

“Neither of you is the other’s prisoner. You are working as a pair, as a conjoined unit? I find this a concept beyond visualization.”

“Nevertheless,”
Taen said, “it exists.”

The Guardian’s attention shifted to Wolfe.
“I am puzzled by the responses of this young one. Perhaps you might assist me in clarifying the murky pool.”

“I doubt that,”
Wolfe said.
“I myself have little clarity of thought.”

“What do you seek?”

Joshua said nothing but slowly shook his head.

“Perhaps I can answer for both of us,”
Taen said.
“I began this search, looking for the Guardians, even though there was little but rumors. I sought to find why I was abandoned, and to be allowed either death or to join the others.

“This one, whom I had known when we were hatchlings, and whom I fought against in the time of war, joined me. What he hopes to gain, what he hoped to gain by studying our way in the time before war, I cannot tell you. But he was a strong pupil, both in the ways of fighting and in the ways of thinking. Since we have been together, he has become an adept, having
talents even I was not aware could be gained. But I leap ahead.

“Before we could truly begin our search, we
felt
a threat, something unseen, unknown. Its onset is a buzzing, as of insects, but there is not true sound I have felt an aura of blue when this happens; he has not. He has had some pain, some physical evidence, his outer layer showing bruises for a time accompanied by sharp pain, then the signs vanish.

“Both of us
felt
this had something to do with our quest, and feel this menace growing, and feel it especially strongly here in these parts of space that were once Al’ar.”

As Taen spoke, Wolfe felt an emanation from the first Guardian, then the others — something dark, strange, cold. Taen flinched as if he’d been struck, and Joshua realized he, too, had felt what the Guardians had emitted.

“So,”
Taen said,
“we were not becoming insane. This is real. What is it?”

The Guardian looked at his two fellows, then back at Taen and Wolfe.
“This shall be explained. But not at this moment. You. Terran. I cannot bid you welcome as an honored one. Our races fought too long and there was too much blood spilt for me to feel or say that. But you are now our guest. You will eat, sleep, learn here, and no one shall bring you harm or offer you shame. I am Jadera.”

The Guardian bowed slightly, and the Lumina on his headband flared, subsided.

Wolfe’s vision blurred inexplicably, cleared when he blinked moisture from them.

He realized there was a smile on his face.

Wolfe half remembered some of the foods they ate, but most were unfamiliar. They were the dishes of a state dinner, which no youth, even the son of an ambassador, would have been allowed. Some he liked, a few he had to force down, fingers crossed as his mind reminded him there was nothing in the Al’ar diet a Terran could not survive.

He wondered what the Al’ar foods tasted like to the aliens. To him, they were a flurry of flavors, mingling or sometimes overriding each other. Some were solid, but most were in heavy soups. A few came in covered, insulated containers, and were inhaled as a gas.

The room he ate in was huge, shadowed. Against the walls light-constructs flared, subsided. Beside each seat was a half dome on the table that delivered and removed each dish.

The Al’ar ate at small tables around him, conversing in low tones. Joshua wryly reminded himself the unemotional Al’ar were genetically incapable of performing a Prodigal Son routine and that he was the only one who was upset that Taen’s arrival wasn’t made more of.

At first he thought all of the aliens on the planet had been summoned, but then he realized many of them were present only in image.

He quietly asked Taen how this was done.

“A simple matter,”
Taen said.
“Each sits in a booth with a background prepared to simulate this room. There is a communications device in front of him, and he has large screens around him. This way, we do not shrivel in loneliness, even though we are great distances apart at our duties.”

Wolfe turned to Jadera.
“If it is a permitted question, what are the duties of the Guardians on this planet?”

“You may ask, and I shall answer. There are many, ranging from maintaining this fortress to keeping watch for intruders to … the matter that brought you here, and that which I shall speak of at another time. Still others have rituals to attend to.”

“Rituals?”
Wolfe asked.
“But we Terrans always believed — I do not know why — the Guardians were leaders of the flesh, not what we would term
priests.”

Taen lifted a grasping organ, expressing surprise at what Joshua said.

“But how could that be?”
Jadera responded before Taen could speak.
“How can a being lead in the body if he has not a vision, an ability to lead in the spirit?”