Strider's Galaxy (32 page)
Authors: John Grant
"There is a planet that the Autarchy values above any other except Qitanefermeartha itself," the Helgiolath said.
"'Qitanefermeartha'?"
"Qitanefermeartha is the planet at the very core of the Autarchy. It is not of current concern. It is so well defended that even this fleet might have no chance of succeeding against it. Perhaps in the future . . ."
The Helgiolath's second face turned back blindly towards Lan Yi. Did the aliens have two brains, one for each head? He was becoming much more interested in their physiology than he was in thoughts of fighting the Autarchy. The
Santa Maria
had been sent into space with the primary purpose of discovering a new world for humanity to colonize but with the secondary aim of studying alien lifeforms—not as lifeforms, exactly, but as representatives of other modes of evolution. Lan Yi had not been deeply involved in this part of the overall project, but it had interested him nevertheless. If he were ever given the chance he wanted to investigate Polyaggle: she was clearly put together in some way that human biology had yet to encounter. Dissecting a Helgiolath could likewise add more to humanity's understanding of the workings of biology than all the thousands of years of research that had gone before . . .
"Please tell me what you would like us to do," said Pinocchio.
Lan Yi started. He had almost forgotten that the bot was there on the command deck with him.
"I will give you the co-ordinates of this planet, which is called F-14," said Kortland. There was a note of relief in the alien's translated voice, as if at last he were dealing with someone rational.
"Please do not do so as you did before," said Pinocchio. "We have lost several of our personnel to your mode of moving vessels through space."
"You take this over," said Lan Yi to the bot. He had become too intrigued by the Helgiolath to remember Strauss-Giolitto and Strider. A couple of medbots should have been here by now. Was his order of priorities Strauss-Giolitto and Strider or Strider and Strauss-Giolitto? This worried him as he turned away from the communications Pocket to look at the two women. Strauss-Giolitto was motionless except for the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. It looked as if Strider had broken the woman's jaw, but this was nothing that a medbot couldn't deal with quickly. Strider, although her eyes were still closed, was mumbling some sort of gibberish. Spittle was leaking out of the side of her mouth.
"Translation?" Lan Yi said to Ten Per Cent Extra Free.
There isn't any.
"Is she all right?"
She will soon recover.
He knelt down beside Strider and took her head on to his knees, stroking her face.
"I have recorded those co-ordinates," said Pinocchio behind him. "You must tell us more about this planet."
Strider was beginning to recover full consciousness. Her eyes opened, staring into Lan Yi's, and then closed firmly again. "The hill of unbelief is never the sight of seeing," she said, very quietly.
"I do not understand you," said Lan Yi.
Her eyes opened once more. This time she recognized him and put her arms up towards him, pulling his face down towards hers. He kissed her politely on the cheek. She responded by kissing him eagerly on the mouth. He was appalled. His mouth was Geena's territory, not Strider's.
"Stop, please," he said, as her face moved briefly away from his.
He could see her eyes moving into focus.
She squirmed away from him across the floor of the command deck.
"It is undoubtedly very well protected," Pinocchio said in the background.
The Images were no longer interacting with Lan Yi, so he had no idea what Kortland was saying from the communications Pocket; it sounded like an explosion of flatulence that he was pleased to discover was not coming from himself.
Strider was lugging herself to her feet. She seemed shaky, but the craziness had gone out of her eyes. Lan Yi saw her look towards Strauss-Giolitto, who was still unconscious, and then towards the back of Pinocchio, who was talking earnestly with the Helgiolath.
"I have now stored a back-up of the co-ordinates within myself," the bot said, "but until I have received human instructions I am unable to take further action."
"Let me take over," said Strider.
Her brusque brushing of Lan Yi out of the way as she moved towards the Pocket might have been offensive, but somehow it was not. The out-of-Taiwanese didn't even start to think about what Pinocchio felt as he was thrown aside as well. Instead he went to Strauss-Giolitto. Still no goddam medbots.
"Stop pissing about and give me some more fucking information," said Strider into the communications Pocket.
Lan Yi hoped that Ten Per Cent Extra Free was performing adequate expurgation.
#
The flintreader in the eye of.
She.
Sun bright in the very high sky, then growing too much smaller. Feel of distance above ground. Wings flexing.
Dark sky now.
Thousands of children nudging uncertainly inside her.
This is not what we want, mother.
Most of them would die within moments of their birth, but enough of them would live.
The shape of creation was a rhombus. This had been known since time was very young.
Wings move, and then are torn from the back. Pain would be better than the sense of loss. The flintreader sees all, because he has become the too-small sun and the very dark sky. He is her magical incarnate lover and the one who surrounds her. She bites into him, feeling the warm succor of his fluids easing themselves as they should do into her mouth. The flintreader lets her take her fill and then releases her—thrusts her away from him.
This is not supposed to happen. The flintreader comes for a queen only in the moment of her death. It is not his role to mate with her through the feeding ritual, as he has just done.
Wingbrush. The flintreader once more?
No. Instead the Human-thing named Strauss-Giolitto. Hurtling towards the ground together with the human-thing, pulling her flesh away from her body in little pieces. No pain, but knowledge that the flesh would not return for a very long while.
Copulation with the Human-thing. Interesting but not greatly pleasurable. Try to make the bite, but this time pushed away even before the skin can be pierced.
Utter darkness, then brilliance.
The flintreader with her again as they fly, her wings restored, down topologically impossible corridors. Almost all of her dead, but almost all of her regrowing inside her.
Sharp blade descending. Flintreader gone from her side. Darkness brighter than the brilliance. Species-death descending with a loud shine. Descending towards her. Descending.
Blade, discovered from the Human-things, averted. She wings in emptiness. Where the flintreader? Gone, as always is in life. First real hope she is alive. Thousand of lives inside her. Must be protected.
Fly on through emptiness.
No flintreader.
Human-things least bad option. Raise small ones until take back to Spindrift. Much flesh on Human-things. Birthing can be achieved.
Exchange flesh.
Blinding lights and once more the sensation of falling.
Exchange flesh, or feel the species slip away. The male and the female mate after the female is engorged with a litter and then the female sucks the flesh out of the male and plants her already sentient offspring into his shard. This is the way it has always been. This is rightness.
She is underwater, the worst of all places to be. The coldest of all water. Required: the warmth of the flintreader.
Now light again, and she can see bubbles of air drifting up swiftly from mouth. Wings start from back but are heavy with moisture. Dying here.
Back in air, but somewhere unknown—not Spindrift. Move wings, and now can fly. Air too thick for breathing. Gag as if trying to breathe water.
More pain.
But soon to reach the Human-things once more. Then to the birthing give and if only that forevermore the eleventh was the next number.
She.
Wanted to be.
Herself.
Again.
Flintreader holding her back.
Hitting him away.
Human-things excellent hosts for the brood. Better even than flintreader. More flesh.
#
In the end, Polyaggle spent a very long winter on a planet called Xr—where she was hunted through the snows by creatures that looked like low walls but had gaping mouths in their centers—before she was able to fight her way back through her nightmares to one of the Pockets on the command deck of the
Santa Maria
.
"You're the last to get here," said Lan Yi, holding her in his arms, although it was obvious to her that her bristles were cutting painfully into him.
Did he have enough flesh?
#
There was a time when there had been a world called Preeat, which had been inhabited by a pre-space people called the Preeae, who looked rather like something you discovered splattered on the windshield of a cabble. Now no one called the planet Preeat any more, because it was much more conveniently referred to by the Autarchy as F-14. Of course, no one called the dominant aboriginal species Preeae any more because no one had seen any of them for a very long time. Two thousand years ago the cleansing operation had taken the Autarch Nalla about two seconds to conceive and about two hours to watch being executed.
The Preeae had looked remarkably funny as they'd fried in the Autarchy's beams: the spectacle had been well worth watching.
The Autarch never did anything without reason, unless he felt like it. The reason in this instance was that he needed an unpopulated but hospitable planet so that his technicians could develop and manufacture extra weaponry. The various species of The Wondervale showed a remarkable amount of ingratitude towards the Autarch, who spent much of his time—when he remembered—keeping the galaxy in order. So it was necessary to keep the forces of the Autarchy properly equipped with weapons just so that they could enforce law and order whenever they had to for the benefit of the people.
The Preeae, for example, were no longer unlawful or disorderly.
The techs on the world that was now called F-14 had not entirely been volunteers. To call them conscripts would have been unfair, because most of them had been rather more unwilling than that. Nonetheless they worked away faithfully producing the hardware for density rays, maxbeams, fudgeblasters and all the rest. Once every few planetary orbits a small armada of Autarchy warcruisers would descend to hoist skyward the products of the techs' endeavors. In the early days a few of the techs had passed loose comment about how they were less than totally happy with this business of manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. After those few had gone the way of the Preeae there was substantially less chit-chat in the canteen of an evening.
F-14 was, naturally, well defended. For example, even a fleet of seven thousand six hundred and ninety-two warcruisers would have difficulty getting close enough to slide a missile through F-14's defensive shields. A single vessel that used cobbled-together technology that mixed the primitive with the best that the Images could produce . . .
"Is it really necessary?" said Strider.
"If this tyranny is to be ended," said Kortland, "we have to wreck its manufactory."
"But what about all those people?"
"They are of not great importance. There are only a few hundred thousand of them. There are billions on billions of people in The Wondervale whose lives will be saved if the factories of the planet F-14 are destroyed." Kortland paused. "I once felt exactly as you do now. But do you kill a poisonous parasite before or after it kills a host of people?"
"I still don't like it," said Strider.
"If it is something we can do and no one else can," said Lan Yi, holding Polyaggle's claw, "I think we should do it."
Strider nodded to him. "Yeah, better to kill people than to let billions of others be killed. Easy enough as a mathematical calculation. A bit more difficult in real life."
"This is my reasoning," said Lan Yi. "I am pleased that the final decision will be yours."
"Listen to your advisors," said the translated voice of Kortland.
"I am. Pinocchio, cue in those co-ordinates."
4
"Destroy, Destroy," the Bellboy Said
F-14 didn't know what hit it until very much later. At one moment it was the most securely defended planet in The Wondervale with the exception of Qitanefermeartha itself and at the next a comparatively small warcruiser had somehow glided through the defenses and was raining down a torrent of fire on to the surface. The enhanced
Santa Maria
now contained as much weaponry as the Helgiolath fleet had been able to give it. Here within the planetary atmosphere it was running on jets. What it couldn't maintain within the atmosphere was the full gamut of defensive shields: that was a cause of continuing worry to her.
Strider tapped away at her Pocket's keyboard, knowing that she was dealing out death but trying not to think too hard about the individual deaths. Pinocchio was alongside her, manning the next Pocket and operating even more ruthlessly than she was. He seemed to be treating it all like some kind of holo game. She was grateful to him, but was also aware that, every time she pressed a key and one of those little factory-blips on the ground blew into pieces, hundreds or perhaps thousands of sentient beings were losing their lives. It didn't make any difference that those beings had been constructing crueller weapons than even humanity had been able to devise. She fed in another co-ordinate at Pinocchio's instruction, watched another factory explode. She just hoped that everyone there had died instantly. The thought that some of them might live on for a few hours, a limb or two blown away, waiting for medical help that would never come, was more than she could bear.
Nevertheless, she hit another factory and gave another cry of triumph.
Between the factories there were constructions that she could recognize as residential complexes. Kortland had told her that she ought to target these as well, but she'd refused. This might be a necessary massacre, but there was no need to make it worse than it had to be. The children of the technicians might indeed grow up to be creators of weapons of mass destruction, but at the moment they had to be given the benefit of the doubt.
Small fighter craft began to rise from the planet's tormented surface. O'Sondheim, whose designated job this was, picked them off easily with phasers. There were no missiles or beams from the ground as yet: the people on F-14 were restrained by the fact that the
Santa Maria
was operating in the world's stratosphere, well beneath the defensive shield. Any missile or beam that failed to hit the warship might do damage to the shield, making the planet yet more vulnerable to attack.
Another factory erupted. This one must have contained particularly sophisticated weaponry, because the entire massif on which it had been built began to melt and then flowed like lava, albeit much more swiftly, down a long valley to engulf a residential complex. The
Santa Maria
was moving fast enough that all that Strider could see was the start of the carnage. She shut her eyes momentarily, trying not to imagine what was going on down there.
The
Santa Maria
jerked. The techs on F-14 had at last found some way to hit it. Nelson fell away from his Pocket and collapsed heavily to the floor, his hands over his face. Strider retained her balance with difficulty.
"What the hell was that?" she snarled at Pinocchio.
"I don't know. We have suffered no structural damage." The bot was concentrating most of his attention on the destruction below.
"Yeah, but the next one could hurt us badly. Find out what it was."
Her lover caused his torso to open so that a small metallic spine emerged, reaching its way unsteadily towards the glowing Pocket. The entire command deck lit up as the wire entered the Pocket. Pinocchio himself seemed to be jolted by the contact. Through the Pocket he was interfacing with the Main Computer. The connection couldn't last long. If there was no response fairly soon . . .
Another shock ran the full length of the
Santa Maria
. This time the damage felt more serious. The Pocket in front of Strider began blinking away, every few seconds, from the scene on the ground to show the exterior of the ship. A big chunk had been taken out of one of its tail fins.
"The fighters are firing energy-seeking ballistics capable of—" the bot began.
"Forget the command, Pinocchio," Strider said. "We're getting out of here."
She leaned her head back into the Pocket and issued the necessary instructions.
The Pocket refused to respond. Instead, the 3D display vanished and she saw a graphic representation of a tract of landscape.
"What the—?"
"We're going down," said Pinocchio.
"Who says?"
"The laws of physics. We've lost one of the jets."
"Can't we just run on the other three?" She knew the question was stupid as soon as she asked it. With the latest redesign the Images had carried out, the
Santa Maria
was by no means an aerodynamic craft. It was supposed to be out in empty space, not dodging around in an atmosphere. The Helgiolath, when installing the weapons systems, had given the ship just enough jet propulsion to enable it to survive in such circumstances. As Kortland had made perfectly obvious, it wasn't particularly important to him whether or not the human beings aboard the
Santa Maria
survived this mission. There were thousands of spacefaring civilizations in The Wondervale: the disappearance of one, here or there, didn't make much difference.
"Are we going to be able to make a landing?" said Strider to both the bot and the Pocket. "Or are we just going to make a crater?"
"Assuming we're not hit by another ballistic, we ought to be able to land, if we can find somewhere big enough and flat enough," said Pinocchio.
Strider looked at the schematic display of landscape in her Pocket. There was a large expanse of desert right at its center.
"I think the Images have taken over control of this part of the mission from us," she said.
WE HAVE INDEED,
said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.
"But can you get us off again?" Strider asked.
Possibly. Unlikely. We will almost certainly require help.
"Time until impact?"
Forty-two point one three seconds.
"Everybody get down!" she screamed. "Pinocchio, intercom and commline the rest of the personnel! Move it!"
The whole craft seemed to be trying to pull itself to pieces. Strider threw herself to the floor. It seemed odd that the view-window was ahead of her rather than above—one of these days she must instruct the Images to finalize their revampings of the
Santa Maria
. Assuming there
were
going to be any more days, of course. She could see a grayish sky streaked with even greyer clouds. There was a wallop of deceleration as the retro-jets cut in, and she felt as if she were likely to shoot straight out of the view-window to arc downwards on to the snow-covered peaks of a mountain range that appeared momentarily, dizzyingly, and then was gone. She could hear Pinocchio talking urgently into the intercom, making a loop chip, and then he was on the floor beside her. His face looked entirely tranquil. It was at times like these that one remembered most piquantly that he was not a human being, not a living creature at all. But he was a sentient one—that was the important thing.
THREE POINT SIX ONE SECONDS,
said Ten Per Cent Extra Free. The Images would certainly get out of this alive, and Pinocchio almost certainly would. Strider was not so sure about the human beings, herself included, but with luck at least a few of them might . . .
For a split second Strider's stomach was at least fifty meters above her prone body. The
Santa Maria
bounced and rocked away over towards the right. Leander swore loudly as the crew on the command deck began sliding across the floor. Then the
Santa Maria
righted itself again, bounced again. Strider wished she had something to hold on to. She felt as if she were a marionette under the control of some insane puppeteer who was taking sadistic pleasure in pulling all her strings at once. Her chin slapped the floor and she bit her tongue hard enough that she could taste the blood. The noise of the retro-jets was deafening, but at least the surface beneath her seemed to be more stable. She took a glance towards the view-window, but all she could see was the same grey, rain-heavy sky. There was a chance that the atmosphere of F-14 was poisonous to humans. What cocktail of chemicals would the rain in those distant clouds be composed of? At least the
Santa Maria
was headed for desert, where the rain wouldn't be an immediate problem. But what about the planet's micro-ecology? Ideally, she should keep everyone locked up in the
Santa Maria
until the Helgiolath or the Images or both engineered some way of getting the ship back up off this world, but she wasn't too certain that Kortland and his kind would make the effort and anyway the defense forces of F-14 were bound to get here first. No, the best thing to do was to get everyone out of the
Santa Maria
as quickly as possible and disperse them, hoping that there was nothing too lethal in the atmosphere. The Images could come along with Pinocchio; she would keep the bot beside her. Of course, a sand-desert wasn't going to offer too many hiding places, but . . .
Shit, that was the worst bounce yet, as if the
Santa Maria
were now beginning to think that it really
would
like to be shaken to bits, or, if not, would like to shake anyone inside it to bits. She chanced another look at the view-window and saw the desert vista wheeling at horrifying speed towards her. A sad thought occurred: presumably there were plants and animals which had somehow managed to eke out an existence in this waste, and now some shrieking behemoth from the skies had descended to shred them with the force of its impact or incinerate them with its retro-jets.
Hello, we're the human species. Don't you just like our funky sense of humor?
Pinocchio put a heavy hand on the back of her spine, pinning her to the floor. He was trying to say something to her but she couldn't hear it over the noise of the jets. There was nothing visible through the view-window now but a blizzard of orange-red sand. She wished the bot would take his damned hand off her, and wriggled her displeasure at him.
THOCK!
That was the worst bounce yet, but she sensed it might be the last. The racket of the jets was gradually declining, and there was the feeling that the
Santa Maria
was gradually slowing its erratic career across the desert surface. Once the people on F-14 got their fighters on to the job it wasn't going to take them very long to find the spaceship: the marks on the sand, observable out at least as far as geostationary orbit if some Autarchy minion wanted to be cutesy and shut off the defensive shield for a few moments, would tell them everything. Yeah, as soon as the boat stopped it was going to be a question of abandoning like there had never been an abandonment before. Everyone for herself or himself. With luck a few people could survive this disaster, so long as everyone went in different directions. Of course, everyone would be leaving tracks in the sand that would guide the searchers to their precise location. She wished, now, she'd countermanded the Images and told them to bring the
Santa Maria
down in water, but probably that would have vaporized an inland sea. With luck there might be a windstorm that erased their traces, but somehow she didn't think the possibilities were all that great.
The craft ceased shuddering. It had stopped its screaming skid.
Strider shook Pinocchio's hand away from between her shoulderblades.
"Right, everyone to the locks, quickest!" she yelled. "We're a sitting target here. Pinocchio—tell everyone."
HEARTFIRE AND ANGLER ARE TAKING ACTION TO SLOW DOWN THE SEARCH FOR US,
said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.
UNLESS THEY ARE UNSUCCESSFUL WE HAVE JUST OVER SEVENTY-ONE MINUTES BEFORE ANY OF THE F-14 FORCES WILL DISCOVER US.
"That's about three months too short a time for me," said Strider breathlessly, hefting Leander on to her knees and then her feet. The woman's eyes were wild. Strider shoved her in the direction of where Pinocchio was at the intercom, indicating that he should take charge. O'Sondheim was all right, although like Strider he had bitten his tongue badly, but Nelson had at some stage dislocated his hip. Strider put her foot between his buttocks and yanked savagely. He gave a cry of agony, but she felt the joint jolt back into position.
"I love it when you treat me rough, babe," he said as he failed to get up on to his hands and knees. His second attempt was more successful.
"Get to the locks!" she shouted. "Suit up as you go."
Evacuating the
Santa Maria
took less time than she had anticipated, even though four people who had been working in the fields had been smashed to death as the ship landed. Someone wanted to give the corpses a "decent burial"; Strider ordered him to leave the bodies where they were, and backed up her argument with a wave of her lazgun.
The air of F-14 smelt like armpits—more accurately, Strider realized, it smelt like the armpits of the person who chooses to stand too close to you rather than one's own warm fust. It was presumably packed with organic chemicals of various possibly poisonous kinds, as she'd feared. She wondered how many of them she had breathed before she'd got the helmet of her suit on. Certainly enough to kill her if she was out of luck. The same was true for everyone except Pinocchio. She should have ordered that people suited up completely before they left the ship, but it had seemed like a better idea to get them out of it as soon as possible.
"Scatter," she said through the suit radio. "The further we are away from each other the more likely we all are to survive. Go in twos and threes." She grabbed Pinocchio's hand. "In five days' time I'll raise a commline conference if I can. If not, someone else can do it. It doesn't matter who. For now, what we have to do is get as far away from here as we can."
The prospects weren't good. She'd scanned the horizon, and all she could see were dunes—except for the parts where there weren't even dunes. The F-14 techs were going to be able to blast the grounded
Santa Maria
to pieces without any difficulty and then simply follow the foot-trails of her people through the sands to whatever pathetic hiding places they'd managed to discover for themselves. Strider reckoned that the future of the human species in The Wondervale had about an hour to run.