Starborn and Godsons

by Larry Niven

  “Sir?”

  “Get in touch with the hunting party.”

  ♦ ChaptEr 52 ♦

  levers

  West of Whoville, on a small flat shelf of rock near the “nine” on the imaginary clock, the captured Starborn sat cross-legged under the weapons of the watchful Godsons, who regarded them with a mixture of anger, satisfaction and curiosity.

  Curiosity for the Starborn and also for the environment itself, the glowing cthulhu city, holding each with a measure of astonishment. Toward the Grendel Scouts, for having given a better fight than any of them expected, and the underground city, as if they had finally had the time and energy to consider where they were, and what they were seeing.

  Captain Stype felt something boiling in her gut. Her part of the mission was over, but some part of her insisted that it had just begun.

  Justice . . . a voice whispered.

  She had climbed out of her armor, traded it to Sergeant Margo Lassiter, admiring the Russian’s choice. He hadn’t been stuck in a can fighting unarmored civilians, something that gave her no pleasure at all. No sense of satisfaction.

  “What is this place?” she asked them. No answer. She stepped closer to the shortest of them, a woman with sullen eyes and pouty lips. “You,” she said. “What is this place?”

  “A city.” Evie Queen’s voice was dulled by defeat.

  “Who pushed the button?” she asked, and thought that her voice seemed very calm and reasonable.

  “What button?” Joanie asked. Beside her, Shaka tried to hiss a warning.

  Stype knelt down in front of her. “I’ve watched you. You seem to be in control around here when Sikes isn’t around. So. In the mountains. With the bees. Who pushed the button?”

  Toad seemed to pull into himself, try to make himself smaller, when he was already the smallest of them all. He whimpered, just loudly enough to reach Stype’s ears.

  “Did you do it?” she asked, and swung her hand, cracking it hard across Toad’s face. Toad tried to stay quiet, but again, whimpered.

  “I asked you a question, you ugly little man—” and she did it again. Toad looked up at her, spitting blood from a torn lip, eyes glittering with fear, and he opened his mouth.

  “I did it,” Joanie said.

  Stype’s head whipped around. She let Toad go.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said . . that the assholes you sent after us killed our friends. We had the right to defend ourselves.”

  “You did? You had the right?” Stype squatted close to her.

  “Yeah. I killed him.”

  “Your . . friend. This man Sikes killed your father. And you helped him escape, and then killed for him. What kind of twisted little bitch are you?”

  “I didn’t enjoy it,” Joanie said. “I’ll leave that for twisted bitches like you.”

  Stype kicked her in the stomach. Two of the other Godsons pulled her back, but she was panting. “You had better be glad you’ve already surrendered,” she said. “Because, princess . . if this was still a fight, I’d kill you. Kill you.”

  “Back off, Major,” her men said.

  Stype felt as if something was draining away from her. Some emotion that had filtered her own perceptions.

  Colonel Tsiolkovskii was in pursuit of Cadmann Weyland Sikes, and that was probably how it should have been from the beginning.

  She had no slightest doubt that Tsiolkovskii would bring Sikes to heel. Bring him back . . or render justice on the spot. She wasn’t certain what she preferred. If captured, he would be frozen. If killed . . she would not be there to see it, might only see his torn body after the fact.

  Neither was a particularly satisfying outcome.

  Stype sighed, and asked Lassiter: “Do we have a signal yet?”

  “No, ma’am,” she said, fiddling with her equipment.

  “We’re too far below the surface.”

  That was beyond annoying. Stype wanted to alert the Speaker that they were winning. Had won. And . . it was possible that that great man had words for her. But they’d have to wait until they were closer to the surface.

  And she had been ordered to remain here, with her captives. That didn’t sit well with her. She was not built to do nothing. She was built to move, to act.

  Perhaps there were things to explore: the captives seemed under control. Was there anything useful to be determined about where they were?

  That wall for instance. It was massive, probably concealing supports that kept the cave roof from collapsing on this amazing city. It was scriven with odd symbols. What if . . what if that was . . .

  Writing. Alien writing. Humanity in Sol system had never even contacted alien life, let alone intelligence. That had of course been the potential promise of their journey.

  She liked this, noticing that her thoughts took her away from bloody vengeance. That was good.

  She studied the wall, and noticed for the first time that there were two protrusions, one on each side of a wide rectangle graven into the rock. On closer inspection . . .

  Could that be a door? Disguised as a bas relief carving? Where might it lead? Another chamber . . or perhaps a more direct access to the surface?

  She had noticed that the signal strength flickered as they moved from one part of the cave to another. Could that be because there were other caves, or fissures, above them?

  Major Stype reached out and grasped the lever, pulling it gingerly at first, and then harder. She felt it move, just a bit, as if there were compound gears that were easy at first, and then more difficult as they engaged more of the mass. She stopped. Odd, that. How old was this place? It was uninhabited, had been for perhaps a thousand years. Longer. What a wonder that this lever moved at all, after all this time. Delicacy, that a single person could pull it . . but solid as well, such that a thousand years of grit had not totally jammed the mechanism. Amazing.

  But when she heaved, the lever gave only two centimeters, then ground to a halt.

  She looked again at the other side. At the other lever. Perhaps they were not simple redundancy. Perhaps they were designed to be pulled simultaneously? The distance was too far for human arms to reach both. Almost eight feet, beyond any human arm-span, implying that, if she was correct, the creatures who had built this city had a far longer reach than human beings . . or acted in cooperation. Were they larger than humans? No, wait, of course they acted in cooperation: look at this city!

  She remembered the illustration of the squidlike “cthulhu” beings, and imagined one struggling to grasp both levers at once. Then two, in concert. Why the separation?

  Some alien version of the “two-man rule”? A practical matter of gears, or a safety precaution, perhaps . . ?

  “Sergeant Lassiter!” she called. “Come over here and help me.”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “I suspect,” she said, “that we have another passage here. Perhaps like a cargo bay, with a more direct route to the surface, in which case we might be able to get a signal.”

  She saw Lassiter relax with the thought. The woman’s discipline was fine, but there was no real pleasure in being so far underground. The sheer oppressive pressure of a billion tons of rock weighed on them, even when they weren’t thinking about it consciously.

  “That would be a good thing, ma’am,” Lassiter said. First she pulled on the same handle Stype had tried, until it noticeably began to bend.

  “Stop. I don’t think it’s just a matter of force. Let’s pull on both at the same time.”

  Lassiter went to the other lever, and began to pull. The instant they were both pulling at the same time, the pull became smoother. Again she marveled at the engineering. How many centuries? What had they been? What had been their dreams and hopes . . ?

  And one brief thought: What might be on the other side?

  A fleeting moment of worry. Whoever had once lived here, they were surely long gone.

  The glowing fish-things were here . . and it would be reasonable to suppose th
at they had some relationship to the city-builders. That they had been here for millennia?

  Perhaps the city was built here because of them. Or . . perhaps they had been seeded here. Bred to provide light.

  If there was something living here that might have been here for so long, might there be other things alive as well?

  It was a fleeting thought. The door was moving, and behind it light flickered.

  ♦ ChaptEr 53 ♦

  the door

  The door was composed of the same substance as the wall. More like rock than cement, but she had the distinct impression that it had been cast rather than carved. Extremely fine grain, if she was correct about this. And very tightly fit. When the door was almost level with the ground, water gushed in. The water level in the next chamber was a little higher than the city chamber, but not so high as to drown them, thank goodness. And the joints were so tightly made that water didn’t leak when the door was sealed, or even as it opened. How could it open so smoothly, and yet not leak? That would call for some investigating.

  Stype shone her lamp into the crack between the door and the jamb. Its glittering wedge of light revealed another cave, one perhaps smaller than the cave housing the strangeness the rebels called “Whoville,” but she could also see what looked like a ramp of some kind against a wall about three hundred meters distant. The beam faded beyond that, and the angle was sufficiently acute that she wasn’t sure if that was the limit of the chamber, or if that apparent wall was just a rise, with greater space beyond.

  The water seemed peaceful, but not stagnant. That meant that there was an egress for it, yes?

  “I’ve got a stronger signal, Major,” the sergeant said.

  And that was very good news, good enough to drive other thoughts and questions from her mind. “Let’s chase that down, Margo,” she said.

  The Grendel Scouts (what an absurd name!) were seated cross-legged, a position from which it was impossible to rise quickly. Two men with alert trigger fingers, standing ten paces away, could control the lot. She decided to call over the others to help her.

  “Griffin! Takahashi! Garcia! On the double!”

  The three men checked to be sure their compatriots had the Grendel Scouts under control, and hurried to her side.

  “Help me,” she said, and indicating the doors.

  “What’s on the other side of this?” Garcia asked.

  “I don’t know, but I’m hoping for a more direct path to the top. There are big critters up there. Maybe the cthulhus felt they needed a wall and a locked door.”

  “And . . why do you want it opened?”

  “Again, Corporal,” she said patiently, “because we want a direct route to the surface if possible. We can’t go out the way we came with our prisoners. And even as important, we need to make contact with Messenger.” She felt her spine straighten. “We need to report success.”

  That helped, temporarily repressed the constant ugly buzz in the back of her mind. Kill that bitch, it said. Kill her, and the rest of them too. She ambushed and murdered the man you loved.

  Discipline. You can’t say “don’t think of a purple cow” because just the thought demanded that you think of a purple cow. You can say: “think of a green mountain” and maybe steer clear of the cow.

  So she focused on her intellectual curiosity, her sense of duty. Even the mildly oppressive sense of being crushed under a billion tons of stone, deep underground. That helped. Discipline kept that primal fear from bursting through to the surface, but she could indeed tap into it, and that effort drove the thirst for vengeance into the shadows.

  The troops set to it. The faster they could discover a way out, the faster they could get the hell out of this place. They were soldiers, of a kind, not anthropologists. And even then soldiering was mostly theoretical, two years of training on leased U.N. tactical fields. Today was the first time some of them had ever fired live rounds at real human beings.

  Together, they heaved on the levers. Again, Stype was stunned at the gearwork. There was no evidence that the creators had been here in centuries. Perhaps longer. And yet when both levers were pulled, it felt as smooth as if they had been oiled yesterday.

  The door opened.

  ♦ ChaptEr 54 ♦

  the aquarium

  Cadzie and Trudy fled upwards through the tunnels, crawling and climbing and running for their lives. They didn’t know who was behind them . . perhaps this Colonel Tsiolkovskii she had warned him about. All he knew was that this man had peeled off from the main group after suffering losses and temporary defeats, continuing on and on like an unstoppable force of nature.

  And he had little doubt that such a man, awakened after a century of cold sleep for the single purpose of murdering him, could be stopped now, after all this. And Trudy, who had betrayed her people, would be in an equally terminal position.

  Before, it had been fight or be captured. Now, he was certain, it was flee or die.

  Stype’s sight stabbed into the darkness beyond.

  Stalactites and stalagmites, water to their mid-calves but not beyond. At the very furthest extent of their lights, Stype saw a kind of ramp or slope, perhaps some natural structure that had been modified. Nothing so elaborate as the garish alien city. Built for utility, perhaps. A stairway to the surface? At the moment it even seemed likely.

  With satisfaction, the major noticed that her urge to kill the Grendel Scouts had diminished. Tsiolkovskii would find Sikes, and she had little doubt that there would be no surrender, no peaceful frozen sleep. There would be blood, and pain.

  That thought pleased her, but not as much as the thought of getting the hell out of here.

  “Stay alert,” she said. “Lassiter, how is the signal?”

  “Better,” the sergeant said. “I’ve actually got one.”

  “Then send a message, now.”

  Margot nodded. “This is task force ‘Snow Cone’ calling Messenger. Any relays please facilitate communication. This is task force ‘Snow Cone’ calling—”

  A burst of static, and then a distant voice. “Snow Cone, this is Messenger. What status?”

  “We have captured most of the enemy. Sikes remains at large. The colonel in pursuit, and we anticipate capture or kill shortly.”

  “Urgent message: suspend operation. Repeat: suspend operation. We have good reason to believe that Sikes’s story is plausible. Repeat: the Speaker now finds Sikes’s story plausible. That the creatures known as ‘cthulhu’ are not only territorial, but capable of inflicting the wounds observed. There is now reasonable doubt as to his guilt.”

  That rocked her, more than she would have thought. If Sikes was innocent . . then the colonists were correct in trusting him, and the Godsons had been wrong. If they were wrong . . then they were guilty of kidnapping, wrongful imprisonment . . and possibly worse. People had died on both sides.

  By the Speaker. What a mess. It was . . .

  “There’s something moving out there,” Garcia said. He’d said it before, but she’d been lost so deeply in her head that she hadn’t heard.

  “What?”

  “There’s something moving out there,” the corporal repeated. Their lights showed nothing above the water line, but shining them down, Stype could see things that looked much like large trout. Maybe eels. Diving away from the light at times . . but others ignored their lights, and seemed to be nibbling at the fleshy vegetable matter growing at their feet. Only now she noticed that it felt slippery, uneven.

  “These fish?” she asked, already suspecting he meant something rather different. Something that triggered fear, even thought she didn’t know what she was afraid of.

  “How large?”

  He shrugged inside his combat suit. She could see the shoulder lift. The men without the suits were more than uncomfortable. She could feel it: they were afraid. But of what? The inhabitants of this city were long, long dead. And so would be anything that had been kept on the other side of that door.

  Right?

 
; “Back out,” she said. “Maintain defensive positions.”

  “Major, I’d estimate the life-forms approaching to be about the size of German Shepherds.”

  “How far?”

  “I—” and that was as far as Garcia got before he disappeared into the water as if his feet had been lassoed out from under him. The water was only mid-calf high, so it couldn’t really be said that he was submerged. But the water foamed with blood and screams as at least three eels as thick as a man’s thigh went after him.

  They couldn’t even shoot without hitting their own man. Margo Lassiter leapt in with a knife, hacking at a thing that had its jaws anchored firmly on Lassiter’s face, only to be attacked in turn. The armored sergeant to her right went in, his power suit giving him enough strength to be a walking weapon. He peeled away two of the eels, crushing them in a grip like a machine press. But then—

  A flurry of the things were on him, swarming until he resembled a man who had suddenly grown a dozen rubbery arms.

  On land he would have kept his footing, and who knew what might have happened. But here the footing was uncertain, slippery with algae. He toppled and fell. Now he was under the water, thrashing and screaming, and the things went for him until there were more eels than armor. The things were all muscle and teeth, and something about the raw ferocity and speed of their attack made her feel her own thoughts were frozen in place.

  The sheer speed of the things. Dear God. And . . and they were peeling him out of his armor . . . and the screaming stopped.

  Sergeant Lassiter backed away, just in time.

  Force equals mass times acceleration. The speed of motion, with which the jaws closed, was enough to damage the armor, and then damage again, and then pierce—

  “Major! We’ve got to get out of here!” Her men were behind her, hauling ass, and she was grateful that Lassiter had actually stopped to call to her, had remembered her, because she might have been hypnotized by what should have been an impossible sight as flecks of metal flew into the air, and then blood and bone.