Priam's Lens

by Chalker, Jack L

  Ruth nodded. “So—strange. I never get used to seeing them.”

  Spotty made sure that Littlefeet was as comfortable as could be, with others nearby in case he needed anything. Then she said, “What does she mean? I have never seen a Hunter close-up. Not the body.”

  “Come, then,” Father Alex invited her. “It is laid out over here, right next to the three of our own those two got before we stopped them. You should see the enemy now and again.”

  The figure looked surprisingly tiny in death, although the ferocious energy of its life and attacks magnified its presence then. The skin was a golden yellow-orange, with streaks of black and white going randomly all over the body. In the tall grass, it was virtually invisible until and unless it moved. The jet-black hair was short and wiry and only on the head.

  The most prominent feature were the hands. They weren’t exactly hands, but distortions of hands, in which the nails were not ordinary fingernails but thick, long claws that were razor sharp and extended a good ten centimeters past the tip of the fingers. The feet, too, ended in curved claws that looked as if they could slash as well as kick.

  Nevertheless, it still looked very much like a young girl. Even a pretty young girl, in top athletic shape but just pre-pubescent. The curves were there in the body; it was very definitely female, but there were as yet no breasts or pubic hair. It was easy to guess that, at most, she’d stood perhaps a hundred and thirty centimeters, not much more. Her throat had been not just cut but slashed, but she’d already been knocked out by the drug in the darts, so there was a curiously peaceful look on her face. It was unsettling.

  “So this is the enemy?” was all Spotty could manage.

  “One of them,” Father Alex replied. “If you looked in her mouth, you would find few molars—the flat teeth we have. They’re all sharp, designed to tear flesh off bones rather than eat and chew. They also will die if they do not eat flesh, since they can not digest the vegetable matter which is all we eat. And since there aren’t any big animals left, the only thing they can eat to survive on is us. I often feel sorry for them, really. They didn’t choose this, nor did they choose to hunt us. I’m sure we look as familiar to them as they do to us. But they were not born to this, they were bred to it. They are in a sense the demon’s wild children.”

  She shuddered. “Do they—I mean, she looks so young. Are there older ones?”

  “There are many variations of them, but they all look very young and not very developed. I am not at all sure that they have sex. I don’t know how they reproduce, or even if they do, or if, periodically, the demons simply create and release more. I don’t think I shall ever be in a position where I can sit down and ask them about it, even if they were willing and able to tell me the answers. I’ve never seen or heard of a baby, nor a full adult. That says something; only God and the demons know the rest.”

  She turned away and looked at the others. In addition to Littlefeet, the two had injured five and killed three more. The bodies were now laid out near the Hunter’s, and they did not look nearly as peaceful in death as the Hunter had. The first sentry’s midsection was shredded almost to bits, and entrails and organs hung out in spite of their best efforts to make him at least presentable. A second’s head had been torn completely off. It seemed incredible that such little girls as the Hunters could have the strength to do that. The third was the least mutilated, but had suffered those nails going repeatedly into his chest and abdomen, puncturing vital organs. He had most likely died later, during the night, of internal bleeding.

  The other Hunter was in so many pieces they hadn’t even bothered to gather them all together.

  The real question in Father Alex’s mind was, why had they attacked? If it was just hunger, and there were only the two, then the single outlying sentry would have sufficed. They could have simply dragged his body off and that would have been that; that happened all too often. Instead, they had kept coming in, kept attacking. A pack might do it, although it was extremely rare, but just two? They weren’t attacking suicidally, either; they had meant to take as many of the Family out as they could.

  Father Alex didn’t like it one bit. Something was changing in a world whose only positive point was that it never changed. Twelve warriors from a related family electrocuted. Now three killed by Hunters who made an attack that was both well planned and executed and yet suicidal and seemingly without purpose.

  He sighed. At least Littlefeet was back on the disabled list, so he could keep the pair together a bit longer. Not that it would help much in the end, and he wasn’t at all sure Littlefeet was going to like the pain of the next days and perhaps weeks. He just hoped that appearances were right, and that there were no deep wounds.

  But why were there wounds at all?

  TEN

  Enter the Dutchman

  The one problem with interstellar travel was that time was always the enemy of truth. Not only did time go at a very different rate for those within the genholes than for those outside, it was next to impossible to send accurate and up-to-the-minute data on ship positioning and tracking. Up to whose minute, and when?

  That was one reason why the Navy wanted a Gene Harker along, rather than a robot, however brilliant and clever, that was not prepared to improvise and understand what was possible and what was practical. Yes, humankind had made machines in their own psychic image who were smarter than any of their makers, and more versatile, but they still depended on being given specific instructions and goals in advance by people who could not know all the questions that might need answering. The most flexible and practical one to send on any such mission was a combination of the best of both: a human in a combat-hardened e-suit.

  It was almost always the humans in their suits being dropped on hostile worlds or from ship to ship in normal space. Riding the keel was not considered a proven method of infiltration and travel. Harker wanted to prove it.

  While the ship went through the genhole and those inside prepared for their own duties, watched additional briefings, or ran new simulations of their updated problems, Gene Harker slept, blissfully unaware of anything at all. There was nothing at the moment he could do, so, for now, the suit itself was awake and in charge.

  The first switchover was monitored, noted, the data from the genhole gates read out and identified, and compared with known navigational charts. The suit determined that this was almost certainly nothing more than a switchover, and thus it did not awaken the man inside.

  The Odysseus turned, and as soon as the automated systems on the ship and the gate meshed, it accelerated once more and went into yet another genhole, and all was quiet once more.

  This happened three more times before the suit decided that there was an anomaly. The readout from the selected gate showed that it was inactive—that, in fact, it had been deactivated as leading to occupied territory. The Odysseus should have been unable to traverse the final distance to the gate, let alone go through it; collision alarms should have been ringing all over. Instead, the gate, shorn of the identifiable light system and internal glow that showed active gates to be properly functioning, swallowed the ship.

  From that point on, the next two switchovers showed a variety of genhole gates that were in fact not encoded with any headers known in The Confederacy. The codes were totally different and, at this point anyway, totally unreadable. Nonetheless, the ship appeared to know the codes and the complementary mathematics and had no more trouble using them than it had any of the official ones.

  The suit made a note of this. Genholes could not be reprogrammed by humans, even geniuses; it took the kind of artificial intelligence systems that required whole planets just to store the knowledge and compute the variables. The genholes had been placed by creating essentially random wormholes and then forcing the genhole gate through them. Only when this was done thousands, even millions, of times, and star charts made and compared, had it been possible to build and map a transportation network safe enough to send through real ships with living bein
gs inside.

  Going from a naturally occurring phenomenon to generating it themselves to being able to stabilize and harness what some called tunnels through space-time had opened up the universe to humanity. Its network created The Confederacy. A few other races had been encountered out there, some of which had interplanetary travel and at least one of which had been playing with generation ships, but none had discovered how to harness the wormhole principle and use it consistently.

  It still wasn’t easy to do or maintain. The math involved in programming each genhole gate was so complex it was done at factories and maintenance areas; genholes were replaced every few years, or they should have been. When the Titans came, it was feared that this same network could be used as a shortcut road map to lead them to all the choicest inhabited worlds of The Confederacy. Some were simply turned off, some deactivated, but most were replaced with special gates that used a far different and totally military cipher. This allowed Naval vessels to get into enemy territory if they had to, but nobody else, and each emergence through a genhole rekeyed the codes so that only the ship emerging could reenter from that point.

  Nobody was supposed to have those codes except the highest defense intelligence computers. Even ships were supplied with them only on a need basis, and with rapid expiration. The suit knew this, and knew that, too, the Odysseus was applying those codes it should not, could not know, and doing so easily enough that they might as well not have been there at all. It made a note for future debriefing, if it ever occurred: the damned superintelligence code system for occupied areas didn’t work. It probably never had. It was just too complicated.

  It actually would have been a difficult thing for the Navy to discover on its own. When it used these genhole gates, they worked as they were supposed to. Nobody else even tried them because they gave off an “inactive” or “inert” signal.

  It was lucky that the Titans appeared to use a totally different and still unknown means of accomplishing the same thing. Otherwise, the road map was wide open. It was in many ways a lucky break; just as they ignored all resistance, they ignored this as well.

  • • •

  “That is not my idea of a fair fight!” Sergeant Mogutu complained, emerging dripping wet and aching, not to mention stark naked, from the sim chamber aboard.

  “I’m sorry, Sergeant,” Katarina Socolov told him. “It’s hard on me, too, but it’s the best I can come up with to simulate what you might face on the surface of a Titan-occupied world. Nothing—no machinery of any kind—works. Food would be present but not easily obtained. I postulated no large animals because of the cleansing they do before they allow a regrowth, but there would still be person-to-person combat of some kind. You are back to the most basic ancestral state, Sergeant.”

  He glared and quickly put on a towel, then stomped off to the showers.

  Colonel N’Gana, who was about to enter, stood there wearing only a towel and a headband. “You will have to excuse my sergeant for grumbling,” he said to her in that very low melodious voice of his. “However, he will be a good man down there in those conditions. There is little call now, nor has there been for ages, for hand-to-hand combat and basic resourcefulness in the military. That is why we are able to command the fees that we do.”

  She looked down at the control board. “Well, Colonel, I can certainly accept that you will be at least capable down there if my guesses are anything close to correct. You appear to have beaten the sim most of the time. Your sergeant beat it three times, and nobody else has quite beaten it yet. To what do you owe your remarkable record?”

  The colonel flashed an evil grin. “It is because I dispatch any potential threat before it can be a threat to me. It is because I am devoted entirely to winning every such contest or dying myself. And then, perhaps, it is because I truly enjoy snapping the losers’ necks.”

  She said nothing in response to that. There wasn’t anything to say, only to think that it was good that, at least for now, the good colonel was on her side. She knew for a fact that he was by no means kidding her; the readouts as he’d dispatched sim attackers hand to hand showed that he got a tremendous rush when he did so.

  Still, she had to wonder about both the soldiers and the others, including herself. The colonel, after all, knew it was a sim, always knew it was a sim, always knew that he was, no matter what, going to wake up and come out of there whole. All of them were dependent to some degree on the devices of the culture in which all of them had been raised. She wasn’t sure that she, or anyone, could really imagine what it was like down there.

  She heard a rustling noise to her right and turned to see the Pooka entering the sim control chamber. The Quadulan was a secretive and enigmatic type. She’d often wondered what it must be like on his home world. What kind of an evolution would produce a creature that was partly like a snake, about three meters long but thicker than a grown man’s thigh, covered in insulating fat and then thick waterproof hair that was so stiff it served as quilllike defense against being eaten as well as the cosmetic and perhaps protective roles such body hair usually denoted.

  Its “arms” were several tentaclelike appendages that could be withdrawn entirely into the body cavity, leaving only the closed and flattened three fingers at the end of each to suggest that anything was there. When needed, these arms could extend out two to three meters, and with six of them placed around its midsection it could accomplish feats of close manual dexterity as easily or more so than many humans.

  The face was somewhat owl-like, although it was all flesh, no beak or bony cartilage. The eyes were deep set, round, and changed like a cat’s in reaction to the light. They were not color-blind, but they did see into the infrared; perhaps they did not see all the gradations of color the human eye did in exchange for seeing as comfortably at night as they did in broad daylight. The mouth was beak-like, with overlapping lips that, when opened, revealed rows and rows of mostly tiny pointed teeth that seemed to go all the way down the esophagus.

  It was said that they had originally been named Pookas by an Irish scout named O’Meara who landed on their world and found it difficult to find the natives, who lived below ground in vast complexes, though they easily found him. They would ooze out and take parts of his packs, his instruments, all sorts of things, and bring them below to be examined and analyzed. The Pookas were invisible spirits of Irish folklore; it’s not known if O’Meara ever finally found them, but those who followed did.

  It was a curious mixture, humans and Quadulans. They had very little in common save a quest for understanding the universe. The thing that had brought the two peoples together was an understanding that both were intelligent and cultured.

  The Quadulans, it seemed, unlike Terrestrial snakes, could hear quite well. And they absolutely loved fast-paced music with a heavy beat. Their own native music was tonally quite different but oddly pleasing to human ears as well. In that case, music had truly been the universal language music professors always dreamed it might be.

  Still, their lifestyle, their biology, their whole existence was quite alien to humans. They got along, they traded, as junior—very junior—partners, except when human interests got in the way, in which case the Quadulans discovered how junior they were. Still, humans had given them the keys to the stars, and the Titans were coming for them as well. Quadulans, it seemed, thrived on the same sort of worlds humans and Titans both liked so well.

  “You have the sim set up for me?” the Pooka asked her, its voice resonating from somewhere deep inside it, sounding in some ways like a very artificial monotone. It was, however, natural, and formed by inner muscles and internal gases. Their own language was formed in the same way, but involved such bizarre sounds that, while humans eventually learned it and programmed it into their machines, no human could ever speak it or follow it without aid. The Pookas, however, had no trouble with human speech, if you didn’t mind the eerie bass harp monotone.

  “Yes, I did what I could,” she told it. “However, there is only
so much I can do with this lack of information.”

  “That is soon to be remedied, I believe? In the meantime, this will have to do. If my kind was specified as necessary for this expedition, then it is because of our physiology. That is logical. Someone thinks that I can get something that you could not. Comparing your abilities to mine, I surmise that it is someplace dark, perhaps well underground; that it is someplace that may only have a small access hole or tunnel; and that, most likely, it is in itself either some kind of data, data module, or unknown device that is no larger than my circumference. That is the problem I will work on.”

  “Colonel N’Gana just went in on the surface sim,” she told it. “Since no com is allowed, there is no way for me to notify him that you will also be starting in on your sim. He is a very dangerous man and is likely to kill any surprises. Don’t you think it’s prudent to wait until the Colonel comes out?”

  “That will not be necessary,” the Pooka responded. “I am the only Quadulan on the expedition. I am not on the sim world. I also know the Colonel’s name. We will allow him to get in a bit so that he is away from the entrance and then I will go in. If he strikes, I am not so easily taken, and this will be a good test. If he does not, then he is irrelevant to me.”

  She sighed. “Suit yourself. Um—you weren’t in your own people’s military, were you?”

  “The concept of military and civilian among your people is very quaint,” the Pooka responded, going to the entry hatch. “It shows just how long most of you have been without a war. Your people must have opposites of everything, even sexes.” And with no further elaboration, it triggered the opening sequence on the hatch, which released its air and swung open, filling the area temporarily with very hot, humid, somewhat fetid air. The Pooka slithered in, and then vanished as the hatch closed and resealed itself behind it.

  Socolov’s com link buzzed. “Yes?”