“The trumpeters are digging. Excavating holes.”
Lum Gee took the binoculars and watched for a minute. “Looks like they’ve dug down to the water level and are throwing mud over themselves. Something about parasites, maybe.”
He recovered the binoculars and looked again. “More than that. They’re actually burying themselves in the mud. Some of the small ones are completely covered already.”
“How does that help us?” She gave an impatient whistle. “It is sweltering. People will die today. We’re going to lose humans and Cavlee alike.”
“I’ll work the fragile ones at the bottom of the pit where it’s cooler.”
“What we need is rain,” Lum Gee said.
It wouldn’t rain today. There were few clouds this morning, and the ones that Nils Oolmena did see were the wispy kind that didn’t give shade, let alone cooling rain. There was something very strange about the light.
The sun on this world always had a diffuse look to it, bleeding on the edges where the neutron star tugged at its gasses. But now there was a long tendril of light snaking away on one side, with a darker looking patch where it connected to the sun. He couldn’t exactly stare at it, and had to study it while glancing sideways.
For a moment, that seemed no more than a curiosity, but a bellow from a trumpeter made a sudden connection in his mind. He stiffened in alarm.
“The devotees!” he said. “Everyone down to the bottom of the excavation! Hurry!”
#
Twenty minutes later he was panting for breath in the shade beneath an excavator. The Dweller lay beneath him, cool from its long slumber in the earth. The heat wouldn’t harm it of course—the thing could survive solar exposure in the void of space, after all—but it might wake it. By all of the Thirteen Sacred Shrines, let that not happen.
Even with the cool surface of the monster against his skin and the dirt he’d pushed up around his body, the heat was unbearable. Humans were panting all around him, sweat leaving streaks in the dirt on their faces. They’d grabbed buckets of water, which they splashed on their faces. Some pled to their god, while others cursed in various tongues. The Cavlee were groaning. A pair of nearby Hroom whistled in pain.
“How long will this last?” Lum Gee whispered from behind his shoulder.
“I don’t know. A few days, maybe. Or maybe only a few hours.”
“What if it’s not? What if it’s weeks? We’ll all be dead by then.”
“The trumpeters couldn’t last that long buried in the mud. It must pass quickly.”
Still, she was right that some of the work crew would die. Several insectoids had perished just getting to the bottom of the pit, as they raced in a panic from the far side of the camp. The ones who hadn’t eaten their paste, he thought, and were already weakened.
The surviving insectoids dragged their companions to the bottom, but not through any respect for the dead. Instead, they broke off pieces of carapace and used them like giant fans. It was a gruesome sight, but Nils Oolmena turned his head toward one of them to catch a bit of the air as it stirred.
Lum Gee followed his gaze. “The bugs aren’t like the rest of us,” she said. “They overran their home world with city-sized nests, colonies that had gone out of control and nearly exterminated every other life form.”
“How do you know that?”
“The Cavlee talk. Some of them have been slaves for a very long time and were on the insectoid planet when it was reduced. The Adjudicators killed every single queen and only took drones as devotees.”
“So these ones were already hatched to be slaves?”
“I think so. They don’t seem to notice the difference.”
The insectoids understood him well enough when he gave orders, and had some rudimentary intelligence, but they had no way to communicate with any but their own kind. He thought their language was spoken with chemicals, based on the smells they emitted when they were among their own kind.
Nils Oolmena settled in to wait and tried to ignore the pleas and whimpers of his fellow sufferers. The daylight hours crawled by with agonizing slowness. Night brought some relief, enough that he sent people out for water, and even thought to heap up berms of dirt to provide further shelter. But the machinery had all died in the heat, and nobody was going to be moving material by hand.
By the time they faced another brutal sunrise, scores of devotees had died. The heat seemed endless. But around midday, he thought it was breaking, and in late afternoon, he was sure it was nearly over. He crawled out from his shelter in an attempt to study the sun to see if it was still bleeding those huge plumes of burning gas, but it was already below the lip of the excavation.
With the second nightfall, he was finally able to breathe. He emerged slowly from the pit, hoping that the drop in temperature would bring rain and break the cycle for good, but the sky was still empty of clouds. Green and blue auroras tore through the heavens from trillions of solar particles striking the planet’s atmosphere. It might very well be bathing them with a lethal dose of radiation, but he couldn’t look away.
Lum Gee appeared by his side. “Look at that sight,” he told her. “Have you ever seen anything so beautiful? So terrible? It almost killed us all.”
“I need sugar.”
“Still?”
“Desperately.” She let out a despairing hum from deep in her throat. “Please, Nils Oolmena, I know you have it with you. And if you don’t give it to me . . .” Her hands were trembling.
He turned away from her so she wouldn’t see that he had numerous packets crammed into the pocket of his torn and dirty jumpsuit. He’d scooped up handfuls from his secret stash before fleeing to the pit, needing to distribute them to all of the sugar eaters among his Hroom crew members. Lum Gee would shovel every last bit into her mouth if she could.
She snatched the offered packet, tore it open, and dumped the sugar onto her tongue. She gave a long sigh before groaning for more. He ignored her and studied the plains beyond the perimeter fence. Gradually, she seemed to get hold of her emotions.
Even though it was night, there was enough light from the auroras to see by. The beasts were kicking up dirt and dust as they emerged from beneath their protective soil. Once free, they began to dig again, but this time to create muddy wallows to bathe.
The trumpeters had survived the lethal heat wave with a miraculous adaptation, which made Nils Oolmena wonder how many tens or hundreds of thousands of years—maybe millions—the suffering star had thrown off those plumes of gas as it was devoured by the neutron star. That adaptation had saved the devotees’ lives as well, by giving just enough advance warning to take cover.
Without rain, the brief, scorching heat had killed the grass of the plains. What had been green and supple only days earlier was a vast field of withered brown.
“The Lord of Life is watching from orbit,” Lum Gee said.
“I told you not to call it that. It’s a slave master.”
“It will wonder why the work has stopped and come down to punish us.”
“It knows,” Nils Oolmena said. “Its ship just took a radiation bath. Most likely, it thinks the work stopped because we all died.”
“Either way, it will come down soon.”
“We’re going to make our move tonight.”
She cast a doubtful look across the perimeter fence to where the trumpeters were expanding their wallows, each one jostling to get down to the cooling mud and water.
“The beasts are nowhere near the fence,” she said, “and with the grass dead, there’s nothing to lure them in, either. They’re going to move off looking for food.”
“Not until they’re done cooling down. By then, we’ll have pushed them in.”
A skeptical whistle. “How?”
“With the oldest tool known to civilized people: fire.”
Chapter Twelve
Tolvern almost made the red jump. Svensen and Olafsen were urging her to do it, each maneuvering his wolf to be the first through. She bel
ieved that Catarina Vargus’s assessment was correct, and that the so-called red was really blue and stable. And believed that when they crossed through they’d make a major discovery about the enemy’s capabilities.
Forget Drake’s original plans of leaving Vargus to fortify Lenin; Tolvern would take the two battle cruisers through together, along with every other ship in their fleet. Find whatever the aliens were hiding, and give them a good thrashing.
But a kernel of doubt remained in her mind, and the longer she thought it about it, the more she worried it might be a trap. The Adjudicators were good at laying them, and they would know by now that both Blackbeard and Void Queen were captained by aggressive commanding officers.
It could even be that the alien freighter captain had meant the whole thing as a feint, and the jump really was as red and unstable as it appeared. It had tried to lure them into jumping to their deaths.
Unlikely, but possible. And if she gambled, and gambled wrong, she’d kill them all, one after another, as they ran through a red jump point and came out the other side in pieces.
And so Tolvern ignored the Scandian protests and ordered Wang to begin a search. The device had to be near the jump point. Shouldn’t be too hard to find it, destroy it with pulse fire from one of the falcons, and proceed through once they’d confirmed that the jump was stable. Any delay increased the odds that they’d find enemies lurking in ambush on the other side, but she saw no way around that.
While waiting for the war junks, she sent a subspace to Nebuchadnezzar, packed with as much information as she could. Drake would have to read between the lines of her short, cryptic note, but hopefully he’d figure out that they’d most likely located the enemy base on the edge of his red carrot, where he’d expected it would be found.
She followed that with a lengthy packet of text, audio, and video, giving a complete assessment of their discovery, and sent it toward the war junk that maintained silent vigil near Lenin’s entry jump point. It collected the information, accelerated to jump speed, and leaped back into Moscow. From there, it would relay the data to the next war junk, and so on.
Meanwhile, in Lenin, her remaining Singaporean ships searched. And searched some more. Ten hours passed, then twenty. Tolvern left shift, ate, slept, bathed, and came back onto the bridge. Still nothing.
Did that mean it was red all along? Or was the blasted alien tech simply that good at hiding itself?
Tolvern was in her war room, running over the latest scans, when Noah Brockett burst in. The science officer’s hair was a tangle, his glasses propped atop his forehead. He wore an apron over his lab coat, and it was stained with unpleasant red and yellow-green substances. An eye-watering scent of formaldehyde floated about him like a cloud.
“Brockett, couldn’t you have got cleaned up a little first? No! Don’t sit down!” She waved at the wall. “Stand there and try not to drip anything sticky on the floor.”
He blinked. “Sorry, Captain. I’ve been up all night, and when I made the discovery—”
“Come on, we’re all tired. What discovery? Is this about that alien they pulled out of the freighter?”
“Yes! We have multiple samples now. I’ve isolated the protein sequences that make up their genetic matter, and . . . well, it’s very interesting.”
“Yeah?”
“These guys are old—there’s a lot of genetic variation between tissue samples.”
“Older than humans? I mean, than cave men and all that?”
“Technically, everything is hundreds of millions of years old. There’s no point where you go from non-human to human in a generation. But we’re all descended from the same early human ancestors who were alive roughly eighty thousand years ago. Hroom are a little older, maybe a couple of hundred thousand years or so. But the ghouls . . . these guys have been around a long, long time. There’s a lot of genetic variation from one to the next.”
“Okay, so what does that mean?”
“Hold on, we’re not to the interesting part yet.”
“Are you sure? You seem pretty worked up.”
“In spite of the variation, there are big segments of the genes that are nearly identical from one creature to the next.”
“Meaning genetic manipulation.”
“Right, Captain. It’s not unprecedented—humans have tinkered with their own genetics, too—but the interesting thing is the when. You can map different segments based on how long ago they were manipulated, and how far they’ve drifted since then. The most recent manipulated segment was about three thousand years ago.”
“What is that, the time of Alexander the Great?”
“There’s another manipulated segment at five thousand, one at fifteen thousand, and so on. The oldest genetically modified segment seems to have been manipulated sometime between ninety and a hundred thousand years ago.”
Tolvern whistled as she thought through the ramifications. “The ghouls were already messing with their genes when our ancestors were hunting mammoths with spears. Do you think these are the creators of the star leviathans?”
If so, it would explain why he was worked up. Her science officer was always searching for the semi-mythical ancient race that had created the monsters of the deep.
But Brockett only thinned his lips and looked disappointed at her reasoning. “Captain, I’ve got a piece of leviathan tentacle in my lab that an Albion science mission picked up drifting in orbit near Nuevo Tejas. It’s eighty-seven million years old.”
“Oh.”
“Think the age of dinosaurs, not Neanderthals and mammoths.”
“I’m not an idiot, Brockett.”
“Of course not, sir. I didn’t mean it like that. My point is that the ghouls must have been in space for tens of thousands of years.”
Brockett looked like he was edging toward a chair at the war room table, and she shook her head and gestured for him to stay where he was, standing and not touching anything.
“Civilizations rise and collapse,” Tolvern said. “This one happens to have survived for longer than usual.”
“So where are they all?”
“Right in front of us, trying to blow us to kingdom come.”
“Think of it this way, Captain. They’ve been able to manipulate genes for a hundred thousand years. From the time humans learned genetic manipulation to when we discovered the warp point engine was about a hundred and fifty years, give or take. A generation or two after that we were spreading across the stars. In five hundred years, a few thousand settlers on Albion have turned into more than a hundred million, and other colonies have grown just as fast. It’s exponential growth . . . that’s what organisms do, especially the intelligent kind. Civilizations have two states: expansion and collapse.”
“I see. And since they seem to be in their expansionary, growing phase, why haven’t they filled up the galaxy after a hundred thousand years?”
“Exactly,” Brockett said. “The ghouls are practically in our backyard. At the very least, why didn’t they colonize Earth way back in Neanderthal times?”
That shot down one of Tolvern’s theories. She’d taken the bit about judging humans for destruction to be ironic and cynical. Yes, we will collapse your civilization so that ours might grow. The old Albion sugar lords had used similar language while picking at the wounded body of the Hroom Empire. The Hroom were tired, old, and decadent, according to that logic. It wasn’t Albion’s fault that the Hroom stood in the way of humanity’s expansion.
There were many ways to fight a war of extermination, as they’d learned in various wars. If Apex had been like Aztecs, the Adjudicators were like the Spaniards. The hive-like Apex colonies quite openly set about to ritually slaughter their rivals, much as the Aztecs had cut out the hearts of tens of thousands of victims from rival tribes until the steps of their temples flowed with blood. They didn’t hide their desire to exterminate their enemies to make room for their own people.
The Spaniards, on the other hand, had arrived in the Americas with vir
tuous talk of spreading Christianity and civilization, but through war and disease and enslavement emptied the land just as surely. And now the Adjudicators were emptying human planets with their own high talk of humanity’s crimes.
Perhaps the Adjudicators really did feel they were ridding the systems of invasive species by reducing intelligent civilizations, culling their population, and leaving the remnants trapped at subsistence levels. But did it matter if it was cynical or sincere?
It apparently mattered as far as limiting their own spread.
“Nice job, Brockett. This is solid work and good news.”
“Yes, excellent news. The Adjudicators aren’t the elder race, but they’ve been around long enough that they must surely know something about them.” His brow furrowed. “If only we can convince them to stop trying to destroy us long enough to ask.”
Tolvern couldn’t help but laugh, a welcome release from all the tension. “That’s not what I mean by good news. The point is, if they aren’t expansionary, it means we’re not facing some vast empire that can bring down the resources of a thousand star systems onto our heads.”
“Ah, yes. I see, sir. That is one way to look at it, I suppose.”
The science officer looked vaguely disappointed in her as he turned to go. Let him be disappointed. So long as he didn’t touch anything on his way out.
#
Tolvern was almost at the end of another frustrating shift, waiting helplessly with her fleet while Wang’s war junks kept up their search, when two things happened almost back-to-back.
The first was a return subspace sent from across a dozen systems, all the way from Alliance-held territory.
Persia freed. Fleet in motion.
There was a good deal of shouting and messages back and forth across Blackbeard and through the fleet at this information. A concentrated search must have finally paid dividends, discovering the enemy device that had hidden the Persia jump point all these months.
It meant that Dreadnought was free, General Mose Dryz, too. In addition to the battleship, scores of cruisers, destroyers, missile frigates, corvettes, torpedo boats, war junks, Hroom sloops, and star wolves could leave the Persia system. Count the other ships pushing forward in a continuous stream from across the Alliance, and it would become the largest armada ever assembled.
The Alliance Trilogy Page 37
