There was an alien minefield freshly placed near the jump that led deeper across the frontier toward Lenin, and something shadowy showed up nearby that was probably the star fortress, heavily cloaked and lurking. It was unclear if it had been there all along or if it had recently arrived, carrying fresh rider ships.
The ghouls would hear the pings against their hull and start hunting Wang’s ship as soon as the squadron jumped out of here. As good as the Singaporeans were at hiding, it would have driven Catarina crazy to sit motionless like that, as helpless as a turtle buried in the mud while crocodiles swam about overhead.
Wang’s response finally arrived. Her expression darkened. “The evacuation . . . not good. We lost several more ships before we got out of Castillo. Glorious was the biggest blow.
A couple of officers on the bridge swore or muttered exclamations. HMS Glorious was only two months out of the shipyards, a new Punisher-class cruiser, and outfitted with a plasma ejector, in addition to her other armaments. Built specifically to combat the Adjudicator threat.
And Wang wasn’t done. “Two destroyers lost, three star wolves, another pair of torpedo boats, and a ship with four hundred and fifty of Kelly’s base workers. The poor fools died in stasis, never knew what killed them. They sleep with their ancestors, now.
“The beast almost caught Citadel, too,” Wang continued. “Hit Fox’s ships with its spore cannons. If reinforcements hadn’t jumped into Castillo, he’d have never escaped. The Adjudicators have the leviathan spitting up its latest meal now, but we expect it to return to Fortaleza and from there make a move toward Persia. Which is what we want, believe it or not. Fox is falling back—he has no more fight in him until he can get patched up and receive reinforcements. Hopefully, from you.”
Catarina thought of her own squadron, which seemed entirely inadequate. But it was fast, and could make up ground on Fox’s slower task force, with all of its evacuees and damaged ships.
She nodded. “We should be able to rendezvous with Fox before he’s forced into Nebuchadnezzar. Once we join forces, we might hold the enemy a few days, but we’ll need fleet support. Is Drake back from Albion yet? Can Tolvern spare some cruisers?”
What a nightmare. Dozens of ships already destroyed, wiping out thousands of crew and millions of man hours of labor spent in the yards across the Alliance systems. By now they should have had a fleet of three hundred warships to move against the enemy bases. Instead, the leviathan was devouring them as fast as they could be built.
“No more delaying,” Wang said. “Tolvern said to let the leviathan continue. Once the fleet reassembles in Nebuchadnezzar, we’ll fall back to Persia to make a stand. And hope the monster follows us. That’s what I meant by ‘on target.’ Persia.”
The other woman fell silent momentarily without ending the video transmission, and that gave Catarina a chance to contemplate. They were going to make a stand at Persia? Did that mean Drake was soon to arrive at the head of Inferno? Perhaps the general, with another task force of sloops of war? And even if they did, what would it matter? Dreadnought herself had gone down the leviathan’s throat. If a battleship couldn’t stop the monster, what would one more battle cruiser and a few sloops do?
Wang continued. “The following are your orders from Tolvern. Rendezvous with Fox. Avoid combat unless you see the enemy deviating. At which point, do everything in your power to get it to follow you into Nebuchadnezzar. From there, we’ll lure it into Persia somehow or other. That’s where this battle will be settled, one way or another. I don’t know anything more than that.”
And with that, Wang ended the transmission. It had an air of finality, and moments later the war junk threw up cloaks and make an evasive maneuver to hide itself from the eyes that were certainly watching from elsewhere in the system.
Lure it to Persia. Tolvern must have a plan of some kind. Catarina allowed herself to hope.
Chapter Seven
Devotee, come to me.
The words entered Fontaine’s head as clearly as if they’d been whispered into his ear. He was in the recycling plant, supervising the workers as they fed the corpses of humans, insectoids, and Cavlee into the vats to be rendered into their essential elements, and from there reconstituted into a slurry to be fed back to the living.
You worked until you died, and then they turned you into food to feed the next generation of slaves. Across the system, millions of slaves were working, dying, and eating the dead at any given moment.
The smell of the harsh chemicals and the slurry coming out of the pipes made his eyes water and his stomach churn, but the implant regulated his chemicals, his moods and desires, and instead of disgust, he felt pride, honor, devotion. But somewhere below, like a drunk man who can hear his own slurred words, his self, his true self, cried out in horror.
And the ugliness that he could see was just the thin layer of scum on the surface of a deep pond of misery. Below the plant, in the stasis vaults buried deep in the heart of the asteroid, were untold billions of workers awaiting their turn. They’d lain there unmoving and unfeeling for decades, but they were being awakened now at an accelerating pace. Some new war was brewing, and whispers down the rows of devotees said it was another move against the humans. Some unknown length of time had passed since Fontaine’s own capture, during the first assault on Tunis. Years, he thought.
Fontaine had been a tramp freighter captain who ran the lanes outside the control of the Merchanting Federation’s guilds. During the reprieve years, the Merchanters had moved swiftly to reestablish control of trade, convinced they’d driven off the Adjudicators for good and eager to reestablish their old privileges. Humans were nothing if not self-interested.
Technically, he was only allowed to carry foodstuffs and raw minerals, but every shipment smuggled a little something on the side, and on his final mission he’d been hauling brandy from Earth with the intention of returning with the Tunisian cloth they called gold-wool. Fifty denarii a yard on Tunis, but ten times that on Earth if you could avoid the tariff collectors.
His freighter was running quiet, staying off the official channels, and so his first sign something was amiss came as he decelerated to find a handful of small human warships in orbit above Tunis—the local militia fleet—attempting to hold off three huge alien carriers. The aliens sent their rider ships to deal with the militia while the carriers dropped nuclear bombs onto the main population centers of the planet.
Nuclear strikes had already annihilated millions, while millions more were being gathered by giant slaving ships that hovered above towns and cities and sent paralyzing jolts of energy to leave their victims writhing on the ground until they could be collected. In space, the Adjudicators knocked out ship engines and captured the crews of militia and civilian ships alike. Fontaine’s last memory was seeing gray-armored decimator units batter their way onto his bridge while disabling his crew with stun guns.
Fontaine awoke some unknown period of time later in the bowels of the asteroid that became his home and prison. At first, he knew nothing about his situation. For all he knew, he was on the other side of the galaxy a thousand years after his capture. But when rumor passed through the halls, factories, and sleeping compartments that the enemy was mounting another attack, he knew it couldn’t have been too many years.
Humans were resilient, treacherous in their own way. And fertile; no war had ever held population growth for long. Given enough time, his people would have surely mounted a counterattack on the Adjudicators.
The floor across the rendering plant was overlaid with a bewildering maze of bioluminescent pathways that gave off light and a harsh, astringent odor. The insectoids came during shift changes to lay down new patterns and reinforce the old, spitting up a chemical with their mouth parts that they smeared into place with their abdomens. Fontaine had no idea how the lines worked except one’s feet seemed to automatically find them.
Devotee, come to me.
This time, as he left his shift to obey the summons, he cut ac
ross the glowing blue, green, and yellow pathways to follow something his eyes couldn’t see. It pulled him inexorably toward the small lift reserved for their overlords.
A figure fell in beside him. A woman, short, with brown eyes and a dark complexion. Black hair shaved on one side of the scalp, where an implant emerged from her skull. Blood and pus crusted around the wound.
“Have you been summoned?” he asked her.
She nodded. “You, too? Any idea why?”
“It’s unlikely to be good.”
“It never is,” she said. “We’ll find out soon enough, I expect.”
They reached the lift. There were no Adjudicators around, and he’d seen none today in the vast rendering plant, but the doors opened automatically as if they’d been expected. A blast of air swept away some of the foul smell, then seemed to draw them inside.
He gave the woman a closer look-over as the doors closed and the lift started into motion. “You sound Tunisian.”
A nod. “My name is Zakiya Al-Harthi.”
“Pierre Fontaine.”
“New Quebec?” she asked.
“Earth, actually. Suiss-Italia on the western edge of Eurasia. We have a similar accent to the New Quebecois. I was taken at Tunis, though. You, too?”
Another nod. “Tunisian militia. Captained a patrol boat, a long-range four-gunner with thirty crew and warp point engines. We were trying to drive them from the planet when they disabled my ship.”
He raised his eyebrows. “I was a captain, too. Tramp frigate. Came into the system to trade and got caught up in the fighting.”
“Why didn’t you escape while they were attacking the militia?”
“I didn’t know Tunisia was under assault until it was too late,” Fontaine said. “Came right up against the planet, saw the fighting, and was caught in a trap before I could get out of there.”
“Ah, so you were one of those smugglers we were always chasing around. Pirates and crooks, the lot of you.”
“Maybe if you’d spent more time preparing for the Adjudicators to return instead of chasing smugglers, we wouldn’t be here now.”
“Some of us thought that all along, you know. But some people thought your kind were the bigger threat . . . to their profits.” Al-Harthi let out a short, bitter laugh.
Militia, smuggler—pointless distinctions now. The real question was why their masters were summoning two former human starship captains. There couldn’t be many of them among this vast collection of devotees, and it was unlikely to be a coincidence.
“What happened to your crew?” she asked.
“Dead, I think, but I don’t know for sure. Yours?”
“No idea. I can’t decide if I want them to be dead or alive. Probably best if they were killed, I guess.”
The lift stopped, and the door slid open. Fontaine felt no compulsion to move, so he stayed put. A man appeared, studied the two of them, and then stepped in. He had the same sort of general features as Al-Harthi, but his pupils were wide, almost dilated, like someone still in his first week out of stasis. He wore coveralls with pockets that bulged with tools, and grease stained his hands. The sickly sweet smell of Cavlee lubricants hung about him.
“You another Tunisian?” Al-Harthi asked when the doors had shut again. Her tone was cautious. “What is your name?”
“Mahmoud Farooq. And you?”
“Zakiya Al-Harthi.” She pointed at Fontaine. “This one is Pierre Fontaine. Terran.”
“What did you do before you were taken prisoner?” Fontaine asked.
Farooq looked wary. “Why?”
“Humor me.”
“First mate on a Merchanting Federation freighter.”
“What class of freighter?” Fontaine asked.
Farooq glanced at Al-Harthi before returning his gaze to Fontaine. “Class-A1.”
“So you can pilot a starship across jumps, even though you weren’t a commanding officer,” Al-Harthi said, and gave Fontaine a significant glance. He returned a nod.
“Of course. Why does it matter?”
“All three of us are starship captains,” Al-Harthi said. “Something is going on, something that’s probably going to take us off this rock and—”
She stopped as the door slid open again. This time, Fontaine felt compelled to leave the lift, and the others followed him into a straight, tube-like corridor. The artificial gravity had been turned down by roughly two-thirds, and Fontaine’s first step launched him toward the ceiling, where he bumped his head. He came down and settled his balance. Strange, that; their masters typically kept gravity within .7 to 1.05 g.
A fully armored decimator unit stood guard at the end of the hallway. Two of the creature’s arms held assault rifles, while the third was free. The decimator reached over its shoulder with the third arm and tapped a complex sequence of symbols on a display screen. The door behind it opened.
Fontaine exchanged more glances with his two companions before continuing. Security. That was almost unknown on the base. Other than the piece of alien tech buried in all their skulls, of course. It burned new circuits in his brain and flooded his body with chemicals to ensure his compliance with every order. What need was there for guards when every prisoner had been turned into a devotee?
There must be mistakes. Errors. Faulty implants or mentally damaged individuals.
He led his two companions into a circular room about twenty-five feet in diameter. Glowing yellow and green screens flashed codes or words of some kind, symbols that looked like a mixture of Chinese logograms and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Five transparent horizontal tanks bubbled with a liquid lit from within by a bluish light. A gray arm or leg floated in each of the tanks, each connected to electric leads.
In the center of the horizontal containers sat a round, bath-like tank filled with bubbling liquid. Chains dangled from the ceiling, and while Fontaine watched in mixed horror and fascination, they hauled a limbless body out of the liquid, where it dripped the thick, viscous liquid back into the container beneath it.
It was the withered head and torso of an Adjudicator. The head dangled forward, eyes closed, and the long, sloping chin rested against its breastbone. Tubes entered at the chest and dipped under the long rib cage and entered what passed for the creature’s groin (it appeared to be sexless), while fifteen or twenty different wires of varying thicknesses connected to different parts of the skin.
Movement around the edges of the room drew Fontaine’s attention—round-bodied Cavlee with long arms and short, powerful legs. They drained the smaller tanks through tubes attached to the floor and removed the limbs that had been suspended inside. They detached leads and unclipped hoses.
The head lifted on the torso, and dull, lizard-like eyes glanced at the Cavlee as they waddled forward holding the limbs. No, not so much reptilian as dead. Like the gaze of something that was not truly alive and never had been. There was cutting and snipping with shears and scalpels, and the Cavlee soon exposed mechanical-looking seals on both the torso and the limbs. As the humans watched, the Cavlee attached the limbs to the alien’s body.
Fontaine had seen many Adjudicators. They weren’t common per se—each of the aliens was outnumbered a thousand to one by devotees—but Adjudicators occasionally came through the plant floor. They mainly ordered changes to the chemical composition of the food product or directed in new streams of waste slurries from other parts of the asteroid base.
Sometimes they killed weak or damaged devotees. Mostly, they left this task to the insectoids, who passed through in culling waves every few days to snip and sever, then haul the dead to the rendering tanks.
But Fontaine had never seen one of the creatures completely outside of its suit. Did all of their arms and legs come off like that?
Yet the torso and head looked old and withered—flesh sagging, muscle tone weak, and the gray skin blotched with black and white spots—while the arms and legs were smooth and muscular and with an even, almost creamy gray color.
He had the impression
of looking at someone old, ancient perhaps. The dead gaze turned from the Cavlee to the three humans, who had come to a stop a few feet away.
“You are humans, are you not?”
The question came into Fontaine’s mind, and with it a rush of chemicals. It made his fingertips tingle, his groin ache with sudden stimulation, and his stomach turn over like the rush of a million butterflies. He sank to the floor with a sigh of pleasure. Al-Harthi and Farooq fell groaning by his side, and the three of them lay there writhing.
“The reward circuit of your brains is overly sensitive,” the voice said. “That makes you a weak species, weaker even than the Cavlee or the Oortang.”
The rush of pleasure and desire faded, and Fontaine felt a flash of rage.
We are stronger than you will ever know. We will destroy you!
The three humans rose shakily to their feet, and Fontaine felt another rush of chemicals. This one was more subtle, as if the Adjudicator had learned their limits. The pleasure was gone, his anger, too, replaced by a warm flush that brought tears to his eyes. He wanted to lift his hands and praise this creature. To become a true devotee. The other two murmured by his side, something in Arabic that sounded like a prayer.
“I am the Lord of Lords,” it said. “The one who rose to purify the universe when my predecessor fell. This is my base, and these are my people. We will leave the sector a burned cinder. The life that comes after us will be pure and holy and uncontaminated by the judged and their wicked creations.”
The humans clamored a response, filling their words with praise and gratitude. Fontaine’s anger, had it truly existed, was a faded memory, and he wished only to serve and obey. To die in righteous service of the Lord of Lords.
A sudden urge to be quiet silenced him. Al-Harthi and Farooq also fell silent. The only sound was the wet slurp of the Cavlee attaching limbs and the burble of liquid as the tanks refilled from their hoses. The labored breathing of the elderly creature in front of them rose in a rasp.
The Alliance Trilogy Page 57
