by Brian Daley
When the Scepter first arrived, there were Voices in many parts of Scorpia as well as on many smaller landmasses and outlying islands. The Voices had never been successful in curbing the Aquam penchant for bloodshed, but they wielded formidable leverage by dint of their rallies, sit-ins, civil disobedience, and protest fasts. And they revered the Oceanic.
However, even the most resentful local honcho or head-woman would think hard before using force to silence them. The order's voodoo was very effective among superstitious
Aquam, particularly when helped along by purgatives slipped into drinks or vomitics dusted onto food.
The women of the order had greeted the Scepter with hosan-nas, but when LAW's expansionist Roke Conflict-oriented intentions emerged, the Voices mounted a campaign to drive the Visitants back to the stars.
Scepter's crew members were too insulated by their technology for the order to hunger-strike on their doorstep, and in any case, Captain Marlon had absolutely no qualms about letting them starve to death en masse. Marlon used bribery and threats to keep Aquam laity from becoming involved, and civic disobedience failed because there was nothing LAW wanted or needed in the way of Conscious Voice cooperation.
After failing to discourage the Visitants, the Voices lost their protective aura of inviolability; they learned that nonviolence could prevail only if some countervailing force imposed restraint on the opposition. Many secular Aquams were only too delighted to purge the Voices who had constrained their actions for years. Adherents deserted in droves, and lay supporters ran for cover; Voices who remained steadfast wound up as sling-gun practice targets, slaves, atrocity victims, and fresh meat.
The deaths of Marlon and his command staff came far too late to save the sect, yet a few Conscious Voice members managed to go underground.
With unease and resentment rising among the Aquam, owing to Scepter's imminent departure, rumors circulated that several Voices had resurfaced and formed a suicide pact as a final gesture of denunciation.
Mason tried to ignore word of the impending deaths and concentrate on the return to Periapt, distracting himself with images of loved ones, prestige, and the tranquil living that awaited him. But not Boon, who Incandessa thought an exemplary Periapt, with a more acute moral sense than Mason.
Even so, there was nothing Boon or the Voices could do to stop the departure of the Scepter or block the full-scale annexation mission by LAW. All that aside, Boon was Mason's chief supporter and closest friend, and he had suddenly blundered into a volatile situation that would possibly draw the wrath of a LAW mission review board.
So Mason hastened off after Hippo, while behind him Incandessa wept openly for his safety as much as for his imminent leavetaking.
Mason tried to use his plugphone to communicate with the team's groundside complex, but the COMSAT relay was down. Hippo had had other news to relate: He and Farley Swope had discovered four caches of pilfered LAW equipment, including Optimant and LAW weapons, telecom gear, and biochemical modules.
The Aquam aren't as resigned to postponing progress as you think, Hippo had said.
Mason nearly stumbled headlong over one of Hippo's toy-like gizmos—a mollywood cart no bigger than a child's wagon self-propelled by rocker arms. The rocker arms were worked by the same system that cocked and fired the Aquam's sling-guns: lengths of transplanted freshwater mussel contractive tissue made to flex by means of Scourland galvani stones matched against contractive straps of treated plant-sap rubber. Hippo had dubbed his invention a muscle car.
Then Farley Swope and her young Aquam lover, Sunbeard, were beside them. Sunbeard's namesake tow whiskers were tied off in a dozen gold-beaded braids. They had located the Voices and Boon.
"Where?" Mason demanded.
"On Execution Dock," Sunbeard said.
Mason did not even try to stifle his moan. Execution Dock wasn't on the shore but stood alone on the other side of seven meters of churning, lethal ocean.
Why the hell hadn't he tasked someone with monitoring Boon? He had seen his friend grow disillusioned with LAW service, just as Mason and the others had. But Boon's idealism was the most fervent of all. The truth was that no one could have been spared to baby-sit Boon. With Scepter's team cut by more than half, the survivors had been forced to take on a double workload just to complete a cursory survey before the preprogrammed voyage home.
Execution Dock was a microatoll that stood some two meters higher than the overhang on shore and boasted a fairly level area to either side. There were no stocks, manacles, or pillories attached to the dock because the Oceanic would have obliterated them when it covered Execution Dock at high tide.
As he approached, Mason heard Boon's voice raised in fury above the dirge wails of the Voices. Intent on plucking Boon from the rock if necessary, he ordered Hippo and Farley to bring in one of the helos. On the open area to the right, twenty-five square meters or so, four Conscious Voices knelt in a circle, gazing into a crystal lamp. They were wearing their traditional black shroud robes and ritual aspect: heads shaved; scalps, faces, and exposed necks heavily coated with white claylike makeup; eye sockets kholed black; lips, gums, and teeth stained the same color.
To one side of them stood Boon, hands dangling uselessly at his sides, wearing a look of desolation and madness.
Mason ran forward, searching in vain for the whamboo gangway that was used to conduct the condemned to their place of death.
"Boon! Boon, where's the gangway?" he shouted.
In their time together—in LAW fundamentals training, through subjective months onboard the Scepter, and for nearly three baseline years on Aquamarine—Mason had seen the man in many moods, often somber and even dispirited, but never the way Boon looked then.
"Don't… dunno, Claude; some of their followers took it away after I forced 'em to let me cross. Claude, go back to the lighthouse. There's nothing you can do here, and seeing you's liable to set the Voices off."
Muttering to one another, the women had pointed to Mason—readily identifiable to many Aquam because of his intricate auburn queue and biosculpted comeliness. In contrast, Boon was absolutely unenhanced—strong but compact build, receding dishwater-blond hair, a nose too thin, long, and upturned. What made him stand out in a crowd was the glitter of intellect and fervor in his eyes. But that glitter had become unnerving, giving him the air of a man who had been pushed beyond some crucial limit.
"Just stay put and keep your eye on them," Mason called as calmly as he could. "The evac helo'U be here straightaway."
Boon only took an unsteady step toward Mason and the crashing, lethal moat between them, putting his back to the death's-head women.
"We've caused enough loss of life on this miserable water-ball, Claude. I'm going to talk these four out of it if it takes till high tide. Bad enough we're going to fly off without offering one iota of real progress so that when LAW gets back this way in twenty or thirty years, it'll have that much less trouble taking over. But I'm salvaging something before I go!"
"Boon, stay away from the edge!" Mason warned.
The Oceanic could kill in ways beyond counting, and the uncertainty of its actions had always been for Mason one of the greatest terrors of Aquamarine's dominant life-form.
A howling came from the dock.
At first Mason was not able to tell whether Boon had grabbed one or more of the Voices to prevent a jump or if they had pounced on him while he was distracted. What was certain was that Boon and the women were suddenly in a thrashing, struggling moil, so close together and changing positions so rapidly that Mason couldn't risk a shot even if he had the presence of mind to unholster his gun. His hoarse screams for them to stop went unanswered.
Although Boon did not want any more Conscious Voices to die, neither did he intend to die himself, but trying to get free of them looked impossible. Raised in a low-tech culture in which great physical hardship and arduous manual labor were the norm, an adult female on Aquamarine commonly had more endurance and a higher strength-weight r
atio than did the average male Periapt workstation-chair drone.
Yet somehow Boon shoved and beat his way free of then-grasp and retreated up the low crag at the middle of the rock. Mason thought he would have an opening in which to draw his sidearm and hold the women off, until Boon's heel slipped out from under him and he tumbled out of sight.
Thinking his friend had fallen into the waves, Mason shrieked, but it was clear from the way the women swarmed after Boon that the struggle was not over. When the flailing, grappling human knot appeared to the left of the crag on the lower, smaller flat area, Boon's face and hair were red with blood. One of the Voices carried a bloodstained rock.
Boon's movements had grown faltering and uncoordinated. With exultant cries, the Conscious Voices dragged him down, seizing his arms and legs, then hoisted him up again. Mason had drawn the superconducting pistol, the laser aimspot as much on Boon as on any of the women. But even at that moment he found a rationale for not squeezing the trigger.
The Voices yelled in a harsh, discordant chorus as they broke Boon's feeble grip on them and flung their victim up and out—not far, but far enough to clear Execution Dock and splash into the Amnion. The women instinctively threw themselves back to avoid any wetting.
I should've killed him, Mason told himself all those years later. I should've had the guts to do that at least, to spare him—
All around the point of Boon's impact, moving phosphorescent strands converged, and the water itself seemed to coalesce, to take on a semisolidity. Boon's drifting body was visible as a silhouette inside a pool of blue-green turbulence. His form shifted, lost in the murky swirls; then, just as suddenly, it became more distinct. Mason saw that he was naked as a fetus, though there was no hint of where his wearwithal suit, field belt, or other accoutrements had gone.
The Conscious Voices had scrambled out of sight behind the crag, perhaps fearing Mason's gunfire. Their dirge had resumed, louder, a weaving of broken wails and ululations.
All at once, the heaped Amnion gathered itself around the body trapped within. Mason howled Boon's name as the body jerked, whirled around by the irresistible power of the water, and began… everting.
All that was inside erupted from him, turned inside out: palate and tongue, epiglottis, and pharynx disgorging; teeth drifting loose from the extruded jaws; eardrums and auditory ossicles set afloat; nasal membrane and conchas burgeoning forth from nostrils; rectum coming forth, and pleated sigmoid colon following; urethra feeding out the urinary meatus like unspooling string… The body shrank in on itself as its contents were warped out; blood clouded around him but dissipated again and disassembled even more quickly than it had appeared.
It was all the more appalling to know that the ghastly things the Oceanic was doing to Boon were impersonal, dispassionate—indeed, some of the little data the survey team had managed to garner about it suggested that the organism could not truly comprehend anything that was not itself. Uncounted humans had met their end at the touch of the Oceanic—no two, it was said, in precisely the same way.
Miniature versions of some of the more common manifestations of the Oceanic—Farfeelers, Locobrates, and Tendrils-took form in the shape-shifting water. Boon had lost any resemblance to a man, though not quickly enough.
And Mason turned his eyes away…
Sometime later Hippo Nolan, Farley Swope, and Sunbeard found him sitting in the sand, gazing at Execution Dock. The waves had quieted, and the Oceanic manifestations had dispersed, along with any sign of Boon. The dirge of the Conscious Voices had dropped to a low, crooning elegy. When Mason emerged from shock sufficiently to tell his teammates what had happened, Hippo wanted to kill the women, but Farley stopped him. They had wasted too much time already, she said. There was the shuttle run and a preprogrammed departure to make. She was sorry about Boon, but their responsibility was to the living, not the dead.
Mason went along not because they were right but because it hurt so much to gaze at the Amnion. He thought at the time that the pain would abate once he got back up to cool, clean, quiet Scepter.
Outside the rearing, dilapidated Optimant lighthouse a small contingent of locals had gathered—leaders of the Rhodes clan and a crew of armed fighters.
Despite the rancor and violence of the evening, the mood of Skipjack Rhodes, Incandessa's father, was almost light. Rhodes's cousin HazeHoller, grandee of the high dam stronghold of Wall Water on Lake Ea, far upriver to the west, had died without issue or close kin aside from his wife. The widow had asked Skipjack, who had a reputation as a war leader and diplomat, to come assume joint rule and help her hold the place against the land-grabby grandees of the region.
None of it made any difference to Mason, save that Incan-dessa and their child would be that much more secure. Skipjack was shrewd and fond enough of her to arrange a good political marriage. Incandessa herself was absent, and Skipjack blocked the way when Mason started off to find her.
"She'll see you no more, Claude," he said. "You'll never return here, and you say you cannot take her with you, so she's declared you dead. She mourns your passing tonight and will hereafter accompany me to Wall Water."
Skipjack had seen LAW guns work, and he knew the Visitants could get into the lighthouse if they wanted to. But Skipjack also knew that the Visitants wouldn't shoot. Haunted-eyed and numb, still seeing Boon's gory face as the Voices took him down, Mason allowed Hippo to pull him away.
Barely three shipdays out of Aquamarine orbit Skipjack made voice contact with the Scepter by means of the shit-simple commo unit Mason had left behind, uplinked via one of the long-term survey SATs the team had left in orbit.
Rhodes came on long enough to say only that Incandessa had gone into difficult and premature labor but had successfully birthed their child. Rhodes terminated the link without mentioning the newborn's gender or whether it was Anathemite.
Mason's distraught efforts to reestablish contact were scrubbed permanently when the SAT glitches reappeared in epidemic strength and all six birds went off-line. Hippo had wondered aloud if it was some vestige Cybervirus at work.
Mason's distress at not knowing the fate of his wife and child hit him with a force that amazed him. His agitation grew until Hippo had to restrain him bodily from tampering with the star-ship's navigation suite in an attempt to return to Aquamarine—a foolhardy if not suicidal idea given the team's lack of experienced deep-space hands.
He remained on meds for some time. When the meds wore off, he discovered that the pain of loss wasn't at all assuaged by distance and vacuum. With time dilating as the Scepter climbed toward relativistic speeds, Claude Mason wept long.
Light-years worth.
The better part of a decade.
The previous day, when he had finished relating the story to Deitz, she had studied him for a moment before speaking.
"I'm reasonably certain that the inquest won't go to trial," she had said at last. "I only wish there was something I could do about the prison you've already sentenced yourself to."
Chapter
Nineteen
What made the onslaught of the Manipulants doubly bewildering was that so many had been mustered so quickly and without the Exts' being aware of it. Damocles was stupendous, its layout labyrinthine, but infiltrating the Periapt shocktroops by back routes wouldn't have been possible unless someone in LAW had had them more or less prepositioned.
The attack wasn't a sudden reaction to the Exts' decision to forego the tethership drop, Dextra reasoned; the engeneered Specials had been somewhere nearby as insurance of some kind, a contingency force.
The Exts' ammunition had apparently been rendered inert, and the Manipulants carried no firearms, probably because the Aero Forces quailed at the mere idea of bullets flying onboard their starship. But sonics, irritant foams, electroshock batons, and whapbag rounds were useless against Exts in battlesuits, who could seal their breathers against riot gas, too. Thus, the Manipulants simply charged, wielding their huge, cleaverlike fighting blades.
Shock and confusion would have paralyzed other troops, but the Exts were in zanshin vigilance. With no avenue of retreat and no alternative but surrender, they met the Manips head-on without hesitation.
The utter horror of the attack had Dextra frozen in place, appalled, unable to believe what was happening before her eyes. She seemed to be experiencing it all through a shifting prism. She reasoned that she had lost her balance, though no one had bumped into her and she had not misstepped. The deck felt as if it were tilting under her, threatening to throw her headlong.
Directly in front of her a Manipulant was trying to eviscerate an Ext fighter. The Ext half pivoted, leaned aside, and avoided the Manipulant's upswept chopper blade with only a glancing parry; then he began to bore in, using his gauntleted free hand for a blocking blow to the Manipulant's wrist. The offworlder held his carbon-black quillon dagger in a kind of fencing grip. The Manipulant was wearing a vest of woven armor, but the vest left a lot of the Special Trooper exposed. The Ext levered his head out of a powerful one-handed choke hold that could have broken his neck like a peppermint stick and got inside his foe's guard. The lusterless black point of the vapor-deposition blade stabbed deep and tried to rip sideways but was stopped by armorply. Manipulant blood spurted, as red as any unrefor-matted human's.
The Manipulant should have been mortally wounded but didn't act like it; perhaps it simply didn't care. Jaws yawning wide like an animal trap, it tried to hold the Ext still long enough to gut him. But the Ext held off the enemy's knife arm with his raised elbow, released his grip on the Special Trooper, and slithered clear by way of a momentary gap between the Manip's right arm and its side.
The so-called Skills, however, weren't a magical charm of invulnerability, Dextra saw; another Manipulant appeared behind the first to strike at the Ext before he spotted it. The Ext went down, chest hacked open and collarbone cleaved in half. Two more Exts closed in on the Manipulant who'd gotten their buddy, one spearing it with her bayonet and the other going for its knife hand with a long, black bowie.
