"Look out," Fortunato said, "we've got company." Brennan looked up the corridor. A dozen of the human simulacra were approaching, dressed as bellhops, maids, and ordinary men and women in dresses and three-piece suits. In the middle of them was Lankester of the State Department. Brennan dragged Tachyon over to the elevator as the creatures advanced at a steady pace, their faces composed and utterly unemotional. Fortunato joined him, a worried look on his face.
"What do we do now?"
"Punch for an elevator."
The things were twenty feet away when they heard the chime of an arriving elevator.
"Take him," Brennan said, thrusting the limp, barely conscious form of Tachyon into Fortunato's arms. He drew an arrow from his quiver as the elevator door swished open. Inside were three middle-aged men dressed in conservative business suits with Shriner's hats on their heads. They stared wide-eyed as Fortunato dragged Tachyon inside. Fortunato looked at them.
"Basement, please," he said. The one standing by the panel of buttons punched it automatically as Fortunato stopped the door from closing with his foot. Brennan placed three explosive arrows in the midst of the advancing creatures. The first one hit Lankester in the chest. The second and third exploded to the left and right of him, blowing gore and protoplasm all over the hotel corridor. He fell back into the elevator and Fortunato let the door close.
Brennan leaned on his bow, took a deep, relieved breath. The Shriners huddled together fearfully in the corner of the elevator.
Fortunato looked at them. "First time in town?"
"So Lankester had been replaced by one of these newgeneration swarmlings some time ago?" Brennan asked. Tachyon nodded and took a long pull from the mug Mai handed him. It was full of thick black coffee, laced generously with brandy.
"Before I ever met him-it. That's why it was pushing for that insane attack plan. It knew we wouldn't be able to really harm the Swarm Mother, yet such an attack would make everyone think something concrete was being done to fight the menace." He paused, took another long pull from the mug. "And there's another thing. The Swarm Mother might want specimens of aces."
Brennan looked at him quizzically. "Specimens?"
"To take apart and replicate from her own biomass."
"Shit," Fortunato murmured. "It wants to grow its own aces. "
They were in Tachyon's office at the clinic. Tachyon had cleaned up, but was still pale and shaky from the ordeal he had undergone. There was a bandage around his neck where the Swarm creature had attached its suckers.
"What happens now?" Brennan asked. Tachyon sighed, set the mug aside.
"We attack the Swarm Mother."
"What?" Fortunato said. "That Swarm thing scramble your brains? You just said it was insane to attack the Mother."
"It was. It is. But it's the best option open to us." He looked from Fortunato, who was openly incredulous, to Brennan, who looked blankly noncommittal. "Look, the Swarm has started a new wave of attack which is much more ' sophisticated than its previous ones. There's no telling how far they've managed to penetrate into the government."
"If they could replace Lankester," Brennan murmured, "who else might they have gotten?"
"Exactly. Whom does it have?" Tachyon shuddered. "The possibilities are mind-boggling. If it could replace enough key personnel to carry it off, it'd think nothing of starting a worldwide nuclear exchange and simply waiting the necessary millenia until the surface of the planet is inhabitable once again."
"It's obvious that we can't trust anyone from the government to help us attack the Swarm Mother. We have to do it ourselves."
"How do we do that?" Fortunato asked in a tone that indicated he wasn't won over by Tachyon's arguments. "We have the singularity shifter," Tachyon said, his voice rising eagerly. "We need a weapon, though. Takisians have successfully used biological weapons against Swarm Mothers in the past, but your biological sciences aren't sophisticated enough to produce a suitable weapon. Perhaps I can come up with something…"
"There is a weapon," a quiet voice said. The three men turned and looked at Mai, who had been silently listening to their conversation.
Tachyon stared at her, and then sat upright in his chair, sloshing the brandy-laced coffee over the front of his brocaded dressing gown.
"Don't talk nonsense," he said sharply.
Fortunato looked from Tachyon to Mai. "What is this shit?"
"Nothing," Tachyon said. "Mai works with me at the clinic. She's used her power to help some of my patients, but it would be out of the question for her to get involved in this."
"What power?"
Mai lifted her hands, palms facing outward. "I can touch a person's soul," she said. "We become one and I find the sickness in it. I take the sickness to myself and soothe it, smoothing the curves of the life pattern and mending the breaks. We can then both become well again."
"Meaning, in English?" Fortunato asked.
"She manipulates genetic material," Tachyon said with a sigh. "She can mold it in near any way she visualizes. I suppose she could use her power on the Swarm Mother in a reverse manner to cause cellular disruption on a massive scale."
"She can give the Mother cancer?" Fortunato asked. "She probably could," Tachyon conceded. "If I allowed her to get involved, which I'm not. It would be insanely dangerous for a woman."
"It's insanely dangerous for anyone," Fortunato said sharply. "If she's the best bet against that Mother and she's willing to try, I say let her do it."
"And I forbid it!" Tachyon said, sloshing coffee from his mug as he slammed it against the arm of his chair.
"It is not for you to forbid," Mai said. "I must do it. It is my karma."
Tachyon turned to Brennan. "Can't you talk some sense into her?"
Brennan shook his head. "It's her decision," he said slowly. He wished he could agree with Tachyon, but Brennan knew he couldn't interfere with Mai's karma, her chosen path to enlightenment. But, Brennan resolved, she wouldn't walk her path alone.
"That's settled, then," Fortunato said flatly. "We get Mai up to the Swarm Mother and she sticks it with a fatal dose of cancer. I'm going too. I want a piece of that motherfucker myself. "
Tachyon looked from Fortunato to Mai to Brennan and saw that nothing he could say would change their minds. "All right," he sighed. He turned to Fortunato. "You'll have to power the singularity shifter," Tachyon said. "I can't do it myself." He dragged his fingers through his curly hair. "The swarmling temporarily burned out some of my powers in trying to suck out my memories for the duplicate Tachyon. We can't afford to wait until they come back."
"I can, however, ferry a boarding party close to the Swarm Mother in Baby. Fortunato can shift the party inside the Swarm Mother. Speed and stealth will be necessary, but the boarders will need some protection. Modular Man perhaps, or maybe one of Trips's friends.. ."
Brennan shook his head. "You said speed and stealth would be necessary. If you sent Modular Man in there blazing away, he'd bring down the defenses of the Swarm Mother in an instant. "
Tachyon massaged his forehead wearily. "You're right. Any suggestions?"
"Of course." Brennan took a deep breath. This was getting far from his original reasons for coming to the city, but he couldn't let Mai face the Swarm without him. He wouldn't. "Me."
"You?" Tachyon said hesitantly. "Are you up for it?"
"He was up for rescuing you from the blob," Fortunato broke in. He looked at Brennan, the doubt in his eyes replaced by certainty. "I've seen him in action. He can handle himself," Tachyon nodded decisively. "It's settled, then." He turned to Mai. "I don't like sending a woman into danger, but you're right. You're the only one who has a chance of destroying the Swarm Mother."
"I'll do what I have to," she said quietly.
Tachyon nodded gravely and took her hand in his, but a cold chill passed through Brennan at her words. He was sure that Tachyon had heard an entirely different meaning in them than he had.
Lift-off was something Brennan filed away as a
n interesting experience. He would not willingly seek it out again, but the sight of the Earth in Baby's viewscreens was a scene of awesome beauty that he would carry for the rest of his life. He felt almost unworthy of the sight and wished that Ishida, his roshi, could view it.
There were three others in the Arabian Nights fantasy that was Tachyon's control room. Tachyon guided his ship in silence. He was still hurting from his mistreatment by the Swarm. Brennan could see that he kept himself going by willpower alone. His face was lined with weariness and uncharacteristic tenseness.
Fortunato virtually crackled with impatient, nervous energy. He had spent the time before lift-off charging his batteries, as he had put it. He was now ready, and impatient for action.
Only Mai seemed calm and unmoved. She sat quietly on the control room's couch, her hands in her lap, watching everything with unworried interest. Brennan watched her watch. She had agreed readily to Tachyon's plan. How she would carry it out, though, was a different matter. That thought worried him.
After a time, Tachyon spoke, tension and weariness cracking his voice.
"There it is."
Brennan peered over Tachyon's shoulder at the globular monstrosity that filled Baby's forward viewscreens.
"It's immense," he said. "How do we find our way around it?"
Tachyon turned to Fortunato. "Instruct the singularity shifter to take you to the middle of the thing. You should end up pretty close to where you want to be. You can find the nerve center by tracking its mind." Tachyon felt the mind of his ship tug at his brain. What is it, Baby?
We're approaching the Swarm Mother's detector range. Thank you. He turned to the others. "You'd better get ready. It's almost time."
Fortunato took out the singularity shifter from the backpack in which Tachyon had hidden it in the spare bedroom of his apartment. In the bottom of the pack was a. 45 automatic in a shoulder rig.
"What's this?" Fortunato said. He looked at Tachyon. "You may need it," the doctor said. "It's going to take more out of you than you know, to power this jump." Fortunato touched the butt of the gun, looked at Tachyon. He shrugged. "What the hell," he said, and strapped it on. He hefted the singularity shifter, and he and Brennan and Mai formed a circle. All helped hold'the shifter. Brennan glanced at Mai. She looked back steadily. Out of the corner of his eye he saw in a viewscreen a brilliant flash of light wink out from the Swarm Mother. Baby rocked as the organically generated particle beam struck her, but her defensive screens held. Brennan felt a soft whisper in his brain.
Remember. You must not allow Mai or Fortunato to be captured by the Swarm Mother.
He looked up at Tachyon, who stared at him steadily for a moment, then turned back to his viewscreen.
"Go!" Tachyon shouted.
Fortunato's eyes closed, his brow furrowed in concentration. Spectral ram's horns glimmered from the sides of his head. Brennan felt a sudden wrenching, a tearing as if every cell of his body were being hurled apart. He couldn't breathe with lungs that were no more, he couldn't relax muscles that were torn into their constituent molecules and hurled across hundreds of miles of empty vacuum. He stiffled a scream and his consciousness slammed up against a wall of nausea. The trip was worse than his jaunt to the clinic, for it seemed to last forever, though Tachyon had said a journey by singularity shifter lasted no time at all.
Then, suddenly, he was whole again. He and Mai and Fortunato were in a corridor that was dimly lit by large blue and green phosphorescent cells in the translucent ceiling and walls. Ropy tendrils ran below their feet, presumably conduits for whatever was used as blood and nutrients in the thing. The air was hot and wetly humid and smelled like a greenhouse gone bad. Its oxygen content was enough to make Brennan giddy until he adjusted his breathing. He felt light on his feet, though there was a definite gravitational pull. The Swarm Mother, he realized, must be spinning, producing artificial gravity that was necessary for directed organic growth.
"Are you all right?" he asked his companions.
Mai nodded, but Fortunato was breathing harshly. His face was an ashen mask.
"The… space faggot was right.."he panted. "That was a bitch." His hands were shaking as he fumbled the shifter back into the backpack.
"Relax-" Brennan began, and fell silent.
Somewhere ahead in the twisting, rolling passageway was a vast sucking sound.
"Which way do we have to go?" Brennan asked quietly. Fortunato concentrated mightily. "I can sense some kind of mind up ahead." He pointed in the direction of the sucking sound. "If you could call it a mind…"
"Great," Brennan muttered. He unslung his bow. "Listen," Fortunato grabbed Mai's arm. "You could help me out…"
"No time for that," Brennan said. "Besides, Mai will need all her own energy to get through this thing. And so will L" Fortunato began to say something, but the sucking sound, which was getting louder and louder, was suddenly right upon them when a grotesque green and yellow mass of protoplasm rolled down a bend in the tubular corridor toward them. It had a score of suckers placed randomly over a globular body that nearly filled the passageway.
"Christ!" Fortunato swore. "What is that thing?"
It was plastered to the side of the corridor, scouring the wall and floor with myriad suckerlike mouths that were ringed by hundreds of foot-long cilia.
"I don't know, and I don't want to find out," Brennan said. "Let's get going."
He selected an arrow and laid it loosely on the string of his bow, and started to edge past the thing. Mai and Fortunato followed warily. The thing continued to scour away. The cilia of the mouths facing them quivered eagerly as they passed, but the creature made no move toward them.
Brennan sighed in relief.
The blue phosphorescent twilight tinged their surroundings with a sense of soft-focus unreality as they followed the passageway deeper into the Swarm Mother. The unmoving air was so thick with the scents of living things that it reminded Brennan of the jungles of Vietnam. He kept glancing around, twitching with nervousness, feeling as if he were in the crosshairs of a sniper's rifle. He couldn't shake the ominous, oppressive sensation of being watched.
They followed the undulating passageway for half an hour in tense silence, always expecting, but never actually facing, a deadly attack from the Swarm Mother's killing machines. They stopped when the corridor branched into a Y -shaped fork. Both tines of the Y seemed to be leading in the direction they needed to go.
"Which way?" Brennan asked.
Fortunato rubbed his swollen forehead tiredly.
"I can hear a thousand little twitterings. Not real minds, at least not sentient minds, but their noise is driving me crazy. The big one is still up ahead, somewhere."
Brennan glanced at Mai. She looked at him placidly, as if willing to let him make all the decisions. Brennan tossed a coin in his mind and it came up heads.
"This way," he said, taking the right fork.
They hadn't gone a hundred yards before Brennan realized that something was different in this passageway. The air smelled sweet, almost cloying. It was difficult to breathe, yet at the same time almost intoxicating. The odor grew stronger as they advanced.
"I'm not sure I like this," Brennan said. "Do we have a choice?" Mai asked. Brennan looked at her and shrugged. They went on, turned a sharp bend in the passageway, and stopped, staring at the scene before them.
The passageway widened to forty feet across. On both sides of it, hanging near the ceiling, were scores of grotesque swarmlings with shriveled limbs and huge, swollen abdomens. They were nursing from what looked like swollen nipples jutting from the walls of the passageway.
In turn, Swarm creatures of every size and description crowded around each of the hanging swarmlings, jostling for a place at one of the hollow tubes dangling from their swollen abdomens. The Swarm creatures ranged in size from tiny, insectlike entities to tentacular monstrosities that must have weighed several tons. There were hundreds of them.
"It looks like they're feeding," Fortuna
to whispered. Brennan nodded. "We can't go through there. We'll have to go back and try the other branch."
They started back down the passageway, and suddenly stopped when they heard a quiet buzzing, as if from a multitude of small wings, drift down toward them from the way they had come.
"Shit," Fortunato said in disbelief. "We're caught in the middle of a damn shift change."
"The first Swarm creature we ran into ignored us," Brennan said. "Maybe these will too."
They hugged the wall of the passageway-it was warm, Brennan found, and pliable to the touch-and were as quiet and unobtrusive as they could be. They waited.
A swarm of the insectoid creatures buzzed down the corridor. They were four to six inches long with segmented bodies and large, membranous wings. The first few passed them by and went straight to the feeding chamber, and Brennan thought they were safe. But then one stopped and landed on Mai. Another joined it, then another and another. She looked down at them calmly. One landed on Brennan's shoulder. He stared at it. Its mouth parts consisted of multiple mandibular arrangements. One set of mandibles began tearing at the fabric of Brennan's shirt while another stuffed fragments of cloth into its little mouth.
Brennan brushed the thing aside distastefully and stepped on it. It crunched loudly under his foot, like a cockroach, but two had already taken its place on Brennan's body. He heard Fortunato swear and knew they were crawling over him, as well.
"Let's try to move away from them," he said quietly, but that did no good. The bugs followed and landed on the three in increasing numbers.
"Run for it," Brennan called, and they took off down the corridor.
Some of the swarm continued on to the feeding chamber, but more followed them down the passageway in an angrily buzzing cloud. Brennan batted at them as he ran, knocking some out of the air. He slapped at the ones crawling on him, but there were many to take the place of those he knocked down or crushed. They landed on his face and arms and he could feel their thousand little feet crawl all over him. They seemed to be most interested in his clothes, and, more importantly, his bow and arrows. It was as if they were scavengers programmed to dispose of nonliving matter. But that didn't make them harmless. Brennan felt their sharp mandibles tear into his flesh nearly as often as not. The buzzing of their wings and the clacking sounds of their mandibles were loud in Brennan's ears. They had to get away from them.
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