Starhammer

by Christopher Rowley

  "How did they die?" asked Jon.

  "Their enemy reached them. Too late to save itself from destruction but in time to doom the operators of the machine. They worked feverishly to transport the surviving population of their planet to safety, far far away, and then succumbed to a horror that had penetrated the interior."

  The echoes of this ancient struggle to the death seemed to wail around them still in the tormented dust of the dying planet.

  The Bey moved on to practicalities. "Once we are close to the machine, a small group will undertake a first reconnaissance. Then, the prime assault group will go inside. This will consist of myself, Gesme, Aul, and Dekter. Should we not return or give a signal within thirty minutes, a second group will enter, consisting of Jon Iehard, Officers Dahn, Wauk, and Bergen."

  Jon saw M'Nee and Chacks exchange looks. The Bey had pointedly excluded them.

  "On this taper, which I will entrust to Mr. Iehard, I have inscribed the route to take once inside. To the best of my recollection it should guide you through the interior to the control chamber."

  The Bey collected himself before continuing. "Inside the machine we will face another danger and thus I must add a final warning. Heed it. If we do not signal within the proper time, you are to think of us as dead men! If you subsequently enter the machine and see us, apparently alive, open fire at once. If you can it would be best if you could destroy our bodies. Use explosive bullets, make the bodies inoperable."

  They stared at him.

  "And then get away from the scene. On no account whatsoever should you approach such a body, even after you have broken it into pieces."

  Owlcurl Dahn voiced the general puzzlement. "Why would this happen? What would have happened?"

  "The machine is contaminated by a weapon from the enemy of the ancient race. The enemy that virtually destroyed them, the enemy that they finally annihilated. The enemy that they built these vast machines to defend themselves against."

  "What enemy was that?" Dahn said.

  "They called it the Vang Oormlikoowl." The syllables rang with an eerie sound. The Bey continued in a hushed voice, "Of course, my pronunciation of the words is incorrect, so Rhap Dimple tells me anyway, but that is approximately the ancient's term. As best as I understand it, it translates as 'High Intelligence Omniparasitic lifeform.'"

  "What does that mean?"

  "A complex lifeform that sees all other life as nothing but food or an 'environment' of one grade or another. A lifeform that is fundamentally opposed to any like our own. There can be no communication between us and it. To it, we are either food or a hindrance, or worse. To us, it can only be a dire threat."

  "What is in that machine, Mr. Bey?" said Officer Bergen in a trembling voice.

  "A military form, a deadly peril."

  "The jelly-that-is-flesh, the flesh-that-is-steel!" Angle Umpuk said quietly.

  "Yes, Mr. Umpuk, exactly."

  Haltingly, the Bey described the few characteristics of the mysterious devil inside the machine that he recalled. When it came time to tell of the fate of his beloved Aleya, he forced himself to describe everything, even the weird alien organs that the thing had grown from her, that wobbled like pink ferns in the air behind her as she walked toward him that last time, her eyes conscious, her mouth constricted in a terrible scream of agony but her limbs completely under the control of the other, the slimy thing that winked at him under her skin.

  When he had finished they broke up in a somber mood and returned to the hovercraft. They set off again, south and slightly west. Everyone was preoccupied with the tasks ahead.

  —|—

  Enormous military motion was in train all around them as the components of the Grand Sector Fleet, Admiral Grahsk in command, with poor Booeej locked in his cabin, were assembling in orbit above Baraf.

  Aboard the jumpers, battalions of shock troops were readied for deployment. Drones were released into the atmosphere to probe the dusts of the equatorial region.

  Superior Buro troops aboard heavy tanks were rumbling across the basalt seabed only a few hundred kilometers behind the Elchites. They were but part of a huge force that was sweeping into the equatorial zone.

  Aboard the leading battletank, Melissa Baltitude rode beside Magnawl Ahx. She was right in the cockpit, privy to the activity going on all over the system. The laowon were throwing everything they had into the chase. If they failed, they were preparing to sear the planetary surface with nuclear fire. If they failed, Magnawl Ahx was prepared to sit on the surface and wait for the sterilizing fire rather than the rage of the Heir and certain expiation on Laogolden. That meant Melissa would sit and wait with him.

  The tank was a monster, thirty kilometers in length, riding six pairs of heavy treads. It still kept up a steady eighty kilometers an hour over rough terrain. On the flat it did better, edging up to over one hundred.

  Arranged in holding pods in rows under their feet were the shock troopers, who would be fired out in ejection harness should they be needed.

  Melissa stared out into the murk, and even the massive batteries of lights aboard the laowon battletank couldn't cut the dust for more than fifty meters. The clouds hid everything, and made the going fearsome in among the crustal pits.

  Her thoughts roved forward to the fugitives and Jon Iehard. In her heart she prayed they would not catch them. She didn't want to see Jon after the laowon had broken him. She knew he would be broken very small before they allowed him to expiate.

  But if they didn't catch him, then there would be the nuclear fire and after that, nothing at all. If she'd had tears left to shed, Melissa would have wept.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  For an hour they probed southward through the dust. No sight of anything larger than dust grains, or smaller than the seabed presented itself. Throughout, they observed radio silence.

  Then they saw a light floating past them to the north. The Bey ordered an immediate halt as he and Jon tried to get an image of the light, but it disappeared too quickly.

  "A laowon probe?" said Jon in concern.

  "Most certainly, we must accelerate our timetable."

  They ran for the hovercraft and returned to the trail of the great machine. And almost immediately they sensed something up ahead, a mass loomed out of the dust.

  "The machine!" Jon cried.

  But the Bey shook his head. "No this is just the rear marker machine. A rear guard for the Hammer."

  "If it guards the Hammer, won't it fire on us?"

  "I think it is only programmed to fire at targets up above, in orbit, not on the seabed. In either case it has been dormant for eons. Probably awaiting instructions."

  They swung out and around the machine, a hemisphere a half kilometer in diameter. It rested on immense caterpillar treads that were barely visible at its base. The upper surfaces were pitted and marked with lines that seemed to form enormous eyes, a face, something between a toad and a crocodile. The expression was undeniably fierce.

  "The face of the ancients," Jon exclaimed, pointing to the markings. The Bey followed his indication and then turned and nodded.

  "A strange characteristic for so advanced a species, to decorate a weapon with a ferocious face. Like the peoples of human antiquity in the preindustrial economies. They carried the fetish decoration of weapons a long way. Early body shields wore faces, the prows of ships were carved in the figures of women and fierce beasts, and even during the early industrial era slogans were written on shells and ferocious designs painted on combat aircraft. Of course, we have progressed far beyond that now, our weapons are not decorated anymore, they have become purely utilitarian, surely a signal of the highest civilization."

  Eblis Bey's irony was lost on Jon, however, who as yet knew little of ancient history. "Perhaps these were their first high technology weapons. You say they were not warlike. They just hadn't ever done it before."

  "And yet, these peaceful beings discovered the most terrible weapon of all."

  The still machi
ne—silent, huge, and ominous—vanished behind them in the murk.

  "More lights, to the north." Jon pointed out the window of the mantid.

  A laowon probe was swinging in their direction, its engines failing, screaming in complaint as the dust ruined them, its lights like probing fingers in the clouds. It passed eastward and disappeared from view.

  They came upon tracks, colossal tread marks one hundred meters across, dug a meter deep into the seabed itself.

  "We are close Mr. Iehard, very close now." The Bey was consumed with excitement.

  They moved directly west, following the north side of the treadmarks. The wind had dropped further as night drew on, the dust was clearing.

  Far ahead, Jon saw something huge, round, humping up against the horizon. The dust hid it again, then the veil fell away and he saw a shape in gray-green eternite, like a hen's egg with the pointed end uppermost. It was cradled at its base within huge tubes or folded arms in a rectangular configuration.

  The Bey had seen it, so had Gesme, at the wheel. Eblis Bey raised his binoculars to his eyes.

  "At last!" he exulted in a quiet voice. "After thirty years I have returned. I will keep my oath to them, who lie entombed within that dreadful hulk." He stared at the distant shape with eyes widened by the proximity to doom.

  Jon felt the sweat in his palms. He was trembling slightly, his eyes locked on the distant, smooth shape. It was absolutely colossal, he realized.

  And then there were blazing lights, suddenly, almost above them. A laowon probe, a black metallic X-frame swung past at a height of fifty meters. The lights speared them momentarily through the dust. It swung past on its trajectory and stopped, swung back toward them. Jon called Aul to halt the mantid. He sprang out with the grenade launcher and raised it to his shoulder. The probe returned, engines laboring, coming in about thirty meters up. When it was almost overhead Jon fired three grenades. The first two missed, exploding harmlessly behind, but the third blew up in the left side engine and the probe dipped smartly into the ground in a fireball of hydrogen.

  "Onward!" the Bey screamed. "We have no time left, we must reach the machine."

  Their position was no longer secret. High above them, the battlejumpers would be targeting the drop zone. Cyborg pods were snapping into ejection tubes like cartridges into firing chambers. In seconds dozens of other probes would be swarming toward them.

  Their mantid leaped ahead, a gap opened between themselves and the rest. Then the turtle suddenly accelerated. Jon and the Bey exchanged a meaningful glance.

  Painfully, slowly, the machine before them grew until it seemed too large to be possible, to be comprehensible, and yet it continued to swell larger and larger ahead, becoming overpowering in scale. It was a bald colossus, the size of a small space habitat. The smooth gray surface bulked into the sky for several hundred meters.

  Then the perspective made it seem almost spherical, resting on a base of four monstrous pillow shapes, each of which was supported by a pair of treads more than a kilometer in length.

  Jon had been prepared for the thing to be a giant, but the creation was so huge it went beyond understanding. How anything so vast had been constructed planetside, to run at the bottom of a deep ocean no less, was beyond his conception of engineering possibilities.

  They finally drew close to the leviathan and began to pass along its length. The turtle kept up with them.

  The Bey pointed up to the flanks of the lower part of the machine, where huge tubes wormed over each other in a braided system.

  "Up there is one airlock. To reach it we'd have to get up on the landing surface. There aren't any steps to the seabed."

  Of course, Jon realized, everything would have been floated into it through the deep waters of the long vanished ocean.

  "The machine is still," Jon said. "I thought it would be moving."

  "It will move soon enough. It lives yet."

  Streaks crossed the sky, shapes were descending all around the machine, parachutes snapping open only hundreds of feet from the ground.

  "Ahead of us!" Gesme said. A human figure, in laowon military uniform, bounded toward them.

  Jon had the Taw Taw in his hand, he dropped the window, emptied a clip, the gun roaring, and the trooper shed a lot of flesh and uniform but continued to come straight for them. It left the ground on a forward dive, explosive bullets still hitting it, and caromed across the bowshield of the mantid and smashed a hand through the windscreen.

  Jon shot the hand off at the wrist and it flew across the cabin then hit the side window. The cyborg swung the stump, Gesme ducked and the entire windscreen shattered as the trooper slid away, falling behind them while they caromed from one of the giant machine's huge treads.

  "Cyborgs!" screamed Gesme. "They're almost impossible to kill."

  "Oh great, that's just what we need," Jon said. He looked back, more bipedal figures were landing in the mid distance. The mantids following were barely going to make it.

  The Bey pointed through a gap between the treads. "Turn here, Gesme. Take us in between the treads."

  The hovercraft curved then sped into the space underneath the giant. Their lights showed a flat, dull upper surface stretching all the way to the next set of treads.

  The treads towered over them, and Jon tried to imagine the sound the monster must make when it moved. They were a hundred meters wide and as they turned, the rock beneath was crushed to powder.

  "Are the others following us?" the Bey said.

  "Only the turtle so far."

  Ahead of them a projection jutted down from the belly of the monster. It quickly resolved into a small corkscrew ramp that ended in a cracked and worn flange of eternite hanging only five feet above the plain.

  They clambered out, the Bey running ahead with Rhap Stardimple, up the ramp to the heavy circular airlock set in a groove in the belly of the machine.

  Jon and the young Elchites took position on the ramp above the hovercraft, assault rifles at the ready.

  "We can't hold them off with just rifle fire," Gesme said. "These are Imperial shock troops."

  "Accurate fire can still disrupt them. Try for the head and eyes, that must be a weak point."

  Jon loosened the Taw Taw in his holster, cast an anxious eye behind him to the airlock door. The mote was pressing itself into a curved depression in the outer airlock surface. Jon banged a clip of explosive shell into his assault rifle.

  Lights were coming around the farthest treads, the turtle and the other mantids, in a group, their engines a sudden growl under the machine. Running pursuers were already closing on the last mantid in line. A human figure jumped, landed on the mantid's back. There was a flurry of activity, the mantid lost way, swung sideways and ground to a halt, several more troopers climbed into it.

  "Which one is it?" Gesme cried in anguish. Through the binoculars Jon could see three figures in desert costumes being dragged out. "It's Bergen, Wauk, and Hargen, they've been taken prisoner."

  The surviving mantids, lead by Braunt's and the turtle, roared toward the ramp. Behind them sprang the fleet footed cyborgs. The Elchites fired, a crescendo in the confined, echoing space. Their bullets exploded in a fury of smoke and metal splinters on the distant tread.

  The cyborgs did not return fire but continued to sprint toward them. The Elchites' fire was accurate, they were well trained in the use of firearms, still it was difficult to stop the shock troopers; direct hits had to pierce the armored brain pan to really damage the things.

  The great outer door creaked open slowly behind them.

  The turtle slammed to a halt, bouncing its rubber apron off the eternite ramp flange. Gelgo Chacks helped Finn M'Nee out. Braunt, carrying a rifle, ran forward. "Did you see those things?" he said in a shocked voice.

  "That's part of the reason we are here," said the Elchite Acolyte Aul. "All of this abuse of human beings must stop."

  "Those things aren't human."

  "Not entirely, the laowon have seen to that."
/>   Braunt added his fire to theirs, still the cyborgs ran forward and many more were coming into view.

  The remaining mantids finally sank down by the ramp. The Orners and Angle Umpuk scrambled up to the airlock.

  "Hurry now, everyone inside," the Bey said, his voice shaking from nervousness. They turned and ran for the lock.

  The cyborgs were closing fast. Jon got off another clip, he hit one trooper, saw puffs rise from the black and blue uniform before the figure staggered. Then it shook off the impacts and resumed running.

  The great door was closing. He slipped inside, turned back as three cyborgs hurdled the turtle to land on the ramp flange then leap for the closing lock. One flew straight in, caromed off the wall and landed upside down in the corner. The others were caught in the door, which closed on their waists.

  The one in the corner sprang backward, erect, in time to catch the first three bullets from the Taw Taw longbarrel. They staggered it, but its own gun came up and a demiclip began ricocheting around the metal bubble of the airlock interior. Jon fired again and again, the shots knocking the cyborg skull back, slamming it into a wall, until finally something broke and it slumped backward in a heap.

  With a slight squeal of effort the huge door was crushing the trapped troopers. To Jon's horror the cyborg upper halves still functioned. An arm shot out, seized Owlcurl Dahn and jerked her to the door.

  The mote was activating the inner door of the airlock, and Jon heard it begin to move with a faint hiss.

  "Turn your head!" he screamed to Dahn and fired into the cyborg's skull. Three shots were fired before it consented to die.

  There had been carnage in the airlock. Two of the young Elchites, Dekter and Aul had been hit hard, as had been Captain Hawkstone, who'd taken a round through the neck. He lay in a lanky tangle of limbs, blood surrounding him in a widening pool.