Plezmarxsh looked up at the airlock entrance uneasily. On Lashtri Three, the thing had spread with a terrible rapidity. "What will we do?"
"I will report to the high admiral at once. Send the troopers in, try to track the fugitives, we must know where they've gone to ground."
"The humans are doomed then. They will be attacked and converted."
"They are doomed anyway. We have two spies among them. Superior Buro has followed this case from the beginning. But I still want to know where the humans are. The machine is huge, they could hide in there for days. We may not have so much time."
—|—
Jon lurched down each passageway as the mote led him. The walls of yellow brown scales were monotonous, endless. Each time they came to a new opening, the mote considered the passageway carefully and then directed Jon forwards.
The Bey had grown very heavy. Jon's shoulders ached from carrying the old man, who had been silent for some minutes. They reached another junction of passages.
Suddenly, there was a tremendous noise down below. Distantly, they heard screams and gunfire. The eruption made Owlcurl Dahn gasp in fright. Jon stopped and turned, the effort cost him considerable pain in his wounded shoulder. The sounds of firing were clear, but still distant, far below them, somewhere in the bowels of the machine.
He paused, carefully set the Bey down, and listened intently. Eblis Bey came awake as long ripping sounds wafted up from the small arms fire of the cyborg troopers. Eblis Bey knew only too well what it was they were firing at. "The devil is awake now."
They looked around them with distinct unease.
"Which way now, Rhap Dimp?" Jon asked the mote.
"Left. Close now. Emergency, lack energy."
Jon put out a hand to keep the mote warm. It had the coordinates of their primary targets. He passed the mote to Officer Dahn, who cradled it carefully.
Then he lifted the Bey across his shoulders once again. They turned left into another passage and proceeded to its end. The maze seemed endless, as if they were just tracking back and forth in it forever, and Jon was close to despair. The cyborgs would soon climb the risers and find them, wandering about stupidly, within twenty meters of their goal.
And then the mote led them through a doorway that opened onto a large circular space. Ribs of pink eternite rose from the perimeter and curved together in a mesh to form the roof.
Immediately, the space above their heads filled with man-sized flashing holograms. Lines of some alien code, ideograms, images. Jon set the Bey on his feet and propped him up. He stared at the codes in awe.
"At last, at last!" The Bey was overcome with wild emotion.
An onion-shaped chamber was swelling out of the floor with a sound like a huge balloon inflating. A door opened in it like an enormous iris. From within came a deep orange glow. The chamber was looming over them like a giant head. The iris widened.
"Rhap Dimple, come to me. Now you must give the Keeper all the codes it will need." The Bey's voice quavered slightly.
The mote rose from Dahn's hand and floated across to the Bey, who held the mote up to the door. Rhapsodical Stardimple warbled a stream of notes.
There was silence. Then a light shone directly onto the mote. Rhap Dimple uttered another stream of tones.
The iris glowed a fiery pink and slowly opened. In it stood a batrachianoid robot, three meters high, like a surreal mechanical toad. It glowed where its eternite segments met. In what looked like a huge toad's head, enormous eyes suddenly lit up. It extended a vast palm, into which the mote delivered itself. Blue and green sparks flew between them. The globular optics turned and focused on Eblis Bey, Jon, and Owlcurl Dahn.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
At the entrance to the maze, Angle Umpuk lay dying. To move was to expose himself to agony. He lay back against the wall and tried not to think of the blood he was shedding. He prayed the medics would get through in time to save him.
Thoughts of failure pounded gloomily through his mind. That accursed mote! He had never expected a robot to interfere like that. Even if the damned Superior Buro people reached him in time, it was unlikely he'd get paid for this job. The Buro didn't believe in rewarding failure. The whole thing was an awful mess.
He heard something, a small slithering sound. It was coming closer with great rapidity. He lifted his handlight.
Along the wall, a pink worm was approaching with uncanny speed. He watched it ripple down to the floor and zip across it with a sinuous wriggle that took it to Gelgo Chacks' body. Umpuk estimated it was about a foot long and as thick as a man's finger. With horrible vigor, it shoved under the body and disappeared.
Bizarre things began to happen to Chacks' corpse. There were sounds like the tearing of meat. With astonishing speed, humps rose up and broke through Chacks' clothing. The limbs of the corpse began to jerk in an uncanny imitation of life. The uniform broke open completely to reveal weird growths, like a clump of pink ferns, that sprouted out of the dead man's back.
Another worm was approaching, it reached Umpuk's foot, and he began to scream.
More runners arrived. Umpuk's writhing body was already jerking and twisting violently. Suddenly, it rose up, tearing an awful scream from the doomed man's throat. It stood next to that of Chacks, itself imbued with a strange, leaden vigor. M'Nee's corpse was now twitching its limbs. Coral-shaped growths were exploding between the shoulder blades. Braunt and Gesme were also jerking about on the floor, fronds pushing from their necks.
Soon, the entire group was shambling down the passageway, toward the command module, following the trail of blood left by Officer Dahn. To his horror Angle Umpuk found himself still alive, but completely helpless inside his own body. His wounds had ceased to bleed, but his tormented nervous system continued to present him with an overflowing ocean of pain. But he could no longer even scream as he lead the zombies of the former Orner crew down the passageway. The thing that now controlled them seemed to know the way perfectly.
—|—
The Keeper was puzzled. The mote claimed that there were urgent new targets. It passed a stream of coordinates.
New targets! After such an eternity of waiting, the machine was finally to be used once more. The Keeper almost succumbed to a fit of electronic excitement.
But the beings accompanying the mote were not the comrades of the battery command. They were not even of the wisdom seeker race.
There were no precedents, no commands, no programming to go to for a solution. The first code level demanded that the Keeper exterminate the beings. They might be enemy cells. The presence of the mote however produced an option. The Keeper read through the secondary code then scanned the beings as instructed, and immediately felt a prick on the scanning field.
One of them carried a Trace with Honors from a hallowed master. It indicated the being thus Traced had mental powers of the same order of magnitude as the masters themselves. Automatically, the Keeper shifted to third-level code. It consulted the Trace and read its arguments.
In Jon's pocket, the tiny silver cube he'd carried so far grew a few degrees warmer for a moment as it surrendered a tiny amount of its mass to the Keeper. The Keeper appeared to ruminate over the new data. They waited breathlessly on its decision.
A sudden shriek turned their heads. Owlcurl Dahn was pointing to the doorway. Angle Umpuk, Gelgo Chacks, Finn M'Nee, stood there weaving slightly on their feet.
"It's impossible, they're dead!" she screamed.
Indeed, there were huge, gaping holes in M'Nee's torso that still leaked blood. But it was the other things, the odd pink growths that trailed in the air behind the men, that set Jon's trained reflexes to work. The Taw Taw came up and he fired half the clip. The bodies were chopped down, M'Nee cut almost in two, blood sprayed back onto the walls. The dead were thoroughly dead once more.
And yet, there was furious activity in that ruined flesh. They stared, horrorstruck, as Chacks' torso sat up. As ruined hands began pushing at the floor, raising the body to its de
ad feet.
Then the top half of Finn M'Nee, eyes vacant, rose up on the arms and began hopping toward them.
Dahn's scream was matched by the thunder of the Taw Taw.
The bodies tumbled again.
"Rhap Dimple, tell the Keeper to save us!" implored Eblis Bey.
But the Keeper had already taken note of the arrival of enemy cells.
With ponderous grace, it stepped around the humans and opened its mouth. An incinerating blue flame scorched the ruined tissues of the damned to smoke and char.
Incredibly there was still something living, struggling inside Angle Umpuk's smoking remains. It glistened, it pulled free, they glimpsed a wet, pink flash, and it was gone, escaping a final blast of the fire by a fraction of a second.
"We must get inside. It will never give up!" the Bey said in a tormented voice.
Jon watched the Keeper turn to face them, its mouth still open. They could be dead within seconds. The Taw Taw felt quite puny in his hands, he doubted he could do more than scratch the Keeper before that flame thrower crisped them.
But instead of flame, a pale orange light came on in the Keeper's eyes and the barrier faded and the iris door was open to them. They entered the command shell, the Keeper followed, and the great machine's main battery went on targeting alert.
Inside the command shell, Jon set Eblis Bey down on the closest equivalent to a couch, a mushroom-shaped structure that looked like it might be great for big toads to squat on.
Screens of hexagonal design and unusual color coding had lit up. On one was a reproduction of Baraf in black and harsh green, with a cloud of red dots in orbit above.
He tried to revive the Bey, succeeded at last. At the sight of the control panel, Eblis Bey made a great effort. With Jon's aid, he leaned over it and tried to puzzle out the six arrays of small levers. An inset panel contained a single, massive lever.
The Keeper glided into the room. Jon looked at it apprehensively, the mote floated beside it. Between them flowed more sparks.
Jon experimented, pushing a black lever. On the left hand screen the viewpoint switched to a star pattern.
"What are the coordinates for Laogolden?" He asked the Bey.
"Rhap Dimp has all that information. The Keeper has it now. It is up to the Keeper."
Eblis Bey tried other levers in that array. All the screens showed star fields. Then the final lever, and a spray of ideograms filled one screen.
Eblis Bey spoke to the mote. "Rhap Dimp. Ask the Keeper to open a radio channel, we need to talk to the laowon."
The mote flew to hover before the huge Keeper. Once more it warbled. The Keeper's eyes glowed momentarily.
Levers in the other panels moved by themselves. The view on screen narrowed to a far distant sector of the Orion galactic arm. Stars, dust, more stars, grew rapidly in size under a purple targeting overlay. One star finally lay centered in the middle of the viewscreen.
"Laogolden's primary, the Kbark itself!" whispered Eblis Bey. "Now we must try and set up a way of working directly with the machine. The mote can translate most of what we need, I think."
Somewhere above them a speaker crackled into life. Radio hiss filled the space.
"How can we tune it? We need a laowon military channel."
But the hiss was suddenly broken by harsh laowon voices. The Keeper had assumed that the ships orbiting above were a part of this new emergency and had automatically scanned for the fleet's communication channels.
Jon spoke, demanding to speak to the commanding officer of the laowon forces. There was consternation for a few moments, then Magnawl Ahx was switched through.
"By the authority invested in me by the Heir and the Imperial Command Council, I call upon you to surrender immediately." He said. "You are offered a complete pardon in return for your cooperation. Please help us to prevent any further bloodshed."
To Jon's concern, Eblis Bey had slumped back into unconsciousness. Owlcurl Dahn stared back at him helplessly. When she tried to speak, she was incoherent. Jon realized with a tremor that he had just become the Earth's chief negotiator. On his shoulders lay the responsibility for the human race in the coming confrontation with the most powerful of all laowon.
His voice quavered a little at first, but then it hardened, rather to his own surprise.
"Our surrender is out of the question. Instead, I demand that you call off your troops. We have taken command of the Starhammer. The primary target is Laogolden itself. If we have to, we will fire the Hammer and Lao-primary will become a nova. The Hammer operates by creating a gravitational disturbance. It works instantaneously across great distances. We have targeted Lao-primary and we will fire if we have to."
As he finished, he felt a burst of pride. He liked the sound of that little speech. He rubbed his brow, he was sweating heavily although it was far from warm in the control chamber.
He wondered how the cyborgs would try to get at them. Possibly they would just plant explosives inside the machine. Of course, he was sure that they would much prefer to seize control of the machine itself. But that would require a successful breakthrough into the fire-control chamber, and from what Jon had seen of the mechanism that seemed to grow it out of the floor, that would take some doing. The technology of the ancient batrachians was radically different from human and laowon norms.
And if cyborgs did get in, they would have to contend with the Keeper. Jon doubted that he had seen more than a fraction of the Keeper's combative abilities.
But in the battlepit of Plezmarxsh's lead tank, Ahx smote his forehead in consternation.
"Who am I speaking to?" the Superior Buro chief said.
"This is Jon Iehard, speaking on behalf of Eblis Bey, and for the human race."
"Where is Officer M'Nee?"
"Officer M'Nee is dead." Jon stopped himself from saying more. It would be better to keep them dangling in the dark concerning Umpuk.
Magnawl Ahx gave a great groan. It was clear that both spies had failed. They held no further leverage and the damn weapon had already been targeted on Laogolden. He looked to the others in the pit, including Melissa Baltitude. It was too late, too late even to use her. She stared back at him with wide, wild eyes. Animals, all animals, these humans, but treacherous and surprisingly tenacious. Too late!
"We have failed," he said in a voice of flinty despair, and he signaled the high admiral to begin the nuclear hailstorm that would destroy the threat to the Imperiom forever. Ahx tried to steel himself against the swift death that he knew was coming. He prayed the Heir would not demand an expiation from his family.
Jon spoke, breaking into these thoughts. "These are my demands. You will immediately open a line of communication to the High Council of the Imperiom. I will need to speak to the Heir himself. There is vital business to discuss. The ways of the worlds are to be changed from this day. No longer will the Imperiom weigh down the human race."
Jon was already feeling a little intoxicated with the negotiations.
Ahx smiled bitterly. "I'm afraid I cannot do that. There will not be time."
The battlejumpers unlimbered their missiles, swept in for the kill, unleashed a broadside toward the great machine hidden in the dust-laden atmosphere below.
Several things happened at once.
The outer screens of the defense machines detected the incoming missiles as they were launched, then shifted to full alert. The great machine's automatic defense systems came onto full power. The Keeper awoke to the call.
Enormous beams of ionizing energy flashed to the defensive machines. Their fields swelled, arched into the sky and interlocked above the primary machine.
The Keeper's eyes glowed brightly. A battle hologram appeared in the center of the control chamber.
One hundred and eighty kilometers to the north and east a cube four kilometers to a side began to vibrate insanely in its socket in the planetary crust. Then with a great flash it was gone, taking with it a small tribe of Zun People and their meat larders.
Laowon missiles struck the screen and exploded harmlessly, before the targeted nuclear detonation points. The sky high above the machine filled with the debris of smashed rocketry, which slid off the screens and tumbled toward the seabed, burning furiously as it fell.
From the great machine came a pattern of defensive fire, which created gravity voids in any nearby centers of high temperature. The fusion engines of the battlejumpers in close orbit detonated in a sparkling array of fireworks, covering the northern limb of the planet.
Ahx waited, stared dumbfounded at the screens of the battletank. No nuclear fires erupted. Instead the bulk of the battlefleet had disintegrated violently in orbit.
Magnawl Ahx turned to Plezmarxsh. He swallowed heavily.
"It appears that the security of the Imperiom itself has now fallen to us alone. You must break into the control chamber and destroy the humans."
Plezmarxsh bit his lips.
"If we fail, they say they can destroy Laogolden. Don't you think you had better open a line to the Heir? The Grand Council should be summoned. This weapon just disposed of an entire battlefleet. It appears to be immune to nuclear attack. What if their claims are correct?"
The Superior Buro would be forever shamed.
"Do you think you will survive this debacle if I do that? You will expiate, alongside myself. The Heir himself will operate the hot tongs that extract your liver, piece by piece."
Magnawl Ahx turned to the commanders of the cyborg troops. "Break into the control chamber and kill or incapacitate these humans."
They hesitated barely a second, glancing to Plezmarxsh. "Blue Seygfan flies alone," Plezmarxsh said unhappily.
"Of course not, the Buro is with you."
Plezmarxsh pursed his lips.
Inside the machine, the troopers ascended in the risers, and as they ascended, the first waves were met by freshly hatched runners that burrowed into their flesh and made directly for the brainpans inside the armored skulls. Once there, they produced a powerful acid that let them through the metal casings in seconds.
The cyborgs rose to the higher floors with dead circuits. They collapsed and their flesh was quickly absorbed by suckers that sprang from the walls. The vang military form fed with a frantic frenzy. Within minutes, all that was left were the cyborgs' metal components and bone structures.
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