After two hours, Dronon’s sun set, rolling quickly, a dull shield dropping before the onslaught of darkness. In the distance ahead, they spotted a huge black saucer. Massive legs rose in the air around the saucer like hinged towers.
They drove to it, found a deserted hive city with gaping rust holes in it. The armor was pitted from incendiary fire. The city provided the best shelter they had seen all day, so they stopped to camp. They laid out a few blankets beneath the crook of one towering leg, built a cooking fire, and began heating some food bags.
Then they sat, listening to the night sounds of an alien world: something on the horizon kept making a noise like a popping bag. Elsewhere, a creature called out, “wheeeee,” in a high, buzzing voice.
Veriasse felt disappointed at not having found a hive, and after he checked the back of Everynne’s neck to see how the wound was healing, Everynne lay down on her blanket just staring up, as if deep in thought. Orick grumbled about the inconvenience of always finding dronon where you didn’t want them, but not being able to find them on their own home world, then lay down protectively beside Everynne. The poor bear had been listless all day, and his stab wound, although slight, had cost him much. He fell asleep within minutes.
“Don’t worry,” Veriasse said to the others. “The chances are good that our fire will attract some attention in the night. Perhaps by morning we will meet the dronon, and then we’ll find out how they feel about our intrusion on their world.” He lay back and thought. Everynne’s scar was mending well, but he somewhat hoped that they could wait a few more days.
Gallen and Maggie were restive. Maggie wore her mantle, and she fairly buzzed with excitement as she studied the legs to the hive city, talked about the engineering feats of the dronon who had made such a thing. At last Maggie took a torch, led Gallen up into the body cavity of the dead city. There they stood on the black metal of a turret mount and gazed into the deep shadows.
To Veriasse they looked as if they were peering into the shell of a huge turtle. Maggie shouted and whistled to hear her voice echo.
The two climbed inside to explore.
Veriasse watched the light from their torch dim as they entered the recesses of the city, and soon he was alone with Everynne and Orick. Veriasse felt weary, tense, and he lay down beside Everynne. Orick snored; it was getting very dark.
He had thought Everynne slept, but she said softly, “Well, here we are.”
“At last,” Veriasse said, trying to sound hopeful.
Everynne laughed, not the musical sound of joy, but a derisive chuckle. “At last.”
“Do you regret having come?” Veriasse asked.
It was an unfair question, he knew, but Everynne answered, “This is the planet where I will die, one way or another. I guess I’m disappointed that it is taking so long. I had myself braced for a battle today.”
“I know that you think you will lose something if I win this battle,” Veriasse said, “but I promise you—when your consciousness is subsumed into that of Semarritte’s, it will not be a death for you. Instead, it will be a wonderful awakening. I have seen it happen with clones before. It will be such a powerful experience that it will overwhelm you, and you will fall asleep for a few moments. But you will awaken a much wiser and more powerful being. Trust me, my daughter, trust me.”
Veriasse looked at Everynne’s face, lit only by the campfire. She was more frightened than he’d ever seen her. She trembled violently. Her lips pulled back in terror, and a heavy perspiration lay on her forehead.
Veriasse took her hand, caressed it, but Everynne did not turn to him. Instead, she laughed coldly and said, “Father, if I turned around and walked away from here, would you hate me?”
This was a subject that Veriasse had hoped to avoid—a discussion about other options, other plans for defeating the dronon. He had already considered all of his options, discussed them in depth with Everynne and Semarritte before her, rejected them one by one. She couldn’t walk away from this, and Veriasse could not afford to let her be weak. He wanted to warn her against trying to take the easy path, remind her of billions of others who would suffer and die under dronon rule if she quit now. Instead, he only spoke the truth. “I would love you, even if you turned away. You are as much a daughter as I have ever had, and I’ve watched you learn and grow these past three years with great joy and a great deal of pride.”
“But you will love me more when Semarritte fills me, won’t you?” she said bitterly. “I’ll bet you can’t wait until she succeeds me. How long do you think it will take before you bed her?”
Veriasse had rarely seen Everynne angry. Never had he heard her say an unkind word, yet he had to remind himself that emotionally she was still a child, and he had to make allowances for that. “Everynne, don’t torture yourself this way. No good will come of it.”
“I’m not torturing myself,” she said. “You’re torturing me. You’re killing me! “ She rolled away from him and began weeping.
Veriasse wanted to say something to comfort her, but there was so little he could say. At last he whispered, “If you want to walk away from this, then tell me, and I swear I will do everything in my power to get you home safely. If this is what you want, we can raise armies, take our keys and open the gates. People everywhere love you. They would fight if you asked them to, and in a matter of days I swear I could raise an army of billions to fight in your behalf. They would scream across the worlds in a rampage of blood and fire. Terrors could be unleashed on a thousand worlds. If this is what you want.”
He did not have to tell her that the losses from such a war would be immeasurable. The dronon would begin destroying those worlds they had already captured. The images of mushroom clouds were still fresh in his mind from this afternoon, and images from the terror-burned world of Bregnel lay in his mind like a black clot, but this war would be far worse than anything that had occurred before. The dead would pile up quickly, mountains of corpses so vast that no one could ever begin to count them.
But Everynne already knew that. She could not turn away from so many in need. She lay crying, and said at last, “Hold me, Father. Please?”
Veriasse put his arm over her shoulder and snuggled against her back. She gripped his hand, hard. He held her until she stopped shaking, nearly an hour, and at last he whispered, “Are you all right? Do you feel better?”
“I’m all right,” she said firmly. “I just wish it were over. I was frightened for a minute.”
“There’s my brave girl,” Veriasse said, and he lay with his body cupped around hers, smelling the sweet scent of her hair. After awhile she began to breathe deeply, as if she would soon fall asleep, and he wondered about Maggie and Gallen. Though they had been in the dead hive city for a long time, he reminded himself that it was a huge place. He imagined that they might keep exploring for hours. He gave himself permission to sleep, and soon fell into a fitful dream.
Maggie rushed through the dead dronon hive city, feeling wild and free. Her nerves jangled in anticipation, and Gallen ran behind her. They would meet the dronon soon, and she fully expected to die, but for the moment, the mantle she wore wanted images of this city. It drove her forward in a mad rush through the beast, gleaning images of an engine room where monstrously large hydraulics assemblies had once driven the massive legs. She studied the power system and the exhaust nacelles.
Though the city was dead and much of the equipment had been scavenged, the dronon took great care of their equipment; they had even protected the abandoned machinery by coating it with oil.
The heavy odor of rusting iron and dust filled the city. The corridors were dark. Wind whistled through the hallways high overhead.
For an hour Maggie and Gallen studied the engine rooms, then found what could only have been egg warmers in a huge nursery. But Maggie’s mantle drove her on, ever curious. It fed its discoveries to her in a constant barrage, so that she felt as if she would burst at the wonder of it all.
She ran laughing into the bowel
s of the city, and Gallen ran beside her, bearing the torch, sometimes touching her shyly. At last they reached a storage chamber and walked down a long corridor. Various implements of unknown intent had been piled along the walls, the machinery of a forgotten age. Enormous capacitor coils rose up for ten meters, sitting like huge thimbles. Spare legs for the hive city were strung from the ceiling. Bits of round, antique flying message pods lay heaped in a pile, and Maggie’s mantle warned her to fill her pockets with them so she could disassemble them later. Things that looked like dronon heads made of glass—with three sets of compound eyes-lay in a heap, as if in some distant past the dronon had tried creating androids. Or perhaps, Maggie wondered, there were even now dronon-shaped androids running about in the hive cities. But her mantle whispered that if such things existed, they had never been seen on any world.
Much of what she saw her mantle could understand—bits of cabling, servomotors, a shelf heaped with mechanical brains, outdated egg-warming chambers. These things she would explain to Gallen. Yet much of it was equally mysterious to her. Most of the dronon equipment was bulky, five times as heavy as anything a human would use. The dronon seemed to prefer their machinery to be durable rather than lightweight or convenient.
In one vast chamber, they found what could have only been a spaceship. It was a small vessel, eighty feet long, forty wide, shaped like a Y. Maggie didn’t know if she could fly it.
She opened the hatch, went inside, and her mantle whispered to her as she studied the engines. She told Gallen, “This has a gravity-wave drive. We couldn’t take it out of the solar system. Still, I’ll bet it’s fast.” She went to the control board. The chairs before the panel were saddle-shaped affairs meant to hold a dronon body, and various foot pedals on the floor looked too intricate for any being with less than four legs to operate. The hand controls were set on a dashboard nearly five feet away and could only be manipulated by something with long arms. Maggie grinned, realizing that this must be an ancient dronon warship, for only the vanquishers with their long battle arms could have worked those controls.
She was giddy with excitement, grinning in wonder. She laughed, then laid back on one of the saddle-shaped chairs and stretched. Gallen set the torch in a groove on the ship’s control panel, then turned and looked at her, perplexed. “I’ve never seen you in this kind of mood before.”
“What kind of mood?”
“So ecstatic. So free.”
Maggie laughed. “That’s because I’ve never been happy or free before,” and she realized that there was more truth in it than she would have dared admit to herself.
“Your smile looks good on you,” Gallen said. He swung his leg over the saddle, sat facing her, his legs wrapped around hers. He lay back with his arms folded behind his head. His half-closed eyes looked tired, and the flames from the torch flickered, showing only half of his face. She felt electric, wanted to kiss him now, make love, but Gallen only studied her a moment.
Maggie’s mantle whispered for her to get up, look deeper into the storage chambers. She took it off and held it in one hand, not wanting to be distracted by its insistent promptings.
Gallen leaned forward, stroked her jawbone tenderly with his fingers, and kissed her. It was an odd kiss, she thought. It wasn’t insistent with desire, nor was it one of the guilty little pecks that Gallen had given her back home. It was slower than dripping honey and tasted just as sweet. It spoke to her, saying, “I love you just as you are, and right now I am content with that.”
They held each other and kissed for a few minutes, then Gallen leaned back again, pillowing his head with his hands.
“Damn you, Gallen O’Day,” Maggie said. “It took you long enough.”
“I suppose it did,” Gallen smiled, self-satisfied. “When we get back to Tihrglas, will you marry me?”
Of course I’ll marry you, she thought. But then her heart fell. “I’m not going back to Tihrglas.”
“Not going back?” Gallen asked.
“Why would I want to go back? What’s for me there? You said it yourself not a moment ago. In all my life, you’ve never seen me so happy. Gallen, how can I begin to explain this—right now, I want to tear this city apart,” she said, waving toward the ship and the dronon city around her, “and discover exactly how it works. Like those little dronon message pods. Until two hundred years ago, that was the only form of communication the dronon used. They hadn’t discovered radio waves at all, until we showed them. The pods have miniature antigravity drives in them, and no technician that I’ve ever heard of has disassembled one of the buggers and figured out how it worked. Gallen, I’ve got a pocket full of dronon technology, and right now I feel as rich as can be. It’s amazement and discovery. Here I’m free to learn and grow. I can’t get that on Tihrglas. Pick any other world we’ve been to. I don’t care which. I could go back and be happy, but you’ll never see me smile again on Tihrglas.”
Gallen stumbled over his words. “Maggie, I—we don’t belong here. I can’t protect you here.”
“I don’t want your protection,” Maggie said. “You asked to be my husband, not my bodyguard.”
Her flippant words didn’t answer his real concerns, she realized. He was a bodyguard. It came naturally to him. Part of him cried out that at all costs he had to protect those around him, maintain a semblance of order. But in these past few days, they had staggered through so many worlds that he was left confused, overwhelmed. He had not been able to discern the underlying order in the worlds around him, simply because the human societies they had visited were all experimenting and growing, twisting away from any predefined shapes.
“You have your mantle,” Maggie said. “It has to be teaching you something. In time, you’ll become a Lord Protector, like Veriasse.” Or perhaps a frustrated fanatic, like Primary Jagget, she wondered. When Jagget’s world had twisted out of shape on him, he had not been able to adapt. He kept calling Wechaus “my world,” but it was peopled by folks who over the millennia had become strangers to him.
And suddenly Maggie understood. In his way, Gallen already was a Lord Protector. Back in Tihrglas, he’d planned to run for sheriff of County Morgan, and in a few years he’d have become the Lord Sheriff of all the counties. He’d been born to become the Lord Protector of Tihrglas.
Gallen’s eyes misted. After a moment he said softly, “Maybe, maybe I can find a world we could both live with.”
Maggie took his hand in hers. “Maybe we can find that world together.”
In his dream, Veriasse rode his airbike, speeding over the dull plains of Dronon with Everynne beside him. Ahead were dark clouds, gray as slate. He could hear the distant rumble of thunder. They drove hard toward the sun as it prepared to dip below the clouds, and he passed under the sprawling leg of a dronon hive city. There was so little daylight left that Veriasse despaired of ever making it to the horizon.
The sun dipped below the distant hills, and Veriasse gasped. Grief passed through him as the night descended. Yet suddenly the white sun flared out on the horizon as if it had reversed in its course, blazing across the blasted land, filling him with hope.
The dream was so real that Veriasse stirred, heard a distant rumble, and realized that thunder was brewing on the horizon. He would have gone back to sleep, but Gallen shouted, “Over here! Come over here!”
Everynne stirred from his arms.
Veriasse sat up. Gallen had fired his incendiary rifle into the air. White chemical fire streamed in the sky like a brilliant flare, then arced toward the ground. Gallen and Maggie had come out of the dead hive city and were now standing on a gun mount. They shouted and waved, and Veriasse looked out over the horizon. In the distance, something massive and black moved in the darkness, crawling over the plains, heaving its bloated body along like a gigantic tick. Veriasse could only see it by the lights at its battle stations, lights that glowed in the night like immense red eyes.
The ground shook and rumbled in pain. Veriasse had not heard thunder in his dreams but the
sound of a dronon hive city groaning as it pulled itself over the broken earth.
Gallen hooted and shot another round from his rifle, shouting in an exaggerated brogue, “Come on, you lousy bastards! Drag your ass on over here! We’re tired of chasing after you!”
The dronon city changed course and began moving toward them, its turrets swiveling as the dronon searched for sign of enemies. Veriasse’s heart pounded in his chest. His breath came ragged. They had found the enemy.
Chapter 19
Veriasse could almost not believe his luck. Of all the scenarios that he had imagined, this perhaps was most ideal—to spot a dronon hive city in the distance at night. He went to his pack, pulled out his various paraphernalia. Some of it had taken him years to acquire. A translator he clipped to his mantle was equipped with a microphone that he could speak into, loudspeakers that would throw his voice, and a tiny speaker that plugged into his ear. With it, he could speak his native English softly and have his words translated into dronon in a commanding roar. Meanwhile, the device would translate the dronon’s own clicks into English and feed them into the earpiece.
Veriasse plugged in the earpiece, then flipped on the translator, noticed that Everynne was doing the same with her own translator.
He also pulled out some protective goggles that would keep acid from his eyes, in case a dronon spit at him.
Under dronon law, those who engaged in ceremonial combat were not allowed any weapons to fight with, but for his own defense, Veriasse had brought a small holo projector. He got it out, set it on the ground before Everynne, turned it on: the air above her shivered for a moment, then blazed with an image of a Golden Queen, a hive mother whose abdomen was a great saucer-shaped, bloated sac. Her small useless wings were neatly folded over her back, and she stood regally, her clublike forearms raised as if to do battle, her head held high so that the uppermost of her three eye clusters allowed her to look behind her back while the other two arrays scanned the horizon at one hundred and twenty degree angles. The whiplike sensors under her mandibles swung about wildly, as if she were trying to catch an elusive scent.
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