Metal Swarm

by Kevin J. Anderson

  A prepped crowd had gathered in the Palace District Square. Traditionally, the Archfather spoke from the Unison temple, but Basil had decided that the Whisper Palace was the best venue. “Go. They are waiting for you. My deputy and I will observe from here.”

  Energized by Basil’s speech, the Archfather marched off, followed by attendants who continued to straighten his robes and brush at imagined specks of lint. Getting into character, he moved with a ponderous grace, using his heavy staff.

  As scheduled, Deputy Cain arrived to join him. Basil nodded. “You’re finally here. Good. I want you to hear the Archfather’s words.” The Chairman took his place on the inset balcony alcove from which they could watch without being seen. The audience began to stir as the honor guard marched toward the platform, preparing the way.

  “The Archfather has never voiced anything but bland platitudes,” Cain said, looking down into the milling crowd.

  “Not today. Never again after today.”

  The bearded man climbed the steps to stand on the high platform, and the crowd fell silent. The Archfather began with a traditional invocation, adding a few militaristic phrases that went beyond the usual “care for each other and love God.” In a booming voice, he said, “There is nothing more holy than a soldier fighting for a holy cause. I will tell you what we must do.” He raised his staff and lowered it again like a spear carrier thumping his weapon. The audience was fully attentive now.

  Ever since General Lanyan had returned, Basil had decided to turn the failure into a crowbar. He did not allow any sanitizing of the horrific footage of Pym, insisting that the bloody deaths of EDF soldiers play without mercy. Before the surviving colonists were even cleaned up, their clothes still in tatters, their skin still smeared with alkaline dust, soldiers had recorded their grim tales of the Klikiss invasion.

  The monstrous Klikiss images (originally recorded on the soldiers’ suitcams) were broadcast incessantly on the newsnets. No person could help but shudder upon seeing how the hideous insect creatures had enslaved or slaughtered the poor colonists.

  “Those monsters are a miracle in disguise—just what we needed.” Basil smiled with satisfaction. “It shines a whole new light on King Peter’s supposed insurrection and his divisive comments. They will see Peter’s ploy for what it is, juvenile politics, and they won’t want any part of it. The Klikiss threat will make all loyal citizens draw together.”

  “Perhaps if you gave them another King, they would forget about Peter entirely,” Cain suggested. “When do you plan to introduce your new candidate? When will you show him to me?”

  “When it is time. At the moment, we need something different. Religion is the key, and for now the Archfather will fill a pivotal role.” He pointed out to the speaking podium in the Palace District Square. “Listen.”

  The Archfather delivered his speech like a true master, full of passion and fire. The audience, already primed with fear, was moved by his grand statements. “You have seen the images. Those creatures attacked us, stealing worlds that we have so painstakingly colonized. They are called the Klikiss.” He raised a fist. “But I call them demons! No truly faithful person needs a scientific explanation for an answer that is so obvious.”

  The people muttered, growled, cheered, or cried out.

  “I speak to give you hope, but first we must face an unpleasant reality. First you must understand why the demons have come. You see, we have brought this punishment upon ourselves. We have shunted aside our religion for secular concerns, paying more attention to business and politics than to God.”

  Basil smiled at the surprised expression on Cain’s face. “I thought that was a nice touch.”

  “First the hydrogues nearly destroyed us, but we defeated them. Then even our King and Queen turned against us, abandoned Earth and the Hansa—and as soon as they did so, the Klikiss returned.” He nodded sagely. “That is when we went astray. Peter continues to speak his poisonous words against the Chairman, against the Hansa—against all of you. He cannot be forgiven for that, and you will continue to pay the price if you listen to him.

  “The Klikiss demons have come as chastisement for our indiscretions. If we are to save ourselves, we must change our way of thinking. In the coming days, I will lay out a great plan for our survival. God punishes us only as a reminder of how we have disappointed Him. But as always, God is kind, and He shows us the path to redemption.”

  The people cheered. Basil was extremely satisfied. Cain, however, seemed perplexed. “But Unison has always been a very uncontroversial religion, so much a compromise of every faith that all of its power was drained away. I thought that was the original purpose behind forming it, to disarm fanatics and let us follow our business pursuits unhampered.”

  Basil pursed his lips. “At one time that was true, but Unison can no longer be a bland religion. Not in times like these. Under my guidance, this is just the first of many speeches the Archfather will deliver.”

  100 MARGARET COLICOS

  The flat, tinny melody played against a fugue of human screams. In the alien ruins to which she had retreated, Margaret sat looking out a tower opening. Her feet were curled under her as she huddled against the rough wall. She had tried her best, but she had known from the beginning that the colonists had no chance. Now even DD was gone, and she was completely alone among the monsters. Just like before.

  She had struggled to communicate with the breedex—shouting in their harsh scraping language, demanding that the Klikiss not harm the colonists, emphasizing that these people were her hive. She had drawn equations on the ground, played her music.

  But the breedex no longer heard her. Even her music box did little to impress the Klikiss. The hive mind meant to consume every human it had “stored” to foster a great fissioning. The hive needed to expand, to replenish the numbers it had lost in recent battles, including four of its eight domates. Margaret wondered how that would affect the fissioning. The Klikiss offspring would depend even more on the human attributes the hive mind meant to incorporate. She remembered the handful of Klikiss hybrids that had resulted from poor Howard Palawu’s assimilation.

  That wouldn’t save any of the colonists.

  Driven away from the battle, untouched by the mayhem, Margaret had watched Klikiss warriors recapture some escaping Roamers and drive them back into the boundaries of the camp. Laboring nonstop, multilegged workers circled the battleground, picking up human corpses and throwing them back into the stockade. When the domates fed, they could acquire what they needed from dead flesh as easily as from living victims.

  Bearers had brought dozens of grublike excreters to create resin-cement to seal the human survivors inside again. Very soon, the rebuilt stockade became a festering chamber of horrors. The people had been starved now for two days since the battle. Their water had been cut off. The solid walls were higher and smoother, with no openings, no chance for anyone to slip away.

  Either to spite the domates or express their grief, the survivors had gathered the corpses and piled them on bonfires, denying the breedex some DNA. Even from a distance, looking down from the Klikiss towers, Margaret could hear the captives howling. She was outside, safe, and completely miserable.

  She wound up the music box and played it again. She had learned the words of “Greensleeves” from Anton himself, had even taught them to Orli:

  Alas, my love, you do me wrong,

  To cast me off discourteously.

  For I have loved you well and long,

  Delighting in your company.

  At ground level, with a buzzing and unified movement, columns of Klikiss workers and warriors filed down out of towers, while others leaped from arched overhangs and flew out to the churned ground. Margaret’s stomach clenched. So the breedex had made its decision.

  Your vows you’ve broken, like my heart,

  Oh, why did you so enrapture me?

  Now I remain in a world apart

  But my heart remains in captivity.

  She let th
e music box wind down. How she missed Anton. How she longed for Louis to be here. She and her husband had done such a fine job of reconstructing the Klikiss Torch, using that alien weapon for what they had thought would be the good of the Hansa. A massively incorrect assumption.

  The four remaining domates lurched out of the Klikiss city. One of the striped creatures limped, and Margaret saw that two of its segmented limbs had been severed in the recent battle. The domates stalked ahead, their carapaces and spines polished. The workers had buffed and dressed the tiger-striped creatures for this grand procession.

  Flanked by warriors, the domates advanced purposefully toward the stockade wall. Inside the compound, standing on the highest rooftops of the town’s buildings, the captives saw them coming and let out a wild uproar. They hurled plascrete blocks, metal reinforcement beams, even heavy furniture, injuring a few loitering Klikiss scouts. The domates did not pause. They had their eyes on the immense genetic feast spread out before them.

  As a species, the Klikiss hated only other subhives and the black robots. Initially, humans had simply been an obstacle, a distraction . . . but now they were raw material. Shuddering, Margaret tried to retreat to a better place in her mind.

  As a xeno-archaeologist, she was accustomed to solitude. She and Louis had spent extended periods digging through haunted cities on empty planets, searching for scraps of long-forgotten history. She had particularly loved their first solo expedition to the pyramids of Mars. They had devoted years garnering the funding, living on a shoestring, calling in favors, taking out loans against everything they owned. She and Louis had set up a hab unit in a red canyon, scrounging every scrap of condensed air and water they could boil out of the Martian rocks and sand.

  The set of mysterious pyramids had first been detected on satellite mapping overflights of Mars, then imaged in greater detail from ground-based rovers. The pyramids were perfect tetrahedral structures towering more than two hundred meters above the canyon rim. Each angle was perfect. The sides must once have been polished mirror smooth, though signs of weathering were evident.

  The original images had caused an amazing stir on Earth. Humanity had barely ventured beyond their own solar system, had not yet encountered any other trace of an alien civilization. Thus the mystery of the Martian pyramids captivated everyone. Before any rigorous scientific research could be done at the site, however, an Ildiran warliner had come to Earth and stolen all the thunder, introducing the human race to the vast alien Empire. From that point on, few people had been interested in a dead old artifact of questionable origin.

  Margaret longed for the innocence of those exciting days. . . .

  Now the four domates rose up in front of the thick stockade walls. People on the other side shouted insults, screamed, or wailed. Worker insects applied a grayish paste to the walls, and all Klikiss backed away as the chemical oxidized in the air, reached thermal instability, and blasted the sealed resin walls inward, opening the way for the domates.

  Taken by surprise, the captives tried to retreat, backing into corners. When the smoke cleared, Klikiss workers raced forward on multiple legs, pulling away debris to make a passage for the domates. The striped Klikiss raised their sharp limbs, ready to feed.

  Again, Margaret sought shelter in memories. She forced her mind back to the days that she and Louis had spent at the Martian pyramids, wearing environment suits, combing the angled structures for any hint of alien language or extraterrestrial technology. They had used the best sensors and analytical devices they’d been able to afford, and had made leaps of intuition. They drilled core samples, sent echo-sounders to study the internal structure. They worked for weeks. And found nothing.

  In the end, they’d had no choice but to conclude that the famed Martian pyramids did not have an extraterrestrial origin, but were instead a one-in-a-million natural phenomenon of bizarre mineral growths. She and Louis had painstakingly compiled their data and posted their results for all to see. Louis in particular had been sad to strip the wonder from a landmark of the human imagination.

  That announcement had made Margaret and Louis Colicos famous, at the same time triggering an angry response among people who desperately wanted to believe in the mysterious alien presence. The Martian pyramids were still a geological wonder, built over countless centuries by the crystalline conversion actions of a rare colony bacteria. But that had not stopped the hue and cry. She and Louis had even received a few death threats. But they stood by their findings, simply pointing to the data. What else could they do? The truth was the truth, no matter how inconvenient or disappointing it might be. She had drawn strength from Louis, and he had stood by her. . . .

  Inside the stockade, the domates began their slaughter. They fell upon the trapped humans, systematically killing one after another. Though the people fought back, they had no chance at all. Klikiss warriors plunged through the gap in the wall, but they let the domates do most of the killing. It was their racial tradition.

  Margaret thought she could smell the blood from where she sat. The human cries of pain and fear merged into a single background tone that grated on the back of her skull. She closed her eyes.

  By the time of the Martian expedition, she and Louis had been married for only a year. Though day-to-day existence was hard and uncomfortable, those days had been like a real honeymoon for them—so peaceful and romantic. She and Louis had barely finished their work before the funding and supplies ran out, but Margaret hadn’t wanted to leave the red planet. It had been an accident, though probably inevitable, that they had conceived Anton there in the deep canyons on Mars. . . .

  High in the Klikiss tower, she wound the music box again. “Greensleeves.”

  Finally, all the screams from the compound ceased. She heard a last frantic wail from a few colonists whose careful boltholes had been discovered; then that too was cut off. Klikiss workers flooded into the compound and piled the bodies of their victims before the domates, who gorged themselves on all the new human DNA.

  101 TASIA TAMBLYN

  When the Osquivel finally reached Llaro, Tasia was glad to be coming as a liberator, for a change. Nikko Chan Tylar was ready to tar and feather those who had illegally imprisoned his parents. Robb was making plans to load the ship with up to a hundred Roamer detainees and anyone else who wanted to come along.

  As they arrived on a silent, low-angle approach vector, Tasia advised Robb on where the main settlement was. He altered course accordingly. “I’m sending an ID signal and announcing that we have no hostile intentions. Just in case.”

  “Shizz, you do that, you’ll be warning the Eddy crew down there.”

  “Come on, we’re not exactly a stealth craft. They must have orbital sensors to detect us regardless. Why not try to resolve this peacefully?”

  “Your optimism gives me cramps, Brindle.” Nevertheless, she knew the Eddy babysitters stationed on Llaro had to be strictly bottom-of-the-barrel recruits if General Lanyan hadn’t even needed them as cannon fodder against the drogues. She didn’t expect there’d be much in the way of shooting.

  Nikko leaned over the two pilot seats, squirming with anxiety. “Did you send a message telling my parents that I’m aboard? Have they answered? Has anyone responded at all?”

  Only a whisper of static came back. “No questions, no demands, no ‘happy to see you.’ Everybody must be playing hide-and-seek.” Tasia looked down, checking the coordinates. “That’s damned peculiar. The settlement and base should be right down there.”

  “We’re coming over the horizon now. We’ll be in view in just a few minutes.”

  As they flew over it, Tasia’s eyes drank in the details of what remained of the colony town. The permanent settlement and colorful temporary camps had been smashed flat, materials strewn about as if a tornado had hit; the croplands for miles around were burned or excavated. “Shizz, what the hell happened down there?”

  New termite-mound towers and lumpy structures had sprung up everywhere, and a large trapezoidal frame t
hat must have been a newly built transportal, stood out in the open. The Klikiss ruins were no longer ruins, but a full-fledged metropolis five times the size of the old towers she had seen on her first visit here. Dark forms like gigantic bugs moved about on the landscape. Some of the creatures climbed down from the alien towers; others took wing and flew.

  Tasia suddenly remembered a bizarre piece of news that the Mage-Imperator had sent via green priest to King Peter. “By the Guiding Star, those are the Klikiss! They came back to Llaro. They—”

  “They demolished the whole damn colony,” Robb cried. “That explains why nobody’s answering.”

  “I’d rather be facing the Eddy watchdogs.”

  Nikko gripped the back of the copilot’s chair to keep his balance. “We can’t assume everybody’s dead. We don’t know what happened. Maybe there are survivors. We have to check!”

  “Take a look and draw your own conclusions.”

  “No! We don’t know enough! Some people might have gotten away. A lot of them. We can’t just give up.”

  “I wasn’t giving up,” Tasia said. “Not yet. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to go ask those bugs what happened. They look too damned much like the black robots. And I’ve got issues with those things.”

  Robb leaned forward. “What’s that? Something shooting into the air.”

  Dozens of small boxy ships launched from the burned fields, heading toward the Osquivel. The ground was covered with the angular craft, and they took flight like wasps from a rattled nest. “Aw, hell, now they’re after us.”

  Robb was already turning them in a high-G loop. Tasia threw herself in front of the weapons controls.