Conquerors 3 - Conquerors' Legacy

by Timothy Zahn

  "Now what?" Cavanagh asked, shivering in the cool night air as he looked around them. The entire block of buildings had been constructed under a single roof, and aside from a couple dozen vent pipes poking up like defoliated shrubs, the rooftop stretched flat and open. No cover, no place to hide, and on all sides a sheer four-story drop to the streets below.

  "We find another stairway and get the hell out of here," Bronski said, peering across the roof. "Looks like another trapdoor over there." He started off in that direction -

  And suddenly, from behind them, came the high-pitched screech of tearing metal.

  Cavanagh spun around. The trapdoor they'd just come through had vanished, along with about half the metal framing that had attached it to the tarred-wood roofing material. Even as he watched, a huge Bhurtist hand came up through the opening and began ripping away at the rest of the framing.

  "Damn!" Bronski bit out, jamming his gun back under his jacket. "Come on."

  He headed off, but not in the direction of the trapdoor he'd pointed out. "What about the other stairs?" Cavanagh called, running after him.

  "We'll never get it open in time," Bronski called back over his shoulder.

  Cavanagh frowned. Near as he could tell, they were headed at a dead run straight toward one edge of the roof. "So what are we doing?"

  "This," Bronski said. Still running, he dropped into a half crouch and jumped -

  And caught hold of a tendril loop that hung a meter down from the main mesh of the Parra vine spanning the sky overhead.

  "Don't just stand there," the brigadier grunted, hauling himself up with some effort onto the tendril. "Come on."

  Grimacing, Cavanagh backed up a few steps, eyeing the vertical distance dubiously. But a quick survey showed that this was the only tendril over their roof that came even marginally within reach. If the alternative was to wait here for the Bhurtala... Taking a deep breath, he ran forward and jumped.

  He made it, just barely, getting his left hand and about half of his right on the tendril. "Use your momentum," Bronski instructed, catching his right wrist and pulling the hand into a more secure grip. "Swing your legs, arch your back, and pull. Come on, you must have seen gymnasts do this a hundred times."

  "I'm not a gymnast," Cavanagh gritted, swinging his legs as instructed and trying to remember exactly how the professionals did this. It always looked so smooth and quick and graceful that he'd never really noticed the technique.

  "No, you're going to be lunch," Bronski shot back. "Come on."

  Swallowing a curse, Cavanagh swung his knees up, arching his back and tugging with his arms -

  And suddenly he was there, teetering precariously on his chest on top of the vine, pumping his legs hard to try to maintain his balance. Bronski caught him under the right armpit and hauled, and a few seconds later he was up. "About time," the brigadier grunted. "Here they come."

  Cavanagh looked behind him. The entire metal framing of the trapdoor was gone, along with sizable chunks of the wood around it, and one of the Bhurtala was fighting to squeeze his massive shoulders through the freshly enlarged opening. "Can we get rid of this tendril somehow?" he asked as he and Bronski pulled themselves up onto the main Parra mesh.

  "Take too long to cut it," Bronski said, pulling out his flechette pistol and aiming at the tendril. "Let's try this instead."

  He fired three times. But the steel darts merely embedded themselves in the vine's tough outer surface without cutting it. "That should do it," Bronski said, putting the gun away again and carefully pulling himself to his feet. "Let's go."

  Cavanagh followed suit, wondering what all that had been about. Was Bronski hoping the embedded darts would cut into the hands of the Bhurtala when they tried to grab hold of it? "Where to?" he asked.

  "Let's start by getting away from here," Bronski said. "After that we'll figure out how to get down."

  They set off. From the ground the tendrils of the Parra vine's intertwined mesh looked fairly thin, even delicate. In fact they were reasonably thick and not delicate at all, most of them measuring a good six to ten centimeters in diameter, with the main supports twice that thick. Slightly flattened on top, they were quite adequate for a human being to walk along. And on a clear, sunny day, at ground level, Cavanagh wouldn't have thought twice about doing so.

  At night, five stories above the streets of Puerto Simone Island, it was terrifying.

  And they hadn't even gotten yet to where they were five stories over the streets.

  "Don't look down," Bronski kept saying as Cavanagh inched with painstaking care along the mesh. "Stick to the main support vines - they're thicker, and they have those outrigger branches coming off the sides you can use if you start losing your balance. And don't look down."

  It was stupid advice. Cavanagh had to look down if he wanted to see where he was going. Too tense even to swear, he kept going, fixing his eyes on the vine and trying hard to keep the rooftop below in hazy unfocus where he could almost forget how far down it was.

  They were nearly to the edge of the roof, with the deep chasm of the street gaping ahead and below, when a triumphant roar came from behind them.

  "Keep moving," Bronski ordered, pausing and turning carefully around to look.

  "They're on the roof?" Cavanagh demanded, too shaky to risk his balance by turning himself.

  "The first one is," Bronski said grimly, pulling out his flechette pistol. "Here he comes toward the tendril." The brigadier looked around them - "Hold it, Cavanagh - sit down right where you are. Sit down now,"

  There was an urgency in his voice that demanded instant obedience. Carefully, Cavanagh lowered himself into a squat; then, clenching his teeth, he let his legs slip off both sides of the vine, dropping down to land on his rear and stiffly outstretched hands. The jolt of the landing ran straight up his spine as his hands scrabbled for handholds on the short outrigger branches -

  And without warning he was suddenly enveloped by a screaming swarm of small brown grooma.

  "Bronski!" he shouted, ducking his head to his chest as the grooma darted across and past him, their claws tearing through his jacket into his arms and shoulders. One of the creatures slammed with exquisite pain into his right biceps, all but paralyzing that arm. Cavanagh squeezed his legs tightly around the vine, locking his ankles beneath it, hoping desperately he wouldn't roll over and wind up hanging upside down.

  And then, as suddenly as they had appeared, the creatures were gone. "What in the name of - ?"

  "I'll be damned," Bronski said. "It worked."

  Frowning, Cavanagh turned his head. The herd of grooma had gathered on the vine mesh directly above where all three Bhurtala were now standing, screaming and clawing viciously at the lead Bhurt as he struggled against their attacks to pull himself up by the hanging vine loop.

  The hanging vine loop that Bronski had fired three flechettes into, cutting into the Parra vine with sharp-edged metal, and sparking precisely this reaction from the vine and its grooma symbionts. "That's not going to hold them for long," Cavanagh said.

  "I know," Bronski said, already clambering carefully back to his feet. "Maybe it'll be long enough."

  Grimacing, Cavanagh eased one leg up -

  And dropped abruptly back into a sitting position as something tore through the outrigger branches and went whizzing past his ear.

  "Watch it!" Bronski snapped, flailing his arms for balance. "Stay down!"

  Cavanagh dropped his torso to the vine, wrapping his arms around it and looking back. The two Bhurtala still on the roof, not content to wait for their climbing partner to clear away the enraged grooma, were running across the rooftop toward the two humans, jagged pieces of something clutched in their huge hands. Even as Cavanagh watched, one of them hurled one of the pieces upward.

  This one came closer, ricocheting off the vine just behind where Cavanagh was sitting. "They're trying to knock us off," Bronski snarled. "Using pieces from the trapdoor."

  "What do we do?"

 
"You just hang on." Dropping into a crouch on the vine, Bronski swung his flechette pistol around and began firing.

  For all the effect, he might as well have been throwing snowballs. The jagged missiles kept coming, swishing through the leaves or bouncing painfully off his legs or arms. One piece caught Bronski square on the chest, and he flailed madly for a heart-stopping minute before he managed to regain his balance.

  And then, as abruptly as it had started, the barrage was over. Cautiously, Cavanagh leaned his head around the vine he was clinging to and looked down.

  One of the Bhurtala was loping back toward the ruined stairway entrance. The second was crouched down below them, digging with his hands at the edge of the roof.

  "He's ripping out pieces of wood," Bronski said quietly. "Getting more stuff to throw at us."

  And even if he didn't succeed, the Bhurt heading back to the stairway was bound to find more ammunition. And then the two of them would resume the aerial attack, keeping the two humans pinned down until their friend hanging from the vine cleared away the grooma and climbed up.

  At which point he and Bronski would be dead.

  Cavanagh swallowed, his mouth chalk dry, his pulse racing painfully in his throat. The aliens' scenario was vacuum clear, as inevitable and unstoppable as an incoming tide. And it left them with exactly one option. "Then we have to go right now," he said to Bronski, his voice shaking with dread. "And we have to run."

  "I know," Bronski said. Had probably known, in fact, long before Cavanagh had. "You think you're up to it?"

  From beneath them came the sudden crack of breaking wood. "Do I have a choice?" Cavanagh snarled back, unlocking his ankles from around the vine and shoving himself to his feet again. "Come on."

  He set off along the vine, his careful jogging pace quickly and inexplicably accelerating into a flat-out run as adrenaline or fatigued recklessness or sheer hubris flooded into him. Time seemed to slow to a crawl, his vision tunneling in to block out everything except the vine ahead, the strange madness ruthlessly crowding out any attempt by his rational mind to pause and think any of this through. Beneath his feet the rooftop dropped abruptly away to the lights and insectlike scurrying of pedestrians in the street below; behind him the sudden howling of their pursuers was grimly satisfying proof that they'd been caught off guard. A fresh pair of wooden chunks went spinning past, too late and far too wide of the mark. Cavanagh kept running, dimly noticing that his cheeks were hurting -

  "Hold it," a panting voice called. "Cavanagh - hold it."

  Cavanagh jerked, coming suddenly aware again of Bronski running beside him. Suddenly aware, too, that the ache in his cheeks was due to a wide, almost feral grin laminated across his face. "What?"

  "I said stop, damn it," Bronski growled, coming to a teetering halt and jabbing a finger downward. "Look - we're here."

  Cavanagh frowned, looking down. The street he'd last noticed himself running over was gone. In its place, barely two meters beneath his feet, was another roof. "Oh."

  "Oh?" Bronski puffed, easing into a crouch and sitting down on the vine. "Is that all you can say, oh? I yelled for you to stop a whole building ago."

  "You what?" Cavanagh blinked, sitting down on the vine and looking behind them. The brigadier was right: the rooftop directly behind them - a small roof, just beyond a narrow, dark alleyway - was indeed not the one they'd left from. That particular roof was one building farther back. "I'll be damned."

  "I thought for a minute you were going to run all the way to the spaceport," Bronski grunted. Getting a grip on one of the tendrils, he slid off the vine, hanging for a second before dropping the rest of the way. "Damnedest switchover I ever saw. I didn't know you Brits did this berserker rage thing."

  "Must be the Scandinavian blood in the family line," Cavanagh said, still not believing it as he followed the brigadier down onto the roof. "I don't think that's ever happened to me before."

  "Well, don't lose the cutting edge just yet," Bronski warned, working at the edge of a shiny square in the roof with a folding knife. "In case you hadn't noticed, the Bhurtala aren't just sitting there waiting for us to come back."

  Cavanagh looked around again. The grooma were still gathered around the damaged tendril, their chattering clearly audible over the city noise coming from below. But the Bhurtala themselves were nowhere in sight. "They must have gone back down to street level."

  "Brilliant deduction, Holmes." There was a soft click, and Bronski pulled up the trapdoor. "If we're lucky, maybe they left before they saw which building we wound up on. Let's go."

  No one was waiting for them as they emerged from the stairway onto a deserted side street. "Any idea where we are?" Cavanagh asked, looking around. Two blocks ahead he could see one of the more brightly lit major arteries, though even at their distance it was clear that the earlier crush of pedestrian traffic still hadn't resumed.

  "Bokamba's place is about a block that way, I think," Bronski said, pointing in a direction roughly parallel to the main street. "The Puerto Simone street system is an inhumane joke, but I think if we go this way, we'll hit a tram line that'll get us to the spaceport."

  "I hope it's not far," Cavanagh said, rubbing his sleeve at the sticky sweat around his neck. His berserker rage, as Bronski called it, had worn off on the walk down the stairway, leaving him a throbbing collection of sore joints, exhausted muscles, and aching bruises where the grooma and the Bhurtala's wooden missiles had struck him. "I don't think I could walk more than another - "

  And from behind them came an all-too-familiar roar.

  Cavanagh spun around. A block away, in the gloom of the side street, stood the dark figure of a Bhurt, its arms raised in triumph. It howled again, this time in a call of summons.

  "Come on," Bronski snapped, slapping Cavanagh's shoulder for emphasis and taking off in the opposite direction.

  "We can't outrun them," Cavanagh protested as he broke into a sprint, his aches and exhaustion pushed to the background by a fresh surge of adrenaline.

  "You're welcome to surrender," Bronski shot back.

  Cavanagh bit off a curse, glancing back over his shoulder. The Bhurt's summons had been answered: all three of the aliens were visible now, running side by side, their short, thick legs pumping rhythmically against the paving stones. In a straight run Bhurtist strength and stamina would eventually win out over almost any human opponent. The recommended counterstrategy, Cavanagh remembered reading, was to use the aliens' greater mass and inertia against them, changing direction as often as possible to limit the pursuers' ability to build up speed. In the middle of a city, though, with changes of direction defined by the layout of the streets, that wasn't going to be easy to do. Cavanagh glanced over his shoulder again -

  His pounding heart seemed to freeze. Behind the three Bhurtala, moving silently and without lights, the shadowy shape of a groundcar had joined in the chase. This time, clearly, the Mrachanis were going to make sure their quarry didn't slip through their client aliens' fingers. "Bronski - look - "

  He never finished the warning. His toe caught the edge of a loose paving stone, and the ground rushed up and slammed hard into his chest and outstretched hands.

  For a handful of heartbeats he lay there, his head spinning, his whole body seemingly paralyzed as his lungs struggled to retrieve the air that the impact had knocked out of him. With a supreme effort he pushed up with one arm, half turning over. The Bhurtala were still there, still coming -

  And then Bronski was beside him, his hands grabbing under Cavanagh's armpits. "Get up," the brigadier panted, hauling him halfway to his feet. "Get up, damn it."

  But there's no reason to, Cavanagh tried to say. There's no hope. But his throat was as paralyzed as the rest of him. He tried to raise an arm, to point at the oncoming Bhurtala and the groundcar pacing along behind them. But the arm, too, was paralyzed, and dropped to his side with the warning undelivered. The aliens were less than half a block away, legs pumping harder as they closed in for the kill....
/>   And suddenly, with a squeal of tires, the groundcar leaped forward, its lights blazing to life. The charging Bhurtala faltered, their silhouettes turning to look behind them -

  And with a horrendous crash the vehicle slammed into the three aliens, scattering them like broken dolls through the air to land with sickening thuds on the paving stones. They skidded or rolled across the ground for another second, then lay still.

  "See?" Bronski murmured as the groundcar coasted to a stop in front of them. "I told you not to count him out."

  The vehicle's lights flicked off, and the driver leaned his head out the side window. "You all right, sir?"

  Cavanagh smiled tightly. "I'm fine, Kolchin," he croaked, wobbling toward the groundcar. His muscles and joints still ached, and his chest now felt as if it were a single massive bruise. But suddenly none of it mattered. "I'm just fine."

  Piltariab was waiting for them just inside the door to Bokamba's house. "Ah - Moo Sab Plex," he said to Kolchin, a puff of chlorinated coffee mingling with the scent of burned bread. "I'm highly relieved to see you back."

  "I told you I'd have no trouble," Kolchin said as the Avuire stood to the side to let the three humans in. "But thank you for your concern. Have our guests behaved themselves?"

  "They have created nu further truble," Mitliriab said darkly from an open doorway at the end of the entrance hall. Cavanagh sniffed, caught the same unidentified odor that he'd noticed on their earlier walk from the docks. "Is this the human yu spuke uf, Mu Sab Plex?"

  "Yes," Kolchin said, touching Bronski's shoulder. "This is Assistant Commonwealth Liaison Petr Bronski."

  Mitliriab's gaze shifted to Bronski. "I salute yu, Liaisun Brunski," he said. "I have a crime tu repurt tu the Human Cummunwealth. Wuld yu cume inside."