Pinkh felt a leap of pleasure. This was the final strike. It was preamble to peace. A suicide mission; he ran eleven thankfulness prayers through his mind. It was the dawn of a new day for Montag and Thil. The Lords of Propriety were good. The Lords held all cupped in their holiness.
Yet he had thought the unthinkable.
“You will be under the direct linkage of Subaltern Pinkh,” the briefing officer said again. Then, kneeling and passing down the rows of sappers, he palmed good death with honor to each of them. When he reached Pinkh, he stared at him balefully for a long instant, as though wanting to speak. But the moment passed, he rose, and left the chamber.
They went into small groups with the sortie leaders and examined the target-cubes. Pinkh went directly to the briefing officer’s cubicle and waited patiently till the older Montagasque’s prayers were completed.
When his eye cleared, he stared at Pinkh.
“A path through the labyrinth has been cleared.”
“What will we be using?”
“Reclaimed sortie craft. They have all been outfitted with diversionary equipment.”
“Linkage level?”
“They tell me a high six.”
“They tell you?” He regretted the tone even as he spoke.
The briefing officer looked surprised. As if his desk had coughed. He did not speak, but stared at Pinkh with the same baleful stare the Subaltern had seen before.
“Recite your catechism,” the briefing officer said, finally.
Pinkh settled back slowly on his haunches, ponderous weight downdropping with grace. Then:
’Free flowing, free flowing, all flows
“From the Lords, all free, all fullness,
“Flowing from the Lords.
“What will I do
“What will I do
“What will I do without my Lords?
“Honor in the dying, rest is honor, all honor
“From the Lords, all rest, all honoring.
“To honor my Lords.
“This I will do
“This I will do
“I will live when I die for my Lords.”
And it was between the First and Second Sacredness that the darkness came to Pinkh. He saw the briefing officer come toward him, reach a great palm toward him, and there was darkness . . . the same sort of darkness from which he had risen in his own cubicle before the briefing. Yet, not the same. That darkness had been total, endless, with the feeling that he was . . . somehow . . . larger . . . greater . . . as big as all space . . .
And this darkness was like being turned off. He could not think, could not even think that he was unthinking. He was cold, and not there. Simply: not there.
Then, as if it had not happened, he was back in the briefing officer’s cubicle, the great bearlike shape was moving back from him, and he was reciting the Second Sacredness of his catechism.
What had happened . . . he did not know.
“Here are your course coordinates,” the briefing officer said. He extracted the spool from his pouch and gave it to Pinkh. The subaltern marveled again at how old the briefing officer must be: the hair of his chest was almost gray.
“Sir,” Pinkh began. Then stopped. The briefing officer raised a palm. “I understand, Subaltern. Even to the most reverent among us there come moments of confusion.” Pinkh smiled. He did understand.
“Lords,” Pinkh said, palming the briefing officer with fullness and propriety.
“Lords,” he replied, palming honor in the dying.
Pinkh left the briefing officer’s cubicle and went to his own place.
As soon as he was certain the subaltern was gone, the briefing officer, who was very old, linked-up with someone else, far away; and he told him things.
3
First, they melted the gelatin around him. It was hardly gelatin, but it had come to be called jell by the sappers, and the word had stuck. As the gelatin stuck. Face protected, he lay in the ten troughs, in sequence, deliquescing the gelatinous substance around him. Finally, pincers that had been carefully padded lifted him from the tenth trough, and slid him along the track to his sortie craft. Once inside pilot country, stretched out face down, he felt two hundred wires insert themselves into the jell, into the fur, into his body. The brain-wires were the last to fix. As each wire hissed from its spool and locked onto the skull-contacts, Pinkh felt himself merge more completely, integrate fully, a little more integration with the craft. At last, the final wire ran in like hot ice, and Pinkh was metalflesh, bulkheadskin, eyescanners, bonerivets, plasticartilege, artery/ventricle/instep/neuron/capacitors/molecules/transistors,
BEASTC
C R
R i A
A F
F T
TBEAST
all of him as one, totality, metal-man, furred-vessel, essence of mechanism, soul of inanimate, life in force-drive, linkage of mind with power plant. Pinkh the ship. Sortie Craft 90 named Pinkh.
And the others: linked to him.
Seventy sappers, each encased in jell, each wired up, each a mind to its sortie craft. Seventy, linked in telepathically with Pinkh, and Pinkh linked into his own craft, and all of them instrumentalities of the Lord of Propriety.
The great carrier wing that bore them made escape orbit and winked out of normal space.
Here •Not Here.
In an instant gone.
(Gone where!?!)
Inverspace.
Through the gully of inverspace to wink into existence once again at the outermost edge of the Thil labyrinth.
Not Here •Here.
Confronting a fortified tundra of space crisscrossed by deadly lines of force. A cosmic fireworks display. A cat’s cradle of vanishing, appearing and disappearing threads of a million colors; each one receptive to all the others. Cross one, break one, interpose . . . and suddenly uncountable others home in. Deadly ones. Seeking ones. Stunners and drainers and leakers and burners. The Thil labyrinth.
Seventy-one sortie craft hung quivering – the last of the inverspace coronas trembling off and gone. Through the tracery of force-lines the million stars of the Thil Galaxy burned with the quiet reserve of ice crystals. And there, in the center, the Nebula Cluster. And there, in the center of the Cluster, Groundworld.
” Link in with me.”
Pinkh’s command fled and found them. Seventy beastcraft tastes, sounds, scents, touches came back to Pinkh. His sappers were linked in.
“A path has been cleared through the labyrinth for us. Follow. And trust. Honor.”
“In the dying,” came back the response, from seventy minds of flesh-and-metal.
They moved forward. Strung out like fish of metal with minds linked by thought, they surged forward following the lead craft. Into the labyrinth. Color burned and boiled past, silently sizzling in the vacuum. Pinkh detected murmurs of panic, quelled them with a damping thought of his own. Images of the still pools of Dusnadare, of deep sighs after a full meal, of Lord-worship during the days of First Fullness. Trembling back to him, their minds quieted. And the color beams whipped past on all sides, without up or down or distance. But never touching them.
Time had no meaning. Fused into flesh/metal, the sortie craft followed the secret path that had been cleared for them through the impenetrable labyrinth.
Pinkh had one vagrant thought: Who cleared this for us?
And a voice from somewhere far away, a voice that was his own, yet someone else’s – the voice of a someone who called himself a bailey – said, That’s it! Keep thinking what they don’t want you to think.
But he put the thoughts from him, and time wearied itself and succumbed, and finally they were there. In the exact heart of the Nebula Cluster in Thil Galaxy.
Groundworld lay fifth from the source star, the home sun that had nurtured the powerful Thil race till it could explode outward.
“Link in to the sixth power,” Pinkh commanded.
They linked. He spent some moments reinforcing his com-mand splices, ma
king the interties foolproof and trigger-responsive. Then he made a prayer, and they went in.
Why am I locking them in so close, Pinkh wondered, damping the thought before it could pass along the lines to his sappers. What am I trying to conceal? Why do I need such repressive control? What am I trying to avert?
Pinkh’s skull thundered with pain. Two minds were at war inside him, he knew that. He SUDDENLY knew it.
Who is that?
It’s me, you clown!
Get out! I’m on a mission . . . it’s import –
It’s a fraud! They’ve prog –
Get out of my head listen to me you idiot I’m trying to tell you something you need to know I won’t listen I’ll override you I’ll block you I’ll damp you no listen don’t do that I’ve been someplace you haven’t been and I can tell you about the Lords oh this can’t be happening to me not to me I’m a devout man fuck that garbage listen to me they lost you man they lost you to a soul stealer and they had to get you back because you were their specially programmed killer they want you to Lord oh Lord of Propriety hear me now hear me your most devout worshipper forgive these blasphemous thoughts I can’t control you any more you idiot I’m fading fading fading Lord oh Lord hear me I wish only to serve you. Only to suffer the honor in the dying.
Peace through death. I am the instrumentality of the Lords. I know what I must do.
That’s what I’m trying to tell you . . .
And then he was gone in the mire at the bottom of Pinkh’s mind. They were going in.
They came down, straight down past the seven moons, broke through the cloud cover, leveled out in a delta wing formation and streaked toward the larger of the two continents that formed ninety per cent of Groundworld’s land mass. Pinkh kept them at supersonic speed, blurring, and drove a thought out to his sappers: “We’ll drop straight down below a thousand feet and give them the shock wave. Hold till I tell you to level off.”
They were passing over a string of islands – causeway-linked beads in a pea-green sea – each one covered from shore to shore with teeming housing dorms that commuted their residents to the main continents and the complexes of high-rise bureaucratic towers.
“Dive!” Pinkh ordered.
The formation angled sharply forward, as though it was hung on puppet strings, then fell straight down.
The metalflesh of Pinkh’s ship-hide began to heat.
Overlapping armadillo plates groaned; Pinkh pushed their speed; force-bead mountings lubricated themselves, went dry, lubricated again; they dropped down; follicle thin fissures were grooved in the bubble surfaces; sappers began to register fear, Pinkh locked them tighter; instruments coded off the far right and refused to register; the island-chain flew up toward them; pressure in the gelatin trough flattened them with g’s; now there was enough atmosphere to scream past their sortie craft and it whistled, shrilled, howled, built and climbed; gimbal-tracks rasped in their mountings; down and down they plunged, seemingly bent on thundering into the islands of Groundworld; “Sir! Si “Hold steady, not yet. . .not yet . . . I’ll tell you when . . . not yet . . .”
Pushing an enormous bubble of pressurized air before them, the delta wing formation wailed straight down toward the specks of islands that became dots, became buttons, became masses, became everything as they rushed up and filled the bubble sights from side to side –
“Level out! Now! Do it, do it, level now!”
And they pulled out, leveled off and shot away. The bubble of air, enormous, solid as an asteroid, thundering down unchecked . . . hit struck burst broke with devastating results. Pinkh’s sortie craft plunged away, and in their wake they left exploding cities, great structures erupting, others trembling, shuddering, then caving in on themselves. The shock wave hit and spread outward from shore to shore. Mountains of plasteel and lathite volcano’d in blossoms of flame and flesh. The blast-pit created by the air bubble struck to the core of the island-chain. A tidal wave rose like some prehistoric leviathan and boiled over one entire spot of land. Another island broke up and sank almost at once. Fire and walls of plasteel crushed and destroyed after the shock wave.
The residence islands were leveled as Pinkh’s sortie craft vanished over the horizon, still traveling at supersonic speed.
They passed beyond the island-chain, leaving in their wake dust and death, death and ruin, ruin and fire.
“Through death to peace,” Pinkh sent.
“Honor,” they responded, as one.
(Far away on Groundworld, a traitor smiled.)
(In a Maze, a Lord sat with antennae twined, waiting.)
(Flesh and metal eased.)
(In ruins, a baby whose exoskeleton had been crushed, crawled toward the pulsing innards of its mother.)
(Seven moons swung in their orbits.)
(A briefing officer on Montag knew it was full, golden.)
Oh, Lords, what I have done, I have done for you.
Wake up. Will you wake up, Pinkh! The mission is—
The other thing, the bailey, was wrenching at him, poking its head up out of the slime. He thrust it back down firmly. And made a prayer.
“Sir,” the thought of one of his sappers came back along the intertie line, “did you say something?”
“Nothing,” Pinkh said. “Keep in formation.”
He locked them in even tighter, screwing them down with mental shackles till they gasped.
The pressure was building.
A six-power linkup, and the pressure was building.
I am a hero, Pinkh thought, I can do it.
Then they were flashing across the Greater Ocean and it blurred into an endless carpet of thick heaving green; Pinkh felt sick watching it whip by beneath him; he went deeper into ship and the vessel felt no sickness. He fed the stability of his nausea-submerged, helpfully, along the neural interstices.
They were met by the Thil inner defense line over empty ocean. First came the sea-breathers but they fell short when Pinkh ordered his covey to lift for three thousand feet. They leveled off just as the beaks swooped down in their land-to-sea parabolas. Two of them snouted and perceived the range, even as they were viciously beamed into their component parts by Pinkh’s outermost sappers. But they’d already fed back the trajectories, and suddenly the sky above them was black with the blackmetal bodies of beaks, flapping, dropping, squalling as they cascaded into the center of the formation. Pinkh felt sappers vanish from the lineup and fed the unused power along other lines, pulling the survivors tighter under his control. “Form a sweep,” he commanded.
The formation re-grouped and rolled in a graceful gull-wing maneuver that brought them craft-to-craft in a fan. “Plus!” Pinkh ordered, cutting in – with a thought – the imploding beam. The beams of each sortie craft fanned out, overlapping, making an impenetrable wall of deadly force. The beaks came whirling back up and careened across the formation’s path. Creatures of metal and mindlessness. Wheels and carapaces. Blackness and berserk rage. Hundreds. Entire eyries.
When they struck the soft pink fan of the overlapping implosion beams, they whoofed in on themselves, dropped instantly.
The formation surged forward.
Then they were over the main continent. Rising from the exact center was the gigantic mountain atop which the Thil Lord of Propriety lived in his Maze.
“Attack! Targets of opportunity!” Pinkh commanded, sending impelling power along the linkup. His metal hide itched. His eyeball sensors watered. In they went, again.
“Do not strike at the Lord’s Maze,” one of the sappers thought.
AND PINKH
THREW UP!!
A WALL OF!
THOUGHT!!!
THAT DREW
THE !!!!!!!!!!!!
THOUGHT!!!
OFF THE!!!!!..................ezam s‘drol eht ta ekirts ton od
LINKUP SO
IT DID!!!!!!!!
NOT REACH
THE OTHER
SAPPERS!!!!
BUT HIT!!!!!!
&nb
sp; THE WALL!!
AND BROKE
LIKE FOAM!
The words reverberated in Pinkh’s head as his sortie craft followed him in a tight wedge, straight for the Maze of the Lord.
“I – no, I—” Pinkh could not force thoughts out to his sappers. He was snapped shut. His mind was aching, the sound of straining and creaking, the buildings on the island-chain ready to crumble. Bailey inside, Pinkh inside, the programming of the Lords inside . . . all of them pulling at the fiber of Pinkh’s mind.
For an instant the programming took precedence. “New directives. Override previous orders. Follow me in!”
They dove straight for the Maze.
No, Pinkh, fight it! Fight it and pull out. I’ll show you where they’re hiding. You can end this war!
The programming phasing was interrupted, Pinkh abruptly opened his great golden eye, his mind synched in even more tightly with his ship, and at that instant he knew the voice in his head was telling him the truth. He remembered:
Remembered the endless sessions.
Remembered the conditioning.
Remembered the programming.
Knew he had been duped.
Knew he was not a hero.
Knew he had to pull out of this dive.
Knew that at last he could bring peace to both galaxies.
He started to think pull out, override and fire it down the remaining linkup interties . . .
And the Lords of Propriety, who left very little to chance, who had followed Pinkh all the way, contacted the Succubus, complained of the merchandise they had bought, demanded it be returned . . .
Bailey’s soul was wrenched from the body of Pinkh. The subaltern’s body went rigid inside its jell trough, and, soulless, empty, rigid, the sortie craft plunged into the mountaintop where the empty Maze stood. It was followed by the rest of the sortie craft.
The mountain itself erupted in a geysering pillar of flame and rock and plasteel.
One hundred years of war was only the beginning.
The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction Page 44
