“How do I know you speak with authority?”
“You don’t. But I name you a Silfen friend, Ozzie Fernandez Isaac.” He held up a pendant identical to Orion’s. “You have the freedom of the paths. Go where you will with our blessing. If you think I’m just a lying son of a bitch, seek those who you know will speak the truth.”
Ozzie stared at the pendant, almost ready to throw it back at Clouddancer. That’s what Orion would have done with all his magnificent teenage fury. But then this whole event was being staged for his benefit, not Orion’s; telling him what he wanted to know even if it wasn’t what he wanted to hear. The pendant was obviously the culmination of that; it was significant in some way even if he couldn’t see how yet. “Thank you, Clouddancer,” he said formally, and accepted the pendant with a small bow.
When he put the chain around his neck, his vision was momentarily wiped out by a foggy emerald sparkle. It was as if every sense were stretched raw. The feel of the air blowing on his exposed skin scraping hard enough to bruise, the heat of the sun threatening to singe his raggedy hair, sound of rustling leaves the cacophony of an orchestra. He could smell the scent of every berry and flower on the reef combining together like volcanic sulphur. And in his mind he sensed the thoughts of the Silfen Motherholme all around him, an immense realm of life whose size alone brought complete comfort to any entity it touched. A size that surely made it invincible. It pervaded the gas halo, twisting through the physical and biological elements like a nuclear spiritual force. Intangible connections slipped away through the smallest interstices of spacetime binding the Silfen wherever they roamed through the universe. A family that surpassed any possible human dream of connectivity and love.
Ozzie envied them for that. But for all the sense of belonging the Motherholme exuded, it was alien. The Silfen really wouldn’t help humans in their struggle against the Dysons. They didn’t see that as a flaw in their character. It was correct, essential, because that was how the universe functioned.
“Wow.” Ozzie was glad he was sitting. The emotional impact wasn’t quite as great as when he’d looked into the memory of the world that had died. Even so, it was a glimpse into a heaven that was achingly beautiful despite its imperfections.
The moment passed, though he would know it forever.
Clouddancer was staring at him, slim face held straight with cheek muscles slightly dimpled, mouth half widened, tongue stilled, an expression Ozzie knew was one of compassion and sadness. “One day,” he promised the alien, “we will forge a bridge across that gulf between our hearts.”
“I will embrace you that day, friend Ozzie.” Clouddancer turned to Orion, who had slipped back into his usual petulance. “So long, kid. I hope you find your mom and dad.”
Ozzie could just see the insolence about to find its way through the boy’s mouth. “Be big, man,” he told the boy. “Nobody’s perfect.”
“Sure,” Orion grunted with a textbook teenage shrug. “Thanks for letting me know about my parents, anyway.”
“Easy.” Clouddancer turned to Tochee. His eyes sparkled with ultraviolet light. The big alien answered in kind.
“I have to go,” Clouddancer said. “There’s a long wind coming. I need to stretch my wings.”
“Have fun, dude,” Ozzie said.
The Silfen walked back to the forest.
Ozzie looked at Tochee, who had aligned its eye on the forest where Clouddancer had gone. “You okay?”
“It had the same shape as you. But it was very different.”
“Yeah. I’m just beginning to realize that myself.”
“So now what do we do?” Orion asked.
“Get back to the shelter, gather some food, and darn my socks.”
“Why?”
“Because tomorrow we’re out of here.”
***
Morton was scouting on the lower ridges that made up the eastern edge of the Regents, high above the Trine’ba. It was drizzling again, icy droplets making the moldering boltgrass treacherous underfoot even for his armor suit with its terrain-adaptive boot soles. His sneekbot swarm scuttled around him in a wide perimeter line, searching for any traces of the Primes. They’d seen increased activity in this area recently, more overflights, and several troop patrols. Not even the Bose motile was sure why. There was nothing here. Nothing could be built on the sharp ridges and long talus falls. No crops would grow on the poor, saturated soil.
“Can’t find a bloody thing,” he said. “If they’ve planted any sensors around here they’re too advanced for us to find.”
“I don’t believe that for a minute,” Rob answered. “Their electronics are still back in the stone age. I’m just about finished myself. I’ll meet you back at the rendezvous point.”
“Gotcha.” Morton’s virtual vision map showed him Rob’s icon positioned on the high ground above the fused-glass crater where Randtown used to be. Not far, in fact, from the clapboard house where they’d found the Bose motile.
The small green glow that indicated the Cat’s position was coming from the back of the valley along the side of Blackwater Crag. MorningLightMountain was still using it as its main transport route back into the wider valleys. Motiles were preparing a lot of ground for cultivation, plowing up the sodden human fields and acres of virgin boltgrass on the foothills. There weren’t many Prime-life plants that grew in such a climate, so the Bose motile claimed. The fields that had been sown earlier in the invasion had produced the most feeble-looking shoots. A big percentage had drowned in the waterlogged furrows. A plague of Elan native tal-fungi had spread over the remaining shoots, furry milk-white blooms erupting along the limp leaves.
The Cat was supposed to be cataloguing the tractor-vehicles that MorningLightMountain was using to spray the newly prepared land with fungicide. Over the last few weeks, a vast pharmacy of venomous chemicals had been spread across the land by an army of Prime agricultural machinery. Simon Rand had analyzed the samples they’d collected, and announced that the fungicide would be of limited use against tal-fungi. The pesticides, also, would have little effect on Elan’s insects.
“I can see foundations going in at the end of the Highmarsh,” the Cat announced. “From the look of the equipment they’ve got piled up waiting, I’d say some kind of chemical plant. Makes sense; they’re importing a hell of a lot of chemicals. Cheaper to produce them on-site.”
Cat’s Claws had watched through sensors and sneekbots as the big tanks full of toxic agricultural chemicals arrived through the gateway that MorningLightMountain had established in its new settlement a mere two kilometers along the shoreline from the radioactive hollow where their nuke had detonated. The construction had begun while they were still celebrating their success. Fusion drive ships had descended out of the sky once again, bringing a huge number of soldier motiles and their flyers. MorningLightMountain simply repeated its initial landing operation, establishing an armed camp, then putting up a force field. Inside that a wormhole gateway was constructed, industrial machinery was assembled, big power generators brought through. Roads were bulldozed between the new hub and the route around Blackwater Crag. Inside a week, its operation was the same size as before, with the one difference: its garrison of soldier motiles was four times greater. Congregation pens were built out into the waters of the Trine’ba, and a replacement refinery once more began pumping out the thick black liquid that was saturated with base cells. At which point, the Prime resumed its agricultural operations.
That was what MorningLightMountain did, the Bose motile explained. That was all it did: expand.
“How far?” Morton had asked.
“Infinite,” the Bose motile said. “Think of it as a sentient virus. It has a continuity which goes back to its evolutionary origins, possibly even before. All the Primes ever did was grow and compete against each other. Now this one has achieved total dominance, eradicating the rest of its kind, though in truth there was never much difference between them. You ask why it does this, it wouldn’t even under
stand the question. It is growth.”
After the beautiful success of wiping out Randtown, the truth had brought them down hard. Ever since, they’d performed low-level acts of sabotage, kept the survivors alive, and kept quiet about the Bose motile in their reports to the navy. Mellanie’s messages kept promising she was trying to get them off, but so far she hadn’t managed to give them a time frame. Rob was getting very antsy about that.
“Is there a force field around the foundations?” Morton asked the Cat.
“No. But there are a lot of soldier motiles stationed down there. I count sixteen flyers patrolling above it. Wait…that’s strange.”
“What’s happening?” Morton asked.
“The flyers. They’re stationary. They’re just hovering.”
“I’ve got that, too,” Rob said. “The bastards came to a full stop. Why would they do that?”
Morton looked along the shore of the Trine’ba toward the new Prime settlement. The cloud base was scudding low over the water as it always did these days. Sheet lightning flickered through the bulbous underbelly over toward the invisible southern shore, with the odd rumble of accompanying thunder echoing around the surrounding mountains. The lake itself was dying. Fusion fire from the ships and the base cell pollution had finally killed off the delicate unique ecology. Dead fish floated on the surface, their rotting bodies sticking together to form large mats of putrefying gray flesh. Underneath them, the lifeless coral was slowly decaying, producing a dank scum that washed up on the shore to form fizzing dunes of thick umber bubbles.
Flyers were constantly in the air above the desolate lake, circling around the shore in search of any hostile activity, and keeping the land around the force field under constant observation. MorningLightMountain usually had at least sixteen on patrol at any one time. This morning, there were twenty. Now, Morton couldn’t see one of them moving. Their force fields were on, their engine exhausts rotated to the vertical position.
“Motiles are stationary as well,” Rob said. There was a worried edge to his voice. “Shit, that’s spooky. They’re just standing there. Even the soldiers.”
Morton’s virtual hand touched a communications icon. “Simon, what’s the Bose motile doing?”
“Dudley is fine. Nothing wrong.”
Morton manipulated his communications icons to give him a direct link to the Bose motile. “Something is happening out here. All the motiles have frozen.”
“I don’t know why. The only reason they have for doing anything is that’s what they’ve been ordered to do.”
Morton used his suit’s electromagnetic sensors to sweep the bands that MorningLightMountain employed. The alien’s signal traffic had dropped to about ten percent of normal. “Hang on, I’m going to patch you in to what it’s saying. Tell me what you can.” His virtual hands routed the sensor reception into the link. He didn’t like exposing the Bose motile to the Prime communications. None of them were sure if MorningLightMountain would be able to move the motile around as if it were just another of its puppets. There was absolutely no way they could ever confirm the story that the Bose motile was telling them, either, though Morton suspected it was true. As a precaution, they’d agreed it should be isolated from all Prime communications. This was a justifiable exception, he felt.
“Oh, Christ,” the Bose motile said.
“What?” the Cat asked.
“MorningLightMountain has launched another invasion into the Commonwealth. It’s using something called corona-rupture bombs against our stars. We’ve got a superbomb of our own, which can knock them out, but that only makes the radiation spillage even worse.”
“Is that why they’ve all stopped? Is it concentrating on the invasion?”
“No. One of our ships has got through to the staging post star. It fired something into the star which…Oh. The destruction is enormous. MorningLightMountain is losing all its magflux extractors. Wormholes shutting down. The one into the Trine’ba settlement is gone. Its local group clusters are having to maintain contact through a wormhole in orbit. I don’t understand what we did to the staging post star. Surely—My God, it’s going nova. We triggered a nova! Nothing will survive. It only has minutes left.”
“Ye-hay! We killed it?” the Cat asked.
“The staging post, yes,” the Bose motile replied. “All the wormhole generators leading into the Commonwealth will vanish.”
“So we’ve won?”
“The invasion has been halted. MorningLightMountain still exists. As does the generator for the interstellar wormhole. This is not good. It now sees humans as a very real and immediate danger to its continued existence.”
“But it’s got to realize that if it attacks us again, we can wipe it out completely,” Rob said. “It’s not stupid.”
“No, it isn’t,” the Bose motile said. “Nor is it reasonable and open to negotiation as a human would be at this point. I’m not sure we did the right thing, though I admit I don’t see an alternative.”
“We can turn stars nova.” There was a trill of admiration in the Cat’s voice. “How wonderful.”
“The navy will need to do it to Dyson Alpha now,” Morton said. “That’s the only solution left to us.”
“Go, Navy!” Rob shouted.
“Here it comes,” the Bose motile said. “I can see the light growing. The radiation is reaching the staging post itself. MorningLightMountain is withdrawing the interstellar wormhole. All remaining wormholes are gone.”
Morton turned his attention back to the flyers hovering above the Trine’ba. They were holding steady. Prime signal traffic was almost nonexistent. “What are the immotiles it left behind going to do?”
“I’m not sure,” the Bose motile said. “All the immotiles are independent again. For the moment they’re unified copies of MorningLightMountain, but that won’t last. They’ll revert to autonomy, and try to carve themselves territories. Those on the ground will make alliances with the groups that control the big lander ships.”
“Will they fight among themselves?” Simon asked hopefully.
“Not for centuries,” the Bose motile said. “They occupy a lot of territory; there is no need to compete for a long time. But this is assuming the Commonwealth allows them to grow in the Lost23 systems.”
“That won’t happen,” Morton said. “We’ll probably be withdrawn, and they’ll nova the stars.”
“That is inadvisable,” the Bose motile said. “The radiation which novas release can quite easily sterilize all life on neighboring star systems. You’d wipe out this whole section of the Commonwealth.”
“Who gives a shit about details?” Rob said. “We can win. The immotiles left behind can be wiped out one at a time while we whack MorningLightMountain on its home star.”
“The remaining immotiles still present a formidable force,” the Bose motile said. “They have thousands of ships and several wormhole generators remaining in the Lost23 systems. They will probably seek to move beyond human reach.”
“None of this affects us,” Morton said. “All we have to worry about for now is how the local boys react. Any clues on that yet?” As he spoke, he saw the flyers moving again. They were all heading back toward the force field.
“The local immotiles are agreeing to cooperate, and remain linked into a group cluster. Without the supply route to Dyson Alpha, all expansion of existing operations will cease. They will concentrate their resources on strengthening their border against any assaults you make, and from any navy bombardment. Communications will be resumed with the other groups and clusters on Elan to decide what to do. It will mainly depend on what action the Commonwealth takes against them.”
“We should find that out soon enough. The next wormhole communication is scheduled for seven hours’ time.”
“They’ll take us home,” Rob declared. “There’s no point to all this sabotage bull when you can wipe out entire stars. How about that? Home free. And we didn’t spend half the time they threatened us with.”
�
��Home free?” the Cat asked sweetly. “So how exactly were you thinking of explaining why we’ve held on to our version of Dudley?”
“Shit!”
Morton watched Rob’s blue icon change to amber as he switched to a secure encrypted channel.
“Morton, you’ve got to think of some way to square that with the navy. Maybe just leave it here and pretend nothing happened. The survivors owe us big time, they won’t rat us out.”
“Could be. I want to hear what Mellanie says in the next message.”
“Goddamn,” Rob swore. “You are so pussy-whipped. Well, you make it clear to that little witch I’m not going to let her and her conspiracy theories stand between me and my clean record. That applies to you and the psycho bitch as well. When the navy lifts us, I want my release. I’ve fucking earned it.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Niall Swalt had been cycling to work at the Grand Triad Adventures office when the Prime attack started. He still came in every day, even though the tour operator hadn’t seen a single client since Mellanie returned from her short vacation. For some reason, head office on Wessex hadn’t canceled his employment contract. Every Friday night their accountancy program paid his wages; so every Monday morning he arrived back at the office for another week of doing whatever he wanted on company time. That was mainly accessing TSIs. He went through Murderous Seduction at least once a week.
It was the silence he noticed as he cycled along the last stretch of road toward the employee gate. With the office sitting on the end of the CST station’s main terminal, he was used to the constant mumble of the crowd that besieged the main entrance. According to local news shows, over a third of Boongate’s population had now left, with everyone else anxious to join them. Niall wasn’t so sure about the official numbers; he thought it was more than that. Every day he cycled to work from his two-room flat, going the long way around the massive station yard. That way he didn’t get caught up in the huge jam of people arriving on the highway. There were so many cars driven into the verges along the approach roads that the government employed seventeen crews towing the abandoned vehicles away, not that they could keep up. It wasn’t just the sides of the highway that were clogged, of course. A lot of people drove through the same maze of streets he used in the commercial district surrounding the station, and parked on any clear spot before walking around to the front. Some mornings he’d find hundreds of cars had appeared overnight, turning the roads into quite an obstacle course for him to weave his way around.
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