Hol shook her head and chuckled pridefully. Despite their falling-out, he was still her student, and she couldn’t deny any of her varied feelings for him. In the end he was, and always would be, perfect to her. She carried on with her own fight, her reflection upsetting her pace not at all.
The Gun Golem shot in Jav’s place had been driven forward by the impact and was now decorated with a deep, crack-lined hole in the small of its back. Rather than turn towards its attacker, though, it had proceeded up and after Furst, toward the Root Palace. Ren, unable to damage the Gun Golems, and concerned about his teacher, requested permission to escort Furst to what they all hoped was safety behind Sana Bale’s shield.
Barson noted the two shapes racing overhead, and having overheard the earlier exchange revealing Furst’s condition, sent Ren to draw enemy fire away from the wounded Shade.
Froster was almost giddy about being immune to both the face guns and the pistols, but that feeling was matched equally and oppositely by the frustrating realization that he could do no more to them than they could to him. Also, the random shots into the Scavenger Cloud were potentially dangerous to other Shades. Confirming with Hol, he lured/coaxed/delivered the Gun Golem he had been fighting to her and Jav, and then moved on to act in support wherever he might be needed.
Hol and Jav fell upon the single Gun Golem, and together made short work of it. They took turns striking it with all the strength the combination of their powers could produce. It was almost a competition to see who could hit harder. For both of them, though, the Gun Golem was a convenient surrogate: for Jav it was Hol for killing Mai Pardine, his lover, and for Hol it was Jav for rejecting her. In addition to ridding themselves of one more Gun Golem, the exercise proved to be rather therapeutic for them both.
Brin didn’t know what to do. She had caught a Gun Golem, had succeeded in imprisoning it upon the Dharma Clock, but the desired result would not come. The Dharma Clock was really two wheels on a single hub. The front wheel served to bind her opponent. The one behind turned and, with each full revolution, expanded the front wheel explosively. Three revolutions had expanded the Wheel, but had not harmed its victim. Oppositely, Brin was getting weaker. Her joints throbbed, and her head felt like a drum, with each beat of her heart sending a crushing wave of hot, crippling fatigue over the ever more sensitive surface of her brain. She couldn’t see straight, and the judgment meant for the Gun Golem, while assaulting her with physical feedback, was beginning to creep into her own mind.
She was sleepy, and dream thoughts befuddled her. Guilt was stabbing at her from countless, undefined sources, but Ren Fauer’s face came to her again and again. How could she lie to him for so long? How could she use him like that? How could she care so little for someone who regarded her so highly?
(Didn’t she care, though?)
He had saved her life when she was a girl and again just minutes ago. He was in love with her, of course; there was no question—there never had been. She remembered caring for him, remembered what it felt like, but in the end it had always been too easy to turn on him. He never knew. He was so easy to manipulate. But why him? He was so nice.
(Because he was so nice.)
He made her feel wanted and needed. He made her feel like a princess. He made her feel warm. He made her feel soft. He made her feel weak. He made her want him and need him and that she could not tolerate.
Tears streamed down Brin’s face. She had never loved anyone—perhaps never would love anyone—besides Ren Fauer, and she hated him for that. The lashing guilt was relentless now. Turned on anyone else, it would have crucified that person as intended, but Brin’s mind was strong. She was the second highest-ranking graduate of the Locsard Psychic Academy and beating her at her own specialty was a near-impossible task, even with herself as her opponent. Though exhausted by both the effort of her attack and the trauma of receiving it, and very near to blacking out, she felt the guilt of betraying Ren evolve (back) into enmity. She didn’t need anyone making her feel guilty about anything. She didn’t need anyone making her feel like a helpless little girl. She didn’t need Ren Fauer. It was his fault, not hers. Nothing was her fault. Ever.
The Dharma Clock faded, releasing the Gun Golem. As she was about to collapse, Brin was snatched up in the Scavenger Cloud, like a poorly controlled marionette settling into a gossamer bed, and carried off.
Not far away, Barson shattered the Gun Golem he was fighting with his Million Horse Kick Punch. Both fists drove forward and sent forth a torrent of punches transmitted through the ether like a spectral stampede, buffeting the Gun Golem and knocking it to pieces. When finished, he used a localized gravity well to direct the Gun Golem left by Brin into the ground hard. Hol and Jav arrived as the Gun Golem, legs sunk knee-deep into rock, stepped out of its temporary confinement. Exuding an air of menace, the four Shades stood about the lone silver figure, regarding it briefly as a pack of wolves might before they pounced on it and rent it to scrap.
One last Gun Golem, pursuing Ren, remained. Furst passed through the shield, and already past his limit, crashed like a meteor into the Root Palace courtyard.
Ren led a crazy course, endlessly twisting and turning, to give his teacher time to reach safety, but as the situation was now easily manageable, he followed Bale’s order to draw the Gun Golem to her shield. Pausing for a moment to reconfirm the Gun Golem’s focus on him, he flew straight for the Palace, shifting only slightly to avoid pistol shots as they came. Within about five hundred meters of the Palace, the pistol shots began to strike the shield, the bullets spreading liquidly like raw eggs cast against rainbow-tinted glass.
Through her contact with the machine, Bale could feel the shells impacting; could feel the metal eating at the solid energy before dissipating to become new ammunition. She made adjustments to the wavelengths and frequencies, and the shield suffered less and less from the infectious bite of the alien steel.
Ren flew through the shield unimpeded and rushed to his teacher’s side. He looked back towards the approaching Gun Golem, flinching with each pistol shot and breathing easy as each met the Shield and went no further.
After thirteen shots, Bale was satisfied. She had found the combination that allowed for no degradation in the shield. There was only one more thing that they could learn from today’s test and they learned presently. The Gun Golem proceeded to the Palace at its top speed, firing as it went, and as it was about to pass over the courtyard wall, it stopped suddenly and completely when it met Bale’s perfected barrier. Pressed flat against the semi-visible wall, the Gun Golem’s face gun erupted, but served only to knock its own head back. It raised its arm again and resumed firing its pistol, but even at point blank range, the shells could not make the slightest progress.
Abanastar nodded to Schosser. The new lens was in place and ready to go. The spark in the heart of the Cat’s-eye Marble grew and flared to brilliance. A green sphere exploded forth and disappeared through the lenses.
As it hovered outside and above the courtyard wall, the Gun Golem fired its pistol repeatedly. One moment it was blithely going about its business, the next the remaining crescent moon of its head was thrown back at a sharp angle. It dropped to the base of the wall and didn’t move again.
• • •
The tense atmosphere had subsided somewhat. The wrecked Gun Golems were collected and put into safe storage. Brin had largely recovered from the affects of her own psychic assault, but Furst was in critical condition. Once enough Gun Golem steel reached the bloodstream, its effects on Shades were devastating. Artifacts spanned a wide range, however, and so did the transformed bodies of Shades. Some Artifacts, which bolstered mostly psychic talents, altered the body little, except to make it stronger; but others changed the body so dramatically that blood was altogether absent in the transformed state. Furst was lucky. Although his insides had been ripped apart, he had not been infected. His injuries were extensive and very definitely life threatening, but otherwise unremarkable.
Jav
and Ren wanted to visit him in the hospital, but it was too soon. They were told that he would require a series of operations that would take until late evening to complete. If the operations were successful, though, he should recover rapidly.
They next went to check on Kalkin. Almost as soon as he was taken to the hospital, Kalkin had been moved to a special facility to aid in his regeneration, but on inquiring about his condition, Jav was surprised to learn that he had been released. They found Kalkin back at the quarters that he and Jav shared, just finishing up with a shower. After dressing, he threw himself into a chair, and with as much enthusiasm as his current state would allow, he congratulated Ren on receiving his Artifact and commended them both for their part in the fighting earlier.
Kalkin turned to Jav with a grave look made more intense by his obvious exhaustion. “Jav, I’ll never forget what you did for me.”
“Ah, come on,” Jav said embarrassedly.
“No,” Kalkin said, shaking his head. “They showed me pictures, the stages of regeneration—it was like some sick baby album.” He shuddered, thinking about it. “Not just anyone would have done what you did.”
“Kalkin, you’re my boss and my friend. I’d do it again in an instant and without a thought.”
“Thanks. That means a lot,” Kalkin said.
“Look at you, though!” Jav said. “You look as good as new—well, you look tired—but otherwise fit. Are you?”
Kalkin rubbed his chin, nodding. “What about your teacher, Ren? How’s he doing?”
Ren cocked his head uncertainly. “It’s going to depend on the next several hours, I guess.”
“He’s going to come through, Ren,” Jav said. “He’s going to be fine.”
Ren tried to latch on to Jav’s optimism and managed a nod and a smile.
Kalkin checked the time. “I hope they bring good news.”
“Parish and Professor Cranden?” Jav said.
“Um-hmm. The new shield is a good start, but I don’t want to depend entirely on that. Don’t tell Sana Bale I said so, though.”
“No,” Ren said. “Even with a shield keeping them out, what would we do with ninety Gun Golems waiting just outside?”
“And what about the rest of the Vine?” Jav said. “There’s no way to protect all of it.”
Along with everyone else, they were waiting expectantly for the report scheduled later at 1800, the report they all hoped would spell out a solution to the Gun Golem crisis.
9. BAHAHMEI
10,688.053.1800
With Tia Winn, Cov Merasec, and Elza Steinz out of the hospital, all of the available Shades were gathered in the war room once again. Including Witchlan, they were fifteen in all. Jav noticed that everyone had, unconsciously and with some overlap, grouped themselves into cliques according to generation: the 18th, 19th, and 20th generation generals, the Triangle Squad, and, finally, the new Death Squad together with the emergency Shades. Several different conversations were running concurrently, making the war room perhaps more lively than it ever had been. There was no need for silence yet. There was a time and place for propriety, and all recognized it with grave appreciation when Mont Cranden’s slightly distorted face lit up the broad holographic screen right on schedule.
“Glad to see nearly everyone is present,” Cranden said. His image squished to the left to half its size, leaving the rest of the screen filled with a misty, white cityscape.
“This is Bahahmei,” Cranden said. “In the two days that we’ve been here we’ve been able to find out quite a lot.”
In the cityscape image, a familiar silver figure flitted by, startling those in the war room. Cranden looked over his shoulder in response to the singular reaction then faced forward again.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Our Mr. Parish has already destroyed two of them. If that one gets too close, he’ll take care of it. And even so, that would be a comfort measure only. They seem to know that we are here, but not specifically where. A point of concern, though, is that the people of Bahahmei are the same: they know there is a foreign element upsetting the harmony of their world, but they cannot penetrate our efforts at concealment—not yet, anyway. It may only be a matter of time before their powers of perception grow and we are revealed, but I think we are done here.
“Before I submit my conclusion, I want to present you all with as many facts and as much history of this planet—this system—as possible so you can draw your own conclusions and we can formulate an appropriate plan of action.” Cranden was looking at Witchlan expectantly.
“Very well, Professor. Proceed,” Witchlan said.
“Thank you, Minister. You will recall Cultural Studies Director, Ty Karr, mentioning Bahahm.” Superimposed upon the screen from Cranden’s mind came a series of images to accompany his words. “Bahahm is this system’s sun and is to the people here a god. The mist you saw is everywhere on the habitable two-thirds of this planet and never burns off. It is not mere water vapor, but is in fact a very powerful psychic conductor. I did some tests on an isolated sample and found that the rays of the sun energize it in some fashion. The mist creates a continuous circuit so it constantly receives the nourishing rays of the sun, regardless of which hemisphere is in darkness. Through this medium, the people achieve a kind of group mind. From some of the records we looked at, it appears that while the mist exists naturally through a simple biological process, its conductive and mind-augmenting properties are reinforced and improved by participation in the group mind, or, to put it differently, in the concerted worship of their god, Bahahm.
“Bahahm is pure and clean, without flaw or defect of any kind. The people have an idyllic society. Everyone contributes what he or she can as fits his or her abilities. Selfless cooperation is the happily accepted rule, if you can believe that.
“Of course it wasn’t always so perfect. The history of Bahahmei, like any other world, is filled with crime, betrayal, war. But, ages ago all heard the one true voice of Bahahm, and eventually all chose to listen. When unity was finally achieved, the society advanced quickly and felt the urge—the will of Bahahm perhaps—to reach out to the other planets in the system and spread the worship of Bahahm to those waiting worlds. They began their space program in what we assume to be somewhere around Viscain Year 370.
“None of them harboring life, the two inner planets were first and were both colonized by Year 450. The resource base of the people expanded and so did their range into space. They soon began colonizing the outer planets. The fourth planet was populated mostly with a dominant species of lower apes, which were quickly domesticated. The fifth planet, holding a poisonous atmosphere, was completely lifeless and proved to be the Bahahmeians’ first real challenge. Due to its thick and unusual atmosphere, the sixth planet was a lush, overgrown garden, holding only insect life besides vegetation. Everywhere the Bahahmeians went, they brought with them two things: the psychic conductor—which evidently is a product of their perspiration—and of course their worship of Bahahm. It wasn’t long before every planet in the system began to resemble the model home world of Bahahmei, the White Planet.
“One planet remained and was for the Bahahmeians plagued from the start with the bad fortune of being number seven, a number always associated with death, disease, catastrophe—you know, only the ‘good’ things in life.
“With their faith behind them, though, they would not allow something like that to deter them. It was viewed, even before beginning, as a challenge to top that posed by the fifth, poisonous planet.
“And they were not wrong. Secrei was much like the sixth planet in that it was overrun with vegetation, a contiguous black swamp really, that belched out a combination of gasses providing the dark and insulating atmosphere unique to Secrei. Despite its distance from the sun, the planet was hot and humid and uncomfortable. But it was not uninhabited. Primitive humanoids, only a few evolutionary steps below the Bahahmeians, thrived on Secrei and worshiped their own god, Rasthain, the embodiment of the swamp, or the swamp itself.
“The Bahahmeians arrived on Secrei around Year 530. Secure in the belief of their own god, the Bahahmeians scoffed at the idea of another. Over the next five years they set about converting the natives and weaning them off their customs of cannibalism and blood sacrifices to the swamp.
“But it soon became apparent that there was more than mere superstition to the natives’ worship. While they communicated with a primitive system of grunts and clicks, one word was known to them all and that was Rasthain, the name of their god. At first the Bahahmeians thought it a local appellation, but groups separated by distance and impossibly traversed terrain—from all over the planet—knew the name of their god, just as the Bahahmeians knew the name of theirs. Also, there was a uniformity of custom that was at first puzzling and then frightful, for it began to point to the reality of Rasthain, and to his very real influence on the primitive people.
“Some of the natives were educated and converted, but none of those lived long. Secret hunting parties of natives that acted with stealth, direction, and coordination far in excess of their apparent capabilities murdered them all, always under the cover of darkness.
The Gun Golems (Approaching Infinity Book 2) Page 8
