Traveler_Losing Legong

by Tim Dennis

  43

  Pestano, Morgan and Nod crammed into the little K-ship along with the four Council Guards and flitted back towards Councilor Six's Rip. The tumbling dumbbell that served as "mission Earth" headquarters had expanded by the addition of a power generating station. The massive installation overwhelmed the comparatively light cluster of converted barges and transport pods at the opposite end of the four-hundred meter truss, turning mission control into a hammer, swinging in a broad arc around the almost unmoving power and docking stations.

  They found Six waiting for them in her private conference room off of Mission Control.

  "You should have left Nod there with a couple Guards." She said.

  "What? Just on the pavement?" Pestano's uncharacteristic challenge surprised Six. "They didn't offer any billet."

  "Tugot has a billet, she could have stayed with him."

  "Tugot? He's not an official rep-"

  "He's a Legong and he's on Earth!" Slapping the idiot would be un-Councilor-like, but Pestano picked up her vibe, took a step back and thought quickly.

  "We can break into his implant-" He stopped himself at the vision of seething hatred emanating from Six.

  "He. Doesn't. Have. An. Implant." She said.

  "He doesn't have an implant? How can he not have an implant?"

  Six left Pestano, calling for Nod and Morgan to join her as she passed through Mission Control into the newly Makered corridor connecting them to the new Operations Center. The large, pillarless room would normally house cadets, training for Diverter postings during the months-long journey to the outer system, or reveling and debauching on their trip home. Soft floor coverings deadened their footfalls and a gentle wash of colored light melted the walls and ceiling into one indistinct distant surface. A dozen tables filled the space, each with its own knot of uniformed clerks in deep concentration. Six walked over to the most prominent table.

  "What do we know?" She asked.

  Clerks busily manipulated scenic images and stacked data images. Eyes darted back and forth. Finally one person spoke. An intelligent looking man of about sixty stepped away from his stack of images.

  "Population is estimated at between one and two billion. Aside from the nav devices and these small globes that seem to be everywhere we're not finding any significant advances over our own technology."

  "Do we know what the globes do?" Asked Six.

  The man called up a series of images. "They appear to be automated Makers. We've seen them in several sizes on the surface, but in orbit there seem to be only these:" He focused on a close-up of a metallic globe about a meter in diameter with five long, thin legs protruding from it. "We believe they are the same as those that followed the Earth ship into our space."

  "So we can destroy them?" Six asked.

  The man hesitated, a woman stepped forward from behind another array. "We believe we destroyed three when the Earth ship first appeared."

  "You believe. What is your confidence level?" Six asked.

  On the subjects of ice comets, iron-nickel asteroid cores, or rocky bodies, expert staff could provide precise predictions. Not on Earth-tech. "Um," said the woman. "They move faster than asteroids, stop quicker, change directions quicker, but we can track them."

  "Can you hit them?" Six asked.

  A mature woman, almost Six's age, broke in. "Oh, we can hit them. They just don't leave any debris. We don't know if we've destroyed them or they've just popped out of existence."

  "Yes! They do that." Interjected Nod. "I believe the Traveler called it 'holing.'"

  Nod withered under Six's glare. She moved on to the next topic. "Two billion, fine." She said. "This planet once supported many times that. Settlement pattern?"

  Another clerk stepped up. "Information the Trav-, er, the Earthman gave us has so far checked out. The larger settlements are located where settlements have always been, mostly on rivers or coasts. But what he didn't mention was that all five major landmasses have large areas in their interiors that are undeveloped. Three great deserts not unlike Legong, two lesser deserts, two great continent-spanning forests, two broad grasslands. These, and other large areas, are sparsely inhabited."

  Six finally looked like she was calming down. She turned to Morgan. "OK. These desert areas, what are the actual temperature ranges, is there any naturally occurring water at all? And I want to know about local fauna. Give me options."

  As Six consulted with her array of Clerks, dozens of ships moved back and forth between Earth orbit and the Rip, some attaching themselves to the growing bulk of her headquarters while others sought berths among the thirty Rail-ships clinging to a brace of Diverter Transports. In the midst of it all hung one of Krykowfert's newest ships: an Ark that created gravity without spinning and moved without reaction motors. Makerbots crawled over its surfaces, inside and out, searing Gun towers along its flanks and forming decks within.

  Thirty Rail-ships could launch six hundred Drop-Capsules carrying seven thousand troops. The K-Ark could land thirty thousand more.

  44

  Myles woke to the face of Chanly, staring down at him from beside the bed. "Your people are attempting a landing." She said. "One of your Arks has entered the atmosphere."

  Krykowfert's new Arks can do that?

  He'd not seen them, but understood they could hold ten thousand people, as much as the traditional Arks, but at a fraction of the size while being as maneuverable as the little run-abouts. "Where?" Myles asked.

  Sach paused. "They're headed to a desert, on a large island in the southern hemisphere."

  Myles sent Chanly to his lounge while he dressed, but she wasn't there when he finished. A wicker chair hung in the air outside the front door, and with Chanly nowhere in sight, Myles climbed in and thought of the Legong-landing. Two rings of light snapped on around him and all external sounds silenced. The chair-in-a-bubble shot straight up into the sky and out across fields and towns, fifteen thousand kilometers in twenty minutes. Myles wished it could have gone faster.

  The Bubble-Chair set down on a huge rock in the center of a vast desert. Mountain ranges formed the horizons, maybe a hundred kilometers distant. Between him and the northern range lay a string of damp patches struggling to be lakes, and beside them, one of Krykowfert's new Arks, the smooth, bulging crown of its hull gleaming in the intense sunlight.

  Thousands of Council Guards and tons of equipment littered the plains. Half-Makered walls and flattened stretches of scrubby desert defined the beginnings of a settlement.

  That's what Broad-Plain must have looked like, before the plantings.

  The ground itself seemed alive, well organized platoons marched back and forth, dragging UpBuggies and guiding Cabs filled with troops and gear. It was exciting to watch, Myles felt like a Legong again, his people down there, carving a home from nothing but rock and sand. But this was different: no meteors, no local volcanism, and little tectonic activity. A paradise. The sand scintillated, not just around the Makers, but everywhere, within the limits of the settlement and beyond. Myles rubbed his eyes, squinted and wondered if the visions were a remnant the acceleration of the bubble-chair. As he watched the settlement develop the blue haze of the Makers morphed and faded, out-sparkled by the reflections of sun on sand.

  That's not right...

  The entire desert scintillated, those areas of shadow no less so than the surface of the lake or the dune in full sunlight. All at once the sand came alive, lifting off the ground in waves of blue haze, coalescing into a million tiny flying, crawling, tumbling spheres encircling the Legongs. In a moment the huge Ark disappeared under a cloud of tiny five-legged monsters. Men and women broke from their tasks, some gathering into defensible formations, others scurrying away, smacking at their clothes, frantically twisting and spinning.

  Sputties. It's a million sputties.

  Myles felt another surge of pride as the chaos below resolved itself into neatly organized squares and lines. From the lines came sheets of particle-beams, eviscerating wa
ves of the spidery spheres, but for each Sputtie smashed a dozen took its place. Within seconds the Legong armaments were overwhelmed. For a time Myles could see nothing but a fog of spheres covering the Ark and the ground around it.

  The fog gradually cleared. The Ark, three hundred meters wide, sat silent and dark surrounded by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of limp figures scattered across a kilometer of desert. Myles could pick out movement, but it was too far away to discern detail. He became aware of a presence behind him.

  "You left without me." It was Chanly. A second Bubble-Chair rested on the rock beside his.

  "What's happening? He asked. "What are they doing to the Colonists?"

  Chanly pulled a small ball from her pocket and tossed it towards Myles. He jumped back, the ball passed him and stopped, mid-air, between him and the view below. Myles found that by looking past the ball and shifting his angle he could see close-up what from here appeared only as tiny indistinct movements. In fact, it was a melee. Council Guards backed together into small groups, using sticks and digging tools to fend off encroaching Sputties. Their weapons were gone, but they hadn't given up. A lone woman ran away from the group, straight towards Myles.

  Can she see me? Can I help?

  The ball of a Sputtie came into view behind her, a half-meter sphere atop five segmented legs. Without breaking stride the thing slipped two legs under the fleeing cadet's arms and lifted her bodily off the ground. She struggled and kicked, but the machine just held her at arm's length, turning on its remaining three legs and walking back towards the center of the landed ships. Myles watched similar scenes played out by the hundreds, a procession of Sputties carrying limp and struggling troops back into the Ark they'd come from. Occasionally a Guard got a shot in, disabling one of the things, but soon it became clear it was over. Sputties formed into lines of their own, creating avenues along which to herd defeated troops back into the dead hulk of their ship. Myles waved away the little ball and its images.

  "I don't understand, what, what just happened here?"

  "They tried to create a settlement." Chanly said. "We don't want them to."

  Myles pushed past her and sat in his chair. It lifted up as wished and brought him down to the plain. As he stood on the rocky plain a thousand Sputties encircled the Ark and lifted it into the air. The mass hovered for a moment, as if testing the ship's weight. A hundred more Sputties joined the mass from below and the ship, lofted by its net of grappling balls, rose up into the sky, shrinking to a dot and then disappearing altogether.

  All around him lay the debris of battle, occasional movements catching his eye. He climbed over one of the low walls toward a figure rising behind a broken particle-beam projector. Breaking into a run, he called out.

  "Hey! Stay still! I can help you!"

  Can you?

  The figure ignored him, emitted a blue hum and lifted to balance on one leg. It was a Sputtie, holed-through by a Legong-fired projectile. Almost human in its disoriented confusion, it tried to climb over the damaged gun, unaware that a path lay clear just a meter to the right.

  Myles scanned the ground, running from one pile of rubble to another. Plenty of the material was Legong in origin, but he found no bodies, no Guards, no injured friends.

  Bento!

  "These are Council Guards." said Pig. "You won't find Bento here."

  Myles climbed atop one of the newly Makered walls. As far as the eye could see lay dead and dying Sputties, disabled Makers, particle beam and projectile guns, but not a single Legong. Myles dropped down and picked up one of the abandoned side arms. He thought of Peto and slipped his hand into the trigger.

  "Myles?" Chanly called softly. He turned to face her. "The Clerks, Pestano, Morgan and Nod. They're at the meeting place. They're with Gabrile and the others."

  Myles looked at Chanly without seeing her. He tightened his grip on the handgun. Moments ago several thousand of his fellow Legongs filled the plain. Now there were none. Myles tossed the weapon to the ground and walked back to his bubble-chair.

  "No Myles," she added. "They're leaving. They didn't want to speak to you."

  Myles dismissed her with a wave and took off for the meeting place.

  Within minutes he was back at the building complex, five neat replicas of Legongian City-Centers assembled around a stone plaza immediately south of a compound of red-tile-roofed buildings, themselves surrounding a multi-tiered ornate structure of official stature. It reminded Myles of the high plateau where Peto had brained the museum guide. The chair swung around, passing low over the plaza where a dozen nervous Council Troops guarded two K-ships. His wishes were clear and intense, so the transparent sphere placed Myles right outside the window of the twenty first floor meeting room. He stood, and without bothering to check, stepped directly through the glass wall.

  Pestano and Nod paced back and forth.

  "Where are they now?" Pestano asked.

  "They've gone through the Rip." said Morgan.

  Morgan sat at the conference table with an open f'window. The Ark disappeared into Legong space as the Rip shrunk behind it.

  "I was there." Myles said. "I saw it." Pestano, Morgan and Nod looked over at him. Aside from two Council Guards there was no one else in the room. "Where's ToEv? Gabrile?"

  "What do you mean you saw it?" Asked Pestano

  "I was there, on the plain." Myles gave a brief recap of the events he'd witnessed. Pestano interrupted repeatedly, asking questions for which Myles had no answers, trying to pry out anything he might know about the technology that had been used against them. Nod drew their attention back to the f'window.

  "They're positioning those flying-Makers around the Rip." He said.

  "Sputties." Myles offered.

  Pestano looked at him absently.

  "They're called Sputties." He reiterated.

  Morgan hadn't said a word since Myles's arrival. Pestano rolled his lips together, pinching them between his teeth while maintaining the distant stare he had since Myles arrived. For the first time he made eye contact, addressing him in an overly formal, even respectful, tone: "Envoy Tugot, can you tell me why, on a planet so large and fertile as this, these Earthers can't accommodate a few thousand homesick colonists?"

  Myles knew many colonists, some disgruntled, but none he would call homesick.

  "They say we're different." Myles said. "They say the populations have grown apart"

  Pestano interrupted with a shout. "They say! They say! This is our planet every bit as much as it is theirs, more so."

  "But, Eden-" Myles ventured.

  "Eden? Nonsense!"

  "But I've been there-"

  "Eden is an unknown, we could live a hundred years on Eden before discovering how it's going to kill us. This is where we belong, we are human, this is our home."

  "But Krykowfert's already started settlements on Eden-"

  "I'll tell you something of your Krykowfert and his settlement. Convicts and revolutionaries. He spends colonial resources shipping convicts and revolutionaries to Eden while meteors rain down on the surface of Legong."

  "But surely that's only the beginning. Perhaps those people are the strongest, the most willing to take risks-"

  "Krykowfert shipped your family to Eden. Your brother, his children. Even your parents."

  That was only half true, but Myles could not know that. What he'd seen on his brief exposure to Eden had been rather pleasant, but if Krykowfert was transporting convicts and revolutionaries there, well, the indigenous life may be not be the greatest threat his kin faced.

  Pestano rolled up the false window and left the room. Morgan, Nod and the Guards quickly followed him. "You coming Tugot?" Nod asked.

  "I don't know. I think someone should stay."

  "Suit yourself." Nod exited, leaving Myles alone in the meeting room.

  "Well, you wanted to be an Envoy." said Pig.

  Yeah. Sure.

  Myles sat and stared out the window. Within a couple minutes he saw the K-ships lifting up f
rom the plaza.

  "Lunch." said Pig.

  What?

  "Lunch. You've got to eat. At mid-day that's called lunch."

  It is mid-day? Myles stared at that place in his mind where Pig usually manifested. Pig was right, he was hungry. Pig looked back in mild alarm and snapped out of existence.

  Myles walked to the window. A breeze wrinkled his shirt, the transparent wall was gone. His knees wobbled and he felt a slight dizziness. Myles took a step back from the edge, sniffing faint perfumes and distant sounds of human activity. He reached out again and passed his hand down. Just above waist height he felt the hard edge of the transparency. Stooping down, he was able to see it, causing the slightest of visual distortions as he switched from looking through, to looking over.

  The square below was completely empty now. Not a soul. The four lower buildings visible from his angle appeared duller, flatter, or perhaps smaller than they had before.

  You mean five buildings.

  No, four.

  There were five.

  Myles tried to access his memory. The only recollection that came to him was that he no longer had an implant. He tried again, this time thinking less formally of 'memory,' focusing more specifically on the square, adding to that an overlay of the last time he was in the tall central building. The best he could do was to call up the feeling that there had been five buildings where now sat four. He tried to ignore the uncomfortable incongruency, sat at the table and started picking at the warm bowl of pork and beans.

  Pork and beans?

  He froze, slowly turned. The room was empty. He left his bowl and went to the closed door. As he approached it slid aside with a hissing noise.

  Was there a hissing noise before the food appeared?

  He examined the walls for movable panels. Nothing. He examined the floor for tracks or trap doors. Nothing. He climbed onto the conference table and walked its length, examining the ceiling. No panels, no detail, no light emitting devices. He looked down at the bowl.