“My sins? My sins?” Skizzit stepped forward, and Timas stared at the needle-sharp tips of his quills. “I’ve never had any of you for a pet, nor taken any of you from Earth. Those things were done hundreds of years ago, human.”
Claire watched the argument with a bored expression, but Timas turned to her next. The more he understood about these people, the more he might be able to get them to realize that the Swarm threat to them was real. “And what about you? How can you work for creatures that have done the things to us that these have?”
She smiled. “We have an agreement.”
“What kind of agreement could be worth doing what you do?”
“How old do you think I look?”
She had small lines around her mouth, a hint of crow’s-feet by the eyes. “Maybe thirty-five.”
“I’m ninety-nine.” Claire looked at Skizzit. “The prize is a life measured in the centuries, for one century of service.”
That was the price it took for this woman to turn her back on her own kind and identify with the aliens, then. A tempting price. Without the city to return to, if they kept him here, what would he choose to do?
“Do a lot of people that you rescue on the surface stay here and take that prize?”
Claire nodded. “Wouldn’t you?”
Timas changed the subject. “I was on the surface not too long ago. I saw one of you. And my friend died down there, when his suit got damaged. Why didn’t you help us?”
“There was debris. It was too dangerous, or we would have. We do keep an eye on your surface activities. If you get too close with your mining machine or your people, we act to stop discovery.” Claire stood up and looked out the door.
Another thought occurred to him. “If the wormhole is closed up, is that why one of you gave Heutzin a box to deliver?”
Claire looked off at the wall. “We are self-sufficient. There is no need to send anything. The ones who try to make outside contact . . . pay a dear price for breaking the rules.”
Timas wanted to ask more, but the ticking from the timer stopped. It buzzed until Timas turned it off.
“What was that?” Skizzit asked.
“My air timer. As of now, the people who sent me think I’m dead.” Timas sat down with his back against the wall with the timer’s chain wrapped around his forearm. He dangled it just above the floor. His parents would be grieving, just like Cen’s, for his death now. What a depressing thought.
Claire took a deep breath and squatted in front of him. “It is I, Amminapses.”
“Yes?”
“You brought a dangerous thing here. Tell us exactly where you got this and what is happening.”
Timas repeated everything he knew. Pepper’s original encounter, the spread of the Swarm throughout the Aeolian cities, the attack on the processor, and then the news that a massive fleet, thousands of airships, now moved on this location.
“And there are people up there who suspect, strongly, that we exist down here. Not just the Swarm?”
Timas nodded. “Yes.”
“Yatapek readies for this invasion. Pepper thinks the League of Human Affairs will come and clean up,” Amminapses said. “But alone you will not be able to face it. Pepper is right, you need my help.”
Skizzit jumped toward them. “No, you cannot do that! We have achieved stasis here again.”
Amminapses held up a hand. Claire’s face contorted into a strange and frozen expression of anger. “That is not for you to say. You will be quiet.”
The words had the crack of authority, and anger at being challenged. Timas flinched at them, as did Skizzit, who folded its arms and backed away.
“This weapon you delivered, it’s an extraordinary measure. An emergency tool. It is used to destroy civilizations and races.”
“You made it?” Timas asked.
“Others made it, we are familiar with it. Organic DNA-based computing that uses clustering to achieve computational power at an exponential spread, with a goal-oriented artificial intelligence laid over the top. There’s been a safety modification: a four-hour incubation period. As well as the new target. Us here.”
“But can you help stop it?” Timas asked.
“We have worked in the past on a counter-infection. I will use drones and a ship to get you back to Yatapek. We need to at least slow this attack, yes.”
Timas hated to do this, but he had to ask. “What do you mean, at least slow it?”
“It may be impossible to stop. It gets more intelligent as it grows. By now it is a formidable foe. As we infect it, it may be able to study what is happening and it may withdraw to find a cure. Our best ally is time, the virus is coded to let its host starve. It is designed to rage through a people, engage them in war, and then when it has spread all throughout, let them starve and whither away so that in time, the universe will hardly have known that the infected race even existed.” Amminapses stood Claire up. “It’s beautiful, elegant, and brutally effective. When the Satrapy ruled the Forty-Eight worlds, we never had the courage to deploy it. Our loss.”
“We are released,” Skizzit said. The door had unlocked itself. The alien held it open, and Claire walked through.
Timas got up and followed them out of the building. He gawked again at the giant arch of rock far over his head, lights blazing away from its apex, as well as the twinkling from the hundreds of thousands of windows in the rock’s sides. Dwellings for humans, aliens, all living here.
But now the quiet of the gardens and the cavern had lifted. Activity spread all throughout. Timas looked at the sight of thousands of people, mostly human, moving crates and ferrying aliens in small electric carts toward the center of the cavern.
Timas saw the kind of alien he’d first spotted on the surface. A four-footed creature with a bulky chest, thick neck, and massive mouth. It opened its mouth wide to reveal tongues with multiple ends that would pick things up, or flick buttons and levers.
“Stop staring at the Gahe,” Skizzit said. “They get annoyed, it’s a challenge for them.”
Timas stopped. “What’s going on?” Everyone had exploded into action.
Skizzit pointed at the giant dark spot at the center of the cavern. “They’re getting ready to leave. They’ll fire the nuclear charges in the asteroid to clear it free of the other side of the wormhole, reopening it. Then we evacuate.”
Amminapses added, “The threat of the Swarm is very serious. We need to delay it long enough to get off this planet.”
Everyone here ran for safety, while Chilo’s humans laid their lives down to slow the Swarm. He wouldn’t forget this. Timas looked at Claire. He was really looking at the enemy of his enemy, he felt. A creature that had helped enslave mankind, and still thought of its fiefdom here as its own world.
Allies for now, but a friend, no. Claire, and the intelligence behind her, was something else. Dangerous. Like the ancient heresies: monsters manipulating humans and their fate. He was, Timas thought, facing a kind of devil. And making a deal with it.
CHAPTER FOURTY-FIVE
Amminapses remained in control of Claire. It led Skizzit and Timas across the long width of the cavern into a new corridor, up a flight of grand sweeping stairs, and into a subchamber with heavy-looking, thick spheres. “Our transport back to your city.”
“You have the cure already?”
Another Nesaru waited for them. It stepped forward and handed a black briefcase to Amminapses, who tapped it. “We adapted a counter-infection for your genome a while back, it just required synthesizing. It does not have a four-hour block.”
“And you’re going to give it to us merely to slow it down, while you run away? You expect nothing out of us?”
Amminapses looked at him, contorting Claire’s face into some emotion that Timas couldn’t identify. “You will be fighting it, correct?”
“Yes.”
“That’s all we need.”
Skizzit tapped a five-number sequence on a translucent pad on the pod’s shell. Timas paid close att
ention, trying to memorize the numbers. Just in case.
The hatch opened up and Claire stepped into the vehicle. She picked one of the five seats facing one another in a circle deep inside the armored sphere. They angled slightly up.
The seat reacted to her weight, shifting and adjusting its headrest to cradle her neck and head. Then padded arms reached out to hug her body into itself.
Skizzit went next, and the seat it chose radically reconfigured itself to accept Skizzit’s anatomy.
“You’re going with us?” Timas couldn’t believe that he would be showing back up to the city with an alien in tow.
No one could deny he’d seen an alien on the surface now, could they?
Timas chose his chair and let it wrap around him.
“Ready?” Skizzit asked.
“As I can be.” Timas tried to shift, but didn’t budge.
“Clear.”
The interior of the sphere fell dark. A small screen revealed the rocky roof a hundred feet above them. The sphere rumbled and rose toward it. Timas flinched as they appeared to dash themselves against it, but at the last second a pinprick of a hole grew into a large opening.
They shot through the tube in the rock until a point of brown light appeared, grew, and then they popped out into the heart of the Great Storm.
Instead of climbing, the sphere moved slowly near the surface.
“It’s tough to keep a good connection to the cavern,” Amminapses explained. “We keep the clouds of this planet well seeded with metal-consuming spores. That makes it hard to catch any leakage from Hulbach, or for radar to hit the surface. We can’t afford discovery. We’re keeping close to the surface to use a laser link to keep communications while in the storm.”
Timas stared at the familiar murkiness as the sphere bumped and trembled along.
Amminapses released the chair restraints and sat up. “Among us, there are conflicting memories, early traces of a group story. Call it legend, creation myth, or maybe it is memories of our distant past.”
“Okay.” Timas sat up, and the chair let go of him.
“You should not tell them these things,” Skizzit said. “You will give them leverage over you.”
“I’m the last Satrap of the Forty-Eight worlds, but I am still a Satrap. I will do as I please, and you will be quiet now, Nesaru.” Amminapses didn’t believe in using the names of those who worked for it, it appeared. Claire’s face turned back to Timas. “We are a created species, we understand this by examining our genetic heritage. We are massive so we cannot depend on rapid mobility like most species. We are forced to be symbiotic. Our tendrils can penetrate a conscious mind, adapting to the species after several attempts, and now with technology, we have extended these abilities and our range. We hunger for interesting new thoughts. And why would something like that be created? you ask. It is important, now that we face a new threat that may undo us both, that we understand this.
“You humans believe we are the enemy, out to destroy you, or at least inhibit you. That is true, but . . .”
Amminapses stopped, mouth open, and Claire shook her head. “Where are we?”
“Interruption,” Skizzit said. “Lost a laser link.”
Claire froze. Amminapses returned. “Among ourselves, we see that intelligence breaks out, flourishes, spreads, and eventually, inevitably, it comes to war with itself in its various forms. It fights, consumes, destroys, and upsets the balance of the universe.
“Farther out into the universe where you have yet to venture, this has played itself out with repetitive regularity. And the universe, whether as some larger organism, or whether via creatures that regard themselves as its stewards, has developed mechanisms to combat the ill effects of intelligent life. They seek out and destroy it, balance it, and through evolutionary pressures, force the creation of races that are better equipped to know their limits and cease their natural instincts.
“We don’t know what created us. The counterforce, using us as a limiting mechanism to protect the universe? Or a mightier intelligence that wanted us to slow the spread of intelligents, to limit them to an area and give them more time to develop an awareness, a chance. Both stories had their adherents among my peers.”
Amminapses folded Claire’s arms carefully on her lap. Timas waited several beats before speaking. “The League of Human Affairs, the revolution, the Ragamuffins, and our history on Yatapek all agree that your kind set out to eradicate humanity from the Forty-Eight worlds. How can you defend that? That is not the work of stewards.”
A raised finger. “But it was. You think our methods were harsh, but remember, humanity had several worlds to itself. Earth had been granted emancipation, and it had shut itself behind a wormhole. The birthplace of your species knew the universe was dangerous, and regarded expansion dimly. Chimson remained behind its own wormhole, and for a while, so did New Anegada, until the Ragamuffins colluded with another subject race to reopen the wormhole using very, very illicit technology. It was not an extinction attempt. It was a controlled burn. There are other Satraps, far out there beyond the Forty-Eight worlds. They have chosen more brutal methods. They alter races, change their genetics to make them docile.”
The sphere cleared the storm. They rose now, headed toward Yatapek. How much time remained before the great Swarm fleet hit?
“It was hard to be so lenient, understand. These impulses are designed into us by the creators. When the revolution swept through humanity we felt our failure down to the DNA. We destroyed technology and factories that produced the tools you’d need to spread faster. We committed suicide, or we ran.
“But this weapon you bring now, it is not Satrapic. It’s a weapon that those forces destroying intelligent life use. It’s made by our creators, who we either worship or fear, we aren’t sure which.
“It is strange to you, maybe, that we do not know what we are. It is strange to us. But understand that I remained the last living Satrap in the Forty-Eight worlds out of a hidden drive, put in me by something outside of my will, to salvage what I could out of the Forty-Eight worlds. This was to be the base on which I planned the repacification of humanity, creating warrens under the surface of Chilo until this planet was all mine. I had a hundred-year plan, and now I’ve seen it crumble in front of me and I realize it is time to let it go. I only ever have acted for the good of all species in the Forty-Eight. This agent, released, will not stop with humanity, it will adapt and set out to destroy all intelligent life here until the creators encounter its spread and deactivate it.”
Timas stared at the alien before him, and it smiled back.
Skizzit broke the moment. “Yatapek is asking who we are, threatening to shoot.”
“Tell them it’s Timas, son of Ollin.”
Once again, Timas had made it home. But how long that home would exist, he didn’t know.
PART SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Itotia stood alone in front of the airlock leading out to the rim of Yatapek, her arms folded, dress dirty from dragging through the dirt and corn. She’d run through the fire line that had been set up: a ring of ethanol-drenched ground and dried hay and cornstalks. The smell of the accelerant rolled off her.
Pepper had walked his way across the upper deck slowly, conserving power, muddying himself up as he passed by rows of armed people. The upper deck had a ring of older fighters with their billhooks standing in front of the fire line. After the fire line were the prime fighters, and then in the streets and rooftops, the children. Spears and guns, to cover the others if they fell back into the houses.
“You’re really leaving us.” Itotia’s eyes were red. “I know you are a cold and soulless creature, but I didn’t really think you would flee.”
“I am a man of my word. I can do more, later, with the mongoose-men at my side.” Pepper stopped in front of her.
“Are you even human anymore?”
“You work so hard to keep on my good side, all of you.” Pepper pulled her aside. “But I forgive your
grief.”
“Wait.”
“For what?”
“Don’t you wonder how the gods will judge you?”
“Let them come get me,” Pepper said.
Itotia stepped forward. “You have half an hour, still, before you said you’d leave.”
“Is there a point in waiting? I saw you give up down there as well.” Pepper looked down.
“And I was wrong.” Itotia smiled. “Because we just heard that Timas is coming back up. He’s in an alien airship of some make. It’s asking permission to dock. I ran here the moment I got the call.”
Pepper looked past her at the airlock. “What do we know?”
“I don’t know anything yet. But you have a choice in front of you, don’t you?”
He looked back down. “What do you mean?”
“You have thirty minutes left. It’s close. Do you run off in your escape bubble, or do you throw your lot in with us? Instead of waiting for some vengeance in the far future with your mongoose-men, stand firm with us.” She walked around him, leaving the way to the airlock open. “You talked about making the Swarm pay so hard it would choose to leave us alone. Why don’t you give it the hurting that you wanted to when you were aboard the Sheikh Professional. Or, you can leave us, just like you left those people aboard that ship to deal with the Swarm.”
She started to walk away, and Pepper grabbed the edge of the frame to the airlock.
“Just remember,” she said. “You were wrong to give up hope an hour ago. You might be cold and soulless, but you still make errors of judgment. Think about it.”
Errors of judgment. Like jumping out of a spaceship without a parachute? Pepper tapped the airlock door open and stood at the threshold.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Timas jumped down out of the alien airship onto the metal grating of the docks. The ship had floated up through one of the large docking doors easily, small enough to fit through and land inside the docks, instead of tethering itself to the outside.
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