Hunted lop-4

by James Alan Gardner

  It took a minute to lower a rope and have Tobit shinny down into the cube… which he did pretty well, considering that "bum arm" he talked about. Getting him up to the pilot’s console was a lot more work, but eventually I helped him clamber to the command couch. As he strapped himself in sideways, he yelled, "The dials are labeled in Fasskister Basic!"

  That was an ultrasimplified version of the Fasskister language, one they used on products they shipped to other races. I said, "That proves Sam had some side deals going with the Fasskisters."

  "We already knew that," Festina told me. "Your sister must have had her black ship running regular shuttles between here and the Fasskister orbital. Remember how that Fasskister took one look at you and announced you were definitely not nice? He was confusing you with Clone Boy back on the parapet… who no doubt acts like an utter bastard, no matter where he goes."

  "Christ," Tobit muttered, "have we drawn up a diagram, who’s been conspiring with whom?"

  "Everybody with everybody else," Festina answered, "and everybody against everybody else. Secret alliances, secret betrayals, secret quid pro quo. Sam probably told the Fasskisters she was working to kill all the Mandasar queens, and they were happy to help her… especially since she and her precious Daddy had cash to pay for whatever was needed. Given how Fasskisters feel about monarchy, they’ll probably be pissed when they hear Sam was using them as pawns to make herself queen."

  "With luck, they’ll never know," said a new voice. My own. Only it came from the clear-chested man up on the parapet.

  He and Dade were standing side by side, both holding stun-pistols.

  46

  TALKING WITH DAD

  Festina dived through the hole in the glass cube’s roof I a split second before the stun-pistols fired. Soft, soft whirring sounds… but Plebon and Zeeleepull crumpled, followed by the other Mandasars. Even Kaisho slumped in her hoverchair. As for Festina, the rope Tobit had climbed down was still dangling in place; she grabbed it as she fell and swung wildly as she braked herself to a stop. When she let go at the bottom, the gloves of her tightsuit gave off tiny wisps of smoke from rope burn.

  "God damn it," she growled as she jumped down beside me, "I’m getting really pissed at people sneaking up behind my back."

  Tobit was looking out the side of the cube, to where Dade and my father-son-twin stood on the parapet. "You fucking little weasel!" Tobit yelled at Dade. "What the hell do you think you’re doing?" "Helping me," Clear Chest answered. "Who do you think arranged for Dade to be assigned to Jacaranda? If Vincence could plant a spy on my Willow, I could plant one on his ship too."

  "Shit," Festina muttered. "And I told Dade to guard the clone: a job I thought he couldn’t screw up."

  By now she had her own stunner out of its holster. She couldn’t shoot out through the glass, and the others couldn’t shoot in; but there was always that big opening in the cube’s roof. If Dade and my father shot down through the hole, they could stun us like fish in a barrel — provided Festina didn’t stun them first.

  Things were shaping up into another standoff… except that Dad and Dade had a whole bunch of hostages: the Mandasars, Plebon, and Kaisho. Those of us in the cube didn’t have any matching leverage.

  And Dad knew it.

  He lifted his foot and rested it on Plebon’s unconscious face. "Come on out," Dad yelled at us. "Or I’ll prove this bastard can look even worse than he does."

  I tried not to picture the damage my father could do, stepping forward with all his weight: his heel breaking what little jaw Plebon had, then crushing up into the roof of the Explorer’s mouth, teeth snapping off and driving up into the brain…

  "Don’t you dare!" Festina called in an angry voice. "Hurting that man would be a blatantly non-sentient act—"

  "So what?" Dad snapped back. "I am non-sentient, Ramos. Haven’t you figured that out yet? I’m not just the man you see here. I’m also the man who tried to kill you on Celestia. And the one who sent the entire crew of Willow to their deaths."

  "Knowingly?" Festina asked.

  "Hell yes, knowingly," Dad answered. "Samantha was having a bitch of a time with Queen Temperance. The way Temperance had fortified the palace, it might have taken months to capture the place by siege. So I sent Willow to remove Temperance from the picture. Offer her free passage to Celestia."

  "But Temperance didn’t want it," I said. "Did she, Dad?"

  He looked at me in surprise. "How did you know?"

  "Because queens aren’t stupid," I told him. "She knew exactly what would happen if she headed for Celestia — the League would kill her as soon as she crossed the line. So what was Willow’s second offer, Dad? Something to do with the Fasskister orbital?"

  My father did a double take. "Either you’re amazingly well informed," Dad said, "or you’ve developed an idiot savant gift for lucky guesses. Yes," he said, nodding, "something to do with the orbital. Only it was the queen’s own idea. She sent those goody-goody Explorers out of the room, then offered Willow’s captain a deal. Temperance wanted to meet with the Fasskisters… supposedly to make peace with them, in the hopes they’d start helping her instead of Samantha."

  Um. On the orbital, the Fasskister never mentioned that last part to us… but then, if he thought I was actually my father, he might want to keep the queen’s proposition a secret.

  "Of course," Dad went on, "what Temperance really wanted was to infect the orbital with those damned Balrog spores… but Willow’s captain didn’t know that. His orders were to get Temperance off the planet any way he could, so he just went along. Unfortunately, the queen got to the orbital, stayed barely an hour, then demanded to be taken back to Troyen. Once she’d escaped from the siege at Unshummin, Temperance wanted to go home, get dropped somewhere far from Samantha’s army, and start building her own forces again."

  "Which," Festina said, "was definitely not something you and Sam wanted."

  "Definitely not," Dad agreed. "Willow’s captain took the queen back aboard, then locked the hold door on her, and headed for Celestia anyway."

  I thought about how Temperance had tried to bash through the wall of the hold. Battering herself bloody, knowing that when Willow crossed the line, the League would execute her for all the people she’d killed during the war. As for the crew who’d basically kidnapped her and dragged her into space against her will… it was pretty clear why the League killed them too. They weren’t such nice people.

  But there was still one thing I didn’t understand. I asked, "Why, Dad? Why really? If this was just about making supergrandchildren, you could have done that without bloodshed. Sam didn’t kill Verity till after I’d finished my transformation; at that point, you’d run through your test case, you had all the data… so why murder the queen? And why set up the recruiters, when Celestia has nothing to do with either Troyen or the Technocracy? You could have got your dynasty of superkids without destroying a single life."

  Dad took a long time to answer. When he finally spoke, his voice was so soft I almost couldn’t hear him through the glass. "Jetsam," he said, using his cruel old nickname for me, "have you ever really seen the Mandasars in action?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I came to Troyen a century ago," he told me, "and even then it was clear Mandasars were special. Stronger than humans… more rationally organized… smarter. Your average gentle scores twenty percent higher than a corresponding Homo sapiens, on all nine intelligence scales. And that was just in peacetime. In war… Christ Almighty, compared to Troyen, the Technocracy is so pathetically weak, I sometimes want to puke. We’re lazy and venal, like Imperial Rome at its most decadent; but the League of Peoples make sure that barbarians never come banging on our gates. That’s a crime against evolution. Mandasar society is the most efficient war machine I’ve ever seen, and it’s a travesty they can’t run right over us."

  "They aren’t war machines," I objected. "Troyen stayed at peace two hundred years before Sam got everybody riled up."

  "Two h
undred sterile years," Dad replied, "unnaturally imposed when Queen Wisdom sucked up to the League of Peoples. She was the one who forced warriors and gentles and workers to live together, poisoning each other with their own pheromones, diluting what they should be…"

  "And what they should be is separate from each other?" I asked. "The way your recruiters ripped apart families into single-caste slave camps and brainwashed them—"

  "Like hell I brainwashed them!" Dad interrupted. "They were brainwashed before. I returned them to their true strength. You think it’s an accident that when they’re segregated, the gentles become brilliant tacticians, the warriors become unstoppable soldiers, and the workers become uncomplaining servants? Open your eyes, boy — it’s not an accident, it’s what nature intended. Evolution made Mandasars into perfect infantry, perfect strategists, perfect civilian support… with an iron-willed queen at the top to dictate what everyone else should be doing. That’s the natural state of the Mandasar world, Jetsam: a crystal-clear division of duty."

  "No," Festina said quietly, "that’s only one natural state of the Mandasar world. Evolution also provided the other paradigm: castes mingling with each other, their pheromones balancing each other’s personalities. Less aggressive warriors, less slavish workers, less tunnel-visioned gentles. Not as ruthlessly efficient, but a way of life where everyone has more breathing space."

  "A way of life where everyone is weak," my father sneered. "Easy prey the moment some other Mandasar tribe goes onto a segregated military footing."

  Festina said, "Really? If turning militaristic was always stronger, wouldn’t evolution get rid of the other possibility after a while? But Mandasar pheromones are tuned to make both ways of life possible: segregated and unified. Historically, I’m sure Mandasars sometimes needed to abandon everything else and gear up for war… but they also had to be prepared for peace. Otherwise, what would they do when they’d defeated all their available enemies?"

  "There are always more enemies," my father replied dismissively.

  "Maybe," Festina admitted, "if you go out and look for them. But to do that, you have to invent the peaceful art of boat-building. And navigation. And cartography. And systems of government that hold your empire together when your queen is too far away to make every decision for you." She shook her head. "Success in war always leads to the demands of peace, Admiral. Suppose tens of thousands of years ago, the Mandasars did have a subspecies one hundred percent devoted to fighting; that breed didn’t survive, did it? Either they killed each other in some prehistoric Armageddon, or they starved to death because the workers became too bored and stupid to plant crops properly. Modern Mandasars — Mandasar sapiens — came out on top because they weren’t one-trick ponies."

  She peered up intently at the glass-chested man on the battlements. "Glorify war if you want, Admiral York. A lot of people do, especially since the League has made armed conflict so rare. When no one’s seen combat for a long time, some folks get the idea they’re missing a primal source of energy. But fighting is only part of the story for any species, and the other parts are just as important."

  "Other parts only become important after the fighting stops," my father retorted. "Kill or be killed, Ramos; that’s the fundamental issue, and everything else comes after, if you can spare the time. Don’t go writing poetry until you’re sitting on your enemies’ bones."

  He waved his hand out beyond us, toward the approaching Black Army. They’d reached the last canal now, the one surrounding the palace like a moat. Soon they’d be driving their way across, breaching the palisade and storming onto the palace grounds. My father smiled. "This is what it always comes down to, Ramos. Naked aggression: might against might. You can rhapsodize about art and science and anything else you think is a great accomplishment, but nature doesn’t respect that superficial crap. Death is the one reality our universe truly acknowledges. That’s why Sam and I chose to start a war; I’ve devoted myself to life’s one overwhelming imperative."

  "Killing those who threaten you?" Festina asked. "Yes."

  "Eliminating those who are dangerous to you?"

  "Right."

  "The strong subjugate the weak?"

  "Correct." He lifted his foot, then set it down on Plebon’s face again. "You have ten seconds to surrender or I’ll show you how ugly war can be."

  "I may have ten seconds," Festina answered coldly, "but you don’t. You’re a dangerous non-sentient, threatening to kill a sentient being… and any nearby sentients have an absolute duty to stop you. You’re also a pompous jerk-off, Admiral, extolling the joys of conquest but failing to grasp the most important law of all: no matter how tough you are, there’s always someone who can beat the living shit out of you." She clapped her hands once, sharp and loud. "Balrog!"

  Like fire belching from a furnace, plumes of glowing red erupted from the stairwell. Crimson smoke, thick as a wall, exploded outward to sweep over my father and Dade, so fast the two men were coated with spores before they could react.

  Dade shrieked and dropped his stunner, throwing his hands to his helmet. For ten long seconds, he tried to scrape his visor clear with his fingers, scrabbling at the dusty layer of moss that continued to thicken around him. Then some particularly hungry mass of spores managed to corrode through his tightsuit, down near his stomach where the front had been cut to expose the power circuits. Air puffed out from the suit’s belly, swirling the spores around like steam on a breeze. As the suit began to deflate, Dade howled and doubled over, like something was clawing at his gut. A moment later, he dropped out of sight behind the parapet wall, and his howling cut off dead.

  As for my father — my son, my twin brother — he didn’t even have a tightsuit to protect him. In a single heartbeat, his head was enveloped by a spongy clot of moss: red wads of fuzz coating his hair, covering his eyes, clogging up his nose and mouth. I think he tried to scream, but the noise was muffled to an almost inaudible whine. He took two blind steps but couldn’t manage a third… more moss congealed around him every second, weighing down his legs, freezing him in place. His arms waved feebly till they became too heavy to move; already his body looked twice its original size, with still more spores accumulating all over, packing outward until the human shape was lost. Soon there was only a fuzzy red ball, man height and glowing as bright as a bonfire.

  Twenty seconds of hold-your-breath silence. Then the top of that red-shining ball began to flatten in. Moment by moment, more of the ball sank away, spores sloughing off onto the stone parapet; and there was nothing underneath. No man. No bones. Nothing but solid moss. I could smell an overpowering buttered-toast odor on the wind that blew through the hole in our glass cube… and it made me think of a smugly satisfied predator that’s just eaten a nice meal.

  As the ball of moss continued to dissolve, I could see that the glass chest plate hadn’t been consumed — it must have been indigestible. Also untouched was the tiny glass container that had once nestled in the man’s intestines. The container floated atop the mass of moss, like a bottle bobbing on a calm lake, while spores kept falling away. Within a minute, the ball that had once been my father shrank to nothing but a flat sheen of red on the parapet’s stone. For a moment more, the glass container remained motionless on that mossy bed… and I could just make out the tiny dot of scarlet inside, the Balrog spore my father had imprisoned.

  The surrounding moss suddenly flared a brilliant burning neon: bright enough to blind me for a second. When I could see again, the container was gone — vaporized, dissolved — and the once-captive spore was now just one among a million others glimmering silently in the darkness.

  Mission accomplished for the Balrog… the prisoner freed. But the rescue hadn’t happened till after Dad’s clone had been eaten alive. My father’s other copies — Mr. Clear Chest on Celestia, and Alexander York, Admiral of the Gold, on New Earth — must have stayed mentally linked with the dying man through the whole ordeal: must have felt every millisecond of the devouring as if it was happening
to them.

  I wondered what it would do to you… feeling yourself being eaten alive. The Balrog could surely tell me — if it was telepathic, it must have heard my father’s silent screams — but I decided I didn’t want to know.

  Festina was already scaling the rope, hand over hand toward the top of our glass cube. As she climbed, she called to Tobit, "Have you figured out how to fly this thing yet?"

  "Almost," he answered. "Provided there aren’t any built-in security checks. If the onboard computer wants me to type a password or something, we’re screwed."

  "Cross your fingers that doesn’t happen," Festina told him. "If we can’t stop the attacking army, this cube is our only way out of the city."

  The moment she clambered onto the cube’s glass roof, I grabbed the rope and headed up too. No point me staying in the cube: I couldn’t help Tobit with the controls, and I couldn’t help Innocence either. Sometime in the past two minutes, while I was watching my dad get eaten, Innocence had quietly passed out. Maybe that was a good sign — Mandasars shut down like that when their metabolisms shift into a full-out healing state — but it could also mean she was too broken inside to keep herself awake. We needed to get Innocence to the infirmary… but she wouldn’t be safe till we stopped the Black Army.

  Outside the cube, the air had curdled with the smell of buttered toast — eau de Balrog, so thick the night breeze couldn’t dissipate it. From this angle, I could see how much of the parapet was covered with glowing red: a bulgy patch where my father had been, a Dade-shaped mound nearby, a light dusting everywhere else. Plebon and the Mandasars had been pelted with their share of spores when the Balrog exploded from the stairwell, but they weren’t coated solidly… just a sprinkle of specks, like gleaming freckles all over their bodies.

  Festina turned toward me as I joined her. She stood at the edge of the cube, where it nuzzled the top of the parapet wall. No spores had fallen on the cube itself; but if Festina took another step forward, she’d be walking on moss dust.