Crown of the Serpent

by Allen Wold

  "Holy shit."

  "You might say," Polski said.

  "I've seen him snap off all six shots in less than a second," Darcy said, "and every one a bull's-eye."

  "If it weren't for that," Polski said to Darcy, "you'd have been my first choice. You've had a lot more experience than Rik, and I know you're good enough to do the job, but with that gun of his.... Now look, kid," he said to Rikard, "what I'm asking you is a favor. You don't have to do it. But I think you can do it, and it could make the difference between stopping these raiders now, or letting dozens of thousands of people be carried off for God knows what purpose."

  "You're putting me in kind of a bind," Rikard said. Every­body was watching him. "I do have some unfinished business, and time could be very important."

  "I think I have some idea of what you're talking about," Polski said. "Sukiro isn't the only agent I sent out looking for you. But she's the best, so I sent her where I thought you would most likely be. I knew that a man named Djentsin was on No-warth, and that he had at least one of the Leaves of Ba'Gashi—" There were restrained murmers of surprise from the others.

  "—and I knew that you two had been looking for them ever since you left Seltique."

  "I thought we were being pretty discreet," Darcy said.

  "You were, but I know you, Darcy, and I think I know you pretty well too, Rik. It was just a matter of making some shrewd guesses based on where you went and who you talked to."

  "You were spying on us?" Darcy asked.

  "For purely personal reasons," Polski said dryly.

  Darcy flushed.

  Of course. Polski was still in love with Darcy. He hadn't tried to keep her from falling for Rikard, or tried to put Rikard out of the picture, as he so easily could have.

  "Maybe we're lucky," Rikard said. "They had us cold on Nowarth, I hate to think what would have happened to us if you hadn't pulled us out."

  "I do too," Polski said. "And if it weren't for this business, I couldn't have done it. But if you agree to do what I ask, you may not think yourself so lucky after all."

  "It's not exactly the kind of business I've had much experi­ence with," Rikard said dryly.

  "What about me?" Darcy asked. "Or do you want Rikard to do this by himself?"

  "What I want," Polski said, "has nothing to do with it. You two have been a team for a couple of years now. If Rik went alone, he might have to explain himself to people who would find his being there without you very suspicious. But you'll have to make up your own mind about it, just as Rik will. We'll be landing in a couple of minutes, let's see what we find here first." Then Polski sat back and was silent for the rest of the trip.

  2

  Natimarie was a large world, but rather lacking in heavy elements, such as metals, so most of its technology, which was quite high, was based on wood, porcelains and glasses, and plastics and other organic materials. The population was well under two billion. The town near which the shuttle landed was small by Federation standards, though here it was about average size, just under ten thousand people, surrounded by open grain fields.

  Two Patrol craft stood on their landing spiders, hardly disturbing the fully grown but still green crop just a couple of hundred meters from the edge of town. Four other shuttles had, of necessity, caused more damage—not that the inhabitants of that town would care anymore. Two dark tan Federal armored flyers were parked at either end of the impromptu landing field, and surrounding them all were a dozen or so local fliers, and as many wheeled ground vehicles.

  But it was the town that held Rikard's attention as he and Darcy came off the shuttle. It rose abruptly from the now-flattened fields that surrounded it and was separated from them only by a circumferential road. Rikard had seen some strange architecture on the worlds he had visited, but nothing quite like this.

  At first all he saw were platform floors, suspended in air, connected only by two or three flights of open stairways and occasional columns. Furniture, peculiar to the needs of the Sen-ola, were arranged in groups on each floor, like living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, studies. He could see through the nearer dwellings into those beyond, and through them into others beyond them; see the trees and bushes on the far sides of the houses, between them, lining the streets, which trees and bushes at some angles obscured his view after only a home or two, at others permitted him to see for blocks and blocks. In those directions the air seemed to grow thick with distance, which was because the houses, shops, public buildings did in fact have walls, but walls made of almost perfectly transparent glass.

  "Is the whole town like this?" Darcy asked.

  "And every town and city on Natimarie," Major Chiang said. "It takes a while to get used to. Senola don't have much need for privacy."

  "Or secrecy either," Captain Brenner added. He gestured to a long, wheeled van that was parked nearby and they all got in.

  It was a Senola vehicle, made mostly of wood, with benches on one side on which Anavür and Meshatham sat straddled, and with Humanform seats on the other side for the rest of them.

  "What about survivors?" Polski asked as the Senola driver turned the van toward the town.

  "We'll see them first," Brenner said. "We've kept twenty some odd in the hospital here. The others—about half the pop­ulation this time—have been sent to wherever we could find room."

  "That's better than on Dorflyn," Polski told Rikard and Darcy. "There were only fifty survivors there altogether. Half the population was missing, the other half dead."

  The short ride to the hospital was eerie at first, then disturbing. For the first few blocks the town was simply deserted.

  "Lots of survivors here," Brenner explained.

  But soon, through the transparent walls, they could see the bodies of Senola, adults and children, lying almost anywhere, but mostly indoors, in living rooms, or offices, or shops.

  "We've commandeered every stasis unit we could," Brenner said. The squat beige boxes were set in the middle of each building, sometimes two or more in the larger areas. The number of bodies increased as they neared the hospital and, for the first time, Rikard began to get a personal sense of horror at what had happened here.

  Which was probably what Polski had intended. The colonel understood how much the Leaves of Ba'Gashi meant to Rikard and Darcy, how much they would mean to anyone, especially a Gesta, who could recover them and deliver them to the Com­passionate Brothers of the Capital on Seltique. Rikard respected and admired Polski, and would have been more than glad to help him, even on a job like this, if it weren't for the Leaves.

  As it was, if he and Darcy agreed to become Polski's agents, they might miss forever the opportunity to pull off a stunt that would not only benefit them, but the rest of the Federation as well. If penetrating the raiders' base took very long, as it was likely to do, someone else might find where the Reliquiture had been hidden for the last millennium or so, and reap the benefits of the trade with Djentsin. Or worse, Djentsin might discover the significance of the Leaves, and take them to Seltique himself. Rikard was determined to turn Polski down.

  But that resolve was shaken when they got to the hospital. The place was a nightmare. The patients lying dead in their beds were not so bad, it was the visitors in the lobby, the staff in the corridors, all having fallen where they stood, that brought home the reality of massive slaughter, though none bore any wounds.

  The stasis generators had been set so that the visitors had no difficulty getting from the main entrance to the ward where the selected survivors were being kept. Only along this route had the bodies been removed. On either side, plainly visible through the glass walls, where there were walls at all, the corpses re­mained where they had been found, preserved from decay by the stasis fields that reduced all biological activity by a factor of about a thousand. Even the wards adjacent to the one where the survivors were being kept, under the care of three doctors, or this culture's equivalent, had not been cleared.

  There were twenty-three survivors in all. They lay
in then-low beds, covered by sheets, and seemed unharmed except for being in a state of severe shock. Those who were awake stared vacantly at the ceiling or walls, some of them babbling softly to themselves.

  "These are the best of them," Captain Anavür said. "At least they respond to outside stimuli. All the others are just lumps."

  One of the survivors, four beds down, seemed a little more alert than the others. At least, his—her?—eyes were open and watching the visitors. Rikard went to the bed, curiosity and revulsion struggling within him. "How are you?" he asked.

  The victim looked at him with mingled terror and hilarity. "The skies are so greasy," he said, "so greasy. I can't see through them. But the lightning, it comes, you know, so black in the light, in the night, in the sky, the greasy sky." Then he broke down into a fit of giggling that seemed to go on for a long time but that actually lasted just seconds. Then he was quiet again, and stared at Rikard with huge purple eyes.

  Rikard could only stare back. He wasn't sure he had under­stood the victim's words correctly—his dialect was very much local and backcountry, unlike Anavür's or Meshatham's—but his intonation, his agitation carried a freight of meaning of their own.

  "Did he really say 'greasy sky'?" Rikard asked Meshatham.

  "Yes, he did. A few of the others, when they speak at all, have mentioned the same thing. We have no idea what it means."

  "So many people in an empty house," the victim muttered, almost to himself. His gaze wandered from side to side, then came back to Rikard. "It's empty, I tell you. So many, many...."

  Anavür went around the other side of the bed and pushed a button set into the wall over it. A section of the wall lit up, displaying information on the patient, written in the local typog­raphy, which Rikard couldn't read. "His name's Savathorn," Anavür read. "No internal damage, neurology pretty scram­bled, brain function peaking randomly—at least, that's what it says."

  "Where was he found?" Rikard asked as Darcy came up to stand beside him.

  Anavür touched the button again. "In his home, with his family—two other adults and three children. They were all alive, but completely mindless."

  "They keep throwing," Savathorn said, "like glass on my teeth, the tangled whips of my insides. I can't feel them, they knot and Oh dash I the whips keep tangling. Why? Can't you see them? But the house is empty."

  "We've recorded everything anybody has said," Meshatham told them, "and we've had linguists and psychologists working on the transcriptions and tapes, but I don't think they're getting • very far."

  "Most of what they say," Anavür said, "is just sounds, swearing, babble, noises without words. The few phrases and words they do use, however, all seem to involve this bizarre imagery."

  The others were all standing around the bed by now, and Savathorn was looking from one to the other. He seemed most curious about the Humans, as if he had little or no experience with them. Then his eyes got very large, and he half sat up, and started shouting, barks and yelps, with only an occasional word—"nightmare," then babble, "light too bright, much too bright," then more shouts, a groan, "paint the walls," he said, "paint out the nightmare." Then, just as Anavür started to turn away for help, Savathorn fell back on the bed, utterly calm.

  But his outcry had been heard. Two Senola doctors came quickly into the ward and administered a sedative. "It gets worse," one of them said, "if you don't calm them immediately. Vashagrim over there"—he nodded toward a farther bed on the far side of the ward—"eventually threw himself onto the floor and broke two legs and an arm."

  Savathorn did not resist the ministrations and, after a very brief moment, closed his eyes.

  Polski, his face grim and determined, was looking at Rikard pointedly. Rikard stared back. They had come here only so Rikard would be convinced to join Polski's investigation. As much as Rikard sympathized with the plight of these people, he resented the pressure his old friend was putting on him. Of course, had their roles been reversed, he would have done the same.

  "We've recorded extensive interviews," Chiang said, "with each of these people, even those who could not speak, observ­ing their reactions to questions, key words, and the kind of imagery they use themselves. The tapes also include expert analysis, sometimes contradictory, of each response." She looked directly at Rikard. "Would you like to see them?"

  Not only Polski and Chiang but the others were looking at him as well, including the doctors. Even Darcy was watching him, though her face was expressionless. "That won't be necessary," he said.

  "What are their chances for recovery?" Polski asked without taking his eyes from Rikard.

  "Not very good," Meshatham said. A doctor nodded. "Sa­vathorn seemed to show some improvement at first, but not during the last few days, and now he's regressing again."

  Rikard turned away from the staring eyes, to give himself a chance to think, and to calm down, but all he could see, through the glass wall in front of him, were the bodies in the other wards—patients, doctors, visitors. It was terrible. But what about the Leaves? He rubbed his hands over his eyes. "Let's get out of here," he said at last.

  There were no objections, and no further comment as they left the hospital and got back in the van. But instead of going to the police's temporary headquarters, they went to the place that Forensics had tentatively identified as the site of the first attack, near the center of town, in an office complex.

  Rikard kept to himself during the ride, and tried to dissociate himself from what he could see outside. He thought he should feel flattered that Polski valued his possible assistance so highly that he would go to the trouble to put on this display, but Rikard wasn't sure he was really the right person for the job. There were other Gestae who had far more experience than he. All Rikard had was his gun, which had limited utility, after all. Had Polski's concept of him gotten romantically enlarged since their last meeting on Seltique?

  He felt Darcy's hand on his arm. Her eyes were bleak, but she said nothing. He wanted to ask her what to do, but the decision was his. He turned away from her, but the scene out­side the window was too depressing—a playground or park, with children lying where they had fallen. He closed his eyes, and tried yet again to sort things out in his mind.

  He was surprised, when the van stopped, to discover that he had fallen asleep. Not so much, he thought, from real fatigue as from emotional overload. He glanced around half guiltily at the others as they prepared to get out of the vehicle. Darcy had moved to sit next to Polski. Rikard looked at them for a long moment, half afraid of what that implied. He followed them out to the street, and looked at the building that was their destina­tion, at least six stories tall, and set back from the street by broad, shallow steps.

  "As far as we can tell," Captain Brenner was saying, "about seventy percent of the people in this building are missing. Another twenty percent are still here but dead, and the other ten percent, the survivors, have been removed to hospitals else­where. We don't know the exact number of people who worked here during the day, but records give us an estimate, and it's those ratios that indicate that this was the site of the first attack —more people missing than elsewhere, and of the dead, most but not all have been, ah, damaged."

  They went up the steps and through the broad glass doors of the main entrance into what Rikard assumed was the lobby. There were very few interior partitions here, and those were of glass. Rather, the boundaries between "rooms" were marked by slightly raised strips of a lighter wood than the rest of the floor. Furniture did more to define interior spaces than did walls.

  Captain Brenner showed them three bodies: one behind a large desk, two others on an overstuffed bench. All three had had their skulls opened, as if with the finest surgical tools. All three skulls were empty, and when Rikard bent down to look inside the hollow brain pan of one of those on the bench, he saw that the spinal cord, too, was missing.

  Then Captain Anavür led them on to several other "rooms" where they found more of the same, then up broad interior
stairs to the second floor, as seemingly partitionless as the main floor below, and to an office at one side where a Senola corpse, under a sheet, was stretched out on two desks that had been pushed together end to end. Anavür reached out a long arm and pulled the sheet aside.

  Rikard had not seen an autopsy subject before, and though this one was not Human he still felt a twinge. The victim was lying on its face, its internal organs set out beside it. Its spine had been opened along its whole length to show that its spinal cord was missing. Other incisions, along the lines of major nerves, showed that every nerve fiber larger than a millimeter had also been removed.

  "Was the body intact before the autopsy?" Rikard asked.

  "Except for the skull being opened," Brenner said.

  "How in the hell could they pull out the nerves, then?"

  "We don't know. We've taken a few samples of the nerve sheath up to one of our medical ships, and sent others back to Corydon."

  "They've got the best forensic facilities in the Federation there," Polski explained. "Any partials?"

  "Thirty-one," Captain Anavür said as he drew the sheet back over the body. "We've sent them to Corydon, too. But I saw one as it was being bagged. Skull open, brain half out. The doctors said the spinal cord was loose for about half its length."

  "We caught them right in the act," Brenner said. His face, calm until now to the point of blandness, wore a mask of frus­tration and anger. "Except that we didn't catch anybody! The first crew down found the town pretty much as you see it now. No raiders, no suspects—and no ships either. Colonel, they have to have had a ship. But if they did, it left before we got here. But some of the bodies were still warm. We had scanners aimed on the site when we were still ten hours out. No shuttles left here during those ten hours. No starships. Nothing. No reports of strange craft in orbit, or at the jump-slot, or landing or taking off any time before we arrived. I don't care how they got the brains out, I want to know how they got their God damn ship out!"