Crown of the Serpent

by Allen Wold

  It was not a convenient weapon to use. Nelross had the goon carrying it set it up so that it could be activated. That done he carried it under his arm like some kind of bulky and clumsy rifle, and they left the room.

  Irises snapped again in the corridor beyond, just what Nelross was waiting for. He aimed the clumsy vibracoil at the iris that had snapped last and triggered it. A tracking beam shone white on the iris, and there was a faint but disturbingly modulated hum that lasted for several seconds. Yansen and Dyson, the goons nearest the iris, waited until the white track­ing beam went out, then opened the iris and looked into the room beyond.

  "You got something," Dyson called back. There were smears on the ground, and a rancid smell in the air. But there was no body to tell whether the residue on the corridor floor was from the thing itself, its vehicle, its outer surface, or some other thing it had carried.

  They returned to the trail. Nelross, with his vibracoil, was always the second to enter any room or corridor. But for a long time he had no reason to use it.

  Even so he did not let down his guard, so that when, as they entered the L-shaped room, the iris on the far side, their in­tended exit, was just snapping, he was ready and fired a long beam from the vibracoil. On the other side they found ample evidence of the effectiveness of that particular weapon under these circumstances.

  As far as they could tell from the mess on the floor, at least three of the invisible intruders had been hit. There were three distinct smears of goo; pieces of what might have been semi-transparent leather; a couple of dozen objects that looked like insect legs, but that had been so shattered by the expanding, superheated fluids inside their owners' bodies that it was hard to be sure. There were no artifacts of any kind. The goons picked their way through the mess and went on. After that, there were no further attacks.

  They neared the arcade and Rikard's concerns were replaced by others when he felt the first tingle of what he had so far interpreted as the Tathas effect. He hurried forward to tell Sukiro.

  "Is it bad?" she asked.

  "No, but it's there."

  They entered the arcade. "Just what it is that you're feeling?" Sukiro asked.

  "It's hard to describe," Rikard said. "It's not just psychic, not like communicating with the Taarshome. The Tathas exude a chemical substance, wherever they go, like a snail's trail. It corrodes almost anything except glass and some kinds of plas­tic, and even then it leaves a residue. The thicker the corrosion, or the residue, the stronger the feeling, and if there are Tathas present, you get a bit of their thoughts, too. I don't feel any thoughts, just the sensation of comfort at being closed in, discomfort at having so many people around me."

  "But then why was it so strong on Natimarie? There was no residue there that we found."

  "Stuff in the air," Rikard hazarded, "too thin to be seen or noticed without a specific chemical analysis. And there, the Tathas were being forced to release that stuff all over the place, so it would be strong enough to affect the people. When they're in their holes, where this stuff is thick, where there's been a lot of corrosion, and they've laid down a kind of shell, as it were, they resonate with it, and the feeings I get feel good to them. Here, the Tathas would be kept in dark confinement, which they find comfortable, instead of being exposed to bright sun­light and open air, as they probably were on Natimarie and at the other raided towns. For them, that would be the ultimate terror and torture."

  Rikard followed the strongest traces across the arcade and into a large, rectangular room on the other side, with three of the sharp-angled, rectilinear objects they had seen before, set close around the central table. The corners of this room were obviously not square but sharply in conformation with the geodesic pattern that all the rooms obeyed.

  Rikard followed the Tathas trace to another, even larger room, though with only two of the strange artifacts, and from there into a corridor, and to the room directly opposite. This room was rather small, with a few objects on the table and counters, but no floor-standing artifacts. There was an opening in one corner of the room, where a ramp went down. The trace led that way.

  On Denny's command Colder and Woadham preceded Rikard from this point, until they came out at the bottom of the ramp, three levels lower, at an intersection of corridors. These were only one level high, but they went in all four directions, and were lit as far as they could see, with frequent crossings and intersections visible in the distance. Rikard closed his eyes, felt discomfort to right and left and behind, and so led them straight ahead.

  They followed this corridor a long way, then took an L to the left, then the branch of a T to the right, which ended at last in another T, and from there went into the room opposite the end of the corridor.

  The light was already on when they entered. There was an object of a kind they hadn't seen before, a stellated polyhedron, sitting in the middle of the floor on three of its points. It was three meters tall and two meters wide, metallic in part, transpar­ent elsewhere. Each point was of a different size, shape, and angularity. It had what appeared to be functional knobs, switches, and levers, set into one surface or another, and some of the transparent spikes showed what looked like electronics inside, but not always, connected to other parts or to surface elements.

  In the next room beyond was another object, similar to the first but larger, with more points more acutely angled. Every­body had a hard time taking their eyes from it, but they were too near danger to pause now. The next room had two smaller, similar objects, differing in color as well as number and acute-ness of points. Then they entered a transverse corridor, went to left and through the third door on the opposite side.

  This room contained yet another of the stellated objects and besides that, from one wall projected a device that intersected the counter as if set into it. It was rectangular, with knobs and levers and panels and projections and hollows, all in metallic colors. It was about one meter high and half a meter long. That it was control equipment of some type was obvious, but what it controlled was a mystery. They did not stay to investigate, though there was a faint humming coming from the thing, but went on out the opposite door.

  Here they found themselves in a corridor two levels high, with a ramp going down on one side, at the bottom of which was a door that opened onto a transverse corridor. They went along this a ways and then turned aside and through an iris into a room.

  There were three of the stellated objects here, all very small, placed near the corners of the room. As they passed through Tamura, to avoid touching the pointed thing, jostled the table in the middle, and several small objects fell from its undersurface onto the floor.

  She picked one of them up, a collection of pentagonal rods, each as big as a thumb and from ten to twenty centimeters Jong. The rods slid over and around each other, but they didn't come apart. She put it down on the table and went on with the others.

  The next room was very large, with columns up to the ceiling though it was only two levels high. There were "control" devices projecting from all four walls. Some of these were actually blinking. The goons kept their distance as Rikard led them past.

  They went into another corridor, along it for quite a ways, and turned at several intersections. They went through a room with one huge stellated object, on into another corridor, along it to a ramp that led down to the end of another corridor, and from there into an empty room on one side, where once again the lights were already on.

  But Sukiro looked around the room with a strange expression on her face. "You know," she said, "if I stop to think about it, I wonder if I'm not feeling something odd too. Like—feeling the walls."

  "That's it," Rikard said.

  "Which way do we go?"

  "I don't know, it's—too generalized. I don't get any sense of direction at all."

  "We should go up," Majorbank said. "Hornower's been feed­ing me data on room angularity, and I calculate we should be almost directly under the raiders' hatch."

  "All right, then," Sukiro
said. "Sergeant Denny, you're in charge."

  There were three other doors in the room, but Denny led them through the one opposite their entrance. The room beyond was also lit. Stacked to one side were plastic containers of typical Federation design.

  They had been going on suspicion until now, but the contents of this storeroom confirmed that this was, indeed, the raiders' base. They didn't bother to investigate any of the containers but went out the opposite door into a corridor, the ceiling of which was lit for its whole length.

  "Here's what we're going to do," Sukiro said as they went up the hall. "We're going to just cross their entire base at this level, until we come to the other side. That will give us some idea of the area they have under their control. Then, assuming we've not run into trouble, we'll go straight up as near to their perimeter as we can, until we come to an inhabited area. At that point we'll try to find out how many of them there are, how they're armed, and what kind of force it would take to take them."

  "Should we spread out?" Nelross asked.

  "Let's keep together," Sukiro said, "until we have a better idea of the layout. It won't do for any of us to get separated."

  "What if we come on someone by surprise?" Denny asked.

  "Back off if you can," Sukiro said, "but if you can't, try to take prisoners."

  "What if we get to the top and don't find anybody?" Falyn asked.

  "In that case we start cleaning up. Any more questions? Then let's go."

  They entered the room at the end of the corridor. Here shelves had been built along the walls and in freestanding rows down the middle of the room. Each shelf held a Human body.

  All were nude, all were dead, held in stasis by devices, at­tached to each of the shelves, of a design totally unfamiliar to Sukiro or Falyn. Each body had had its skull opened.

  Petorska brought out a small, emergency stasis-anti-stasis generator, and turned it on the body of a middle-aged, slightly overweight man, then Jasime and Dyson examined the corpse. They found no other damage than that the brain pan was empty.

  The chamber to their left was also filled with Human bodies.

  They did no more than look inside. The room on the right was different—it was filled with Senola corpses.

  "The victims from Natimarie," Sukiro said with a long sigh. "Or at least some of them. I don't think there are more than a thousand bodies here."

  They went through the fourth door of the first chamber, and in the room beyond found the bodies of a different race, the Aalür. They had spherical bodies covered with thick fur, mostly black, but some mahogony, or a dark brick color, and one or two pale terra-cotta with amber shading. They had four doglegs radiating from the lower quarter, each with two large, massively clawed toes. They had two long and muscular arms just above the middle of their bodies, with two fingers and one thumb, also strongly clawed. They had no heads, their dome-eyes were set into the fur on the top of the body and the mouth was a slash just below these.

  The rooms on either side of this one contained more Humans on the left, more Senola on the right. The fourth led into a corridor. They crossed it and went into the room opposite.

  Here were the bodies of yet another race, the Neugar. They were humanoid, tall, slender, fair, handsome with a vaguely feline cast to their faces. Their hair shaded from white to gold or silver-gray. Their large eyes were open, in shades of blue or startling black.

  The room beyond that held more of the same, then they came to another corridor. The next two rooms held Grelsh.

  These were an arthropoid species, pseudo-humanoid, their exoskeletons reduced to form external "bones." Otherwise they had a hard "skin" of a semi-glossy light brown. They had four legs in pairs set very closely together, and were functionally bipedal. They had only two arms but each had an extra joint. Their hands were composed of two central thumbs and two pairs of opposing fingers. Their faces were round and flat, with a mouth like that of a grasshopper, four small eyes, and no feelers or visible ears.

  What they had seen so far represented only a tiny fraction of all the victims taken from any one world, let alone from all the worlds the raiders had visited. The thought of all the levels of the base filled with bodies in storage like this was overwhelm­ing.

  But they still had no idea of the force they were likely to run up against. Given the equipment they'd seen, a custodial crew would need to be no more than twenty strong, even at the rate that new bodies were being brought in—assuming that all miss­ing victims actually got here and were not jettisoned in transit. Such a base crew would be able to do nothing other than stack bodies, of course. It was more likely that there would be many more than twenty, maybe as many as a hundred.

  "We don't have to go any further," Sukiro said. "If they've made room for half a million bodies or more, it could take us a week just to go across. And it wouldn't tell us anything about the raiders stationed here, or those who actually bring the vic­tims in. Let's start up at the next ramp we come to."

  But the first doors they checked only led into more storage rooms, with their hundreds and thousands of stacked bodies— Human, humanoid, centauroid, and other forms. Aside from the bodies, the stasis shelves, and all the lights being on, there was no sign of whoever was working here. At last they found an ascending ramp and went up to another level.

  The first room they entered here was four times the size of the ones below, and its contents were even more appalling. Shelves lined the walls and filled the room in a huge maze of aisles. All were filled with tanks, and each tank contained not a body but a brain, still alive, connected by tubes and wires to life-support devices that stood in the middle of each stand of shelves.

  There were brains of all varieties, matching the variety of the bodies in storage below. Each tank bore a label, with an alpha­numeric code above another code written in an alphabet never seen in the Federation. Some of the shelves held additional equipment, the purpose of which was not clear. None of the aisles between the shelves ran the full length of the room.

  If there was another way up it had to be on the far side of the room. The goons went in and spread out, passing through the maze of shelves, looking at the brains, forgetting for a moment their purpose here.

  Gray shard, for the first time, began to show some animation. He went from tank to tank, looking at the brains within. At first he seemed to pulse, as if with excitement or indignation, but when he realized that he was being watched he forced himself to become rigid.

  He threaded his way, with the others, from aisle to aisle, but at last he stopped, turned to see Rikard and Sukiro still watching him, and said, "I have seen what I need. There may be hope for these yet. Do what you must, there must be an end to this." His voice, as usual, was expressionless, yet mere was an intensity to it in spite of its mechanical production.

  "You were expecting something like this," Sukiro said.

  "I was hoping not, yet I knew it would be. I—"

  But before he could say anything more, Fresno, near a door in the right-side wall, called out softly. "I heard an iris snap, just outside."

  "We can't fight them in here," Sukiro said, "not if these brains are still alive."

  "Now I hear footsteps," Fresno said, "somebody's coming."

  "Everybody take cover," Denny ordered.

  4

  Now that there was an enemy the goons could understand their training took over, and if Rikard hadn't been in their midst he wouldn't have known anyone was there. In spite of their armor the goons could be almost totally silent if they chose to be, if they had to be, and they found hiding places quickly. But Rikard, taken by surprise by the rapidity of the action, stood where he was until he felt hands on his shoulders, pushing him down. He accepted the suggestion without protest.

  From where he crouched he could just see the edge of the iris, through the stacks of containers on several rows of shelves, and saw it snap open, then stay open as four people, humanoids of some sort, came shuffling in. Two of them turned to the racks of brains a
gainst the wall to the right of the door, and thus remained within his limited view, while the other two attended to the racks on the left, moving out of his sight.

  There was someming wrong about these people. Their move­ments were slow and clumsy, and at first Rikard thought that was because, though humanoid, they were not actually Human but some other race with which he was not familiar. But more than that, their clothes were dirty and torn, and their movements were not just alien but unpracticed, an eerie shamble and fumble, almost as if they were moving in their sleep.

  The two technicians who Rikard could see went from container to container, tapping each, sometimes adjusting switches and dials. They worked side by side, starting with the top shelf and working downward, moving methodically along the wall until they were concealed by intervening shelves.

  The goons near Rikard seemed agitated, and then he noticed that they were signaling to each other with complex but subtle hand gestures. Without the com-link to the shuttle or gunship to coordinate their wired-in communications system, they couldn't talk with each other. But they were not confused. They had been trained to deal with situations such as this, however infrequently they might occur, and their sign language was highly effective.

  Rikard was fascinated by this interplay, and as he watched he saw that Sukiro had gotten one aisle over from him without his noticing. She tapped Falyn on the shoulder and, when the corporal turned, made a gesture. Falyn acknowledged silently, then drew her jolter—a paralyzing neuronic whip—stood up and quietly and quickly walked up the aisles toward the technician nearest her, now separated from his companion who was working his way farther down the wall. Rikard craned to look around a shelf full of equipment and watched as Falyn touched the technician with the tip of her jolter, just below the base of the skull.