Crown of the Serpent

by Allen Wold

  The technician staggered but did not fall, and Falyn, expecting to grab the man and drag him back out of sight, lurched off balance for an instant. Before she could conceal herself again the technician turned.* His face was expressionless, even when he saw Falyn and the others behind her down that aisle. It took only an instant, Falyn was already reaching out with the jolter, but the technician was faster, and without a sound turned quickly away and lurched toward the iris. In unison the other technicians stopped what they were doing and did the same.

  The goons, surprised by this turn of events, hesitated just an instant, afraid to use their blasters for fear of damaging the brains. This was enough time for the jolted technician to get out the door. The goons nearest the iris jumped forward to try to stop the three others, but they were in too tight a space and the two technicians nearest the iris escaped.

  The fourth technician might have escaped too, in spite of the quickness of the goons. Though he had shambled somnambu-lantly before, he was moving quickly now and not confused by his surroundings. But while he was still some three meters from the iris there came the soft snapping of a single unitron round being fired. The technician staggered, then lurched away. The goons nearest him all ducked back. Rikard looked in the direction from which the sound had come, and saw Sukiro standing clear and taking careful aim with her gun.

  She fired again, a burst this time. The five 10mm rounds made just a little noise. The technician was hit all five times, and staggered again, but kept going in spite of his body wounds.

  Sukiro pushed the goons near her aside—and other goons in the line of fire backed off, recognizing their commander's pre­rogative—then aimed a longer burst at the technician's legs. The humanoid went down as the shattered bones folded, and flopped out of sight behind a rack of supplies.

  Rikard hurried toward the door, ignoring the goons around him, who were now coming out of cover. The noncoms were snapping orders: "You three get out into the hall."

  "Hold your fire," "Form up and hold steady." Too much control, he thought, let them get the technicians before they get away.

  He came up to Sukiro just as she reached the place where the wounded humanoid had fallen. There was no body, but there was a trail of blood on the floor. Falyn came up quickly as Sukiro, after an instant's consternation, stepped over the blood and strode along the crimson trail in search of the fallen man.

  Falyn did not break stride but went off after Sukiro, and Rikard went along with her. "There doesn't seem to be enough blood for the wounds that guy took," Falyn said.

  Denny, still standing by the iris, called out. "Shall we give chase to the others?" Stupid, Rikard thought. Nelross was bringing his goons forward in an orderly fashion.

  Rikard and Falyn followed Sukiro, around one end of an aisle and up another. Sukiro called back to Denny, "I'll be with you in a minute." Then they came around a section of shelving filled with equipment instead of brain containers. There was the technician, lying facedown, arms and legs sprawled out. And the top of his head was lying beside him.

  "There's no brain," Sukiro said, dumbfounded.

  "How could he possibly have moved?" Falyn asked.

  "No wonder he didn't bleed much," Rikard said dryly.

  Then Grayshard came hurrying up to join them. He didn't even look at the corpse. "The others," he said, "you must shoot in the head."

  "But it's empty," Sukiro said.

  "It is now."

  They all looked at their mysterious colleague, but Denny, still by the iris, called out. "They're getting away."

  "Then go!" Sukiro snapped, irritated, and they all turned to hurry after the goons as, at last, they went out the iris in pursuit.

  Rikard came out into the corridor just behind Sukiro, with Falyn right behind him. The goons on the right had started up an empty hallway, but those on the left dropped into a crouch to fire their blasters at the three zombie technicians, now a good two hundred meters away. One of the zombies was hit and his head exploded. A second was hit in the back, and folded at its new waist and crumbled to the deck. But the third zombie jerked unharmed into a side passage while blaster shots pocked the walls beside it and sang on down the corridor beyond.

  "Full power," Denny snapped, "go get him." The two goons in the lead straightened for an instant. Rikard could hear the click as their armor became fully activated. Then they raced down the corridor, accelerating as they went, in pursuit of the escapee.

  Before Rikard and the others could get to the fallen zombies the pursuing goons reached the corner, jumped around it, and fired two or three times each. "We got him," one called back.

  But Rikard's attention, and that of those with him, was focused on the zombies now at their feet. The one hit in the head was as one would have expected, completely still, but the one shot in the back was irioving, though Rikard could see the deck through the hole in its body. There was, in spite of this, very little blood. And not, Rikard suspected, just because of the cauterizing effect of the blaster shot. There was a rank smell in the air.

  While the others stared, Rikard knelt down beside the zombie and turned it over on its back. There was an incision just under the hairline on its forehead.

  "Kill it," Grayshard called out as he came running up.

  "Not just yet," Rikard said. He grabbed the top of the zombie's skull and tried to lift it off, but it was fastened securely. Private Ming dropped down onto her knees by the zombie's feet and grabbed its legs. Rikard took another hold of its hair and pulled again.

  This time the skull came off, and inside, twisting and coiling, was a mass of pale, creamy white tendrils. It seemed to be trying to compress itself into the lower portion of the skull.

  Rikard rocked back on his heels, disgusted. It looked just like a Tathas, though very small and not the same color as those on Kohltri. But he didn't feel any Tathas effect.

  Gospodin and Brisabane, too, were disgusted at the sight of the thing. Several of the other goons were having a hard time keeping their stomachs down. The body wound was not the issue, it was the coiling mass of white fibers where a brain should have been—a parasite, a monster. Private Petorska couldn't stand it. He pushed Rikard aside, drew his blaster, and fired at the zombie's skull. Rikard was knocked backward by the shock. Bits of tendril and splots of fluid spattered his face and chest.

  Falyn grabbed Petorska and jerked him to one side. "Get control of yourself! You could have hurt someone!"

  "God, I—" Petorska gasped. A cloud of vapor and smoke rose around them. It stank.

  "And now how are we going to interrogate it?"

  "I—" He swallowed hard. "Yes, sir." He turned away and holstered his weapon.

  Rikard wiped slime and bits of tendril off his face, took a deep breath, then reached down into the brain case. His stom­ach nearly turned over, but he pulled out what was left of the creature inside. A thick bundle of tendrils went down through the hollow spinal cord. Rikard kept on pulling, until he had withdrawn nearly two meters of the creature from the man who had been dead long ago.

  Sukiro stared down at the thing. "There must have been one of those in the man I shot in the brain room," she said. Her voice was flat and even.

  "There was," Grayshard said.

  Falyn turned to Gospodin and Brisabane. "Check out that one down the hall," she ordered. They went. "And kill it!" she shouted after them.

  "But the one in the brain room," Rikard said, "it's still alive." He looked at Grayshard. "Could it call for help?"

  "It could," Grayshard said.

  "You, you, you," Sukiro said to Colder, Dyson, and Charney, "come with me. The rest of you keep watch here." Then she started back toward the brain room. Rikard got to his feet to go with her.

  But there was no sign of the brain creature when they got back to the body. Sukiro directed her three goons to search the floor nearby, to look for any signs that such a creature might have made. "It can't move very fast," she said to Rikard, "it's got to be hiding somewhere in here."


  They looked behind canisters, boxes, electronic equipment. They looked under shelves, on top of shelves, circling out from the body on the floor. They found no monster, they found no trail.

  "It could be almost anywhere," Rikard said. "We don't have time to open every box. I think it went for the first exit and got out."

  "Could it operate an iris?" Sukiro asked.

  "I think it could. Tathas can stretch themselves up very tall, and it doesn't take much pressure to trip the touch-plate."

  "Then it's as good as gone."

  "But the damn thing is," Rikard went on, "I get no Tathas sense in here at all—except for what was already here."

  "So then that thing really wasn't a Tathas."

  "It sure as hell looked like one. And there have been Tathas here."

  Charney suddenly turned toward the door, and the others looked too. Grayshard stood in the open iris, watching them. They waited for him to speak, but he did not.

  "Or something related to Tathas, perhaps," Rikard went on, looking straight at Grayshard's vision receptors. Grayshard just stood there.

  "Parallel evolution?" Sukiro suggested.

  "Not very likely, but one time the Tathas had starflight, or their ancestors did, and this race could be descended from those."

  "But you didn't get any of that Tathas effect from the one in the hall."

  Rikard looked down at his hand. There was a slight sheen of pearly white here and there, the juices of the dead creature he'd pulled from the skull. "No corrosive effect either." He wiped his hand on his pants.

  "A different race?" Sukiro suggested. "A subspecies? Workers and administrators and so on?"

  Grayshard's goggles could not reveal which of them he was actually looking at. He said nothing.

  "We can speculate later," Sukiro went on. "Now we have to assume that the alarm has been given. We've got to move, before the rest of the raiders here escape, or hide somewhere—or launch an attack."

  "And," Rikard said, "if they can produce a Tathas-like effect, then we could be in big trouble."

  "We've got to find their headquarters," Sukiro went on, "as soon as we can, while we only have a custodial force to deal with."

  "There's an up-ramp over here," said Dyson, pointing to an iris in a far corner.

  "Then let's take it."

  Sukiro called in the rest of the goons and the noncoms got them organized. Denny took the lead as they went up the ramp in the corner. Everybody was ready for trouble.

  The ramp led them up to a room like the one below, filled with racks of brains and life-support equipment. The brains were visibly of different types, large and small, with varying arrangements of lobes and ganglia and "spinal" cords. One of the other doors in the room opened onto a hall that had a ramp going up the side. They took this up through the center of the floor of another arcade.

  There were several objects here, of the kind they had seen before, round or sharp cornered, of various sizes and degrees of complexity. And there were spiral ramps, set into the corners of the arcade, which led up to the second-level balcony. But even as the goons spread out to check out the numerous exits and find the best way to go up again, all the irises around the balcony opened, and dozens of people poured out to spread along the balcony and take up combat positions.

  They were partially armored, and without helmets. Most of "them were Humans, but a fair number were of another race—humanoid except for a turtlelike beak instead of a mouth, crab-stalk eyes, a high stiff crest of hair from the brow to the top of the spine, and unshod feet that could grasp as well as hands could.

  The ambushers started firing before they were well set in place. The goons returned fire at once, then tried to take cover. But the raiders were shooting down, and the artifacts on the floor of the arcade, even the largest of them, provided protection from only one side, and the goons were surrounded.

  The goons were equipped with only the lightest blasters, and it seemed that the raiders were no better armed. Their aim was atrocious, but their volume of fire increased as more and more came out of the second-level irises and moved around the bal­cony, many to lie on the floor and fire down over the edge.

  It was inevitable that some of their shots would hit, but goon armor, semiflexible titalumin, seemed proof against these weak blaster bolts. Even though they were exposed, the police were not as careful as they might have been, and became overconfi­dent when, receiving a hit, they suffered no more damage than to be knocked aside.

  The raiders did not fare so well. The goons aimed carefully, and though the raiders' armor was, itself, more than proof against these light police blasters, it was not a complete protec­tion. Eight or ten of the raiders were hit with devastating effect before the rest of them learned to lie facedown and shoot over the edge of the balcony.

  There were shouted commands from the surrounding raiders, in a language nobody knew, and they coordinated their fire, up to ten of them picking one goon as a target. Sladen, hit by concentrated fire, fell with his right arm half blown away. Then Choi was hit, and the titalumin on his legs flew off. Gospodin went down when her helmet cracked open. And Maturska, who jumped to Gospodin's aid, was hit by seven near simultaneous shots, her body armor was blown away, and she was knocked back, a broken mass.

  Rikard and Gray shard were at a complete disadvantage. They crouched behind a large divan-shaped thing and several goons formed a wall between them and the raiders on the other side. But it was not enough. A stray shot passed between the protec­tive goons, hit the object beside Grayshard, and the back-flash took off his left arm.

  These casualties seemed to galvanize the goons who, though they had been taken by surprise and were still at a positional disadvantage, were much better fighters. They, too, changed tactics, and teams of two or three picked common targets, aiming just at the edge of the balconies where only a gun or the top of a head was exposed. One by one they began to pick off the raiders, in spite of the massed blaster fire crashing around them.

  And any raider who got frightened and tried to run was hit even before he could get to his feet.

  It began to look like the police were going to win this fight after all, in spite of better than four to one odds, especially when the raiders started a general retreat out the nearest doors. The goons eased their fire, having no desire to kill frightened people who had given up. But then Rikard began to feel a strong Tathas effect. The goons' shots began to miss, and several of them threw themselves facedown on the deck.

  Then an iris on the ground floor opened and the Tathas effect became stronger. Most of the goons stopped shooting and the raiders on the balcony held their fire as well. Rikard wanted to crawl under the object behind which he was crouching but forced himself to turn toward the iris, and so saw, coming from beyond the open portal, two of the shambling humanoid zom­bies, wearing a kind of harness sling between them, in which hung, as if in state, a very large Tathas-like creature. It was bigger than any Tathas Rikard had ever seen, massive, creamy in color with shades of almost orange, each of its tendrils tipped in red. It was this that was broadcasting the devastating psychic weapons, the same, Rikard knew, that had been used at all the towns the raiders had depopulated.

  Rikard's panic was almost overwhelming. He knew all too well the kind of madness those alien thoughts could engender, the horror of being touched by one of those degenerate things, being dissolved and eaten while still alive. He fought to control his fear, fumbled for his gun which, till now, had been forgot­ten, so sudden and intense had been the ambush. His hand found the grip of the .75, his fingers closed around it, the con­centric circles danced in his eyes, and his time sense began to slow, but even as he pulled the gun his vision blurred, not from his built-in ranging system but from the now overwhelming ef­fects of the Tathas' psychic attack. On either side goons sat slumped, or fell, or crawled headfirst into the edge of an artifact or the body of one of their fellows. Many of them seemed able to resist the assault, as if their armor were at least some protec­tion
from it, but it was not enough. The monster Tathas was far too strong, and determined, and one by one the goons fell and lay still.

  The ceiling was too high and far, far too bright. There were too many people, beside him, above him, they pressed in on his senses like sandpaper on raw skin. The smoke of blaster-fire was almost sweet, the sounds of groaning an itch under his skin. Gray stones, the thought came from nowhere, gray stones, and he tried to reach under his shirt for the dragongem, the one thing which, once long ago, had helped him against this evil, but he couldn't get his hand to work. There was a gun in it. It went off, under his body. His leather clothes and mesh-mail just barely protected him from the flash of the shell. He let the gun go, tried to raise his head, saw raiders with glistening hair plas­tered on their heads and necks coming out of balcony irises, down ramps, across the floor from first-level entrances. The Tathas-thing loomed large, though it was so far away, its carrier zombies striding, clumsy but purposeful, toward him.

  He concentrated all his energy on retaining awareness. He could not reach the dragongem, but he could think about it. It helped. A bit. He watched as the raiders, new raiders, moved among the goons, taking weapons, removing the helmets from those who still struggled. Their shining hair wasn't hair, he saw, but some kind of skintight cap that protected them from the Tathas' attack.

  The effort was too much. Rikard gave up trying to watch and just thought about the dragongem pressing against his chest. It was right against his skin, and warm, generating its own psy­chic field. If he could have looked at it, could have closed the circuit between his skin, the gem, and his sight, he might have been able to resist the psychic assault.

  He started to make the effort, to pull his hand under his chest so that he could reach into his shirt but stopped before he had moved an inch. The raiders paid too much attention to the mov­ing victims, those who stayed still they more or less ignored. If they saw his effort, they'd wait to find out what he was trying to do—and then they'd find the dragongem. He couldn't allow that.