Why had the captain chosen “Tomlinson”? A password shouldn’t be easy to guess: shouldn’t be appropriate to anything. But Kipling’s Tomlinson had been cast out of heaven and hell; and SunSeeker’s people were certainly in danger of being cast out of the Excelsius system. Coincidence? Sure.
His watch officer duty had ended while he was gazing at screens. Up at the helm, Officer Okuda had taken over. So … “Think I’ll honor this triumph with a vodka gimlet. After all, I’m not on duty.”
THIRTY-FIVE
BLINDFIGHT
Moral high ground is a wonderful place to site your artillery.
—NAPOLÉON
Was the light in here dimming? Beth looked around the vast cavern. Into her nostrils came seeping the pong of bad fish, of manure, the stinging sour of a tanning works—all mixed together.
Ugh … ack …
She felt her stomach lurch, her head spin. She had led her team through these strange spaces for what now seemed like most of her lifetime.
Her sleep was irregular at best. Slanting sunlight played funny tricks with the eyes. Too much daylight, too. Now too much damned dark. This all disrupted the central clock in all their brains, like flying across multiple time zones or burning the midnight oil: fatigue, queasy sensations, and brain fog set in.
A fizzing yellow fire covered the transparent wall between them and the Methaners. It frothed and sparked. Acrid yellow jets arced from it into the thick, sullen air. Her nerves jumped.
The electrostatic fields made her hair stand on end. Her skin prickled.
Her attention was jerky, trying to look everywhere. A creature appeared in the middle distance.
But … was that odd orange creature moving on … wheels? She close-upped it with a blink and, yes—it had an axle system for three wheels. It speedily mounted a hill, carrying some load away, and vanished before she could get an idea of how it made that all work.
The vault around them was tall and its walls a gloomy black and brown mixture. Maybe three hundred meters broad and just as tall. But distance was hard to tell in the gathering gloom. The footing was tricky because there were ruts from some massive vehicles that left paths more like trenches than tire tracks.
Odd vinelike bushes dotted the plain. As Beth walked, she felt a dollop of moisture strike her shoulder, then her forehead. She licked it—water, faintly brackish. A sighing wind passed by. Raindrops spattered. An ominous growling came through her boots.
On the transparent wall, she could see a sudden splash of light. It twisted and transformed into an intricate design. Twister had backed away from the wall, and she signaled her team to do so, too. Twister said, “I remark again, the Methaners continue amassing electric charge in that vault of theirs.”
“How do they live in that?” Cliff called. “That whole chamber of theirs must be some kind of giant electrical battery.”
Twister’s short hairs at neck and arms were standing out straight. Crackling sparked through the moist air. Anarok backed away, alarmed. The spidow bristled with anxiety. Twister said, “Their technologies are ancient secrets, even to us of the Cobweb. The Methaners are a mysterious and crafty kind. Also cowards, from their distant evolution. That is what drew them to us. Our collaboration was useful for a while, but I am wondering if they are still of good mind. Now—” Twister paused, receiving some signal. “Ah. They have studied your ancient greetings and so now show this.”
“Really?” None of this was making sense. She stood and watched the sputtering colors on the clear wall swirl like a flexing vortex. What the hell…?
Her inboards drew from her links back to SunSeeker and told her that this was an ancient Chinese tricolored glaze termed sancai, a dragon in yellow, green, and white. From the Tang dynasty, it added, so its use here may be both greeting and warning, as a dragon is a dangerous beast.
Cliff said, “Uh-oh…”
“Open the focals on your lasers!” she called to her team.
“Why?” somebody called.
Always the questions; not like they were trained infantry. “I want to be able to see you if you use them. Keep track of positions.” The lasers’ side flare effect diminished power in the main beam but otherwise she couldn’t tell what the hell was happening. If something did indeed happen. Which she suspected it well might.
“Use them? For what?”
The most instructive thing she could say was, “Shut up.”
She had learned the hard way on the Bowl to always study terrain when she could. This shadowy vault was roughly circular. They had come in at, say, the six o’clock position. They were closer to the center now but angled toward eight o’clock.
“Move to the perimeter, near the wall,” she called. “So with our backs to it, we don’t have to worry about all directions.”
Cliff was at her left, and he whispered, “Ambush?”
“Could be.”
They trudged over toward the wall, and she noticed in the dim light that there were stumps of fractured rock dotting the uneven surface. Could be useful for shelter.
In the long years getting here on SunSeeker, she had always imagined arriving at Glory would be a Big Deal of formal greetings, banquets, intense translations. Maybe even welcome to the Galactic Federation or some such from those oldie entertainments. Something like the United Planets some imagined a century or two past. Each planet contributing worth and extracting value from the communing souls …
Yeah. That didn’t work in the Earthside solar system, and it sure wasn’t the tone here. The Glorians were more like magicians than diplomats. Show don’t tell hadn’t worked much. They had gotten a tour of many strange places, lost people, and now were in this sinkhole.
All because, as the Twisty types said, they wanted the new-guy-primates-on-the-block to learn from experience. Like taking a kid into a big art museum and saying, Look all you like, kid, then figure it out—ancient Egyptian, French impressionism, the Parthenon, all you can see. We’ll sit back and see what you think.
Was that how Glorians, in their many shapes and sizes, learned about humans? Could be.
Only … some didn’t seem to like the idea of humans here at all. The Methaners in their caverns.
And they controlled this underground labyrinth.
Someone coming. Some … thing. She could sense it.
She felt pressure building. Her neck hair prickled. Static electricity building. Spattering raindrops. Tension laced the air.
Cliff sent on closed connection, “Look, these Methaners are cowards, Twister said. So let’s figure how to use that.”
“Roger,” she said, trying to think. Abruptly, rain hammered them like an angry beast. Lashing side winds howled. A crackling shaft of many-fingered lightning.
The lightning was not a single stabbing bolt. It lingered. A jagged sheet cut the dark and frayed into snapping forks.
Dark forms came moving toward them from the low hills. Laser shots popped, but their flash was a tiny dull spark amid the sparking lightning. Beth saw her team was spread well, about twenty meters from the transparent wall. Nothing visible on the other side of that now.
Lightning danced. It made hoops, like sputtering yellow archways walking on the stone at their feet.
Beth did not fire. She could not see well enough to tell if the dark shapes about a hundred meters away were advancing. Maybe they came to see the forking yellow electrical swords do their work. “Cease fire!”
She had once been in a jungle storm in Costa Rica. She got wet faster than falling fully clothed into a lake—which would have been more pleasant. This rain was cold.
“Go flat!” Cliff called. “Lightning seeks conductors standing out from the ground. That’s us!”
The team got down, she could see. She lay down, looking straight up. A long silence as the electrical field grew again. Her skin rippled with it.
The lightning came forking again. Bangs and crashes. Brighter than the sun, when it came near her. Shock waves brushed her. The forking lines exploded ac
ross the entire vault like a rifle shot.
Beth made herself stay calm, lying flat, watching the zapping yellow tendrils seek them out. She had no idea if there was some way to send lightning after targets. But if they just ran the discharges long enough, some of her team would get hit. The sharp bite in the air now meant plenty of ozone was getting made. Only a matter of time …
Should she surrender? How? What terms?
No, if the Methaners made the leap to actual combat, they meant to kill. They weren’t fighters. They must have thought a quick zapping would wipe them out. War at a distance.
Surrender meant death.
So … how to use the Methaners’ cowardice?
A glimmer of an idea struck her the same moment Cliff beat her to it. “Look, the Methaners might surrender on credible threat. They may expect the same of us. So they’re scaring us, thinking we might fold.”
She blinked. “Right! So we have to up their game. A lot.”
Bemor Prime nudged his way next to them. “If I know your sort, you have explosives,” he said.
Beth nodded. “We do. Excavation tech. It’s part of the combo chem set, right?”
Cliff said, “I’ve got that in my sub-pack.”
“What do you have in mind?” Bemor Prime asked. “I recommended we bring expolosives, but deplore haste. We may demonstrate—”
“No time. Let’s blow their transparent wall.”
Silence, then: “That will release their atmosphere into ours!” Bemor Prime held its voice down, but it stayed tight with alarm.
“Calm down,” Beth said, edging back. “I’m guessing the Methaners don’t have helmets. Ours are riding on our backs.”
“Hard to know that for sure. Can’t even see them well.” Cliff sounded worried.
“That three-armed thing—whatever it was—didn’t have gear at all, that I can see,” Beth said.
“Ah, so—a gamble,” Bemor Prime said.
“Right.” Beth paused. She could make it an order, but she wanted more than that. She counted heartbeats to ten.
She took a breath to bark out the order when Bemor Prime broke in with, “Cliff, I will come help.”
“With those claws?”
“I have learned some dexterity.”
The air boomed and flashed while the two of them worked. Beth called out on man-to-man comm to each team member. They had been smarter than her. She had flattened out, blending with the rock here. The team was all in the ruts of those trails, maybe a meter deep. The lightning zinged right over them. Ozone prickled her nose.
“Smart!” she said when each checked in. “Stay steady. Don’t talk.”
The air snarled and snapped, and bright flashes lit the battlefield. No movement in view.
Cliff and Bemor Prime came crawling over, moving slow and easy along one of the ruts. Beth said, “There’s a depression about ten meters to my left. Let’s wait out the next bolt and go there.”
Bemor Prime said, “I have been timing them. There is a recharge interval of about two minutes. They must reach approximately a million of your measure, volts, to discharge at this atmospheric density. Then comes another big bolt.”
“Let’s make a dash then,” Cliff said. “I’ve got the elastics out from my pack sections. We can use those—”
Here came the bang and flash. Beth could not stop herself from flinching. Elastics? How could they—?
“Go!” Beth called.
Bent over, all three loped into the small hole, maybe a meter deep. Just barely big enough for them to get somewhat below the rocky flats around them.
“How’s this going to work?” Beth asked.
Bemor Prime was already assembling some elastic bands into a strap with a pouch in the middle. Its claws had indeed learned dexterity. Cliff brought out a jury-rigged parcel, barely larger than a big fist. “It’s a slingshot. You two’ll be the posts.”
Beth nodded, not quite getting it. But then Cliff positioned them with their backs against the short shelf of the hole, holding the elastics. Bemor Prime’s mass would be useful here. He very carefully put the rigged parcel in the pouch. “It’ll go on impact. I armed it.”
He crawled away, head and body low. He stretched the elastics as far as he could. Woman and alien held the other ends.
Cliff said, “Lift your arms high. Gotta get the right angle.”
They did. Beth found it hard to hold steady against the pull, coming at an angle. “Hurry!” she said. She was not feeling strong.
“Heads down!” Cliff called.
A flash and bang of lightning. The yellow was so intense it came through her eyelids as she squeezed them shut. Percussion slapped her face hard.
“Okay, back up!” Cliff called. He stretched the elastics out. Grunted. Adjusted it some. Grunted harder.
Beth braced herself. How could he estimate the right angle in this chaos?
Twister’s voice came over comm. “Whatever are you attempting? I do not advise—”
Cliff let the package go. The elastics snapped back hard, slapping against the spidow’s carapace. The launch angle looked about thirty degrees, Beth automatically estimated. She was tempted to look over the shelf’s edge to track its arc—but didn’t. The transparent wall was maybe fifty meters away—
A flash and bang. A hard punch in the air. Not lightning.
Percussion popped her ears. She dared to look.
A hole maybe ten meters wide yawned in the transparent wall.
Whoosh—she felt a harsh breath go by. Her nose wrinkled. Rotten eggs? Garbage? Mixed flavors. Ugh.
The Methaners’ vault seemed to have higher pressure. It was jetting into their air. Acrid, harsh, a burning sensation. The smell was not just obnoxious. It could kill them. She had jammed her helmet on, but some of the smell had been trapped.
“Get away from that!” Beth sent on team comm. They scrambled away from the wall.
Beth ran like a panicked animal, big leaping strides. Jumped over the snaky bushes. Splashed down in deep puddles, skidded, held her balance, sprang forward. Bemor Prime whooshed past her. She sucked in foul air. Her feet found firm rock and she leaped. An orange flash lit her way. Crashes echoed. The orange forks in the air rippled like living things. They lit the underside of a hovering moist cloud, formed from the rain. Nightmare landscape.
They made nearly a hundred meters before she said, “Go to ground!”
They ran fast, but it was surely time again for some lightning. The team flattened out, bunched together without her saying to at all.
No lightning. They waited. Still none.
Beth looked back at the clear wall. The hole was closing.
“Your breach heals very quickly, as you note,” Twister said on comm. “They are very cautious in their engineering.”
“So?” Beth shot back.
“The Methaners are, by your lights, cautious to a fault.”
“And so?”
“The gas incursion endangered you all. Yet you did it.”
“We had to.”
“Admirable, I suppose, by your standards. You accepted deaths to make your point.”
“Deaths?”
“You have been distracted. Apparently did not note that your team member Mizuki Amamato died from inhaling the invading gases.”
“What?”
She checked her comm inboards. Amamato’s gave no bio back-signal at all. She said to Bemor Prime, “Check Amamato. Find her if you can. But move carefully. We dunno what’s up here.”
“Right.” Bemor Prime leaped and was gone.
Twister said calmly, “Your demonstrated threat is clear: Humans will die to get their way.”
“Get our way? You mean, not get killed.”
“To the Methaners, this is much the same thing.”
“That’s weird.”
“Methaners are indeed, by your lights and mine as well, weird.”
Cliff settled in next to her. He had heard all this and said, “So what are they offering?”
“Y
our ability to leave this place.”
“That’s it?” Beth said.
“Your ship SunSeeker, is a credible threat.”
“We can’t negotiate that. They’ll have to talk to our captain. Redwing.”
“I shall tell the Methaners. They are agreeably afraid of you.”
Beth relaxed, but only a little. “Really?” Beth kept her delight out of her tone.
“This does not guarantee your freedom, understand. Or perhaps”—Twister somehow got a very human note of reluctance into his voice—“even your eventual safety.”
“Huh?” Cliff was startled. “We’re not going to be happy with any constraint on—”
“They can easily hold you captive. That way, what you know and how that threatens their position are constrained.”
Beth said, “I don’t like that.”
“They will gladly negotiate with your Redwing.”
Beth sighed. “If we can find him.”
THIRTY-SIX
THE GRAVITATIONAL WAVE CLUB
Stories must be plausible; reality does not.
—ELISABETH MALARTRE
The clamp on Redwing was like molasses. Hard to move at all. But the frozen-motion feeling was from something in Redwing’s nerves, not some gooey sap stuck to him. The clamp effect the fungus thing applied to him made most other moves impossible. Spidery aches ran through him. The clamp reacted to any major move or arousal in his central nervous system. If he felt a flare of anger, or tried to move his legs, a paralyzing jolt ran through his muscles. Pain that froze him.
More struggle, more jolt. More panic, more jolt. But it ebbed at times, too.
Redwing brought his hand slowly, slowly up toward his shoulder. Just to scratch. Just because he was itchy. He tried to curse through his lockjaw and came up with mostly spit. So close … his hand reached his shoulder, and here came a hard, sharp jab that rattled his bones. His muscles ached deep in, as though he’d done four sweaty hours in the weight room.
Other things were changing in him. He knew he had been unconscious for a while because he felt a fog between him and his memories of the fungal thing speaking—if relayed thought was that. The Fungoid Sphere, as Viviane termed it, had found some way to convey information to him. He could now recall the huge, slimy thing as big as a building, glistening with moisture and layers of growths. A nervous system made from roots and chemical signals, the mind that ran huge living spaceships. And wanted to talk, so Twisto had said. But wanted more. It had invaded him and Viviane.
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