Fixing the scene in his mind, he rolled back over the top of the data cabinet and fired his first shot before his body had come to rest. It went low and pierced the main body of the AHU. This seemed to disorient the machine, and Fedic put the next two straight through the column holding up its sensor station. Its head collapsed forward and rested on its body.
One to go, thought Fedic, and took the opportunity to edge quietly onto another data cabinet, further away. He’d just settled into place when he heard the whispering treads of the AHU that had chased the empty magazine. It was returning.
CHAPTER 29
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The AHU wasn’t taking any chances. It opened up with everything it had on the spot Fedic had been using as his sniper’s next. He wasn’t there by the time the weapons hit their target, but the top of the data cabinet was torn open, scattering debris across the cabinets around it.
Fedic regretted the loss of the cabinet. He hoped it hadn’t contained information about the Caerbrindii that he needed. Then he shut the thought out of his mind and focused on the AHU.
It came upright, balancing on the back of its treads. This made it more mobile, and it moved in short bursts as it circled the front of the ventilator shaft once again. Then it took up a position behind a pillar further up the aisle.
Fedic heard a soft pinging noise, coming from everywhere at once, and realized the AHU was employing a type of sophisticated sonar. That meant it would have his exact location any second now. He dropped down from his current position onto the floor, and the AHU hit the spot where he had been a minute later.
Fedic searched quickly through his field kit, and pulled out a small tracking box. He set it to locate and distort sound frequencies. The box hummed, and the face plate turned red as it locked on to the AHU sonar. Whatever image the AHU now read, it would be an aisle or two over from Fedic’s actual position.
He looked for a good place to confront the machine. A central column flanked a terminal further down the aisle, giving the AHU a picture of three exits into the maze of data cabinets, side by side. Fedic could use that.
He moved further back into the maze, and worked his way toward the column. After a while he heard the whispering tread of the AHU, matching his progress as it danced from cover to cover on the far side of the central aisle. It thought it knew where he was, and it did, but not exactly.
Then Fedic was ready. As he stepped up behind the terminal, his image appeared to the AHU to step out into the aisle on his left. It accelerated out of hiding, opening up on the image showing on its sonar system.
Fedic stepped another image out on the right side of the terminal, giving it evidence on its systems that he was in two places at once. Undeterred, the AHU deployed a back-up system, and fired an energy beam at the second image.
The AHU actually managed to look surprised as Fedic stepped out from behind the pillar. Then he put three super-dense slugs into much the same hole in the middle of its sensor turret. The turret sagged forward onto the floor, and its weapons juddered to a halt.
Fedic didn’t have time to feel relieved. If he was to capitalize on his success, he would need to bottle up the other AHUs on the floor above. The data base didn’t appear to have lifts, so they’d be coming down the stairs. And they would do that once they realized the ventilator shaft was a decoy, followed by the AHUs on the floor below not responding.
There were two sets of stairs, close together in the center of one long wall of the building. Fedic positioned a number of contact mines on the landings half way down each, and set up his fields of fire to cover the top of them.
That should hold them for a while, he thought. Still, time was short. He hurried back to the terminal next to the ruined ventilator shaft and set up an over-ride system at the back of it. It wasn’t long before he was once again on the trail of the Caerbrindii, back in the early years when the Druanii, Rothii and Invardii were rapidly diverging.
Their obsession with treaties was certainly intriguing. A whole legalistic industry had developed over the centuries. It must have been a desperate attempt to keep the new species from annihilating one another.
Most of these agreements appeared to be still in force. At least, they had never been officially annulled or terminated. In most cases it appeared they had simply been overtaken by new developments that rendered the old ones obsolete.
Fedic was sure there was something he could use here, but where was it. He plunged on, further into the labyrinth of point and counterpoint between the three warring nations, in the early days of the Caerbrindii.
A burst of gunfire chittered from the stairs, followed by the hiss of AHU energy weapons.
Part of Fedic’s mind visualized the exchange. The AHUs were at the top of the stars, and his autos had put a shot across their bows. They had tried to pick off the auto units in turn, but the units were well hidden in the corners of the stairway surrounds.
Another firefight erupted from the stairs, heavier armaments thumping and hissing. Fedic made an effort to ignore it, pushing on into the Caerbrindii legal system, with all its fascinating twists and turns.
He reduced the parameters for the search, limiting it to treaties between Invardii and Druanii, the only ones of the evolving races left today.
He was beginning to get some idea of what might be useful to the Alliance. The period just after the three races spread out among the stars was a fertile one for him. There were many ‘rules of war’ that governed localized conflicts. They stopped a victory by one side turning into an all-out war, or starting a long-running feud.
The heated exchange from the stairs ended in a thunderous roar that sounded like a string of almost simultaneous explosions. Fedic smiled to himself. That would have stopped the AHUs in their tracks.
They had ventured as far as the landings on the stairs, and run into the contact mines. He had programmed the mines to work together, and the first AHU onto the landing would have been peppered with jumping and clinging death as soon as it triggered the first one.
More usefully to Fedic, both landings would have now been collapsed by the explosions onto the floor below. He didn’t think the AHUs were capable of crossing a gap that wide.
Still, he had better check. He set the data base to download all the treaties from the early space-faring period, limited to Druanii and Invardii involvement only. Then he took the download time to sort through his field pack for those items that were still useful. He would be going out much lighter than he came in, and his speed back to the glider was of paramount importance.
Fedic finished re-packing and waited impatiently for the last of the treaties to download. He had just stored the files away when he heard something crash through the landing on the stairs, hit the floor, and careen into one of the support pillars by the stairs.
There was only one thing that could be, much as he had thought it extremely unlikely. Goddammit AHUs were throwing themselves off the stairs in their urgency to get at him.
They must have received a direct command to do so from the Invardii base, he reasoned, as he grabbed his field kit and headed for the way he came in. The shaft that led down to the cavern under the data base was some distance away, and he sprinted the distance as more AHUs threw themselves into the gaps where the landings used to be.
From the sounds behind him, some of the AHUs had survived the leap off the stairs, and were closing fast.
Fedic was half way to the shaft when a panel in the wall ahead of him opened.
“In here!” said The Collector, waving rubbery arms urgently. Fedic piled into the opening, and his strange ally touched something to the panel behind them, sealing it shut.
The Collector undulated down a slope that led away from the data base, and Fedic followed. This was another of the many tunnels under the data base, and it had side entrances and overhanging galleries splitting off at every turn.
Faint squealings issued from cracks in the walls, and Fedic was made aware of something moving inside the rock,
traveling on a path parallel to his own. He moved up, closer to the mound of flesh in front of him.
“What is that?” he said cautiously, pointing to the side of the tunnel.
“Those are my young,” said The Collector. “I called them. It is, mmm, a difficult process. Dangerous for me also. If they think I cannot control them, they will, mm, destroy me for control of my territory.”
Fedic was silent. He remembered The Collector telling him how deadly the young of its species were.
“You didn’t say you had already been through a birthing,” said Fedic quietly.
“A precaution,” came the reply. “Your type might kill them all, and take my territory for yourselves. I know how many of you there are.”
Ah, thought Fedic, a cultural misunderstanding. Unavoidable, really, in any meeting between such different species.
“But the situation has changed,” it continued. “A large force of machines is heading for the data base.”
The Collector halted, and Fedic almost ran into its bulbous flank.
“In the end,” it said, “you and your kind are the only ones, mmm, with a chance against the orange devils, the monsters that have already harmed so many of my people. If I want my kind to prosper, I have to help you.”
Fedic was touched. He was about to tell The Collector how much he appreciated the thought, when a dull boom echoed down the tunnel.
“Dammit!’ exploded Fedic. “The AHUs have found us.”
The Collector made some strange squealing sounds, similar to those occasionally heard from the walls of the tunnel. There was a chorus of replies. Then the tunnel filled with reptilian creatures no higher than Fedic’s knee, and he forced himself to stay still.
The creatures pressed in, all around him. Beady eyes flickered momentarily at him, and scaled lips curled over carnivorous teeth in distaste, before they turned back to The Collector. Fedic noticed the one huge claw at the end of the forelimbs, and the short, powerful hind limbs. His strange ally hadn’t exaggerated how deadly its offspring were.
The Collector made the same strange noises again, louder, and the creatures disappeared up the tunnel toward the data base. There was a burst of firing, and the wet sound of dismembered flesh hitting the walls, then the firing grew more ragged.
Fedic winced at the sound of metal giving way, and then there was a clattering as the bodies of the AHUs were upended. There were more gnawing sounds, but when the AHUs didn’t move again, the reptilian creatures returned to The Collector.
“We must hurry,” said Fedic’s strange companion. “More machines and bigger machines are not far away.”
The young of The Collector disappeared into the adjacent galleries as quickly as they had come, and Fedic turned his attention back to his companion. The Collector was traveling much faster downhill than it had moved on the flat, and he was forced into a jog to keep up.
At this rate they would be at the point where the tunnels exited into the lowlands in an hour or two. From there, Fedic knew, he still had quite a scramble around the mountain to make his way back to the glider.
In his heart of hearts he was excited about the treaties he had downloaded from the ancient Caerbrindii data base. It was early days yet, but they held promise.
Despite that, they wouldn’t be worth anything if he didn’t make it back into orbit and dock with his ship. Then travel for days through Invardii-controled space, until he could finally make his run for home.
It had turned into a long and dangerous trip. Didn’t they always.
CHAPTER 30
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Fedic and The Collector encountered no more trouble from the AHUs, and it was unlikely the Invardii security systems could track them underground. Fedic began to relax a little. The Collector’s young were all about them now, sometimes in adjacent galleries, or ahead and behind, like some sort of rolling tide of tooth and claw. The Collector seemed to have a tight control over them, much to Fedic’s relief.
He noticed the tunnel was picking up a little seepage from the walls, and it wasn’t long before there was a trickle of water running down the middle of the floor. Over the next half hour he watched that trickle broaden into a small stream. The floating globe that traveled with The Collector began to dim, and Fedic surmised that its power source lay back in The Collector’s lair.
He adjusted the acoustic receivers in his headset, devices that took the sounds he and The Collector made as they moved along the darkening tunnel and fashioned a view of his surroundings. The Collector seemed to be navigating more by touch and hearing as the globe slowly faded.
Fedic wasn’t surprised. These creatures had lived in hidden places for millennia, and they would be used to the dark. He wondered if the globe had been more of a convenience for him than The Collector.
When the stream became more of a barrier, and difficult to cross, the track stuck to the left-hand side of the now much broader tunnel. Not long after that the tunnel began to level out, and Fedic figured he and The Collector were close to one of the valleys at the base of the plateau. The stream was slowly taking on the look of an incipient river.
The Collector reached up and took the globe in one rubbery arm, and stowed it somewhere under its many folds. What light the globe was still emitting was abruptly extinguished.
“It will be dark outside the tunnel,” wheezed The Collector, covered in the thin slime it produced whenever it exerted itself. The two of them had made good time, but it was clear The Collector was at the limits of its endurance. Its strangled breathing had reached such an intensity Fedic began to worry about it collapsing from over-exertion.
“I think we’re clear of anything the Invardii security systems might have sent after us,” said Fedic, checking a monitor from his field pack. He had been able to get a download from the glider, and it showed a number of machines had arrived at the data base but were staying close by the building.
His acoustic receivers told him there was nothing moving behind them in the tunnels. The second wave of machines at the data base must have found the destroyed AHUs by now, but they hadn’t attempted to follow Fedic and The Collector into the underground labyrinth. Which suited the stealth operative fine.
The Collector began to slow down, and it’s breathing slowly returning to what was, for it, a more normal rate.
Then Fedic looked up, and saw stars overhead. He realized they had just left the tunnel. The track ended in a sandy beach beside the now rapidly moving river. He adjusted his headset back to infrared from its acoustic mode.
“There is an entrance to another cave system, mmm, further along the valley,” said The Collector. “I will be safe there. If you climb out of the valley, the ridge above us will take you back to the mountain slopes below the plateau. Your, mmm, vehicle is there, yes?”
Fedic nodded. He knew The Collector now understood a head nod as a signal of agreement. He wasn’t sure how good The Collector’s directional senses were, but his own understanding of the layout of the land agreed with The Collector’s instructions. The ridge above him led in the direction he needed to go.
Fedic was shifting some rations from his field kit to his outside pockets, so he could eat as he climbed, when he heard a fast, whistle-whack cry. It seemed that the lizard-like predators he’d encountered on his way to the data base were also down here. That was going to be a problem. He looked up, and a number of pairs of eyes observed him intently from across the river.
“Vermyk,” said The Collector flatly. “They will not let you pass.”
Fedic nodded. He knew from experience how fast the creatures were. More disturbingly, they were prepared to let some of their number die so the others could bring down the pack’s targeted prey.
“You will have to take my young with you,” said The Collector, as if this was a matter of course. It made the same high-pitched calling squeals that Fedic had heard it make before. The dull gray of the sandy beach filled with a tide of moving darkness. Fedic stood absolutely still, not flinchi
ng when something brushed heavily against him, and a clawed foot settled on one of his boots.
“You’ll have to, mmm, smell like me,” said The Collector, making its way through its young toward Fedic.
“Rub some of the waste from my skin onto your clothing.”
Fedic scooped up the slime from its body – now drying in the early night-time cool outside the tunnel – and spread it over his clothing. He took his field pack off and treated that the same way. In a few minutes he was saturated with the stuff. No point in holding back, he figured, rubbing it into his hair – his life might depend on it.
“Kneel,” said The Collector, and Fedic knelt. The Collector began something that could almost have been a song. It was a long, steady, chant in the ever-varying whistles and squeals he had heard it use with its young. The creatures around him stirred restlessly, and then they began to climb over each other, trying to get closer to Fedic.
He realized what was coming, and braced himself. Moments later a mass of squirming, climbing bodies smothered him. He was pushed from side to side, and feet and snouts raked down his sides. They seem to have sheathed the large claws he’d seen earlier, and weren’t exposing the fearsome teeth he had seen in the snake-like heads.
The ceremony, whatever it was, was eventually over. Fedic stood and stretched. He found, to his relief, that he had been afflicted with nothing more than a few bruises.
“They will follow you wherever you go,” said The Collector, “and protect you. The bonding should last one or two days. When you want to send them back to me, repeat this sending chant a few times.”
Fedic recorded the short sending chant on one of his devices, and hoped the bonding would hold until he needed to send the creatures back to The Collector. That would be at least long enough to get him back to the glider. If the bonding wore off early he wouldn’t have a chance against this tide of teeth and claw.
Invardii Box Set 2 Page 18
