World Hammer Read online

  Contents

  Title page

  Prologue

  World Hammer

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Epilogue

  The Predator Space Chronicles

  Other works by Craig DeLancey

  About the Author

  Title information

  Craig DeLancey

  EVOLUTION COMMANDOS:

  WORLD HAMMER

  Predator Space Chronicles 2

  For Chris

  PROLOGUE

  All the stars of heaven fell.

  Or so it seemed. Amir Tarkos, human warrior of the Harmonizer corp, dropped toward the axis of a rotating black asteroid. He wore nothing but vacuum armor, and he fell alone. As the horizon grew to swallow half of space, the suns of the galaxy appeared to fall with him.

  The asteroid orbited a fading white dwarf that glowed, coldly dim, behind Tarkos. Around the dwarf star orbited a million asteroids, the cold and silent detritus of a dozen planets that had been destroyed when the sun flared, expanded, and then faded to a cinder. The other asteroids orbited so far out that, from their surfaces, the dwarf sun would seem little brighter than the other stars of the galaxy. But this asteroid that rose beneath Tarkos’s feet was special. It orbited alone in the narrow zone of warmth shed by the star’s last sputters of fusion. If the asteroid had been there before the sun exploded, it would have been vaporized. It could only have been pushed down and slowed from distant orbit—placed here with intent.

  Tarkos dared a single radar ping and his suit told him he had fifty meters to go.

  He held his breath. He wore a simple rocket pack over his armored spacesuit, and when a second ping told him he’d fallen to just twenty meters above the surface, he activated the pack’s adjustment jets, using a pre-programmed routine. A burst pushed him slightly to the side, aligning him closer to, but not quite over, the axis. Then two jets fired in counter-motion from his shoulders, turning him. A third jet slowed his fall. The stars began to rotate around him and the white dwarf sun rushed past, rushed past, rushed past as he spun. He closed his eyes, fighting nausea.

  His boots hit the hard rock violently, sending jolts of pain through his ankles and knees. He exhaled with a grunt and ran to catch his balance. His speed had not quite matched the asteroid’s rotation. He skipped, bounced, slammed against the rough side of a crater, and then flipped to land on his feet again. He might bounce right off the surface. He magnetized his boots, pinwheeled his arms, and managed to run with big, lurching steps until it seemed he no longer tumbled forward.

  He finally stopped, leaning out over his toes. He had matched the asteroid’s spin. But now he felt lost in the reeling stars and madly rotating sun. He forced himself to look down.

  The voice of a human female sounded in his helmet, speaking English, tightbeam relayed off the satellite he’d set in a slow drop above: “Amir. Are you OK? You weren’t breathing, then you sounded like you were in a fight. Over.”

  “That’s one small stumble for a man,” Tarkos said, his voice sounding loud in his helmet, “one embarrassing collapse for humankind.”

  “Don’t joke like that,” the voice came back, an edge of anger in her tone. “Over.”

  “Sorry, Pala. I had a bit of trouble matching the spin.”

  “You should have slowed earlier. Over.”

  “I didn’t want to trigger any collision defense systems.”

  “Well,” Pala Eydis said, “you should talk me through your progress, so I know what’s going on. Over.”

  Tarkos did not say what he was thinking: that out here on this black metal rock, trust was irrelevant. He had no one to depend on but himself. “OK, I’m down. Standing near the axis.”

  It barely felt “down,” however. The asteroid was big but its mass conveyed only a hint of gravity. Without the magnetic boots, he could have been flung off. He adjusted his helmet visuals to paint out the stars, so that the spin would stop making him nauseous. Now that he had a moment to stand still and think, he recognized that he had begun to shiver. The skin of his armored spacesuit was running a quantum computational cooling algorithm, to nearly match the cold of space. But the chill of it began now to penetrate the suit’s active insulation.

  “I’m going to turn off the suit’s camouflage,” he said.

  “Roger that,” Eydis said.

  Tarkos smiled. It was strange to be speaking English, especially old NASA English. For him, one spoke Galactic in space.

  Tarkos sent the command to his armored spacesuit and looked down at his arms. As the black cooling faded, the light of the white dwarf suddenly reflected off his arms and torso, a bright flashing that came and went as the sun seemed to revolve around him. His shadow circled about, a mad sundial.

  His suit began to beep. Small radars, hidden among the rocks, had found him now. The radar absorption properties of his suit were ineffective at this short range.

  “Here goes.” He told his suit to transmit the message that his prisoner, the OnUnAn hive mind organism Gowgoroup, had recorded for him. He and Eydis had checked the message, as best they could, using his ship’s translation software, so Tarkos knew the literal content. But whether it was appropriate, whether it would be an insult or really, as Gowgoroup insisted, a demand that could not be denied—well, no translation program could tell them that.

  “I am a pilgrim,” the message started, in the slurping, gurgling primary language of the swampy world where the OnUnAns originated. “I am Harmonizer Amir Tarkos, an oxygen-order organism, human singleton of the planet Earth, who comes to the venerated Labyrinth of the OnUnAns seeking an answer to a urgent question. I demand entrance of the holy many.”

  “You’re doing it again, Amir,” Eydis whispered in his ear. “Holding your breath. Remember you’re a land mammal. Breathe. Over.”

  He exhaled.

  “Heat signature twenty-three meters at thirty degrees from your current orientation,” she said, still whispering, a useless but natural human reaction to their desire for stealth. “It’s a door, I think. Over.”

  “So far so good,” Tarkos said. “Maybe this will be straightforward. I go in, find the AI, get the answer we need, and then come straight back out.”

  “I suspect that nothing you do turns out that easy.”

  “You know what to do with the ship. We’ll be out of communication.”

  “Roger,” she said. “And let me add: I’ll kill that heap of slugs Gowgoroup, if you don’t come back soon. Over.”

  “If I don’t come back soon, pull Commander Bria from the autodoc,” Tarkos told her. “I think she’s healed enough to stand on her own four feet. She’ll kill Gowgoroup for you, and then start in on this asteroid.”

  He could see heat escaping now, a bright square visible in infrared, where a door had opened in the surface. He walked toward it, a difficult task. His seemingly drunken steps reminded him, in a flash, of a favorite bit of playground equipment from his youth. There had been a park near his home in Turkey, where he had live a short while before coming to the United States. At the edge of the playground, near a patch of trash-strewn weeds that narrowly separated the park from a busy road, had been a disk set up on a central axis. You could run alongside the disk, spinning it, and then jump on. Someone eventually took the toy away, no doubt because it was dangerous, but the strange, unexpected trajectory forced on you as you walked to the center of the spinning disk, and then walked back out to the edge, had been for a small child a grea
t lesson in the conservation of angular momentum. In the same way, the ground tried to slip sideways under him as he walked toward the door. And it felt as if he descended an ever-steeper hill, as he walked out from the axis. He leaned farther backwards with each step.

  The door was about two meters on a side. Tarkos took off the rocket pack he’d used to control his descent toward the asteroid. He lay the pack on the ground, used his suit to drive a piton, and affixed the pack to it. Then he walked alongside the open rectangular entrance, to its “bottom” edge. He performed the difficult and disorienting task of stepping over the threshold, planting a magnetic boot on the edge, and then taking his next step over onto the interior—a maneuver that required a 90 degree rotation, head forward.

  He stood now in a fraction of an e-gee, his head toward the axis, in a room with a ceiling slightly narrower than the floor, but otherwise apparently a cube. A door slid closed behind him. Atmosphere pumped into the room: oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur dioxide and a lot of organics and methane. He could breathe it, if he had to, but he kept his suit on.

  When the pressure neared Earth normal, another door parted. He stepped into a corridor of black stone streaked with crystalline patterns of nickel and iron. Diodes glowed brightly in a line set waist high. He walked a few dozen meters, to where the corridor intersected three other corridors that stretched in each direction: straight forward, curving upward to the left, and curving upward to the right. Three paths into the Labyrinth, most holy relic of the OnUnAn race. He could see in each direction that open gaps in the walls gave entrance to other passages. If he had to walk, which way should he go?

  But then, as Gowgoroup had promised, an image shimmered and took on the appearance of a solid form before him: a hologram of an OnUnAn, a colony being composed of several slug-like organisms each about the size of a large Terran dog. The heap of slugs waved six pairs of eye stalks at him in curiosity. This OnUnAn had the typical members: two “travelers,” two slightly larger “warriors,” a leader on the top of the heap, and a blind and mute coordinator in the center of the heap. Their combined hive mind would be—if Tarkos’s experience with the OnUnAn Gowgoroup proved typical—unpredictable, contentious, and fluidly willing to change.

  Several of the slugs made gutteral sounds, which his suit picked up on exterior microphones and piped into his helmet. The translation software of Tarkos’s suit struggled to keep up. Across his faceplate streamed a message. I am the Priest of Beginnings. Here starts your search, pilgrim.

  A standard greeting that meant nothing, he suspected. But at least it granted his claim to be a pilgrim.

  “I am Harmonizer Amir Tarkos,” he said, talking in Galactic, the lingua franca of the Alliance, and telling his suit to transmit it in sound and also on the radio frequency he’d used outside. “I request immediate audience with the Oracle.”

  “Negation, negation!” two of the slugs near the bottom of the heap gurgled. Tarkos felt a surge of relief: the slugs answered in Galactic. He would not have been well able to negotiate in the OnUnAn language, given that his translationware seemed inadequate to the task. The slug on top of the heap added, “There are no human Harmonizers.” A slug just below it shouted, “The Alliance is not recognized here!”

  “I am a Harmonizer,” Tarkos repeated. “And surely you can tell that my form is typical of a human being.”

  “Humans are a primitive race,” gurgled one of the dark diplomat slugs that had been silent. “No human has come so far.” But the lead slug asked, “What is your question for the Oracle?”

  Gowgoroup had told Tarkos that he must not answer this question. Telling the priest why he had come, Gowgoroup had promised Tarkos, would result in violence.

  So Tarkos did just the opposite of what Gowgoroup had recommended. He told the truth. “I seek the location of the World Hammer, the wandering planet pair that passed near your homeworld Onus, three thousand years ago.”

  “Why?” the lead slug gurgled.

  “I will find these worlds, and go there, and challenge the surviving Ulltrian warriors to surrender or die.”

  The slugs acted in unison, shrinking back and half retracting their eye stalks. Tarkos knew enough of OnUnAn behavior from his experience with his prisoner to recognize the expression of shock and fear. The priest said, with most of its mouths speaking in unison, “We shall not be part of war with the Ulltrians.”

  “Good luck with that,” Tarkos said in English, indulging himself because he knew no one outside Earth understood the language. “Ain’t no one going to sit this war out.”

  The leader of the colony, the slug atop the heap, said in a loud voice, “I have located your ship.”

  “I thought you might,” Tarkos said in English.

  “We will now destroy it,” the slug added.

  Tarkos nodded. “I thought you might do that, too.”

  _____

  “Why should I trust you?” Tarkos had asked his prisoner, the OnUnAn called Gowgoroup, just a week before. They had been aboard his ship, a starsleeve, where the OnUnAn was confined in its quarters.

  “We are aligned now,” the lead slug of Gowgoroup gurgled, “you and I. Our foot trails meld into one.”

  “No,” Tarkos said. He had put on an oxygen mask before entering Gowgoroup’s quarters, but the sulfuric atmosphere irritated his eyes to tears. “You killed a respected Kirt astronomer. You killed my commander, although not irrevocably. You tried to kill me and Pala Eydis. We are not aligned.”

  “I did all that to prevent war.”

  “You did all that to delay war to advantage the Ulltrians.”

  Half of Gowgoroup had died on the planet known as the Well of Furies. Now the three slugs that remained waved their eye stalks in agitation. “There is no advantage. The Ulltrians will win any war. Even the machines of the Lost Zone will fall before them. But a day of delay is a day of extra life for your species.”

  Tarkos frowned. He had no idea whether Gowgoroup actually believed these claims, or simply wanted to render its motives uncertain. “So you say in this Labyrinth we could find the answer we need?”

  “At the Labyrinth, you will not be killed, if you slide as I instruct. And then you can bring your war to the Ulltrians. If the Alliance weakens the Ulltrians before the Alliance is destroyed, my species is more likely to negotiate its own survival.”

  Tarkos laughed without mirth. This explanation had the ring of truth. No doubt the OnUnAns would prefer to beg leniency of weakened Ulltrian victors. “Tell me how one gets an answer from the Labyrinth.”

  “At the end of the many paths through the Labyrinth is the Oracle, an artificial intelligence that is given all our information, all our knowledge. Any pilgrim that finds its way to the Oracle is granted one question of the Oracle, and the Oracle must answer.”

  “So if I ask this Oracle the location of the Ulltrian haven, it would have to answer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even if the priests would want to kill me, if they knew my mission?”

  “The priests will ask you what your quest is, but you do not have to answer.”

  Tarkos frowned. “And then I could just go?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the catch?” he asked in English. Then he struggled in Galactic to find an equivalent phrase, and settled for the awkward, “I find it probable that the task is more difficult than you describe.”

  “The Labyrinth is large,” Gowgoroup gurgled in chorus. It gave Tarkos the dimensions of the asteroid, and Tarkos did the math in his head. A cylinder fifty-five kilometers long, fifteen in diameter, and almost all of it had been carved with tunnels about two meters wide and three tall. Allowing for an extra meter of wall and infrastructure, he figured there were maybe 100,000 kilometers of tunnel, with a surface area approaching the surface area of California.

  Tarkos clamped his jaw and turned toward the door. This was useless: it would take years to walk a maze that large. Gowgoroup was stalling, trying to delay him, or get him killed. Besides, his ey
es felt swelled to twice their normal size, burned by the atmosphere in Gowgoroup’s quarters.

  But a last thought stopped him.

  “Where is this intelligence, this Oracle, inside the asteroid? In the center?”

  “It is very near the entrance, near the axis. But all paths in the Labyrinth run at least the length of the asteroid before turning back.”

  “But if the Oracle is right there,” Tarkos asked, “why not just cut through a few walls?”

  “It is forbidden. The Oracle will not answer unless the pilgrim walks the Labyrinth, without assistance or robots, and without breaking through walls. The rule rules are immutable.”

  Tarkos frowned. They talked in Galactic, always a tricky proposition between different individuals of different species. Each species spoke Galactic in its own way—using sound, or light, or radio, talking at frequencies that others could not hear, crushing it into their own cognitive forms—and individuals often then used phonetic translationware to transform the speech into a recognizable form. The translationware, more than the communities of speakers themselves, enforced the common norms of the shared language of the Galactic Alliance.

  But even allowing for such differences, the slugs had said something odd. “What do you mean, ‘rule rules’?” Tarkos asked.

  “There are rules that determine the rules,” Gowgoroup answered. One of its parts slithered away to find something else to do, no doubt disgusted and bored by Tarkos’s stupidity.

  “Explain these,” Tarkos said.

  “First rule rule is that rules are respected by priest and pilgrim.”

  “And if they are not?”

  “Then the other can respond in kind.”

  Tarkos smiled. “Let’s start at the beginning. Tell me everything, everything you can, about this Labyrinth and its rules.”

  _____

  “We have located your ship, human,” the Priest of the Labyrinth repeated. Tarkos wondered where in the Labyrinth the Priest sat now. Cautiously far from the entrance, he suspected.