Well of Furies Page 7

  “We must return to the Savannah Runner and report,” the leader slug said. Tarkos stared, wondering to what degree this leader really spoke for all of its parts. The slugs were, he knew, semi-autonomous, and even sometimes rebellious. It was a strange organism, hard for a human being to understand: to have your mind divided over bodies, its parts largely independent.

  “Yes, return,” Bria said, “with Pala Eydis.”

  The Kirt clicked several times before adding, “The OnUnAn is disrespectful but correct. We will surely die down there.”

  Bria took over the controls. She slowed the ship, activated its stealth capabilities, and made several erratic turns before she returned to the course Tarkos had plotted. These tasks complete, she finally answered the Kirt: “Now begins long era of war and many deaths.” She pulled back on the accelerator, and they sank hard into their seats, feeling the ominous pull of the world below. “Ours will be least of these.”

  CHAPTER 5

  “This does not look good,” Tarkos whispered.

  They stood before the open door of the cruiser, parked on a narrow stone road that terminated, two hundred meters before them, at a black cliff wall. Buildings of pale brown stone lined the road, with windows and doors so tall and wide that it made Tarkos swallow to imagine the size of the Kriani who must dwell within. From each building, without exception, smoke poured from broken windows. The black fumes drifted overhead, blotting out the twin suns. No sound but wind, and the ticking of the cooling hull of the cruiser, could be heard.

  And, in the center of the road before them, a dead Kriani lay sprawled.

  The Kriani looked to Tarkos like a giant ant. It had six limbs, which lay akimbo in the dirt. Green ichor and pink blood had bled from, and then dried around, two rough scars on the head. On the ground before it, two long antennae lay, severed. To Tarkos they looked like narrow black feathers, as long as his arm. They would be beautiful, but for the bloody root of each that trailed torn muscle and nerve fibers.

  “Laser shot to the head,” Tarkos said, gesturing at the hole, still smoking, between the Kriani’s eyes. “And they mutilated the corpse.” He looked around. “Plenty of places for the attackers to hide here.”

  “No doubt they are many,” Ki’Ki’Tilish said, “and well prepared to kill us. This one wonders whether we will die altogether and quickly, or slowly and in order of our races.”

  Although each member of their party could, to varying degrees, breath the atmosphere here, Bria had required them all to suit up. Tarkos and Bria wore their heavy and deadly Harmonizer armor. The Kirt wore a thin suit of dark metallic material that appeared ready to rip open at any moment as her pointed joints pushed at the fabric. Tarkos frowned. It looked to be a bad choice if any combat started.

  “We must return home,” one of the OnUnAn slugs transmitted. The colony being clustered inside a heavy encounter vehicle, a boxy quadrupedal robot the size of a terrestrial horse. Its many eyes waved behind the square glass of the front of the cabin. The legs of the robot seemed to hesitate, and the whole shifted sideways and then back as Gowgoroup talked. Tarkos wondered if the various parts of the OnUnAn kept giving the transport conflicting commands.

  “This mission,” Gowgoroup gurgled, “is as foolish as running all five of your parts in five directions.”

  Bria ignored the OnUnAn and turned to Tarkos. “Map?”

  Tarkos nodded. Preeajitala had sent their ship some maps, simple and starved of data because they relied on old surveys and occasional space imagery, but better than nothing. Tarkos ran the maps on his implants, so that it painted over his vision as he looked around. “We should be very close. This cliff, up ahead, is where the ruins existed that Eydis studied—last we knew, anyway. I have some partial maps of the interior. It’s possible that she is in there. It seems a likely place to hide during any fighting.” He did not add that they had to hope that the human archeologist had not moved on to some other task in the last four months. Bria hated for Tarkos to state the obvious.

  “I will not go!” several of the OnUnAn slugs protested.

  “Satisfactory,” Bria said. “Stay here beside Kriani corpse.” She started to walk toward the cliff.

  “No. No. No, no,” the slugs gurgled back. Their many eyes pressed against the glass. “We represent the ancient pact. You cannot leave us.”

  Bria sighed but continued on her way. The Kirt looked back forlornly as the door to the ship closed. The hull shimmered, and then disappeared, taking on the image of the buildings behind it. Ki’Ki’Tilish followed after Bria. The OnUnAn’s vehicle came next, leg motors whining noisily, limbs jerking strangely, as if still undecided. Tiklik slipped silently to the back of the line, with Tarkos at its side.

  The cliff rose up before them, swallowing the blue-green sky as they approached. They walked into its shadow, crossing into dark as the stone occluded the twin suns. Tarkos looked back. Their ship was invisible from this distance, the stealth working perfectly. Smoke swirled along the street in their wake.

  “There are trace amounts of several complex proteins now present in the air,” the robot said.

  “I’m not surprised,” Tarkos mumbled.

  “They are characteristic of Kriani blood serum.”

  Tarkos stopped and turned to the robot. “From that dead Kriani by the ship?”

  “No.” The robot stopped also. It shifted slightly. “There is uniquely polarized light emanating from that building.”

  “Laser targeting?” he asked, raising his arm and arming his lasers.

  “It is not lased. It is characteristic of the polarization reflected off the dead Kriani’s eyes.”

  “You’re saying there are more Kriani, looking at us.”

  The whole line had stopped now, as Bria turned to listen to their conversation.

  “I observe a refraction pattern consistent with ambient solar light polarizing off many Kriani eye lenses,” Tiklik said. “It is likely that the Kriani eyes are accompanied by Kriani. Furthermore, their calcium concentration is interesting, like that of the no-longer-functioning Kriani 4.636 measures in front of the cruiser. These organisms are likely the source of the evaporated of complex blood molecules.”

  “Wounded then,” Tarkos said. “Where?”

  Red lines appeared on the building to their right, laser tags projected by the robot. The red lines formed arrows that pointed at the dark maws of several broken windows. Tarkos scanned through a range of electromagnetic frequencies on his suit cameras. Nothing.

  Bria stood erect, rising suddenly over their group. She held her arms open. Her suit amplified her voice as she shouted in Galactic, “We are Harmonizers! Represent Galactic Alliance! Retrieve citizen of Galactic Alliance. Then leave. Your battle is your own. Do not make it ours.”

  Tarkos held his breath, and turned up his suit microphones. Silence.

  After a minute, the robot said, “They have retreated into the structure and out of reach of passive observation.”

  Bria dropped back onto all fours and continued forward.

  _____

  A single huge square entryway had been cut into the front of the cliff. Long centuries had weathered smooth the edges of the opening, and two long depressions in the soapy stone floor revealed where the spiky feet of the Kriani, and before them the Ulltrians, had passed over this threshold millions of times. Bria stopped and glared at the dark hall. Tarkos looked at her, trying to judge her thoughts through the small window on her helmet. Behind them, the Kirt and the OnUnAn panted over the radio, both of them transmitting a chorus of nervous breathing. But Tarkos could hear, just beneath all their noise, a deep throat growl coming from Bria.

  “This one never expected to walk into the dark of nightmares,” the Kirt whispered.

  That seemed to spur the Sussurat. Bria walked into the cavern. The others followed.

  They passed down a long black hall which opened into featureless dark. Tarkos laid a radar view over his visuals, and the computer reconstructed what was before them:
a vast chamber, hundreds of meters on a side, with a huge hulking form in its center.

  “Light,” Bria said. The stealthing capability of their armor could also generate wide spectrum mixed light, and Bria did this now, her suit blazing. Tarkos followed her lead. White light exploded from his suit, casting razor-sharp shadows off the other members of their group.

  Tarkos caught his breath. Before them, a sculpture of metal and black stone rose as high as a skyscraper. Shadows moved and twisted in dizzying ways as he approached it. Bria growled, following along his side. The sculpture depicted organisms, he could see now: organisms heaped and standing one atop another. At the apex stood the form of an Ulltrian, a dozen times real size, rearing back on its posterior legs, its front four legs spread apart triumphantly, as if to claim all before it. It stood atop life-size sculpted Kriani. Beneath the Kriani, the rest of the tower was formed of small and large organisms, packed together as intricately as a puzzle. Whole ecosystems were crushed together, solely to bear up the giant Ulltrian.

  “Are these all organisms of this world?” Tarkos asked. But as soon as he asked this he saw, before him in the sculpture, the unmistakable form of a Kirt, its eight legs spread wide, and atop it, a Neelee.

  “All Galactic life,” Bria hissed. “Made to fight, made to meld and die and change, under rule of Ulltrians.”

  “That was their goal,” Ki’Ki’Tilish said. “The sculpture miserably reveals the horrible end we can all expect now from the Ulltrian return.”

  Tarkos took another step forward. Something in the snarl of depicted organisms caught his eye. A familiar shape. There. There, near the bottom of the sculpture, a limb of a recognizable form. He hurried forward.

  Like Atlas, a human woman, naked, crouched at the bottom of one corner of the sculpture, holding some vast sea creature of another world on her shoulders. A lion and shark were pressed close to her flanks. Behind her, in the dark of the sculpture, a chimpanzee, mouth open in a frozen shout, looked out over the woman’s bent shoulders.

  “Wait a minute!” Tarkos said. He turned to face Bria. “Wait. What the. What the hell? That’s. Earth. I mean. Human. They sculpted a human woman into this. And Earth organisms. And this thing is old, right? But here they are. What the hell? What—?”

  But a sharp crack! interrupted his sentence. Tarkos landed on his back and slid across the stone ground. Several seconds passed before he realized he had been thrown down. His visor opaqued automatically, shielding closing down over the glass. He looked up at sputtering tactical displays as they resolved to show the edge of the sculpture, above him now as he lay beside it.

  The armor emitted a protesting whine. Damage readings streamed across his view: a small ablation of shielding; a fine crack in the ceramic metal; impairment of the suit’s stealthing functions. The light on his chest had indeed fallen dark, so that his armor only glowed along the sides. Nothing serious. But it meant….

  “Projectiles!” he shouted. He’d been hit with a projectile weapon. A strong projectile weapon.

  He rolled to the side and then jumped up. Bria held both her arms forward, firing suit lasers toward a balcony edge high above. On the balcony, Tarkos could make out an uncertain mix of forms. Several Kriani, milling there. He switched his view to infrared and saw immediately the angry glare of the hot metal gun barrels, aimed down at them.

  “It’s the violent end this one always expected!” the Kirt clattered.

  The OnUnAn’s parts all slurped and gurgled, making panicked choking sounds that clogged the radio.

  Tarkos ignored the incoming signals from both of them and shouted, “Come over here, behind the sculpture!”

  Puffs of explosively powdered stone danced across the cavern floor. But the OnUnAn vehicle lumbered forward, into the cover of the sculpture, and the Kirt and its robot hurried along its side.

  “The projectiles are uranium with an atomic weight of 238,” the robot observed with interest, bringing up the rear of their retreat. “There are significant traces of thorium.”

  “Should I use a heavy weapon?” Tarkos asked Bria. He extruded a small missile mount from his shoulder. He hesitated, unsure of what liberties Bria wanted to take here. Tarkos always desperately avoided killing any sentient beings—but the Kirt, the OnUnAn, and the robot were their responsibility.

  Before his commander could answer, a voice shouted over radio, “You should turn off your lights, that’s what you should do.”

  Tarkos realized with shock it was a human voice, speaking Galactic with a heavy accent. A woman’s voice, low and husky.

  “Turn them off!” the voice repeated.

  Tarkos did it. Bria followed his example. The dark became total again. His infrared overlay became more clear. He looked up to the balcony, where the bright ant-like figures of Kriani crowded along the edge. Bright blinks of heat skittered across the floor where their gun fire hit the stone. But their aim went wild now.

  “They…” he started.

  “They’re blind in the dark,” the woman’s voice said.

  “Kriani have radar,” Tarkos said lamely.

  “Not these ones,” the voice answered.

  “Pala Eydis?” Tarkos asked.

  “Yeah,” the woman answered in English. “How do you know that? And who are you? You sound human, that’s what you sound like. But surely you aren’t. Are you?”

  He turned in the dark, wondering where she was. He could not see a heat signature in the vast cavern, other than his four companions and the Kriani above.

  “I am Amir Tarkos. Human. Of the Harmonizer Corp.”

  “You’re human? In the Corp?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well. That’s something. And it’s about time the Galactics intervened in this fight.”

  “Uh, well, we’re not here because of the battles. Sorry.”

  “More Kriani,” Bria said.

  Tarkos looked up. More bright figures were amassing on another balcony. “Yes, Commander.” He switched back to English, “Listen, Dr. Eydis, can we get out of here together, and talk face-to-face? There seem to be more Kriani massing on those balconies, and we are really not here to shoot Kriani. Better we just get out of their line of fire. We have a ship outside.”

  “The hell with outside,” she said. “There’s probably an army of them outside by now.” She added in Galactic, “Get ready to run.”

  “This one is an amphibian,” Ki’Ki’Tilish said, “not a descendent of plains runners. This one will surely die in the rear, if retreat is required.”

  A bright light sprang out of the corner of the chamber: a door opening. A human figure appeared in the doorway. Immediately, gunfire began to rain down around them, the light allowing the Kriani to aim again. But the sculpture blocked the line of sight from the balconies. The exploding projectiles tore up the stone floor to the right of the path to the door, but did not come near them.

  Bria shoved the Kirt, and she stumbled forward, and began to clatter, half sideways, into the column of light before Tarkos pulled her back. The OnUnAn’s transport vehicle took off at a gallop, and quickly pulled ahead. It raced though the doorway, the Kirt following behind, the robot lingering behind it. Tarkos and Bria came last, jogging backwards, arms held out with their suits’ weapons at ready.

  Tarkos leapt through the doorway just as he saw a Kriani come through the corridor to the outside, the path that they had used to enter the chamber. Either there were other Kriani outside now, or the group above had flanked them. The Kriani in the entranceway ran forward, into the band of light cast from the door. Two of its arms held a long projectile weapon with a cylindrical magnetic accelerator at its butt. And, across the face, even obstructing part of its eyes, green ichor seeped from two bleeding wounds on the top of its head.

  Then Bria came flying back through the door, thrown by projectiles exploding over her armored chest.

  The door slammed closed behind Bria with a clang. Pressing the door closed stood a woman in a jumpsuit of green, wearing a light o
xygen mask. She threw a lever that locked the door and turned and leaned against the metal. She was not very tall—a hundred and sixty-five centimeters, Tarkos guessed—but she had a whip-thin athletic build, muscular arms, broad shoulders, and even in the near panic of this moment, she held herself confidently. Tarkos recognized then the pale hair and piercing blue eyes from the one photo in his briefing file.

  “Dr. Pala Eydis?” Tarkos asked.

  Tarkos wanted to shake her hand, to hug her, to do something. Just as he’d felt when he saw Danielle on the Savannah Runner, seeing another human being made him feel immediately lonely for human contact. But his armor stood between them like a wall. The servos hummed with power assist that could crush a human. He reached up and lifted his visor. The taste of The Well of Furies air pressed against his face: musty, dry air that smelled of metal and felt heavy in the lungs. He let his quantum sampler analyze the free viruses and bacteria. Warning signals immediately played across his vision; the life on this planet was dangerous.

  “We’re here for you,” he told the woman. “We need your help.”

  “My help?” she said. Bullets rang hammer blows on the metal at Eydis’s back. “I think I’m the one who needs the help.” Her voice came through her oxygen mask muffled but still surprising loud.

  “Right,” Tarkos said, “maybe we should move somewhere more safe.”

  Eydis shook her head. “Maybe not. They seem likely to move on. I don’t know why they’re fighting, but I do know that they’re fighting each other. We should be safe here a moment. As safe as anywhere else. Till we get on your ship. You did say you have a ship?”

  Tarkos nodded.

  “Let us go,” Ki’Ki’Tilish said. She turned in place, examining the room. They were in a long broad hallway, lined with open doorways. She pulled her legs tightly together. “We’ll die soon, very soon, in this dry grave. Better to die in the sea, or under the suns lights.”

  But no sounds of bullets on metal followed. After a moment, it was almost silent in the room. Tarkos amped up the sonics on his armor, and detected dimly the sound of the Kriani on the other side of the door moving away.