Morton lifted his helmet off. After the filtered air he’d been breathing, the smell in the cave seemed exceptionally strong. Something he couldn’t place: raw meat but with a sugary tang. It was strange. “What is that?”
“The smell?” Mandy said. “Whatever they’ve been polluting the Trine’ba with. It’s been getting worse for weeks now.”
“Any idea what it is? We saw the refinery they’ve built.”
“I took a few samples earlier on,” David said. “It’s like an algae of some kind. They’re bioforming the Trine’ba.”
“I believe it to be the first step in converting this planet to one that is host to their own biological heritage alone,” Simon said. “They certainly show no interest or respect for any existing organisms. It is an imperialism which seems to extend down to a cellular level.”
Rob took out a couple of vials from his medical kit, and slotted them into the applicator patch. “I’m going to put the leg into a healskin sheath after this,” he told David, and put the patch on the man’s discolored thigh. “I can’t set the bones properly, but the sheath and the biovirals should help stabilize you until we can get you back to a Commonwealth hospital.”
David coughed. Tiny flecks of blood settled on his lips. “Hope Lydia’s keeping up on my medical insurance payments.”
“You will survive, David, I promise you that,” Simon said calmly. “I will carry you to the wormhole on my own back if necessary.” He broke off at the sound of someone splashing their way along the entrance fissure.
The Cat waded up out of the water, and removed her helmet. Her purple-tipped hair was sweaty, rising in a multitude of tiny spikes. She grinned broadly, and her wide blue-gray eyes took in the cave with one easy glance. “Nice,” she observed. “Hello, boys, did you miss me?”
“Like stale vomit,” Rob said. He turned back to stripping the dressings off David’s leg.
The Cat strode into the middle of the cave. “Well, my dears, that was an impressive first six hours, wasn’t it. Two of us dead. We didn’t save two refugees. We set off some nukes that did no damage whatsoever. And most of our sensor disks are gone. Talk about making an impact.”
“And you were a big help,” Morton said.
“You heard what I said. You chose to ignore it.”
Even though it was a perfect fit, Morton relished taking off his armor suit. He rubbed at every part of himself he could reach, easing itchy skin and stiff muscles. The semiorganic fiber one-piece he wore underneath repelled the cave’s cold moisture, keeping him reasonably dry. There was nothing he could do to stop the smell.
After living on scavenged packets for weeks, the Randtown survivors welcomed the food Cat’s Claws had brought.
“Manufactured corporate pap full of sugar, badly modified genes, and toxic additives,” Georgia said as she stuffed a fishcake straight from its heating envelope into her mouth. “God, it tastes good.”
“Our way of life has truly ended,” Simon said. He accepted a vegetarian lasagne from Cat, inclining his head in gratitude.
“It’s not from a Big15 factory farm,” she told him. “I wouldn’t fill my body with that shit.”
Morton watched Rob open his mouth. Their eyes met, and Rob turned away.
“We have to decide what to do,” Morton said. “I think our first priority is to get you clear.”
“What about David?” Simon asked. Dunbavand had been wrapped in Morton’s lightweight sleeping bag, protecting the healskin from the cave’s rancid humidity. He was sleeping fitfully as the drugs and biovirals did what they could to assuage the damage.
“We can load him in one of our bubbles and remote drive it out of here,” Morton said. “You’ll be safer up in the Dau’sings.”
“Yes, the aliens seem to be centered around Randtown and the valleys immediately around Blackwater Crag,” Simon said. “We should be safe in the highlands.”
“What about our mission?” Rob asked. “We’re supposed to be making life intolerable for the aliens.”
“We will,” Morton said. “We’ve got six months.”
“I hate to disagree,” Simon said. “But you saw the new force field generators they were building. Once those are operational there is very little even you will be able to do to harm their primary installations, I suspect. This is the third expansion and protective upgrade they have made since they arrived. Each time the force fields are larger and stronger.”
“We tried to get inside at first,” Georgia said. “Five of us were caught going through the sewers. They didn’t stand a chance. The aliens must have been expecting us to try and infiltrate their station. They’re not stupid. And poor old Napo led a dive team that was going to use an underwater route through the old aquarium. Nothing works. They’ve got every route covered.”
“There are no routes, not anymore,” Mandy said. She was chewing listlessly at a bacon sandwich. “They’re already outside the old town boundaries. All the utility tunnels and storm drains are inside the force field now.”
“You boys aren’t thinking,” The Cat said. Her voice cut clean across the cave, ripe with mockery. Morton gave her an intolerant glance. She was doing her yoga, one foot tucked in behind her neck.
“You have a solution?” Morton asked.
“It’s obvious.”
“Want to share that?”
“Nuke them. That’s all we can do.”
“We can’t nuke them. We can’t get to them.”
She closed her eyes, put her hands into Dawn Sunlight position, and breathed in deeply.
“There has to be a way in,” Rob said. “What about caves?”
“No,” Simon said. “We performed a full seismic survey before we started building Randtown. I didn’t want us to suddenly come up against subsidence problems after we were established. That would have been too costly.”
“Do you have anything that could dig underneath the force field?” Georgia asked.
“Alamo Avenger,” Rob muttered with a small private smile.
“No,” Morton said. “We didn’t come equipped to mount a frontal assault. We’re supposed to harass and disrupt, to make them waste time and money looking over their shoulder the whole time.”
“A nice theory,” Simon said. “But they’re a very centralized species. The activity out in the valleys is susceptible to the kind of campaign you’re talking about, but I doubt it would ultimately have much effect on them. To hurt them, you must strike at the structures inside the force field.”
“It’ll have to be an underwater approach,” Rob said reluctantly. “Even if a dump-web doesn’t work underwater, there must be some route in. An arch in a reef, an inlet pipe. Something!”
“Oh, this is painful,” the Cat said. She slipped her foot out from behind her head. “I thought you were executive management class, Morty. What happened to that ‘don’t download glitches, upload fixes,’ corporate speak you’re so fond of?”
“Just tell us what your idea is, please,” he said wearily.
“The aliens keep expanding the area they’re developing around the refinery station, right? So what we do is put a nuke outside the existing force field, and inside the border where the new one is going to be. When they switch on the new force field, the nuke is now inside their defenses, and it goes off. Any questions?”
Morton wanted to kick himself it was so obvious. He put the lapse of clear thought down to the shock of losing Parker and the Doc. “Simon, do the aliens turn off the old internal force fields once the new ones are up and running?”
“Yes. They have so far.”
“Oh, gosh, boys, are we really going to use my little old idea?” The Cat batted her eyes.
“Yeah,” Rob said. “I don’t suppose you fancy staying with the nuke and detonating it once we’re sure everything is peachy in there?”
The blast from Parker’s last stand against the flyers made things difficult. There was virtually no cover left on the foothills above and behind the town. That left them with the easte
rn side, where the low ground had been slightly sheltered from the blast wave. Even there, the trees had been completely flattened and incinerated. Large patches of terrestrial GMgrass had smoldered away before the eternal sleet and drizzle extinguished their paltry flames.
A few large houses had been built there, nestled in their own secluded folds in the land. It was one of the areas where the more wealthy had settled, giving them a splendid view out along the Trine’ba. They’d all suffered from the original attack on the Regents, and the environmental aftermath of the invasion; with smashed lopsided roofs and walls lying askew. Once neat gardens were reduced to muddy swamps where plants had briefly run wild before the climate turned against them.
Morton and the Cat picked their way slowly through one such garden. Its owner had been an avid collector of bamboo varieties. There were clumps of the shoots laid out in long curving patterns; from the air it would have looked like a giant tiger orchid flower. Now the leaves were turning brown and soggy. New shoots were rotting in the mud.
“Another two hundred meters should do it,” Morton said. “That’ll take us to the overlook point.” The garden was a shallow depression, partly natural, that a small army of agribots had then worked to extend into the gentle hillside. They were due to place the tactical nuke right on the edge of the garden, where the bamboo gave way to dunes of roses, putting the device in direct line of sight of the giant refinery station along the shore. With the ever-present cloud blocking the starlight, and the sleet choking the air, it was as dark as interstellar space in the garden. Even on full amplification, his visual spectrum sensors had difficulty producing an image. He was heavily dependent on infrared, which gave the tall dying vegetation an ominous looming appearance.
“Okeydokey,” the Cat said. She was using her slightly contemptuous voice, the one full of false enthusiasm.
Morton didn’t care. He’d paired up with her because he didn’t trust her to undertake Rob’s placement. As backup they’d decided a second nuke should be placed on the lakebed. Their sensor disk and comrelays didn’t function underwater. That meant someone working alone. The Cat was a pain in the ass to have alongside, but he could at least keep an eye on her. He wondered what kind of progress Rob was making. They hadn’t done much underwater training.
The swarm of sneekbots scouting the surrounding area reached the house at the center of the garden. It was a long two-story clapboard affair with a three-door garage and a balcony running the length of the wall that faced the Trine’ba. The two nuclear blast waves had left it severely lopsided, with the splintered boards hanging loose at all angles. Solar roofing panels had half-melted in the heat, running like wax to wilt around the structural beams so that the rainwater was constantly tricking down inside, saturating the interior. All the windows were gone, leaving shards of glass to tear at the curtains as they fluttered about, reducing them to a few sodden tatters flapping indolently in the light sleet.
Sneekbot 411 detected an infrared source inside on the ground floor.
“Well, hello there,” the Cat murmured.
“Another survivor?” Morton speculated. The heat source was about the same strength as a human.
“Could be cattle, or a big sheep.”
“You keep telling yourself that.”
The Cat’s hyper-rifle deployed from her forearm, HVvixen missiles slipped into their launch tubes behind her shoulder blades. Ratmines scuttled down her legs, and darted into the thick cover of the bamboo.
Five sneekbots crept forward toward the house. They picked their way up the ramshackle walls and eased their way in over windowsills. The heat source never moved.
A range of neon-green symbols rose up into Morton’s virtual vision. “Electrical activity.”
“Not much. Looks like a handheld array on sleeper mode.”
A sneekbot hurried across an open doorway, its antenna buds tracking across the living room. An alien was standing in the middle of the big room. It wasn’t wearing an armor suit. Water trickled through cracks on the ceiling to splash on its pale skin. A Commonwealth handheld array was lying on a coffee table beside it. An optical cable was plugged into the little unit, snaking up to a compact electronic device that was fused to the bulbous end of one of the alien’s four upper stalks.
“Shit,” Morton gasped. “Where are the others? They always move in fours.” He ordered the sneekbots surrounding the house to extend their search. “What the hell is it doing?”
“One moment, I’ll switch on my suit’s psychic power booster circuit. Oh, dear, it doesn’t seem to be working. How the fuck do I know what it’s doing, you blockhead?”
“You’re not helping. Again.”
“I’m reviewing the available information. There’s none of the usual signal emission. And it’s not armed. Oh…wait.”
One of the alien’s slender crown stalks bent over to align on the sneekbot as it peered out from behind the door frame. The bud of flesh on the end was wearing a hemisphere of some electronically active plastic material, held in place by a couple of elasticated straps.
“Is that a nightsight goggle?” Cat asked curiously.
Morton never replied. The sneekbot reported it was picking up a transmission based on standard Commonwealth cybersphere protocol. It was a very weak signal; nobody outside the ruined house would be able to detect it. His e-butler printed it across his virtual vision.
I SURRENDER. PLEASE DO NOT SHOOT.
A nasty cold shiver rippled across Morton’s shoulders.
“Oh, my,” the Cat said. “Now what?”
“I have no goddamn idea.” He told his e-butler to use a matching protocol, and used his virtual hand to type out a reply that the sneekbot sent:
WHO ARE YOU?
A FRIEND. AFTER LAST NIGHT, I GUESSED YOU WOULD RETURN. THESE HOUSES OFFER CONSIDERABLE COVER AND ARE CLOSE TO RANDTOWN. IT WAS THE LOGICAL PLACE FOR YOU TO COME. I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU.
WHAT DO YOU WANT?
TO COME WITH YOU.
WHERE DO YOU THINK WE’RE GOING?
BACK TO THE COMMONWEALTH. I HAVE INFORMATION WHICH WILL ASSIST YOUR FIGHT AGAINST MORNINGLIGHTMOUNTAIN.
WHAT IS MORNINGLIGHTMOUNTAIN?
THE PRIME ALIEN.
YOU ARE ONE OF THE ALIENS WE ARE FIGHTING.
I AM NOT. MY MIND IS HUMAN. I AM DUDLEY BOSE.
***
Cressat was beautiful. Mark had been surprised. He’d been expecting something like Elan, a world where the natural landscape of sparse vegetation was slowly being tamed to the human norm of esthetics and practicality. The grand estates would be oases of lush verdure foliage, surrounded by agriculture and forests that were slowly spreading out across the plains, leaving mountains wild.
Instead, he was living in the most perfect manicured parkland. Nigel Sheldon had chosen Cressat for its botany. Its G-class star and lack of a big Earth-style moon gave the planet a passive meteorological environment. It had the standard climate zones and seasons, but storms were rare, and with such a stable atmospheric milieu evolution had produced some spectacular plants. Every tree grew tall, two or three times the size of Earth’s pines and oaks, sporting huge colorful flowers. In midsummer, the native grasses turned from their usual near-terrestrial green to a shimmering swan-white, vast prairies of milky rippling stalks releasing clouds of honey-scented spores that turned the air silvery over entire continents. Vines and creepers ran riot in the forests, their imposing flower cones swelling out to heavy berry clusters.
Biewn, the hurriedly built dormitory village where they were housed, was forty kilometers away from Illanum, the town where the CST wormhole emerged. Nestling in rolling meadowland, with the western horizon bordered by distant snowcapped mountains that reminded all the Vernons of the Dau’sings, it catered solely to the large influx of technicians and experts working on the project.
The forest that formed one side of the village towered over the clutter of single-story houses like arboreal skyscrapers. Streams wound through the undulating land, bri
dged in several places as the network of roads was steadily expanded. More houses arrived each day, brought in on the back of wide low-loader trucks. They might have been mobile homes, but Biewn hardly qualified as one of the employment-whore trailer parks that sprang up around the CST stations on all new worlds in their early years. It had its own schools, restaurants, bars, shops, and civic center; the pre-equipped unit blocks of the new hospital were locking into place like a wall of massive bricks. Everything was being done to give Biewn the same amenities that Illanum enjoyed.
It was spoiled only by the factories. Long rows of the simple, massive cube structures had been built on the opposite side of Biewn to the forest, their dull brown weather-resistant walls eating into the virgin countryside like an unstoppable mechanical cancer. Still more were being built, their assembly going on around the clock. The cybernetics that filled them were arriving at an equally impressive rate.
As soon as their bus drove around the edge of the forest and started down the last kilometer of the new highway to the village, Mark knew he was going to fit in. It was as if the second chance he’d been given financially had magically been extended to his lifestyle. He imagined Biewn being the kind of place that Randtown would ultimately have evolved into, wealthy and purposeful. It had industry instead of agriculture. And instead of the Trine’ba they had the forest, which the inhabitants were already calling Rainbow Wood after its astonishing flowers. But it retained that small-town community cohesion. Less than an hour after they moved into a house as big as the one in the Ulon Valley, three neighbors had dropped by to introduce themselves and ask if they needed help. Sandy and Barry rushed off with a bunch of other kids to explore.
His one regret was that he hadn’t seen any of the legendary fabulous mansions that the Sheldon Dynasty members had built for themselves. None of their country-sized estates were anywhere near Illanum.
That just left his job. He worked in factory 8. At his orientation class he learned it contained three assembly bays. He considered that ordinary enough. Then they told him their size: cylindrical chambers twenty-five meters in diameter and thirty-five high. They were lined by a hundred plyplastic tool arms, and twenty heavy lift manipulators; up to a hundred and fifty engineeringbots could be deployed inside at any one time. The construction operation was supervised by an array loaded with RI-level software.