Shadow of the Warmaster

2

So what happens now, she said. That was a good question. The answer for the next six days was nothing much. The Tutor poked the local language into us and we practiced it on each other, Adelaar went back to work on Slancy’s defense systems, Kumari and I dredged up what we knew about Hordaradda and the Hordar, compared it with what Pels had picked up from Five; we spun out plans without data, knocked them down without data and generally fooled ourselves into thinking we were actually doing something. Made the time pass and that’s about all it did.

On the sixth day Kinok announced that he didn’t see any reason we couldn’t take the tug in, the Warmaster just lay there in orbit like a sleeping whale while the little fish swam around her carefully but undisturbed; most of them landed at the field outside the capital; the rest came down on the continent below the equator. After plotting line-of-sight, ve said that the southern field was over the bulge of the world and out of the Warmaster’s viewcone, which meant we could swing round that way without surprising anyone. So we loaded up the tug and started the tedious trip downsystem.

Pels named the tug Chicklet; behind those fangs he’s a sentimental little fuzzy, Kumari tells him the cute has seeped into his brain. I put Chicklet into the slot behind a pair of cargo creepers and pooted along just beyond their detection range. If I could’ve taken her up to full speed, the trip would have ended in a few hours, but Kinok said not and I didn’t want to push my luck, so I was stuck with a four-day crawl.

That was not a pleasant four days. I got a good look at why Adelaar’s daughter took off; Del had a tongue like a Tongan bladewhip. Pels showed the good sense to hide down in the engine room when he wasn’t asleep or on duty at the com; that way he didn’t have to deal with her. Kumari kept cool; if she was pushed too far, she gave back better than she got. Never, never, ever get in a word-slinging match with our Mom. Trouble was, more often than not I ended up in the middle, getting beaten up by both of them.

We reached Tairanna when the Warmaster was at noon; I had my fingers crossed, hoping Kinok was right and the observers on board were not looking for trouble from space.

The black whale ignored us, not even a twitch to acknowledge our existence; I laid an egg (a shielded satellite) and drifted on. Nothing. I laid another, then I scooted past South Continent into the Polar seas and dipped into the atmosphere through a hell-spawned storm where winds tore the caps off massive towering waves that swept along with nothing to break them up but a few rocky islets. Battered by those winds and by electrical discharges powerful enough to shock Chicklet’s powersystems into fits, we crawled along the coast until we reached the fringes of the storm and settled to a careful drift along the duskline, circling out to sea whenever we spotted the lights of a settlement. Up near the northern bulge of the western coast the land turned hostile, rocks along the shore like shark teeth, white foam pounding high against the stone, precipitous cliffs and equally precipitous fjords. I turned inland there.

The land passing below us was rugged, mountainous; Chicklet said no locals lived there and I could see why. It was the kind of place I was looking for, a deserted locale where we could get up a landbase and a holding area for the vanished until we’d collected them all and could shift them up to Slancy.

About twenty minutes after we left the coast, I set Chicklet down in a pleasant wooded valley between two mountain spurs. There were streams filled with fish and freshwater crustaceans; the forest, the mountain slopes, the grassy meadowflats were thick with deerish browsers and other game that had no fear of fangless bipeds since they’d never been hunted. Chick-let’s probes told us there were nuts and tubers, wild greens, trees and vine fruits; though it was early spring here south of the equator, some of those fruits and berries were ripe enough to eat. Plenty to help feed the vanished when we brought them here; hunting and fishing to pass the time, an untouched wild place to explore, a lake on a small plateau at one end of the valley where they could swim or do some boating if they had the ingenuity to build their own watercraft. Pretty place if you liked that kind of thing.

We kept our heads down for the next four days, sent out EYEs to map the capital and see what was where, using the satellites to bounce the data to us.

The first day I was cautious, sent in one EYE to poke about, ready to pull the deadman if its field started trouble.

Nothing happened so I saturated the place. Except for one area the city, Gilisim Gillin it was called, was completely unshielded. Helpful of them, wasn’t it. They showed us precisely where to look.

By the middle of the second day it was clear the EYEs weren’t going to get past the shield without blowing every alarm in the place, so I pulled in most of them and let Adelaar fiddle with them. She stopped fratcheting and settled to work. By midmorning on the fourth day, those altered EYEs gave us a detailed schema of the shielded area.

There was a monster mainBrain parked in a subterranean honeycomb that stretched under a complex of buildings and gardens enclosed behind a wall at least thirty meters high and proportionately thick; there was a mess of traps and alarms on the ground, nothing we couldn’t handle. A score or more of guards patrolling the place, others at watchpoints inside the structures. The ones that stayed out of the buildings, they worked with leashed pairs of large cats, something like the spotted panthers on Flayzhao. Cats and men were alert. More than alert, they were nervous. I didn’t like that. Something was making them jumpy and that meant trouble for us. I’d rather have them relaxed and lazy like the gatewatch back on Weersyll.

Pels tracked the guards on their rounds, built up a schedule. Night and day it was much the same. Half of them followed set rounds that took some of them through the public rooms of all the buildings, others into the twists and turns of the arcades and the gardens and still others into that mess of wormholes underground. They clocked in roughly every twenty minutes, pressing their thumbs on sensor plates attached to the walls inside and on columns outside, decorative spikes set inconspicuously throughout the gardens. The rest were rovers. They checked in at forty-five minute intervals, using the same sensors but in no particular order. They were good, they kept the patterns random enough to frustrate most observers but still managed to cover the ground.

Whoever it was ran things depended on scanners to warn him of air attacks and to direct the melters installed on the walls; Pels snorted when he saw them, he could hocus them without half trying. No bloodoons to point out warm bodies, or sniffoons to track them, no ’droid shootems. It looked almost too easy. We’d be using miniskips when we went in and they were hard to spot on a clear night, let, alone a foggy or a rainy one; it was autumn up north, storms blowing in every third night, we could afford to wait for optimum conditions so we wouldn’t have to worry about the outside patrols until we were on the ground. Once we broke through into the wormholes, all we had to do was get to the computer before it noticed it had mice in the walls. If we played things right and kept moving fast, we should get in and out clean; with a little Luck they’d blame any traces we left on whoever was keeping them up nights.

I meant to leave Adelaar behind, let her be the one to hold fort while Kumari, Pels and I went after the list, but she wouldn’t stand for that. Stumping up and down the grass, scaring the bitty amphibs off the rocks where they were sunning, she argued at the top of her voice that we had to take her along. She said she’d back her physical capacity against me and a dozen like me, hadn’t she already proved that? and as for mental capacity, she knew more about computers and security, especially anything provided by Bolodo, than me or Kumari or anyone else I could dig up, that she had the core of her equipment in the gear we’d collected on Aggerdorn and why’d we have her bring it if she wasn’t going to use it?

Kumari took me aside and told me not to be a fool, the woman was liable to explode and do something stupid; she’d been under pressure too long, she needed action. Security is something she’s good at, Kumari said, take advantage of that. You know me, Swar, I’ll be happier here with the remotes, setting up the shelters and getting things ready for the vanished. That’s more my sort of job.

Kumari is fragile, her homeworld’s around.7 g; she went into the Tank Farm a while back and had some genwork done on muscle and bone so she wouldn’t get exhausted or injured in heavier pulls, but she prefers to leave running about to us hardier types. Even so, there’s not many I’d rather have at my back; she fights with her head more than hands and feet and that’s one fine weapon.

We took advantage of another storm and rode a skip north to a box canyon an EYE had located for us; by the time the sun rose we were tucked away under an outleaning cliff across the lake from Gilisim Gillin. We slept a few hours and spent the rest of the day going over and over the schema and our plans, getting equipment ready, that sort of thing, and that night we strapped ourselves onto the miniskips and headed for the city.

3. 3 years and 1 month local since Karrel Gozo flew Elmas Ofka and her Isyas for the first time.

The abandoned mine where Elmas Ofka keeps Windskimmer and lives with other outcast and divorced who’ve joined with her, also the escaped aliens with a powerful grudge against the Imperator and everyone who supported him.

A stormy autumn night, about an hour past midnight.

Elmas Ofka touched the bandage on Karrel’s hand. “What’s this?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t tell me that.” She pinched the hand lightly, saw him wince. “So?”

“Elli, Elli,” he laughed at her, touched her cheek with the back of the injured hand. “Didn’t you say stay off work for a while if I could? I needed an excuse, so I spilled some acid on my hand. No big deal. I’m supposed to be making up the income loss by hide hunting. My House won’t expect me back for a couple of weeks.

“You see a healer?”

“Am I mushbrained like some I could mention? Of course I did.”

“It won’t interfere with flying?”

He laughed again, waggled fingers wound with salve-stained gauze, winced at the small pains the movement cost him. “Left hand, Hanifa.” He thrust the hand through the leather strap looped over his shoulder. “Just means I can’t knit for a while. No one’s buying, so that’s no loss.”

She frowned at him for several moments, then smiled and shook her head. “What can I say? Come along, I want to show you something.” She led him deeper into Oldtown, past tumbledown buildings rotting slowly into the earth they stood on as they were elbowed down by mesheme trees crowding into their airspace, to an area of the Mine settlement where he’d not been before.

“Convict barracks,” she said and pushed open the door to a stone structure in considerably better shape than the others; waving him back a step, she leaned into the opening. “N’Ceegh, h’ab hab h’i cecehi h’ep n’beihim hab!” She pulled back, chuckling. “That gargle means sun’s down, stir yourself, it’s me. He doesn’t like company he hasn’t invited.” She ran her forefinger along a merm scar on her forearm. “Never go inside this place without an invitation, Kar. You won’t come out again.”

There was a tiny tinny beeping; a sphere about the size of his fist floated in the door gap.

“Doa, N’Ceegh. Close the door behind you, Kar; follow me and keep your mouth shut.”

When there was no chance any light would leak outside, the sphere popped out a beam, focused it on the floor and went swimming deeper into the cavernous interior.

They followed.

N’Ceegh had a small compact body covered with fur like gray felt, skinny arms and legs, a ball of a head dominated by huge lambent violet eyes. He wore a voluminous leather apron over a leather cachesexe and thin rubber gloves on three fingered hands with long double-jointed thumbs. When they came into his workroom and the light there brightened, a film dropped over his eyes, his scoop ears twitched and folded partway shut. He swung his perch around, drew his legs up and draped his stringy arms over knees that looked sharp enough to stab with. He blinked slowly, gazed with disfavor at Karrel Goza.

“N’Ceegh, this is our pilot. He’ll be working your gadget, I thought you’d better be the one to explain it to him.”

“Unh-fidoodah’ak.” His mouth gash puckered into a pink-gray rosette as his eyes flickered over Karrel, rested a moment on the bandaged hand, moved on. “Come over here, you. Don’t bother me with your name, I don’t want it, I don’t plan to use it. The cuuxtwok’s installed already, but the proto model’s here. Cuuxtwok? She,” he jabbed a wobbly thumb at Elmas Ofka, “calls it a diverter. Same thing.” He waited until Karrel Goza stood looking down at the workbench, then he swung his chair about and began talking. “The scanners old Bitvйkeshit, Pittipat to you, he uses to watch his ass, they’re crude stuff.!Fidoo! That’s all. Need tactile contact with the suspect object before they know it’s there; he’s got some listening capacity, but it’s short range. One of the things the cuux here does is spread a slip field about the airship, the scanner pulses slide along it without noticing it and pass on till they fade out. It’ll muffle some of the noise your motors make but not all; if you can shut them off say half a kilometer from the Palace and let the wind push you over, you’ve got no problem. I’ve tucked in some long-range sensors, they’ll warn you when you’re approaching the danger zone, and this, see this gives you attack capacity, it projects the cuux field in a parabolic mirror in front of the airship, lets you trap and magnify the pulses and push them back at the generators till smoke comes out their ears.” He reached for the control panel and began demonstrating the uses of his creation.

4. In Windskimmer, heading for Gilisim Gillin/

flying over Lake Golga, plowing through swirling mists on a heavily overcast night; a thunderstorm is threatening, but is still holding off/

two hours after midnight, Ruya is full, she’s a faint icy glow coming through the clouds a few degrees past zenith, Gorruya is way off to the west, her fattening crescent a smudge near the horizon.

“Wha…” Karrel used the probe-adjunct on N’Ceegh’s device to poke into the mist, but he could find no trace of the enigmatic objects that had flashed alongside them and vanished in the darkness ahead. “Elli, did you see those things?”

“If you mean something like wingless glassy dragonflies with dark centers, three of them, zipping past us six times faster than anything normal, yeh, I saw them. What was it I saw?”

“Seems to me it’s something N’Ceegh would know about.”

“Alien?”

“Pretty obvious, don’t you think?”

“Brings up a question.”

“Two questions. Did they see us? And what are they going to do about it?”

“Three. What are we going to do?”

“You want to break off?”

“I don’t know.” Elmas Ofka glanced over her shoulder at her isyas sitting on the floor of the gondola, waiting for her decision, content to let her decide. Fingers tracing a scar line, she frowned at Karrel. Finally she said, “It’s late.”

Karrel Goza was briefly puzzled, then he nodded. “I see. What are they doing out here now. Could be they want attention as little as we do.”

“There’s a chance.”

“Right. Let’s keep going.”

“Wind’s from the east. You have to make a wide jog to position Skimmer for the drift over Gilisim, why not do it now. Make them look in the wrong direction, if they are looking.”

“Why not.” He brought the airship’s nose around, driving her as close to the wind as he could; it was too strong to face head on, just as well he was turning early, he could save some fuel and a lot of battering.

Elmas Ofka rubbed at the vertical frownline between her brows… “I wish I knew what was happening out there.”

“Yeh.” He was going to say more, but the warning bell chimed; the instruments had picked up the first pulses from the Palace scanners. He slid the cover off the sensor plate, touched on the cuux field. The thready mist outside turned solid, as if they were suddenly sealed within a brushed glass bottle; it brought a sense of oppression, a hint of claustrophobia. The isyas were troubled by it; he could hear the soft sounds they made as they shifted nervously behind him. He forced himself to relax. “You want to cross the Walls high or low? The air near the ground is apt to be more turbulent than it is at this level, but we won’t be moving that fast and the Tower is the only structure high enough to be a hazard. The guards won’t notice us; in this fog they couldn’t spot a longhauler with its warnlights blazing. The scanners are all we’ve got to worry about and the cuux will take care of those.”

“And if we go in low, you won’t have to run the ballast motors.”

“Run them a shorter time anyway.” He spoke absently as he watched the pulses from the Palace scanners go ghosting past them, invisibilities made visible by the field, eerie undulating tadpoles of light swimming through the mist and vanishing behind them. Five minutes. He bent over the dead reckoner, touching the controls with careful delicacy to keep Wind-skimmer moving in the right direction. Ten minutes. Another chime. He started the pumps sucking. “Ten minutes more,” he said. “Then we’re there.”

He brought the airship down and down until she moved about forty meters above the grass, then he shut the motors off and let the wind take them. The sudden silence felt odd, almost painful. He didn’t want to talk, nor, it seemed, did any of the others. He watched the hypnotic dance of the scanner pulses as the silvery wigglers darted past and past, endless numbers of them-a dance that ended so abruptly he leaned forward, startled, not believing he wasn’t seeing them any longer. “Elli.”

“What?”

“Something’s happened to the scanners. Those dragonflies? Maybe they had business at the Palace.”

“What else could it be?”

He shrugged, settled back. “Pittipat wouldn’t put his hide at risk, not if he knew it. They did it, all right, those aliens. I wonder who they are and what they want.”

“I’m afraid we’re going to find out if we go in like we planned. How close are we?”

“Two, three minutes, why?”

“You sure the altimeter is working?”

“As well as it ever does. I’ve been flying since I was a tweener, Elli. You get to know where you’re riding by how the air feels. The reading’s not out more than a yard or so either way.”

“I was thinking we could have dropped below the wall, that would stop the pulses, wouldn’t it? Why don’t you take Skimmer up again and see what happens?”

“No. There’s no reason to risk the sound of the pump being picked up.”

She grimaced. “You’re the pilot.”