Lords of the Seventh Swarm (27 page)
Read Lords of the Seventh Swarm Online
Authors: David Farland
“Identify those ships!” Gallen ordered the ship’s AI, hoping against all odds that for some reason he couldn’t fathom, human boats would be in the sky.
The ship’s AI answered in its damned neutral voice, “Six dronon Golden-Class vessels, and nine dronon War Hives. Sensor jammers have just been initiated. All radio contact is now impossible. I cannot confirm new arrivals of ships, nor can I verify the locations of mines.”
Gallen looked at Maggie. “Six Golden-Class vessels!” she breathed.
“What does that mean?” Zeus asked.
“The dronon Lords of the Swarms are here—all of them,” Gallen said.
Maggie asked, “Ship, with the jammers on, can the dronon read our position?”
“So it’s true, what Arachne said?” Zeus asked Gallen. “You and Maggie really are the Lords of the Sixth Swarm?”
“Negative,” the ship answered Maggie. “The dronon cannot read our position unless they make visual contact.”
Maggie glanced back to Gallen. “We need to get under cover. The palace?”
Gallen shook his head, thinking furiously. “No, your scent is everywhere there.” The dronon would obviously send Seekers. And in his mind, he saw a vision of clouds, of the towering storms above Teeawah. Felph said they raged there almost constantly.
“Ship,” Gallen nearly shouted, “take us to Teeawah. Get us under the clouds, top speed.”
With a lurch, the ship hurtled forward. Gallen feared the moving ship would show easily on dronon scanners, but he only hoped that now, having just reached Ruin, the dronon wouldn’t have had time to begin extensive planetary surveillance. Besides, even if they had, he imagined, the tangle was huge. He could hide in that mess for weeks.
For twelve long minutes his ship hurtled through the sky at mach fifteen, fast enough so the heat shielding on the ship’s hull began to flame. Gallen’s heart raced; his breathing came uneasy.
Almost as soon as he saw thunderheads looming, lightning at their crowns, they slowed, bursting into their envelope. Under sullen skies, the tangle gleamed wet. Dark purple trees thrust up in exotic corkscrews or folded on themselves like nautilus shells; others towered like giant hairs.
As the ship maneuvered through this growth, the wind drove rain against the viewscreens in steady sheets.
The storm here had worsened over the past two days. Gallen had never seen a deluge like it, as if the heavens poured out all the waters in the world.
Gallen changed course, let the rains cool the burning hull. He imagined how the ship must look from outside this behemoth oozing steam. If the dronon used infrared sensors, even these clouds might not hide the ship. Gallen only hoped that the rain would cool the hull soon.
The ship soared over something huge and pale, slightly pink, like a blind snake void of pigment, worming its way through the trees. The creature must have been two hundred meters long. and eight meters in diameter.
Zeus studied the viewscreen. “Mistwife,” he said. “It must be hungry to hunt in daylight. It comes up from the ocean.”
“At the bottom of the tangle?” Gallen asked. “Yes,” Zeus said. “They live in deep water and hunt on nights when rain slicks the trees.”
Perhaps they are amphibious, Gallen decided, or perhaps like large worms. In any case, it sounded as if they needed moisture. As the ship soared past the creature, Gallen suddenly saw dozens of others like it, worming their way out of the tangle.
“It’s excited,” Zeus said. “It senses our movement.”
Then Gallen understood. There were not dozens of mistwives. This was a single organism. He suddenly envisioned it, like an enormous anemone, sending up tentacles to fetch food. Yet Gallen found that almost impossible to imagine. The ship was two thousand meters above sea level, yet this creature sent dozens of tentacles up through the tangle, questing, searching for food. How large was a mistwife? How powerful?
Gallen didn’t want to find out.
He soared under the storm, counting on the steady throb of lightning, the ionization of the atmosphere, to shield him from the dronon’s electronic detection. The ship began to pick up urgent broadcasts from Lord Felph.
That could only mean that the dronon had turned off their signal jammers, so that they could begin their hunt. Gallen dared not answer Felph’s calls.
And be dared not stay airborne. The dronon would search the planet via conventional radar and with imaging detectors. The constant lightning that speared through the clouds should make it difficult for the dronon to search with infrared, but Gallen couldn’t be certain. If the clouds thinned, if the lightning slowed even for a few moments, he might be found.
The wisest course would be to land immediately, but not near this mistwife. It might crush the ship. Gallen wondered if he could find a region that would be safer, more secure.
But it wasn’t a hiding place that he wanted. They could hide in the tangle, maybe for weeks, but they’d run out of food, if the dronon didn’t find them first.
Now that the dronon had set a picket around the planet, he wouldn’t be able to blast off.
We cannot hide, and we cannot run
, Gallen realized.
Which meant that he would have to fight. On a sudden impulse, he commanded the ship to return to the coordinates where he’d gone on his brief expedition with Lord Felph.
“Where are you going?” Maggie asked. “You don’t plan to look for the city?”
“The dronon will find us eventually,” Gallen said softly. “I won’t just hide. We have to do something.”
Chapter 28
Lord Felph had long tried to keep a low profile on Ruin. It seemed inevitable that the dronon would come to the Carina Galaxy, and he’d made certain that the coordinates of Ruin were kept quiet. The Carina Interplanetary Federation had removed the planet’s name from star charts. Conventional radio chatter on Ruin was kept minimal, and then broadcast only at low intensities on tight beams. Felph didn’t want the planet showing up under scrutiny.
As for ansibles, he didn’t own one. He knew it made him look reclusive to outsiders. Most planetary governments would have considered instantaneous communications a necessity. Not Felph. Billions of people had lived fine lives without the damned things, thank you. That’s what shuttles were for, carrying messages out to civilization.
But when the dronon appeared in the skies over Ruin,
Felph knew that some seventy years of painstaking precautions had been wasted. His world was the first in the galaxy to come under attack. The whole planet fell hostage in the blink of an eye.
Felph puttered about his palace, fretting all morning. Why this day, of all days? With Henn dead—Zeus and Gallen gone.
Felph tried, but after the dronon appeared, he couldn’t raise Gallen over the radio. The dronon’s jammers might have interrupted communications in any case, but Felph suspected that Gallen kept silent for other reasons. Even if Gallen couldn’t hear the transmissions, Felph reasoned he would hightail it back to the palace as soon as he saw the dronon. But apparently the Lord Protector knew enough to crawl under a rock when dronon invaded. Felph had to appreciate that.
At the same time, he wished he’d hired a more intrepid man. A real Lord Protector would have done something about the dronon.
Once Felph failed to contact Gallen, he decided to ask Arachne for counsel. That’s what he had created her for, but the woman was not at her loom, and a search by the droids proved she wasn’t in the palace.
As for Hera and Athena, neither of them had any idea why the dronon ships had arrived. Hera’s advice was, “Sit quietly, and see what happens.”
Athena was more practical. She set out to find Arachne, and by considering the places where the woman might have gone, she chanced upon several loose hairs and a couple of drops of blood in the lower corridors, by the launching bay.
She followed a trail of blood droplets into a droid access corridor, found hairs by a recycling shoot.
Moments later, she retrieved Arachne’s corpse, carried it up, laid it before Felph in his upper offices, and described how she’d found the body.
He stared at it in dismay, shaken, unwilling to believe his eyes, hardly hearing a word. Arachne, his best counselor, murdered. Her face was covered in blood and bruises.
Her silver hair mussed. Her dark eyes looked up blankly, like those of a stupid cow.
All that wisdom, all that beauty, all that insight lost. There was nothing for it but to clone her, start again. Yet. Felph wondered. Even if I clone her, will she be as wise? She’d accumulated so much knowledge in her short life; Felph despaired of ever recreating a creature quite as lovely, quite as prescient.
Felph’s heart hammered, and for a long while he simply stared at the corpse in shock. She’d been killed in the corridors, near Gallen’s ship. Beaten to death.
Who could have done it? Gallen? The bear? And why? Surely Zeus would not have done it, Felph told himself, even as a cold dread filled his breast.
Felph did not have long to wonder. Two hours after he’d first discovered the dronon presence and scant minutes after Athena located Arachne’s corpse, his perimeter security droids suddenly wailed a priority-one intruder alert.
The exterior security cameras showed a dozen craft approach from the southeast. Vanquishers, with black carapaces gleaming in the dull sunlight, skimmed through the grainfield on airbikes.
They halted at the front gate of the palace. Felph, flanked by his two remaining daughters, drove a house transport down to the main gate—a structure of rose quartz that stood some forty meters in the air, supported by twin pillars of red sandstone.
At the gate, Felph commanded the palace AI to open the doors; silently they swung outward.
Felph studied the Vanquishers. Each dronon rode a bike like nothing ever built by humans. The sleek silver machines reflected the dull red morning sun. The Vanquishers straddling them were more repulsive than Felph imagined they would be. Their black carapaces and amber wings appeared regal, but the clusters of eyes, along with the sensor whips protruding above the strikingly cruel mandibles, made them look too much like insects.
For all that, their appearance did not shake Felph so much as the casual way they held their weapons. The huge battle arms of each Vanquisher, with their serrated lower edges, looked crablike. Each arm cradled a dronon pulp pistol or incendiary rifle. The Vanquishers held the weapons as if they intended to use them.
One dronon pulled within a few meters of Felph; dozens of mouthfingers under its mandibles began clicking. A small device that seemed to be mounted to the exterior of the dronon’s skull, just above the mandibles, translated, “We seek the Lords of the Sixth Swarm, Gallen O’Day, and his Golden Queen, Maggie. Our Seekers detect her scent on your premises.”
Felph suddenly became aware of how fiercely his heart pounded. “Maggie, the Golden Queen?”
It suddenly made sense—a Lord Protector and his wife, here on the far edge of nowhere. Arachne must have known. Perhaps she’d said as much to Gallen, and in order to keep his secret, he’d murdered her.
As Felph recognized who Gallen was and why he’d come, a fierce hope began to burn within him.
I created Zeus to beat the Lords of the Swarms
, Felph wanted to tell the dronon. He should be here now, to challenge your lords to Right of Charn.
But Zeus was with Gallen.
Felph looked to Hera, who stared at the Vanquishers, wonder and fear warring in her eyes. She was so beautiful, so flawless. She would make a fine Golden Queen. If only Zeus were here to fight beside her.
“Gallen and Maggie left, this morning, to work in the desert. They disappeared when you showed up.”
“They are hiding,” the dronon’s voice drummed out. “It is madness to hide from us. They dishonor their species. They will be destroyed.”
Not madness to hide, Felph wanted to say. Wisdom.
A plan began to blossom, taking solid form in his head. If the dronon found Gallen, they’d find Zeus, too.
“I think I know where they will hide. I’ll help you find them,” Felph whispered, “in exchange for a promise.”
“What do you require?” the dronon Vanquisher clicked.
“When the Lords of the Swarms challenge Gallen and Maggie to battle, I want to be there.”
In answer, the dronon Vanquisher did an unexpected thing. He put his head forward, crossing his battle arms in front of him, and bowed to Lord Felph.
“It is agreed.”
Chapter 29
Two days earlier, when Lord Felph had piloted Gallen down into the tangle, he’d simply plummeted, letting the ship use phased gravity pulses to pond the tangle beneath into pulp.
The technique had a certain brutish simplicity to it, but Gallen opted now to pilot his ship down by skill, diving into crevasses, following side tunnels as far as possible before battering through the deepest layers of growth, using his antigrav only as a last resort before skirting sideways into some new pocket. By doing this he hoped that he would not leave a visible trace as to the path he took into the tangle.
Certainly, a ship flying overhead would not be able to see where he’d landed. But the tactic also allowed him to deive far deeper into the tangle than he had on his first little excursion, taking him closer to the city, with its legendary Waters of Strength.
And by penetrating farther into the tangle, he hoped the vegetation might permanently shield his ship from dronon sensors.
He hoped it would be safe to travel in the morning. The sfuz should be sleeping, and Gallen suspected that his ship could descend into their territory faster than he could ever go on foot.
When he got five hundred meters beneath the tangle’s canopy, Gallen felt confident that his exhaust would no longer show up on infrared scanner. He stopped the craft let it hover a moment.
He addressed the others. “I think before I go any farther, I should let you know: I won’t force anyone to come with me. It’s Maggie and me the dronon want. I’m going into the tangle, but I’m willing to go alone. The rest of you can stay on the ship.”
“Och, what are you saying, Gallen?” Orick asked “Don’t try to get noble on me, you’ll just muck it up. I’m coming with you.”
“I’ll follow Orick, wherever he goes,” Tallea said.
Gallen said, “Zeus there’s no reason for you to come.…”
Zeus said nothing merely watched the bears, brow furrowed. Gallen expected Zeus to leave, despite Orick’s bold facade. If he wanted to return to Felph’s luxuries, he had only to ask. Gallen was fully prepared to give him control of the ship.
Zeus smiled wanly. “I couldn’t leave you out there alone. I don’t know much about the tangle, aside from what Athena has told me, but I should be of some help.”
Gallen hadn’t anticipated this. Half an hour earlier, Zeus had seemed ready to attack them almost without reason. Now, he wanted to help? “You really don’t need to come” Gallen said.
Zeus laughed nervously. “My friend, if anyone else were going into this tangle intent on reaching the bottom, I’d part company in a most decisive manner. But you’re a Lord Protector, seeking the Waters of Strength. You believe if you don’t find them, you’ll die. While others have sought the Waters from greed or fascination, your motives are purer. I think … you could make it. I want to be there if you do.”
Gallen said, “You’re taking a great risk.”
“Smaller than you take,” Zeus said. “The life of your wife, your child, your friends all hang in the balance.” Zeus’s eyes went unfocused, though his lips held a smile.
Gallen was forced to wonder. He went back to the pilot’s seat, began talking with the ship’s Al, letting it help pilot them down into the weave of bizarre trees, cluttered with odd growths—vines and parasitic flowers that would soon fail so far from light. Still, here in the upper branches of the tangle, life flourished—strange batlike creatures fluttered about the ship’s lights on translucent wings, eating insects, while other creatures danced away, racing along vines, leaping from one branch to another. They feared the ship.
And everywhere was water. Up above there had been rain, but the water from it ran down narrow leaves or along vines till it collected in streams or pooled in strange scallop shaped bowls—some type of parasitic plant—that grew along some of the larger tree trunks. With so much water streaming down, waterfalls cascaded through the tangle, punching holes to the realms below.
Though in places the detritus collected, creating false floors in the tangle, Gallen found that if he followed some larger rivers, he did not need to use his gravity drives topuncture holes through the ground. Nature had done the job for him.
Gallen piloted the ship for hours, picking a path deeper into the tangle, till the living plants and vines faded. The ship’s lights began to display creatures of darkness-blind animals clinging to trees, living off debris that fell from above. In spots, when Gallen’s lights brushed the path ahead, hordes of dark insects shaped like the halves of a walnut shell would die, dropping from tree limbs as if torn away; apparently they were so sensitive to light, his lanterns shocked their nervous systems.
Gallen took a torturous path down, and at five hundred meters, discovered the detritus had become so thick, he couldn’t find any more holes the size of his ship. He would either have to break through, or they would walk.
He asked Maggie’s opinion on how to proceed, and was surprised when Zeus answered, “Don’t try to take the ship any farther. The mistwives sleep down here. They might feel the struggles of the ship.”
Gallen considered. Zeus knew more than he spoke. If the giant mistwives, with their long pale bodies, were as blind as other creatures down here, they probably would have a strong sense for motion. The ship’s pulsing gravity waves would vibrate the trees. The ship would be like a fly in a web, its death throes calling the spiders.
“All right then, we land,” Gallen said. He picked a spot among the branches where humus was thick, docked the ship.
He got out to check the landing site. He didn’t see any of the long, two-toed tracks of the sfuz, yet the ground here was soft and thick. It had not been disturbed in years. On their initial voyage, he’d spotted sfuz spoor early.
But this time Gallen had landed far away from the ridges where he imagined Teeawah would have been, farther out toward the center of the valley. With all this rain, Gallen imagined that beneath them the tangle would give way to lakes and rivers. Certainly the roots of the great dew trees would block the streams, choking them like beaver dams. The mistwives would be in those waters. The thought gave him a chill.
The ship’s lights showed vapor hanging in the air like tattered cobwebs, air so still Gallen could hear his heart thump. In the distance, a strange noise echoed through the tangle—the crashing of falling detritus, then a thundering boom. Gallen didn’t know if it was a natural cataclysm—a log breaking—or if the gravity waves his ship emitted had dislodged something. More frightening was the concern that a living creature had made that noise—a mistwife, moving aside whole trees?
Gallen returned up the gangplank into the ship. “This is a good place to camp,” he told the others. “I think we should get some rest, do some packing.”
“Camp? In the middle of the day?” Orick asked. “What are you after thinking, lad?”
“If I’m right, the dronon don’t know we’re here yet,” Gallen said. “But eventually they’ll find us. Our ship will detect any sensors they use to search for us. Once they find us, they won’t give us much rest. I think we should take what we can get.”
“What about the sfuz?” Zeus asked. “Won’t they discover the ship?”
“Not likely. I’ve parked us out over the water, about even with the tops of the cliffs where the sfuz live. I didn’t exactly plan this, but there’s no sign of sfuz here—no sign that they ever come here. So now I’m thinking that maybe the fox doesn’t hunt where the wolf is on the prowl.”
“Meaning?” Orick asked.
“The sfuz won’t come searching for us—not with the mistwives about. No sfuz has been through here in months, I’d wager.”
“But, it’s still early morning. The sfuz are sleeping,” Orick said. “Shouldn’t we make tracks while the sun shines?”
“I didn’t say we’d sleep all day,” Gallen said. “You’ve got two hours to rest, then we leave.”
