Stardogs (30 page)

The damned slimy little snake! Trying to suck up to her when he’d been stealing again! She shook her head, too angry to speak to him. Instead she said to the others “I’ve left my pack further up. I’ll pick it up on my way back. I should be back within an hour.”

A hundred yards or so back she passed Tanzo toiling along steadily, then Kadar, and finally Johannes. She wondered how he would manage the obstruction with his injured arm. Oh well, she could always help him on her way back up, she thought tiredly.

The cave was a narrow slit into the canyon wall. It breathed coolness into the hot mid-day air. She could quite understand why Deo might have gone into it. It was tempting to step inside and collapse for a few minutes herself. Instead she put on the head-torch she’d brought along from her pack, and stepped into the cave. “Deo!” Her voice echoed. It must be bigger than she’d guessed. She flicked the torch on. The yellow beam stretched into the darkness. It didn’t shine on a back wall.

The cave was not wide, but it was deep. She walked on, following the faultline, downwards. There were occasional cracks and fissures off to the sides, but fortunately the floor was smooth and water polished and dusted with fine sand. It was easy to see Deo’s footprints. Otto could have followed the man by scent, but instead stuck close at her heel. He did not like this place. That in itself was odd. At least one of Otto’s varied ancestors was a terrier, and he was partial to holes normally.

Something soft brushed past her shoulder. She screamed. Otto barked furiously. Briefly, in the torchlight she caught a glimpse of something black, fluttering. “There Otto. It’s only a bat. Just a bat.” She was, of course, entirely wrong. There were bats here on the Denaari-motherworld. Like the others they were escapees from one of the biosphere-genepool-zoos that the Denaari had made for the offworld treasures they collected. But no bat would be stupid enough to come in here.

On she walked. The cave twisted and wound down to where the pressurized water had eaten away at the fault-breccia. She heard a distant groan. It was followed by a breeze from deeper in. It carried a distinctly sulphurous-smell. And it was warm and damp. At first the cave had been cool…

“Deo!” she called yet again.

“Deo-o-o-o.” Only the cave answered. Yet that must have been him groaning surely? But it had seemed such a huge distant sound. Well the echoes did strange things to noises. She pressed on into the stygian depths.

The Dagger of the Goddess knew that he had arrived in hell. He had walked down an endless dark corridor. He had come out of the darkness and into a region of sickly green, glowing luminescence. He walked now amid the steams and smokes. He had seen demons flutter and cluster about these fumaroles. In front of him were a series of fissures from which the groans of the damned issued along with the fiend’s reek of sulphur. The caverns of Hell sighed and thin screams echoed. Surely this was the place to which those who were denied even the lowest rebirth were sent.

The pressure in the cavern dropped abruptly, with a sound like a carillon of kisses. His head throbbed angrily again. Within his skull the nanomech control centre sent out yet another hasty string of orders. The pressure change had been enough to start subdural bleeding yet again. Repair. Repair. The organism needed to be rested. But the damage to the brain was such that the nanomech control over the organism was severely impaired. When the humans had been dumped on the Sil colony world nearly a thousand five hundred years ago, the last of the colony-born Sil were dying. The world that men called Arunchal lacked certain essential trace elements that the metal-rich Silur-homeworld had provided in abundance. The Sil grasp of biological matters had been rudimentary. The only species which survived on Silur were the Sil themselves. The Sil’s energy and genius had instead gone into mechanisation, and then micro-mechanisation.

The Sil would not have chosen mountainous Arunchal as their first and only colony. They’d failed to beat lightspeed limitations, however. Arunchal’s sun was the nearest to Silur. Its planet might not be ideal, but it was close.

Then had come contact with the Denaari. The Denaari who considered all lifeforms as building-blocks. Whose ships and houses lived. The Sil considered non-Sil life as an incidental nuisance. Water and oil. And conflict was inevitable.

The Sil had struck first with missiles and a military honed by endless Sil-on-Sil warfare. The captured Denaari vessel wasn’t armed! On Silur a short triumphal war was foreseen.

The Denaari struck back with a weapon so small that it destroyed the might of the Silur military and their civilization without ever being seen. The unicellular creatures ate copper. Along with the mechanical core of their society, billions of Sil died, as machines failed. Space travel was of course worst hurt. The fledgling Sil colony on a Denaari discovered world was left isolated.

The Sil were wounded. Gravely wounded, but not destroyed. Anarchy and starvation took much of the home planet. Yet a technological core survived. Using other metals and synthetic molecular plastics they returned to strength. The Sil emerged after a dark century stronger and determined on revenge. They’d also learned from their enemies.

The self-replicating nanomech plague which physically slashed Denaari nerve cables was as alien to the Denaari as the unicellular copper-eaters had been to the Sil. The Sil had also attempted to defend themselves. The nanomech surgeons they had introduced to their own bodies were capable of repairing virtually any mechanical damage to the organisms. The colony on distant Arunchal was not forgotten either. They got nanomech surgeons in the robot-rocket post.

Surgeons, even the best nanomech surgeons, cannot deal with entire organisms poisoned by virus-released toxins. Silur died, even as the dying Denaari desperately sent out two specially made ships to sue for peace.

A thousand five hundred years later, when barely a hundred Sil still survived in hidden bunkers on Arunchal, the Nuns, Ghurkas and the Kali-cultists had been dumped virtually on top of them.

Rape. Murder. Anarchy.

Then the many-armed Sil had come forth and enforced peace. Their reasons are beyond knowing now, but perhaps they saw humanity as a weapon against their species’ old foe. To the terrified and grateful humans they were Gods with Godlike powers. So to serve them they shaped a church from the disparate sects. The Sil honed it into a weapon against the Denaari. They provided their weapon with a supply of modified nano-surgeons.

No Denaari Stardog had brought more convicts or traders to Arunchal for two hundred years. The Sil numbers dwindled as they further sharpened their new weapon. Three years before the League-catalogue ship had arrived the last Sil had died. The religion-weapon was left in the ready hands of their priests, who in the fashion of humans, used it to their own ends.

And thus the Sil became extinct without discovering that their ancient foes were gone too. Now a modified nano-surgeon Sil unit had finally reached the heart of the Denaari empire. And the carrier-organism was out of control and badly injured. The surgeon worked tirelessly to repair it. That was what it had been built for. But a surgeon can also kill. This miniaturized marvel had been modified with that end in mind. But the nanomech was a thousand light-years from the orders of the high temple on Arunchal. Tanzo would have given anything to visit that secret place. It was a still functioning Sil bunker.

“Deo! Deo! Come away from there!” At first the dim light had alarmed her. She’d approached cautiously, Stationer-made needler drawn and ready. Otto was plainly frightened, his plume-tail pressed hard between his legs, and that made her wary too. Were the strange noises from some kind of machinery?

She’d looked into the steam-wreathed cavern very cautiously. The light came from some kind of bio-luminescent fungus-like growth which covered large leprous patches of the roof, walls and floor of the cave. Mineral encrusted spouts twisted gargoyle-like up from the floor. The roof, particularly the areas coated in the glowing fungus-stuff, dripped. Strange dark fluffy bat winged creatures chittered and squeaked and squalled and squealed as they scrabbled at the intermittently plopping mineralized mud-turrets. And the man she called Deo walked blindly toward a huge gaping hole, in the center of the cavern from which a deep groaning noise issued. He didn’t seem to have heard her.

She had to run out there and stop him. She should have put the needler away first. He struck her forearm as she tried to grab him, training overriding his confusion. The needler flew spinning and bouncing down into the hole. For a brief moment they wrestled on the very edge of the antlion steep pit. Fortunately, the surface was not muddy as it was in much of the rest of the cavern. The geyser had blasted this bit of rock clean. At the moment its regular eleven hourly pressure-blast of superheated steam was choked by dislodged rocks from the recent seismic event. When hot water and steam finally did escape this time it was going to be a big one.

“Dugra?” His grip weakened. His eyes were wide with shock. “I… didn’t know it was you.” He swallowed convulsively. “I had to kill him. I didn’t want to. I swear. I tried to hold back. My hands… I never truly believed… but the Goddess… she took control of my hands. I swear it… my love.” The words trailed off brokenly. He bent his head, bowed by the enormity of it. He’d told her once that she looked very like… someone he’d once known.

Then he straightened, pulling himself together. “Kill me!” he demanded. “Kill me now. What I did was beyond forgiveness. My life is forfeit.”

“But I do forgive you. And I wasn’t going to kill you, believe me. I came here to rescue you. Now come away from this place!”

“You refused to kill me. You said I must live with the worst of punishments. Myself. Do you now forgive me?” He teetered on the brink.

“Yes! Now come away, do. Away from this pit-edge, back up the tunnel and out of here. This place is dangerous. Now come. Please,” she said, keeping her voice calm.

“No.”

She stamped her foot. “Come away. Now. I order you!”

He shook his head. “I have arrived in hell. I have come here rightfully. I tried to disobey my Goddess. I betrayed you. I killed Sugahata. Go. Leave me. You were right. I cannot forgive me. Go. Go now. See, the demons come for me.”

Indeed, the bat winged furry things were rising in huge flocks from their steaming feeding-places, and were heading towards them. “I’m not going without you.”

“Dugra! You must go!” They could see the eyeless shovel-snouts of the lead creatures now. They looked like winged, broad-bladed spears, trailing fur. Otto began to bark hysterically. Training took over again and the assassin began reaching for his knives.

The flocks joined into a single black mass. And flew on straight over them, heading for the tunnel in single-minded flight. Self-consciously Deo blooded his knives, before putting them away. “Why… Dewa? Why? Why have I been spared?”

She saw the potential. Whatever that blow on the head had done, she couldn’t get to him with logic. He was wandering through a maze of past deeds and guilt. His concussed brain was obviously superimposing his past onto the canvas of here and now. Perhaps she could use this. She struck a regal pose.

“Because your work is not yet done. Follow the demons.” He nodded, and turned away from the pit obediently, and began to stride determinedly after the fumarole-pseudobats. She had to jog to keep up. Behind them the cracks in the cavern floor began to issue supersonic screaming whistles as the pressure below built. Otto stopped, whined and pawed frantically at his ears. She picked him up and then ran on up the passage after Deo. Her headlight shone on a solid mass of fleeing pseudobats.

There was a terrible cracking sound behind them. A minor vent, subjected to pressure as never before, shattered a piece of obstructing rock to screaming shrapnel. Steam howled out, billowing up the passage. It was hot, but nothing compared to the flesh-melting temperature of the superheated steam that was oozing the seventy ton rock-cork out of the main vent.