Starhammer (38 page)

A maze of passages, all lined with what seemed to be scales and zippered shut along the ceilings, confronted them. They explored and soon observed the openings to the riser tubes. They communicated this information back to battlecommand.

The sounds and vibrations of the opening of the airlock had provoked changes within the machine, however. The squad's lights attracted attention. A wild excitation arose in another interconnecting system, which laced the machine interior as tightly as its own energy conduits.

No one in the squad noticed the pale pink stalk, no thicker than a lao little finger, that pushed through the interlocking teeth of the zipper above them. No one saw it grow toward them. A swift change was taking place on its surface. Feathery structures of pink and white tissue a few inches across were sprouting several inches into the air where they soaked up information about the bipedal forms that had entered the machine.

They tasted the exhalation products and passed the information to the higher centers. There was an immediate explosion of activity. Podclusters that had lain dormant for decades, centuries, or far, far longer, snapped open and disgorged "runners." The podshells were reabsorbed by the collaring tissues beneath them.

It happened that a few of the pods had been formed from the flesh of Aleya Bey, thirty years before.

The pink stalk was joined by others; dozens pushed through between the joints of the scales of the walls and ceilings.

The odd-shaped sensory organs began to branch and wobble, becoming things that looked almost like lungs or clumps of seaweed.

The expedition had emerged on the control floor. A hush of eons lay on the place. They played their lights around. A dozen dark ovals lay before them. This was the maze that the Bey had spoken of.

In one doorway, the lights picked out a small, huddled shape upon the floor—another skeleton, a little smaller than the first, still wearing a desert suit. They clustered around it in a circle. Their lights picked out a sparkle of silver among the bones. Eblis Bey dropped down beside them.

"Aleya," they heard him whisper. He reached into the bones and slipped a silver ring from the skeletal hand. They watched him place it on his own ring finger, where it perfectly matched the ring he already wore there. When he stood, tears were visible on his cheeks.

"If your wife died here, does that mean the parasite menace you mentioned will be in this section?" Finn M'Nee thrust forward his question.

The Bey recovered control. "It is possible. To tell the truth I never saw where it came from, or how it attacked. I was saved because I was with Doctor Sehngrohn in the foyer to the control room. The thing cannot get past the barrier set up there by the Keeper."

There were loud noises from far below. The cyborgs were in the ship.

The sounds seemed to decide something for Finn M'Nee. He pulled out his pistol. Gelgo Chacks had raised his weapon as well. "In that case I will take charge now. Please be so good as to surrender yourselves. I represent the Superior Buro."

Faces were ringed with shock.

"You're the traitor, M'Nee!" exclaimed Officer Dahn.

"How is this possible?" the Bey said with a groan. "You were in the technical development section. You were trusted." He broke off with a sob.

They had been betrayed from the start, anticipated from the beginning, guided by the Buro to deliver the Hammer to the Imperiom!

But Jon Iehard had been watching M'Nee and now acted with characteristic speed. The Taw Taw longbarrel boomed deafeningly and the shot hurled M'Nee into the wall, but Jon wasn't quick enough to catch Gelgo Chacks before he got off two cartridges from his handgun.

The first chopped down Braunt and Gesme. The second sprayed Owlcurl Dahn, Jon and the Bey before the Taw Taw boomed again and the slug ruptured Chacks' chest cavity, tumbling him head over heels.

Jon slumped beside the Bey, who lay ominously still.

Owlcurl Dahn was crying through clenched teeth. She held her shoulder, blood ran down her arm. "Oh, but it hurts! I never dreamed anything could hurt so bad!"

"Let me see," Jon said, and then he grunted from the sudden pain in his own shoulder; he'd caught a pellet too.

There was a movement at the edge of his vision. M'Nee, still alive, eyes transfixed with hate, lifting his gun, Jon fired without thinking, the bullets demolishing M'Nee's good hand and forearm, hurling the gun against the wall. The pain seared him once again.

The Bey's eyelids fluttered open.

"Where are you hit?" Jon said in a harsh whisper.

"Disaster," the Bey breathed. "We are undone at the last."

Jon shook his head. He parted the Bey's clothes. There was a small chest wound, low down on the right side. There was also blood from the thigh and the calf of the right leg. He would have to carry the old man the last leg of the journey. Officer Dahn wouldn't be much help. A quick look around showed nobody else left alive, and then he saw Angle Umpuk grinning down at him from the darkness.

"Where did they get you from?" the guide said with a strange smile. "They warned me about you, but I had to see it to believe it." Jon's heart sank. "You were just a piece of greased murder back there in the airlock. Really wonderful shooting. But this was amazing. Damned good thing I stepped around the corner eh?"

Umpuk brought up a small handgun. Laowon military issue, it fired small pellets that released a powerful tranquilizer. "I had a feeling you'd get M'Nee. I thought it would be best if I waited until that was over with. Now if you'll just hold still a second I'll paralyze you and you won't have to suffer another thing until they get you into hospital. I imagine your expiation will be one of the most prolonged in the history of cruelty. Of course, you won't know much about it since they're likely to wipe your brain pretty thoroughly first."

"No," Jon said, tonelessly.

"Yes," grinned Umpuk.

And Rhapsodical Stardimple swung out of the shadow and knocked the gun from Umpuk's hand. With an oath he dived for it, but the Taw Taw longbarrel beat him to it. The reverberations died away.

Owlcurl Dahn forced herself to get on her feet. There were more distant sounds from below. Jon turned to the prone figure of the Bey.

"We are finished, the cyborgs are coming," Eblis Bey said.

Jon shook his head in stubborn disagreement.

"I cannot move," the Bey said. "You will have to go on without me." He grabbed Jon's forearm and his face contorted from the effort. "When you get to the control chamber let Rhap Dimp do all the talking when the Keeper comes. I have primed the mote with the coordinates of our likely targets. Be careful not to make sudden movements when you face the Keeper." He coughed, then renewed his grip. "Now go, leave me."

Jon looked at Rhap Dimp. The glossy little optics stared back. He wondered what was going on in that bizarre little mind. An awful lot would be riding on it—the entire expedition, the fate of the human race, everything.

He turned back to the Bey. "We can't give up now, let me get you on your feet. It's not that far away." Ignoring the old man's objections, Jon braced himself, lifted the Bey, and placed him over his good shoulder.

He set off into the maze, Rhap Dimple floating just ahead. Officer Dahn, clutching her arm, leaving a trail of blood, staggering behind.

The troopers waited by the first set of risers. The officers came up behind them. They were put through directly to General Plezmarxsh.

One of them shone his handlight up at the ceiling. He observed the odd lunglike things on pink stalks, and the white cone-shaped objects that were extruding from cracks between the scales of the ceiling. Abruptly the cones exploded with puffs of dust and fired threads tipped with needles into most of the officers and troopers.

The threads thickened visibly, into wires, then to strings that inspired immediate screams of agony from the officers.

The cyborg guns came up. A staccato drumbeat of fire echoed in the narrow space. The lung-shaped things were destroyed. The threads were cut in some places. But in others they had become ropes that drew their victims into the air.

The screams were horrible, as the vang military form went into action. Once piercers had broken into the flesh of the food, a network of controlling nerves began to grow from the site of infection, working through the existing nervous system, drilling straight through it, linking with terrible rapidity the various organs that would be required for primary control.

To the victims it was as if hot needles were being passed through their flesh in many different directions at once. At the same time, they were losing control of their bodies, their own nerve tissues no longer responding to the higher centers of the brain.

Helpless, in agony, they were hoisted toward the ceiling while the vascular connections thickened into hawsers, rich, sucking, devouring pipes of fresh military-form tissue.

The cyborgs were affected too, but they could ignore the pain. Their nervous systems were a blend of organic circuits and phototronic controllers. The Vang system of nervous invasion was simpler with organic systems, but at a pinch the military form could harden a section of nervous system and switch it from weak chemical-ion transmission to more robust techniques. Piercers and controllers would have to be toughened considerably. This realization set off further explosive changes. Materials that had lain piled in drifts around a storage chamber for hundreds of millions years, looking like nothing so much as flakes of breakfast cereal, abruptly swelled, changed, began manufacturing complex chemicals. The storage chamber, which had contained much of the residues from the conversion of the original crew of the Hammer, filled with a strange stench.

In the passageway leading to the risers, the cyborgs reached up and snapped the connectors or tore them out of their flesh. Their guns continued to stutter as they received orders to destroy all laowon that had been infected.

The profusion of stalks and other organs withdrew suddenly into the ceiling. The cyborgs stood grouped beside the risers, ankle deep in fragments of their officers, and awaited new orders.

When Plezmarxsh reported to Magnawl Ahx, the latter's face paled when he heard of the alien lifeform. "Lashtri Three," he said in a hushed whisper.

Plezmarxsh's forehead furrowed. "Where have I heard that name?"

"It was the world that was burned by Red Seygfan in the interregnum."

Plezmarxsh gasped. "Of course, and this horror must be the same lifeform. But in such widely separated star systems? It doesn't seem possible."

"Baraf did not originate in this part of the galaxy. Who can say where it wandered before it joined this system."

Plezmarxsh looked up at the airlock entrance uneasily. On Lashtri Three, the thing had spread with a terrible rapidity. "What will we do?"

"I will report to the high admiral at once. Send the troopers in, try to track the fugitives, we must know where they've gone to ground."

"The humans are doomed then. They will be attacked and converted."

"They are doomed anyway. We have two spies among them. Superior Buro has followed this case from the beginning. But I still want to know where the humans are. The machine is huge, they could hide in there for days. We may not have so much time."

Jon lurched down each passageway as the mote led him. The walls of yellow brown scales were monotonous, endless. Each time they came to a new opening, the mote considered the passageway carefully and then directed Jon forwards.

The Bey had grown very heavy. Jon's shoulders ached from carrying the old man, who had been silent for some minutes. They reached another junction of passages.

Suddenly, there was a tremendous noise down below. Distantly, they heard screams and gunfire. The eruption made Owlcurl Dahn gasp in fright. Jon stopped and turned, the effort cost him considerable pain in his wounded shoulder. The sounds of firing were clear, but still distant, far below them, somewhere in the bowels of the machine.

He paused, carefully set the Bey down, and listened intently. Eblis Bey came awake as long ripping sounds wafted up from the small arms fire of the cyborg troopers. Eblis Bey knew only too well what it was they were firing at. "The devil is awake now."

They looked around them with distinct unease.

"Which way now, Rhap Dimp?" Jon asked the mote.

"Left. Close now. Emergency, lack energy."

Jon put out a hand to keep the mote warm. It had the coordinates of their primary targets. He passed the mote to Officer Dahn, who cradled it carefully.

Then he lifted the Bey across his shoulders once again. They turned left into another passage and proceeded to its end. The maze seemed endless, as if they were just tracking back and forth in it forever, and Jon was close to despair. The cyborgs would soon climb the risers and find them, wandering about stupidly, within twenty meters of their goal.

And then the mote led them through a doorway that opened onto a large circular space. Ribs of pink eternite rose from the perimeter and curved together in a mesh to form the roof.

Immediately, the space above their heads filled with man-sized flashing holograms. Lines of some alien code, ideograms, images. Jon set the Bey on his feet and propped him up. He stared at the codes in awe.

"At last, at last!" The Bey was overcome with wild emotion.

An onion-shaped chamber was swelling out of the floor with a sound like a huge balloon inflating. A door opened in it like an enormous iris. From within came a deep orange glow. The chamber was looming over them like a giant head. The iris widened.

"Rhap Dimple, come to me. Now you must give the Keeper all the codes it will need." The Bey's voice quavered slightly.

The mote rose from Dahn's hand and floated across to the Bey, who held the mote up to the door. Rhapsodical Stardimple warbled a stream of notes.

There was silence. Then a light shone directly onto the mote. Rhap Dimple uttered another stream of tones.

The iris glowed a fiery pink and slowly opened. In it stood a batrachianoid robot, three meters high, like a surreal mechanical toad. It glowed where its eternite segments met. In what looked like a huge toad's head, enormous eyes suddenly lit up. It extended a vast palm, into which the mote delivered itself. Blue and green sparks flew between them. The globular optics turned and focused on Eblis Bey, Jon, and Owlcurl Dahn.