The Adversary - 4 (16 page)

He sat down on the edge of the big round bed in the morning sun and began reading page one.

CHAPTER

SEVEN It was not so much the giant spiders themselves as their feeding habits that finally caused Mr. Betsy to crack.

On the ninth day of their incarceration in the communal cell, he awoke to the all too familiar tickle of one of the things running over his hand. He mewled in revulsion and pulled himself up in his straw nest, patting his wig back into place-and then spotted the odious creature still lurking not half a metre away, close by the snoring medievalist, Dougal. The spider saw Betsy, too, for it reared up, twiddled its pedipalps with conspicuous insolence, and emitted a crackling purr. It was coalblack, and hairy and had a body the size of a peach.

"Disgusting brute!" Betsy hissed. He adjusted his crumpled ruff. Dawnlight from the slot-window overlooking the gorge weakly illuminated the dungeon's squalor. All about lay the hunched or sprawled forms of the little band of technicians, pilots, and adventurers known as Basil's Bastards, betrayed into the hands of Nodonn Battlemaster by a mysterious operant woman, robbed of the aircraft that were to have insured the freedom of Lowlife humanity. Basil himself had been removed from the cell days ago, presumably to be sent to the torturers.

Keeping a wary eye on the spider, Betsy bent to untie the scarf that bound his farthingale skins tightly about his ankles.

He had learnt to sleep that way early on, since the cell was alive with mice, the legitimate prey of the giant spiders. Betsy was well aware-as had been generations of full-skirted women before him-of the havoc the little mammals could wreak if they ran up your legs. Perhaps he should have welcomed the presence of the spiders, for the mice bit and the spiders didn't; but instead he loathed them. They were too calculating, too agile in pursuit of their victims, and the mice screeched in such a heart-rending fashion when they were caught and whisked away to the lairs up in the dungeon ceiling. After the predators had drunk their fill of rodent bodily fluids, they dropped sad little web-wrapped carcasses on the prisoners below.

Betsy, with his elaborate Elizabethan costume, was by far the most vulnerable target.

And now this spider had the temerity to challenge him! He threw a few bits of straw at it but it refused to retreat, standing its ground near Dougal's bandaged ginger head. Betsy felt about in the heavy shadows for a more substantial missile, but there was nothing handy. The spider waved its legs mockingly. With some effort, Betsy struggled to stand upright, and then saw to his dismay that there was a long tear all along the side of the hoopskirt, exposing the frame. Muttering darkly, he shook the costume to settle it into place.

Three packaged mouse bodies dropped out of his petticoats into the straw.

"You-you ugly monster!" the former rhocraft engineer shrieked. He tore off a red-heeled brocade slipper and pitched it overhand with all his strength. It missed the spider, which sprang onto Dougal's face. The husky medievalist opened his eyes and screamed blue murder, whacking at his beard with open hands and kicking the straw in all directions. "Away, you scullion, you rampallion, you fustilarian!

Aaach-the whoreson's fanged me!"

The other twenty prisoners were coming awake in varying degrees of alertness. As they tumbled from their pallets they disturbed other questing arachnids, and it seemed as if the dungeon was suddenly alive with the scuttling things. They ran about like the disembodied hands of black demons, and wildeyed Dougal in his fake chainmail howled and sucked one thumb and crashed to the floor with a doleful cry. "Then, venom, to thy ... work," he whispered. His eyes closed.

"Bloody hell!" exclaimed the appalled Betsy. The medievalist writhed slightly.

"It got Dougal!" Clifford gasped. He pointed a trembling finger at the surgeon, Magnus Bell. "And you said they were harmless ... "

"But they are," Bell protested. He had knelt to take the medievalist's pulse. "He's only hysterical."

All around them, the walls and floor seemed to crawl. But it was a tangible enemy at last, not a mysterious human woman who tricked and mind-blasted them, who clamped the grey torcs of slavery around their necks and threw them into a Tanu dungeon.

Phronsie Gillis' clarion contralto rang out. "What're we waiting for, mates? Let's get the mothers!"

Basil's Bastards were galvanized. They locked onto the target and roared into a counterattack. Betsy wielded his slipper.

Phronsie and Ookpik and Taffy Evans and Nirupam slammed at the spiders with loose boots, wooden cups, and plates. Farhat and Pongo Warburton stomped. Bengt hammered the creatures with his bare fists. The zany technician Cisco Briscoe snapped his belt like a whip, to sick-making effect. They cursed, whooped, chased, and tripped over one another, all the while taking a fearful toll of invertebrate life. Only a handful of the Bastards were noncombatants: Miss Wang cowered against one wall, trying not to throw up; Philippe the ultrafastidious curled his lip and stood aloof; and the Tibetan physician Thongsa piped out futile admonitions: "I beg of you! Stop! Have respect! The life-form is physically unprepossessing, but it serves a useful purpose in the local ecology!"

"Bugger the ecology," croaked Stan Dziekonski, who had captained a dreadnought in the Metapsychic Rebellion. He jumped on a spider with both feet.

Dimitri Anastos knelt beside Magnus, holding the water bucket while the medic swabbed Dougal's bite. "You're sure he's not dying?"

"Asian!" groaned the knight. "Shall I abide in this dull world, which in thy absence is no better than a sty?"

"Take it easy, big fella," Magnus said. "You'll live, all right."

"Kill!" Mr. Betsy smote the arachnid foe right and left, using his ichor-smeared slipper. "Kill!"

The dungeon door clanked, squalled, and flew open with a resounding crash. Six gold-torc human troopers armed with Husqvarna stun-guns marched in, followed by a brilliantly glowing Tanu farsensor knight whose glass cuirass was emblazoned with a harp motif. In the corridor, brandishing naked swords, were other stalwarts, who shone coercer blue and psychokinetic rose-gold, as well as more nonoperant humans carrying Milieu weapons.

The farsensor lifted a commanding hand. Constrained by their grey torcs, Basil's Bastards were instantly mute and submissive.

The Tanu smiled on them. "I am Ochal the Harper, and I bring you greetings and affirmations of goodwill from King Aiken-Lugonn. Rejoice-for your unjust imprisonment is at an end! We are here to take you away from this place and transport you with the utmost speed to Calamosk, where the King himself will meet with you. Follow us now to the courtyard, where your leader, Basil Wimborne, awaits you." He turned and left the cell.Their minds released, the Bastards looked at one another in numb disbelief. One of the Husky-toting troopers cocked a thumb. "Come on, hop it! Or we might all end up in the soup."

The Bastards began to laugh. They put on their footgear, gathered up their meagre possessions, and began to file out, the able-bodied assisting the halt. Betsy was the last to leave, having wiped his slippers as well as he could on the straw and resettled his bedraggled wig. Two troopers of the rear guard stood on either side of the dungeon door, grinning, and presented arms as the reincarnation of Good Queen Bess the First swept grandly past.

The door swung shut. When the metallic boom had died away the great cell was utterly silent. Among the welter of black bodies in the straw a few kicked brokenly, then were still.

After a time the mice crept out and discovered that the Jubilee was upon them.

It was a dream, Hagen Remillard told himself. It had to be a dream ...

The linked ATVs bobbed at anchor in the Mediterranean shallows south of Aven's neck, waiting for first light and the land race to Afaliah. Hagen had taken the night watch, sure that he wouldn't sleep after his sister told him of the gold-torc force that would certainly arrive at the citadel ahead of him.

Would this advance guard of the Nonborn King present him with some impossible ultimatum? Would it threaten the captive pilots and technicians who might be so crucial to his plans?

Brooding over the contingencies kept Hagen alert throughout most of the night. But around the dead hour, 0400, when human vital energies burn lowest with the depletion of blood sugar, even a metapsychic tended to falter. The mind's eye glazed and looked inward to a world of shadows, to memories and fearful imaginings concretized in nightmare ...

Trudi takes his hand and leads him along an unfamiliar path to a place where the soil is churned and raw and a new building thrusts up huge against the morning sky, sparkling and humming. He begins to whimper as they go inside and the terrible ineffabilities threaten (he is only three and his metapsychic receptors are untrained and clumsy), and the nurse says, "Hush. It's all right. We must say 'Welcome back' to Papa."

The walk on a strange slick floor into dim coolness, and grownups crowd tall about him, ignoring his weak telepathic queries, mind-whispering of matters incomprehensible: Starsearch ... Lylmik? ... MADNESS! ... Goddam he did it! 1700 lightyear scan first try!

And back with brains nonfriedCan't believe he got rig work bloody jungle.

NevergetMEusefuckinghellrigMarcMad2yearsrecovernowstart (MoverGet that imbecile out of here.

But how long a starsearch?

MADNESS! MADNESS!

We've got nothing but time sweetheart.

6,000,000 friggerty years.

It'll work ... starsearch ... rescue us!

... new beginning ... coadunation ... coerce them or appeal altruismethic ...

MADNESS!

Mental Man ... we still may know Him!

The kid you booby.

Oh ...

Let Hagen upfront to see.

Let him see!

Let him see!

MADNESS! LET THE CHILD SEE THE MADNESS THAT BROUGHT US TO THIS EXILE! LET HIM SEE HIS OWN FUTURE ...

It was only a dream. A dream of an enormous captive thing, a brain shucked from its body. Glad to be! Energized artificially, scorning true Unity, glorying in loneness.

In the dream, Trudi lifted him to see the thing, and said, "It's your Papa." The three-year-old-boy screamed and tried to run away.

Only a dream. That was why he didn't try to run now as he saw the thing again, outside the cockpit windscreen of the modular combine. It seemed to be resting on the impeller access hatch, between the twin housings of the sonic disruptors. A hulking form, dully gleaming, having the rough shape of a man. Powercables and armoured hoses sprouted from its blind head and melted into the greying sky.

In his dream, Hagen arose from his seat at the navigation console, opened the cockpit door, and stepped outside. He seemed to float toward the phantom CE rig on the foredeck, and as he approached, it became transparent, and the operator in his pressure-envelope coverall extended his arms, bending down, and smiled at the frightened three-year-old.

"It's only me. It's only Papa."

But he held back, knowing he could not risk the embrace, even in the dream aware that the real body of a man wearing that armour would be refrigerated to a point near absolute zero, almost completely divorced from the transcendent brain.

"I think I finally understand," Hagen said. "Jack was your model. It wasn't possible for you to permanently modify yourself. You were too old for a successful adaptation. But you were determined to be more than Mental Man's brother."

"I would have been his father," Marc said. "And I would have lived content, seeing you and the others command the stars I gave you."

"No longer human."

"You would never have remembered."

"Go away!" the three-year-old cried. "Don't touch me. Don't look at me!" The nurse held him and stopped him from running away, but he buried his face in her long skirt and wept, refusing to look again at his father. The others mind-whispered, and then the walls closed gently about him, and he was lifted and carried away ...

He woke standing on the empty foredeck in the dawn breeze, and went to look at the hatch where the illusion had stood.

There were two great circular indentations in the plass, as if it had supported a tremendous weight.

Yosh wedged his face more firmly into the hooded viewer of the infrared spotterscope and said, "Now we're finally cooking." Servo motors whined and the machine and its operator spun slowly in a 360-degree scan. "Terrific. Perfect emplacement, up here in the beacon tower. Must have a coarse range of seventy, eighty kloms, Calamosk being on a hill. Nearly halfway to Afaliah clearview-wise before we smack into those hills the other side of the Opaar. Oh, this baby was made for steppes."

"How she do on the fine-tune, chief?" inquired Sunny Jim.

He and Vilkas were sitting in the shade and drinking beer after having spent a sweaty two hours deploying the solar-collection panels of the power supply.

"Working," Yosh muttered. Yes, here we go, sauntering down the Great South Road at ... four-one-three-one-two-pipsix-one, a herd of hippies, taking to the freeway, the lazy scuts.

Good thing this Pliocene doesn't run to high-speed surface transit. You'd need HIPPARION CROSSING warning signs every fifty metres."

Vilkas set down his big covered stein, wiped his moustache with the back of his hand, and sighed in a martyred fashion.

"Will we have to hook up the remote right away, or can it wait until after chow?"

"What do you think?" Yosh grinned at his two ashigaru briefly, then vanished again into the viewer. Vilkas groaned. In a muffled voice, Yosh went on, "What's more, we're going to have to string cables instead of slave-transmit, and cobble up something to match the brain-directed board with this red eyeball and the weapons batteries. Sorry, men. This piece of junk must be forty years old if it's a day, and the zappers are even older. You'd think some turkey would have smuggled in more up-to-date stuff by now."

"Could be they did." Vilkas peered gloomily into his empty stein. "But who's to know? The Tanu lords who had contraband dumps kept mum about their collections. No swap meets or comparing goodies. King Thagdal would have had their heads on a pike if he found out they were holding out on him. All important Milieu gadgetry coming through the time-gate was supposed to be the property of the Crown. And things like guns were supposed to be destroyed." He gave a bark of ironic laughter.