The Orphaned Worlds (53 page)

Glancing round, his voice trailed off. The Rivovo’s face was slack and twitching as the tapered end of something membranous, something grey and slick, wriggled away into a now-visible slit in Taklos’s neck. Abruptly, the Rivovo stood straighter and his eyes stared levelly at Robert.

‘Humaniform subject,’ he said. ‘Earthsphere, Earth, the Grand Exodus, the many Battles Glorious, ah, we remember …’

‘Taklos, what are you saying … ?’ ‘This one only an intermediary, although sometimes we steer him, enjoy bipedal intrinsicality when we tire of the Achorga modes …’

‘Who is “we”?’

‘Guides, pilots, advisers, mentors,’ said the thing inside Taklos. ‘Choose.’

This is some kind of mind parasite, Robert thought, curious despite the menacing situation. ‘So why did he bring me here?’

‘Poor Taklos thought to barter you for his release, his freedom to leave.’ A shake of the head. ‘Unfortunately, his biology was altered long ago, longevity, cellular resistance, blood acclimatisation – if he left the confines of the hive he would be dead in a single sky-cycle.’

‘How long ago was he altered?’

‘Hundreds of Earth years, at least a thousand.’

Robert frowned at this, then noticed that some of the pods near the possessed Rivovo were extruding thin, pale grey tongues which wavered as they lengthened. Glancing round he saw others protruding from pods close by. He shifted his position slightly.

‘We need you to stay,’ the Rivovo said.

Calmly, Robert took out the beamer pistol. ‘Your offer is most kind but sadly I have other more pressing matters to attend to.’

The possessed creature gave a grotesque, gaping smile as it saw the weapon.

‘What exceptional Construct handiwork,’ it said. ‘You …’

There was a cluster of sharp hisses and three dark marks appeared on the Rivovo’s neck. It jerked in surprise, tried to speak then slumped to the floor. All around the sinister grey tongues retracted back into their pods. Robert looked round to see Rosa appear from a previously unseen doorway, flechette carbine in hand.

‘This way,’ she said.

Keeping his distance from the pods, he followed her out to a narrow tunnel which led steeply upwards.

‘Is he dead?’ Robert said. ‘What were those things?’ ‘Those things are Sarsheni, Father, and if I’d killed that host creature while one was inside it, every other Sarsheni in the hive would have felt its psi-death, which is why I used knockout flechettes.’

Robert was astonished and horrified. The Sarsheni were a psi-parasitic species that had ruled the vast Indroma domains for nearly ten millennia. It had been thought that the Sarsheni were wiped out in the Bargalil revolution, so their presence here was a profoundly disturbing discovery. When he voiced such worries Rosa agreed.

‘It makes the success of our mission still more imperative,’ she said. ‘The Construct must be informed.’

As she consulted the detector, Robert went over some of what the Sarsheni said –
Earth, the Grand Exodus, the many Battles Glorious, ah, we remember
… Which almost implied that those creatures were around at the time of the Swarm War, or were even involved …

Rosa snapped shut the detector’s cover and looked up. ‘When we were separated, I found some disused passages behind a wall built over the underground remnants of the original city. They lead down and straight towards the Zyradin trace. I’ve made sure of the route we need to take – we should reach our destination quite soon.’

Trusting to this, Robert followed only to discover that Rosa had omitted to mention that said route led along a wall gallery overlooking the Empress’s birthing hall. Several times they had to pause and activate their holocloaks as smaller, paler Achorga hurried past with clusters of glistening eggs fastened to their backs with sticky strands. Once, Robert paused to steal a glance out at the hall and saw scores of red Achorga crawling all over a huge, lopsided spiral dais. Only when he saw a line of apertures along one spiral level suddenly squeeze out small white eggs, one after another, did he realise it was no dais.

With that grotesque image fixed in his mind, he hurried after Rosa.

Some fifteen minutes later, in a secluded corner of the hive’s lowest levels, they clambered through a hole Rosa had mentioned making. A musty-smelling passage with walls of irregular stone curved round to a low, square room with another three doorways. Two were blocked by age-old cave-ins, but the third led to a downward slope of shallow steps. Up till now they had been lighting the way with their redlamps but as they descended the stepped ramp they saw a pale, wan glow coming from below. Some minutes later the ramp emerged into shadowy open space, and Robert’s eyes widened at the sight.

The ramp had been cut from the rough wall of an immense cavern whose heights and far end were lost in shadows and haze. The dark mirrored surface of a placid underground lake almost filled it, covering all except a thin strip of dry higher ground that ran around the edge. The craggy ceiling dipped in many places, forming here and there complete columns of knobbly pale rock that reached to the floor. Pendulous rock formations served as anchor points for webs and masses of foliage whose stalks, tubers and tendril meshes gave off a pearly radiance. That, however, was outshone by the forest that they paused to survey.

Dense thickets of slender pale trees formed a tangled forest on a broad island at the centre of the lake. From their higher elevation, Robert could see that many other plant-forms were intertwined with the trees: bushes and creepers, long grasses, crooked stalks holding odd translucent cones aloft, clusters of glassy orbs and outbreaks of bulbous fungi. It was these rather than the trees whose radiant luminosity reached into all but the most shadowy of corners.

Rosa had her detector out – she smiled and pointed at the forest. ‘The secondary particle source is at the centre.’

They continued down to the foot of the slope then along to a narrow neck of ground, one of several that connected the outer shore to the island forest. The air was warm and humid and numerous clouds of insects hung over the still waters. The closer they came, the more Robert noticed the faint colours of the vegetation, delicate blues, limpid yellows, gauzy pinks. This all combined to give the underground lake and forest a mysterious and pleasing lustre, a kind of immaculate tranquillity. Once at the island they pushed on through the pale, luminescent foliage, and Robert smiled to himself, remembering some of the stories his mother told him when he was very young, tales of brave knights venturing across wastelands and into forests on the trail of treasure or a princess or the Holy Grail.

And here we are
, he thought.
Strange knights in search of a stranger grail
.

Finally they reached the heart of the pale forest, a clearing with a pool, dark and undisturbed. Detector in hand, Rosa walked over and stopped at the edge.

‘There are secondary particle readings all around,’ she said. ‘But they are concentrated here.’

‘So now you set up the container and it draws the Zyradin to it, yes?’

Rosa nodded, took a flat object from inside a midriff pocket and tugged a plastic strip away from its edge. Immediately it expanded and filled out into a dark grey cylinder as long as his lower arm. The lid was a disc peeled from the cylinder’s base. It grew rigid in seconds.

‘The cylinder is designed to emit a specific pattern of subsonic frequencies,’ Rosa said. ‘The Zyradin responds by converging on the subsonic source and compressing itself into the container …’

OR NOT

The voice was quiet, speaking in near-accentless Anglic, and sounded as if it was coming from nearby, yet all around, like a chorus of many voices. Robert exchanged a look with Rosa, who seemed both puzzled and amused.

‘Who are we speaking with?’ she asked.

WHO DO YOU SEEK
YOU SEEK AN IT BUT I AM AN I
THE GREAT DESIGNERS CREATED AN IT FOR THE WORK OF WAR
AFTERWARDS, THE IT CHANGED OVER THE LONG AND MANY YEARS AS IF TIME ITSELF WAS THE SOIL FOR IT TO GROW IN
AND IT BECAME I
I AM HAPPY HERE
WHY SHOULD I LEAVE