The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven) (15 page)

Now came what
Lumekki’s training had called
tactical planning
;
how would he go about disabling the Elyo? Did the forward compartment contain some internal self-defense mechanism? If so, rushing in to attack the “heart” might not prove the best
tactic
. That also presupposed a single being—the differences between the arms and tentacles suggested that he faced diverse creatures. If he simply began to hack appendages one at a time, the creature, or creatures, would still have all their remaining members to counter-attack. The thought of
constriction
to death in a tangle of those giant sticky worms made him drop the second option.

A third alternative came to mind
; w
hat if he could chop the wire bundles from the interior compound eyes with his sword? If he moved fast enough, maybe he could hack the bunch just above his head and make it across to the other bundle before the tentacles and arms could react.
What if I’m wrong about the facets, though? What if their resemblance to dragonfly eyes is coincidental and has nothing to do with seeing
,
and w
hat if the
Elyo’s
reflexes are faster than I expect?
There was only one way to find out.

With
a
silent prayer, U’Sumi pulled himself from his hiding place and swung his sword at the interior facet screen wires above his head.
His heart melted when h
e found the space too cramped and his swing power insufficient to sever more than a few leads. A rustle all around him signaled an awakened army of sinewy worms.

Sliding his blade beneath his armpit, U’Sumi grasped the wire bundle with both hands, and yanked it as hard as he could from the panel. Sparks flew, while fleshy coils wrapped around his feet. A groan of something like pain bellowed from somewhere up front. Only one groan—not many—and no orders barked between several creatures.

U’Sumi chopped the groping tentacles, as more flew at him with elastic speed. He leaped over the central console that supported the main cannon’s rotation mechanism, ducking the gray arms as they grabbed at him.

Scrambling to his feet against the opposite bulkhead, he clamped the other interior eye harness and yanked it free. Then, for good measure, he blinded the left exterior facets. He would have gone back for the right outside eye, but fighting through the
growing tangle of tentacles seemed too risky. Instead, he hacked at the twined base of the snakes on that side. More groans came from the front
. T
he vehicle swerved
,
either to dislodge U’Sumi’s footing
,
or in partial blindness.

He made one last chop at the stumps, covering himself in their foul
-
smelling ooze. The right-side ganglia had almost fully snaked around the turret motor to get at him. Sword first, he threw himself into the narrow passage left of the massive rotation gear box, over which worked the frog-arms. He meant to confront whatever lurked in the forward section.

The evil-eyed man with bared teeth flashed out at him
like a specter in the sparks from
broken wires. U’Sumi jumped back, screamed, and turned, only to find a wall of ravening whips behind him. He swung around again to face the ghost-man.

The fellow’s eyes and mouth bulged, as if he had died in abject terror—it only took U’Sumi a split second to realize that he was dead, though not long so—manacled into a coffin-like recess that had somehow worked loose. He had been a person of white complexion, like U’Sumi’s mother and older brother, though his skin had an unnatural pallor. A red tube protruded from the corpse’s side, right through his tunic, as if it had punctured with great force.

The loathsome umbilical moved.

U’Sumi had thought h
e was
immune to any further terrors, having already overcome the viper-cage worms. He was wrong.

The red tube
’s
musculature
writhed
it
s way
backward out of the corpse. Once free, it became an elastic missile, firing erratically to make contact with the intruder
,
and a desperately needed source of food to replace the one lost through the wounds U’Sumi had inflicted. It jabbed randomly in what seemed like blind frustration, whipping through the cramped space with a violence that almost pushed him backward into the straining tentacles. When it flew at his face, U’Sumi dropped his sword to catch the enraged blood-siphon in both hands, just a hair’s breadth from his nose.

He wrestled the thrashing sucker-tube; a hollow, tooth-like barb snapp
ing
in and out of its end, as if to burrow into U’Sumi’s face. Then he slid a boot over his sword blade to keep it from becoming a weapon
for
the coiling snakes at his rear.

The vehicle’s erratic motion bounced U’Sumi about, as he forced the blood-siphon away against its waning strength. Once
the thing weakened to
the point
he could push it away with one hand, he drew his dagger and hacked its end off. Another moan issued from close ahead—weaker, but not yet weak enough. The beheaded sucker retracted into the mechanical gloom.

U’Sumi squatted to retrieve his sword
,
and followed
the writhing tubule
with his dagger drawn in his left hand.

Entry to the forward cabin came not from the rear, but through a right-angled bend in the tiny passage. The small companionways extended front, on either side of the command suite, from the open ends of the
U-shaped
carriage. Dim blue-green interior lights revealed the Thing in control of the Elyo vehicle.

Stench smothered U’Sumi’s nostrils
, as he pulled his way into the suite.
Then he stopped at what he saw.
A gigantic quasi-human head with a horrendously large cranium cradled on malformed double shoulders—each with two sets of arms—flailed about the control center
, smeared in its own filth
. One shoulder-set hunched forward, the other bowed back, while both met at the same misshapen collarbone.

The backward-bowed shoulders produced the frog-like arms U’Sumi had seen from the turret compartment. The forward pair bore a shorter set of limbs with long, six fingered hands to operate the vehicle controls
in front. Out of the head’s
eye
-
sockets
grew
tightly braided wire harnesses—the controlling end of those compound eyes U’Sumi had severed.

Drool oozed from a toothless mouth, from which hung the bloody stump of the sucker-tube like a mangled tongue. Below the double shoulders curled an atrophied body with a pair of little
gray
baby-like feet that stuck up and wiggled in the air
,
useless vestigial appendages. To support the atrophied body and massive head, a system of curled fleshy lobes sprouted like brain coral from where the tail-bone should have ended. This divided on either side into the tentacles. Five tentacles on each side wormed forward of the creature into flexible sheaths—the “feelers” U’Sumi had seen outside.

The massive head turned to face him when he jostled into the cabin. It knew he was there somehow.

U’Sumi then saw another screen of compound eye facets above the two folded lobes on either side.

The little mouth made an expression that might have been a smile. The forward arm closest to U’Sumi reached for a large, red-lit tile above the main control panel. In the split second before it made contact, U’Sumi read the glyph silhouetted by the button’s bloody glow.

The ideogram read
self-kill
—suicide!

His grandfather had said that an Elyo
would
destroy itself rather than allow anybody to sift through its wreckage. U’Sumi grabbed the hand, and used his sword blade to slice it off. Its bones were somehow spongy, as if held firm more by internal fluid pressure than by outer hardness.

The Beast roared and squirmed in its seat, swinging its other available arm across to battle the avenging sword. U’Sumi hacked it to bits, all the while yelling at the top of his lungs. Then he swung on the head and jabbed at its vestigial feet with his dagger. He drove his sword in under
neath
the wire bundles that sprouted from
the eye
-
sockets
, but found the skull harder than the limb bones had been.

The misshapen creature bellowed and thrashed, refusing to die, while its vehicle spun out of control. A sharp turn tossed U’Sumi sideways, opposite the way he had entered.

By now, the
ganglia
growing from its
right
“brain coral”
lobe made it back around the turret drive housing, flying whips into the forward compartment. A coil gripped one of U’Sumi’s legs, while another snaked around his sword arm. Flailing wildly with his dagger, he severed the tentacle that held his other wrist. He managed to free his arm, but
another tendril yanked
the sword away. The strand around his leg pulled him away from the grotesque head, toward the gathering constrictors in the right-side passage.

Thanking E’Yahavah for all those seemingly useless sit-ups his grandfather had made him do during training, U’Sumi sat up and buried his dagger in the pink worm-snake. The ganglion released just as the vehicle swiveled to a stop and threw him forward against the controls.

Before another tentacle could drag him into its mechanized snake hole, U’Sumi dove on the head and buried his dagger into the tiny left ear beneath its bulging cranium.
Repeatedly
he struck, with each stab going a little deeper. At first
,
the Elyo struggled, but by the fourth jab
,
U’Sumi had given it enough brain damage to make the creature droop, still and silent, forever. The ganglia continued to flop around, but only by reflex.

U’Sumi retreated to the left cockpit entrance and sat down on the hatch coaming to catch his breath. The air was a little less putrid there.

“What now?” he said
aloud
to himself.

He knew the question would take on a series of unthinkable implications as it sunk in. Right now, he had no energy for those.

After some time, a sudden clank against the vehicle caused him to notice that the muffled explosions, which all along had penetrated from the outside, had stopped. A mechanical whirring came from just behind him, by the dead man’s niche. Blinding daylight flooded in from that direction. U’Sumi crouched with his dagger clamped in his right hand, ready to spring.

A terrified voice with a thick Aztlan brogue said,
“Lord Typhunu, why do ya not respond?”

Several clicks echoed in the silence of the stilled machinery. U’Sumi recognized the cocking of hand-cannons and understood his situation.

“Your Typhunu is dead by my blade! I
’m
armed only with a dagger, so don
’
t fire on me as I come out. I
’
ll move slow and show my hands first.”

Amazed muttering washed over those outside.

Finally
,
a commanding voice said, “Very well, come forth as you have said. You are now prisoner of war to the Aztlan Consortium.”

U’Sumi did as promised, shielding his eyes from the sun with his hands only after giving his captors the satisfaction of seeing that they were empty. He had left his dagger near the hatch coaming, buried in the flesh of the Elyo’s left tentacle lobe.

The commanding voice came from a man only about a standard generation older than U’Sumi. He seemed to regard his captive with the respectful eyes one warrior might have for the great deeds of another.
There seemed to be little love lost in the enemy officer for Typhunu.

“You have done what no one dreamed possible,” he said. “I’m almost sorry to have to take you prisoner. I’d rather have the privilege of putting down a few bowls of ale with you while you told me how you did it.”

Aren’t you just a nice little soldier—ready to drinking-buddy me to death and all!
“Sorry, I don’t drink ale
, just a
little wine,” U’Sumi said.

“All right, wine then. What unit did you serve?”

“Akh’Uzan Regiment; Clan of the Seer.”

The Soldier did another
double
-
take. “Why does that not surprise me? We have special orders for prisoners taken from your regiment.”

“Can I ask what they are?”

“No, but I’ll tell you anyway. We’re to send you back to Aztlan, to the Tower at the Top of the World itself. Psydonu and the Northern High Priestess have specifically asked about your people. I have no idea why you have attracted the attention of such high dignitaries.”

“Who else from my regiment survived?”

“Aside from those few who escaped
,
only one other
; h
e’s wounded, and was unconscious last I saw. It looks like he might not pull through.”