The Otherworld Rebellion (War of Alien Aggression #9) Read online

  "Then why the fuck did you do it? I told you not to find the artifact."

  "I wasn't trying to. I..."

  "And why did you tell Hank Devlin? Of all people...why?"

  "It's not really worthless is it."

  "Nope. And you gave it to the rebels. Why, Samhain? Your damn mentor died to protect that thing. He died to make sure nobody had it and you just gave it up to a bunch of pirates and revolutionaries. You gave it to them on a platter. Don't you dare tell me you didn't mean to do that. You betrayed me."

  "I didn't"

  "You did. And I want to know why before I scramble your head."

  Martin Samhain made a point to look her between the eyes when he was talking to her so she could see for herself he was telling the truth. "It had nothing to do with you. And everything."

  "Goddamn it. I told you not to leave your little bubble. You're cracked. I told you not to go out there. I told you you couldn't handle it. Nobody can."

  "I'm back now, aren't I? I'm fine." In that instant, he didn't have to work hard to feel the doubt in her. "My mentor, Professor Gellanden....I know why he erased his memory of the Weirdling artifact, why he purposefully lost what he'd found."

  "Fine. Why?"

  "He wanted to be a priest."

  "You're nuts."

  "He went through the whole routine and backed off at the last minute."

  "So what?"

  "He said he was always waiting for the faith to come to him and it never did. If anyone knew what the artifact meant to the Freezt it was him. That's why he died to keep it hidden."

  "What the hell are you talking about? It's a piece of 5 million-year-old Weirdling tech."

  "To the Freezt it's something....divine."

  "Schizo is what you sound."

  "They come here and wander the Southern continent looking for it. They can feel it. There isn't enough food or light to feed a Freezt down here. But here they are. None of them are indigenous to this continent. They all come here in floating thatches like....like some kind of pilgrimage. It's changing them I think."

  "That's ridiculous. These are delusions. Think about it...How do even think you know any of this? You're making it up. I mean, can you otherwise explain how you claim to have this knowledge?"

  She didn't know, he realized. For the first time, he understood something she didn't. Samhain had to work hard not to show the small sense of triumph he felt then. "For the Freezt, the artifact is like the consolation, the caress Gellanden's own god never gave him. Samhain paused then, but where the meter of his speech would have placed his next words there was only a guilt, a self-loathing that Samhain knew Scilla could read because she grinned at him sadistically.

  "You think you stole their alien god?"

  "No. I'm saying...That's what Dr. Gellanden thought it was. He left it where he found it. He tried to go home, but when he guessed people were coming for him, he erased his notes and his memory to keep it out of Staas Company's hands. He didn't want them to have it."

  "You mean us," she said. "He didn't want us to have it."

  "He didn't want Staas Company to have it."

  "So you gave it to the rebels? They have no hope, no chance. Whatever you think you found, whatever you've given them, it won't help. Rebellion is impossible. It has been for over two-hundred years. These people on this dust-ball have just forgotten that like they forgot it in Houston. Maybe Humanity needs a reminder of the futility of such actions every once in a while to learn what they already know." Her words twisted his gut with a kind of despair and he wondered for a moment if the feeling was all his or if, facing the futility of which she'd spoken, Scilla herself had lost hope.

  Under the boat, the angle of the plasma bit canted as it rotated and cut a wider bore. A few of the smaller bits of ejected rock left long, smokey trails as they flew from the pit and landed less than a dozen yards off to ignite clumps of matchstick scrub.

  Twenty-five minutes later, when the plasma drill suddenly flared up and shot flame out the hole and scorched the hull of the tour boat, he thought it might have been an ancient bomb they'd found. The ground shook under them as it swelled and cracked, sending fissures radiating outwards from the dig site. Once they shut down the drill, the pink light that had bathed his eyes for so long was gone and Samhain stood in a strangely green landscape.

  The tour boat's artificial gravity swirled the dust as it slid sideways to set down on its gear. By the time Hank Devlin and Tsk had come out the hatch and down the stairs, Samhain and Scilla had covered half the distance to the hole. Hank waved them back until he got to the lip of the excavation. Then, whatever was down there stole all his attention. His gaze fixed down into the pit and didn't stray until Samhain and Scilla had reached the edge and looked in too.

  Tsk's upper body swayed nervously. The bug clacked and whined out his jagged chitin jaws and the translator he wore only beeped in failure.

  The hole itself wasn't much more than five-meters across. To see down the smooth-walled and smoking cylindrical shaft they'd dog, Samhain had to stand close to the edge. Alcyone's daylight rays only penetrated halfway down, but as he leaned out past the rocky lip and looked beyond that point, he didn't see the darkness he'd expected. Instead, the rock walls reflected an uncanny bluish glow that Samhain knew could only be made by high energy particles speeding though the atmo. The color filled the bottom of the pit and when he finally risked leaning out far enough to see the source, he didn't understand what he saw.

  What he could only presume to be the artifact floated in the center of a translucent sphere that crackled with discharge every few seconds from the point where it made contact with the rounded stone bottom of the shaft. "That's some delusion, huh, Scilla?"

  "Don't be petty."

  The glow that came off the artifact and the spherical field surrounding it wasn't so bright it prevented his eye from interrogating the form inside, but what he saw made no logical sense. The thing itself was no larger than 1.5 meters in any one direction at any given moment, but its shape kept changing. The edges were as crisp and defined as the edges and boundaries of any of the objects that made up the dimension around him, but what he saw below was obviously not of this dimension. The only analog in Samhain's mind to the shape before him was a piece of water-eroded limestone from a cave he'd seen once presented as a Chinese Scholar's Rock. That rock had been full of holes where the water had pierced it again and again over time. The alien object before him had a finish and flow like mercury but the empty spaces within its form were like the Scholar's Rock. The places where it was and wasn't and the confounding nature of the pattern was a glimpse of a design too large, too grand to apprehend at once.

  "It's just floating in the middle of that energy field," said Scilla.

  "I wouldn't recommend trying to pick it up," said Hank. "It probably carved out the cavern." He turned then and made for the hatch of the tour boat. "Don't touch it until I get back."

  The loose pebbles and debris under Samhain's forward foot began to settle and shift and he instinctively pushed off and stepped back, setting a few stones free to roll over the lip and into the pit. He heard the first clattering bounces of the pebbles on the bottom just before the whole pit flashed bright. By the time he looked down in to see what happened, Scilla was already tossing pebbles at it.

  The first of them landed on the very top of the field surrounding the artifact and disappeared with a crackle and spitting flash that produced a few sparks this time. Tsk chatter-clacked at her. "Interrogative: seek death?"

  She flipped him off and tossed another, and the impacting stone blinked into bright oblivion as it hit. The whole spherical field around the artifact shimmered as discharge whipped and sparked at the base of the field where gravity pulled it against the stone.

  "What is it?"

  Hank Devlin, approached with battery packs and what appeared to be the base node guts for an n-space stealth shunt, the kind they fixed to the hulls to manage EM emissions and visibility. He lowered it i
nto he pit on its cables.

  Below, in the pit, the glowing field around the object looked a hair smaller. "Is the field diameter shrinking?" He watched the artifact inside twist and fold over on itself with geometrical impossibility for a few more seconds until he was sure. "It is. The energy bubble around it is shrinking."

  "The rocks around it are cooling," said Hank. "I think that's where it's getting its energy from. We'll know for sure in a second."

  "Do be careful, Hank," said Scilla.

  Samhain couldn't tell if he was too busy connecting the cables to the n-space rig to answer her or if he was making a point of ignoring her. Hank and Tsk lowered the base unit down into the pit on the cables and let it come to rest just between the wall of the shaft and the energy field itself. "You don't have any panels plugged into that thing," he said and Hank nodded.

  "Put even the smallest sinks on there and it'll suck so much energy into n-space we won't be able to get close. Trust me; this is the way to do it," Hank said as he held up the battery and waited for Tsk to make the connection. "If I'm right, this is all we'll need to get close to it. I think that's a kind of a shield device - energy in - effect out. We'll see."

  "It's not. It's something else. Something more powerful." He swore he could hear it humming in his head. "You hear that?" he asked Scilla, and she ignored him.

  Once they fed the stealth shunt power, the smooth walls of the shaft began to crack and the fractures spat chips and shards as it drained the heat from them too quickly. Samhain brought his arm across his face, and when he looked in next, the very color seemed to be draining from the rock. The energy field around the artifact had shrunk to where it would actually intersect the farthest-reaching gestures of the alien object any second. The moment the mutating form of the device itself contacted the field, the sphere of energy surrounding it ceased to be. "Threshold," said Hank Devlin. He held up a matchbox computer for an IR reading. "About -10 degrees. Keep it below that and it won't make the energy field."

  "When you hit it with the plasma drill," Samhain said. "The flare-up."

  "That must have juiced it up nicely," said Scilla. "That probably made the field diameter increase to create the larger spherical chamber we found it in."

  "Where did all that rock go?" Samhain wasn't sure if it was a shield or a weapon. It didn't look much like Gellanden's alien god.

  "Let's keep this thing nice and cool," said Hank.

  12

  Hive of Auntie Kill

  Northernmost continent

  Captain Hank Devlin spent most of the flight monitoring the state of the energy shunt keeping the Weirdling artifact cold and confirming every few seconds that its placement in the hold and radius of effect wasn't interfering with critical flight systems.

  His pilot's chatter-clacking and whining called his attention to the view out the canopy of the boat where the twisting towers of the Hive were now rising fast on the horizon. "Interrogative: communication with Hive?"

  "Negative." He hadn't attempted to contact the Hive for security reasons, but despite that fact, a line of red flags snapped in the wind over the sun-bleached chitin of the main landing pads. At first glance, there appeared to be over a hundred of the Hive's warrior monks down there waiting for them. Each of the Hs'tok of Auntie Kill's Hive had painted themselves in red and black stripes and each of them held a piece of thin, whipping Otherworld bamboo with a snapping flag.

  Hank had only ever seen the Hs'tok warrior monks paint themselves and put on this particular show once before. That was the day that his mother agreed to become their surrogate Queen and Mother Mastermind. Today was an important day. But why? How could they know about the Weirdling artifact? His eyes wandered up and down the familiar corkscrew turns of the hive's above-ground towers as he tried to imagine what might be so important that the monks would want to honor it.

  His pilot, Zi'vt, clacked. "They know."

  "That's impossible."

  The Shediri pointed at the line of whipping 3-meter flags with his open 'hands' as if offering something.

  "Yes. I can bloody see them. Just land us close to the main entrance." The pilot pointed at the line of monks standing right about where Hank suggested they land, and Hank nodded. "They'll move."

  The towers to port dwarfed the boat as it lined up over the pads and descended slowly on its own gravity. Looking down at that point, he could just see the monks and their flags skittering on twitching legs to form up into a circle around the spot on which the tour boat would land.

  "What's going on out there?" Scilla shouted from the back of the boat.

  Even through the hull, he thought he could hear them chanting as the craft set down. Once he popped the hatch, the monks immediately stopped and waved their flags in silence. Hank had no exoskeleton to make that sharp, chitin-on-chitin crack. He beat his forearms across his chest in Shediri salute, and the pads instantly erupted with response.

  The Hs'tok all opened their jagged jaws and exhaled explosively across an organ that grew like a reed in Shediri voice-boxes. The war cries they shrieked out traveled up and down the nerves for whole seconds after the monks fell silent.

  As he looked out over the Shediri and their snapping flags, he heard the barking like a coming storm. His eye searched the darkness of the shaded, 20m-wide entrance way for he sound until the Hive's 200+ hounds poured out of the open door like a canine flood. They spilled onto the landing pads, barking and running through the monks that waved their flags and barked back with an alien imitation of a dog more convincing than anything a human throat had ever produced. Sometimes he wondered if the dogs liked the Shediri more than humans.

  Martin Samhain stood at the top of the ladder as if the crowd of bugs and dogs below was going to drown him. "I know the Shediri like dogs, but do they need so many?"

  "We've arrived at feeding time," Hank said. "They'll be sending in the meat any second." He heard the familiar crack of the bullwhip to his left, at the far end of the pads where the Hive's pack-master stood, cracking bullwhips in two of its four arms. Behind him, the platform elevator had already descended. Soon it would rise covered in fresh meat.

  "Zi'vt, Tsk, take Mr. Samhain inside, please. Arrange for a team of engineers to remove the active energy shunt and the Weirdling artifact from the hold immediately. I'll see to Ms. Price myself."

  The only objections came from Martin Samhain who didn't seem to want to leave Scilla's side, but Zi'vt and Tsk picked him up without much trouble and carried him towards the entrance through the barking dogs and the monks. He cried out Scilla's name more than once. "Mr. Samhain didn't seem to want to leave you. Do think he's in love with you?"

  She said, "Of course he is, Hank." He wasn't sure if it was a joke. "You do know I wasn't attempting to deceive you about the location of the artifact, yes? You do know that I made my little scene specifically to point out that the fool's drawing was, indeed, a map, don't you?"

  "Yes. It seemed obvious you were trying to tell me that. I'd already figured that out, but thank you for confirming it." He jogged back up the stairs then to open the cargo bay doors, and she followed after him.

  "Then why did you burn my bloody luggage? That was ungentlemanly. You didn't have to do that."

  "Oh, but I did, my dear Scilla, and for the same reasons you were forced to speak the mirrored truth to me in Mr. Samhain's presence. The man must believe I don't trust you. If he thought you and I we were plotting together, then he might mention it to my father."

  "When will Ram Devlin arrive here?"

  "Less than twelve hours...Tell me. How did Mr. Samhain pull off that stunt in the badlands? How did he really find the Weirdling artifact?"

  "He's a better exoanthropologist than we thought."

  He said, "That makes me nervous. What else is he actually good at?"

  13

  New Madras Spaceport

  Otherworld

  Dana said, "Why me?" as she put on the stealth exosuit. "Why do I always have to do the exo-atmo free-flight rec
ons?"

  "Because you made the mistake of getting good at it," Ram told her. "This automated mining sled is making its daily run to the Company collecting stations. It'll dump its rocks out past the orbit of Bofor's Station so the timing is just right tonight for it to give you a free ride exactly where you want to go."

  She wedged herself in tighter between the base of the drive coil casing and external wall of the reactor module and gripped the struts beneath her. Up past the reactor module like a monument-sized tombstone behind her, the external housing on the drive coils blurred before her eyes as they powered up. The field flipped her stomach before it came to full charge. The craft fell upwards into the sky, taking Dana Sellis with it.

  The sled wasn't much more than a piece of surplus junk frame, a modular reactor meant for a pigmy tug, and a single, massive drive coil it used to tilt space in front of it. It lifted off into the night sky from the fringe of the New Madras pads pulling a container full of unrefined Brandon's metal. The haul came from a legal claim and a transponder chirped that fact out to the Staas Company Cutters and patrol boats that she could make out in orbit and beyond. The bluish flares of their Newtonian engines were so bright, she didn't have to use her helmet to zoom in to see them zipping above her as she ascended.

  It took a whole nine minutes just to clear the atmo and by the time the sled pushed on into space, she was sure the three closest company cutters and patrol boats had already given the sled and the load the once over. She watched the bluish plasma flares of the company ships above continue past without any course deviations and looked through the satellites and orbital traffic to her objective. It was dead ahead.

  Shipyard docks, fabrication centers, and null-gee foundries fringed Bofor's Station like a patchwork skirt. The expanse of them dwarfed the station's brightly lit human and alien towers, and without assistance from Dana's suit comp it would have been hard to spot what she'd come for.

  Her helmet's visor outlined the dozen hulls of the almost completed UNS Foxhound class destroyers near the far edge of the shipyards. Their hulls were lit orange by the induction forges that had been moved close while the final layers of armor were built up with a Shediri fabrication technique that human metallurgists were only now beginning to use themselves. The lights of Human and Shediri exosuits buzzed around them.