The Otherworld Rebellion (War of Alien Aggression #9) Page 13

  Five beeps in her helmet told her it was time to jump. There was no preparation to be made. There was nothing to do but look up, sight on the shipyards, and push off hard and clean.

  She launched off the struts, flew up the length of the reactor module and past the overhead drive coils before she gave her gas belt a tiny thrust to get clear. Dana and the sled flew together for a few moments while she looked down the length of the ore trailer at the cloud-covered night side of Otherworld, inky and velveteen dark save where the storms flashed over the oceans.

  The sled veered away to maneuver around the orbital station. It receded quickly, leaving her alone and feeling exposed as she flew towards the docks surrounding Bofor's. The suit made her a hole in the blackness, absorbing 99.998% of the light that hit it and managing its skin temperature well, but that didn't make her feel safer. It wasn't nearly as good at absorbing active search radar. If they pointed that at her, then she was done for.

  Dana breathed shallow and tried not to eyeball any of the tens of thousands of glittering windows of Bofor's Station lest someone look back at her. Nearly twenty minutes later, well inside the ceaseless active radar beams that lit the space surrounding it, she risked a gas burst for deceleration and course correction and slowed herself above the twisting chitin towers of the Shediri section. Another burst to starboard put herself on a course to fly low over the shipyard docks.

  The induction furnaces flared and the magnetically suspended burning balls of doped metal at their center spun fast. They stretched all along the section of the C-docks that had served as construction berths for the dozen warships and lit their growth from their first welds with the color of molten steel. The twelve destroyers built at Bofor's Station's shipyards now had their layers of armor but had yet to be blacked out with an energy absorbing skin so the raw metal shone and reflected the light of its making.

  Dana gestured forward and gave a burst from her gas belt to bring her in even lower now. Skirting 300 meters over the antenna arrays of the ships, she got the first readings off the reactors. The Shattuck's active power plant spat enough high energy particles in her direction to tell her it was active, working, and not exactly fine-tuned yet. She passed over its hull and the array spiking off the top of its command tower while welding flashes lit the starboard side of the slender hull and the port-side hull of UNS Uncas. That next ship was fully lit as well and running better than the first. Teams of human and Shediri builders had worked three shifts for seven months just to fill this contract. Their timing couldn't have been better, she thought. The last pieces are falling into place, she thought, almost as if someone had given them to he rebellion as a gift.

  None of the destroyers had their railguns in place yet, but Dana verified that all twelve reactors were functional and delivering power. Systems cores had been installed in the last week. The engines had been in place for a month; these ships were ready to fly.

  She spun as she passed the last of the new destroyers and reached into the thigh pocket of her suit. The cluster of bumblebee-sized drones she pulled out remained clumped together, clinging to each other. Their black, segmented legs looked stolen from a nest of wasps. Each of them had at least eight. Between the legs were dark spots and bristle. Ten seconds after she released them in the vacuum, the drones let go of each other and gave tiny bursts to separate.

  Dana watched them for only a few seconds because she lost sight of them, but from the direction they'd flown and the spread of them it looked as if they would distribute themselves evenly among the twelve warships below as Ram said he'd flashed them to do before launch. With a little luck at least one of them would make it inside each of the destroyers to hide between decks and await orders to tap the Systems Core and rewrite the ship's control software.

  She spun around as she headed out over the far edge of the docks fringing the orbital station. Below, through the great whalebone shaped skeletons of a haulers yet to be skinned with deck and hull, the blue flares of three more Staas Company Cutters burned bright as they accelerated and blasted themselves down the shipping lane, chasing after some vessel she couldn't see.

  How many company ships would there be in-system the day they pulled this stunt? Even if half of them were in the outer system, there would still be too many in the space around Otherworld to get away without a fight.

  She drifted for another five minutes until a friendly crew en route for the surface faked engine trouble and decelerated to pick her up in a two-deuce, a commercial tug hauling into New Madras. The whole ride down to the surface, the skipper tried to make small talk, but all she could think about was a distraction. What could possibly be distracting enough to let them steal a dozen warships from the company-owned shipyards? If Ram Devlin had a plan for that part, he hadn't told anyone else yet.

  14

  Hive of Auntie Kill

  Northernmost continent

  Zi'vt and Tsk weren't Samhain's friends by any means, but when the last familiar faces scuttled off and left him in the company of entirely unknown arthropods, he had to fight not to panic. It smelled like cheese in the Hive and everywhere he looked was the fast twitching motion of the bugs passing to left and right. Nowhere underfoot was the surface level. The way it curved confused his feet and his eyes and produced a mild vertigo.

  At least one of his Shediri guards wore a translator, but they didn't try to talk to him. They simply maneuvered themselves on four sides to box him in and began to move deeper into the Hive. If he didn't want to get knocked down and kicked by sets of chitin-covered legs, then he had to keep up. As they led him away from the natural light of the landing pads and down the widening passage, the only light came from clusters of spherical growths of varying size adhered to the chitin walls of the wide passage, usually above, but not always. The light they projected reached into the infrared part of the spectrum the bugs had evolved to see best in. The deep red color visible to his Human eyes and the downgrade of the passage enhanced the impression of being swallowed. Every step down that wide, smooth-walled tube he felt he was traveling deeper into not a hive, but an organism.

  The sixteen legs of the four Shediri escorting him pattered on the smoothed surface underfoot and tapped out set of marching clicks. He fell into step after only a few meters. They passed openings on either side of the tunnel as they descended and each one curved away left or right or down so that he could only see a few of the bugs at a time but just out of sight he heard so many more. The sound of their collective footfalls vibrated the air with innumerable individual rhythms.

  This is no ordinary Hive, he thought. But of course it wouldn't be. These were no ordinary Shediri. Without a proper Queen, they'd have no source of the 'mother's milk' that bound their Hive mind and suppressed any perceived supremacy of individual thought. These bugs thought for themselves more than any others in centuries. Maybe that was why the Shediri sentenced drones without a Queen to death. They likely considered this Hive's continued existence and social evolution to be a threat to the larger order.

  After they rounded the next bend, the Shediri escorted him out across the first of the shafts. They followed a curving bridge from one side of the chamber to the other. It was one of at least five he saw crossing what he assumed was a massive ventilation shaft. Wind rushed up past them into the darkness. They didn't let him get near the edge to look down, but he glimpsed bugs going back and forth on the bridges below. They pushed hovering carts full of uncomfortably mammalian-looking red meat.

  On the far side of that chamber he came to the first of the lifts, an open platform on a track laid into the slope of a steep tunnel. There, the walls had been carved out of the rock and nobody had bothered to light anything. He counted the seconds as they descended, trying to guess how far down they went, but that was only the first of several such trips on the alien lift system.

  The temperature had increased a few degrees by the time the four Stripeys that had accompanied Samhain handed him off to a pair of bugs standing guard at a round door. It op
ened like an iris, and the two Shediri ushered him inside, both of them waving with multiple limbs to make sure he got the idea. The door led to a curving passage extending both left and right, but he couldn't see where either path led. "What's in there?"

  Those bugs had translators too, but they weren't talking. Their waving turned to pushing, and once he was through the doorway, the portal closed behind him. He almost stumbled at first because he hadn't been expecting the floor under his feet to be level. It looked as if it some kind of bug resin been poured in to fill flat the curving floors the Shediri were so partial to. This chamber had been modified for a human's comfort. That thought gave him hope as he followed the curving passage around to the right. He saw the glow of the standard spectrum lighting and felt the cooled air on his face even before he stepped into a ovoid chamber with Human chairs and tables and even a couch.

  It smelled less like cheese than anywhere else. The air came from duct too high to reach, but what came in had been filtered for human noses. The fruit they'd left for him was fresh. The water in the pitcher looked clear, but he didn't trust it. Thirst won over caution and after he poured two tumblers full and drank them, he fell back on the couch more than he sat on it. As his body impacted the cushions, he lost consciousness trying to figure out just what he'd been drugged with this time.

  *

  Scilla said, "Did you know there's full human plumbing and a bathtub back there?" The sound of her voice invaded a pleasant dream and in only a few heartbeats, it was lost to memory. He looked up from the couch and blinked as she went from blurry to slightly less blurry. She stood over him smiling against the lighting panels. "I get it first."

  "Get what?"

  "The bathtub."

  "Don't drink the water."

  "What are you talking about? I already did. It's fine. The fruit is decent, too."

  "How long was I out?"

  "Couldn't have been very long; I left the landing pads only a few minutes behind you." Scilla turned to help herself to a bitter Otherworld orange from the platter on the table. She gripped it with one hand and he watched the first digits of her fingers stiffen and pierce the tough skin like little spears. She skinned and ate it in seconds and then went into the mailbag she'd thrown on the floor of the chamber. She pulled out his sketchbook after only a moment's rummaging and tossed it at him.

  "What the hell do you want me to do with that?"

  "What do you think? We're here to meet Ram Devlin so when you meet him, ask to draw his portrait."

  "Why?"

  "Because; that's why." The way she stared behind his eyes then then he knew he wasn't supposed to ask any more questions.

  "He'll say no."

  "Trust me," she said. "He won't. Nobody ever does."

  15

  Otherworld

  Off the East coast of the Northern continent

  Dana Sellis hadn't wanted to ride in the back with the livestock, so she took her chances clinging to one of the alien seating mounds set behind the pilots in the Shediri flight cabin. After so many years of working with them side by side, she'd managed to learn how to cling to their mounds. A bug rested his lower body on it and put four (or more) legs on the deck, but a human had to squeeze with the thighs like they were riding. At least this one had straps to hold on to.

  The transport skimmed over the blackening silver waves and arrived as the last red rays of the Otherworld sunset lit the floating gasbags over the top of the jungle canopy. After the sun dipped lower, they glowed with endogenous light, attracting insects they ate like the animals they dredged from the top of the canopy with their sticky vines. It hadn't taken settlers long to figure out where the bare bones that covered the jungle floor had come from.

  Spray from the choppy, unpredictable, low-gravity sea got caught in the forward drive field and curled up in a line of spray that chased the chitin-hulled transport all the way to the Hive. The pilots ascended briefly to line up for their landing on the pads as all the dimly lit panes of the Hive's towers filled the cockpit canopy and drew their shape against the night.

  Before the transport set down facing the entrance, she noted the ship elevator at the far side of the pads was just returning to position. Someone had arrived right before them. Dana thanked the pilots and waited for her words to translate to bug hiss and clack before she turned, popped the hatch and descended the wide stairs to see a familiar silhouette waiting in the main entrance, backlit by the glow of the hive's interior.

  Their embrace was brief despite the fact that the Shediri nearby didn't notice or care. Ram's body almost vibrated with excitement. "They found the artifact," he said. "The Weirdling artifact is here right now. And after five million years, it still works. You have to see this."

  Once below, she saw they'd placed it in the center of one of the dry dock berths two levels under the secondary launch pads, at the far end. With all the warship-sized fuel cells, the battery packs, the encircling sensor panels, and all the sensor gear the puzzled humans and bugs had piled up around the perimeter of the bay, she wouldn't have been able to see the artifact itself if the lift hadn't opened onto a catwalk high over the floor.

  From that perch she had a clear view of the center of the bay and a ring of base units for hull-mounted energy shunts arranged like a circle of stubby spears around something her eyes didn't understand. "In the center of the spherical energy field...is that it? What is it?" Motes of dust sparked against the field like it was some kind of repulsive shield. "Is it actually changing shape or is that an illusion."

  "It's an inter-dimensional effect they tell me."

  "What does that mean? Is it actually in this dimension?" It increased the rate of change and spun as if it had heard her.

  "It's like an iceberg breaking the surface. When intersects with our dimension, we can see some of it. Imagine the iceberg spun showing us different parts. It's a little like that. Let's get closer."

  Halfway there, she realized it had no power feeds. "There's no juice going to it? It's making that energy field all by itself?"

  "Mostly. The gravity clamps we're using to hold it off the deck and contain it inadvertently increased the power available to it. The field radius is currently a little under a meter. Without anything but the heat of the atmo around it, the radius is half that, not much bigger than the artifact itself."

  Standing inside the ring of stealth shunts, Dana peered through the crackling energy shield around the Weirdling creation while her eye refused to accept the way the thing changed shape in front of her eye. "What is it made of?"

  He said, "I don't have to tell you not to touch it, do I?"

  "What happens to matter coming in contact with it?" The air around it smelled burnt.

  "The field gets bigger. We think that's just a defense mechanism. The really interesting stuff happens when we drain off the energy around it past a certain threshold and take it down to about 2 degrees Kelvin, a degree colder than the vacuum of space. Then the shield goes down and we can throw energy right at it."

  "What happens when you throw energy right at it?"

  "That's the first thing I asked," boomed Chun Ye Men as he stepped into view. "Here use this." The arc of his throw was gentle, but the object spun and blurred in the air so she didn't know what he tossed her until the weight of the test laser landed across her palm like a metal cigar. "Bowles," he said to the Human engineer, can we turn the..."

  "Yeah, yeah," Bowles said as he broke away from the pair of Shediri he worked with. They swayed and clacked and took a few steps back behind the test shields while Bowles gently powered up the n-space energy shunts from the stealth rig. Even five yards away she felt the chill of it like a shadow that penetrated through to cool her skin.

  The sparking motes and discharges that defined the radius of the spherical shield skated over a surface that shrank until it intersected with the shifting form of the artifact itself at which point the shield flickered and ceased to be. The skin of the thing was like a cave rock, but what light reflect
ed off it seemed refracted and the color seemed to depend on angle, which was in a constant state of flux with the shape of it. "I'm really not sure I should point a laser at that thing."

  "You afraid it's going to get mad?"

  "What's going to happen?"

  The way Chun and Bowles and Ram glanced at each other then made them think they were pulling some sort of a joke on her. "We don't exactly know," Bowles admitted. "It's been the same for a few tests and then the reaction changes to the very same stimuli. "Here, give me the laser. I'll show you."

  "No. Now, I want to do it. Should I just..."

  "No!" he shouted it like he was talking to Margo's hounds. "Not until we're recording data. Sorry. Those two kept shooting it for fun. I think they were betting on the power output. Didn't think to record it though." He joined the Shediri behind their shield and a moment later, he nodded in her direction. "Do stand back. And cover your eyes."

  She stood behind the other blast shield with Ram and Chun and aimed the test laser around the edge of it as if she was under fire. "A shot to the midsection would be nice," said Bowles.

  She depressed the button with her thumb and vaporized a string of sparking dust motes between her and the artifact, hitting it exactly at its shifting center. The limits of her human sense of time made it appear as if the other beam on the other side of the artifact appeared in the same instant. It shot from the opposite side of the Weirdling device and drew a line of sparks in the air until the beam struck a belt-iron steel test plate.