Galactic Empires (16 page)

Abruptly he went down on his knees and slowly bowed his head.

What?

A clattering, then the sound of bodies hitting the floor. Two of the Guard had collapsed. Another two went over even as he watched. Others were sinking to their knees like the first, or just suddenly finding somewhere to sit down. Some were crying, others grinning idiotically.

"It is, actually, not a crude technology at all. The Markovians obtained it from the Grazen, who, though they would not admit to it, obtained it from an excavation of some ruins left by those I called the jelly people-they were okay, but tended to be a bit impetuous. Anyway, I needed to see one of your strouds from the inside to be sure of the structure. I've U-transmitted the signal now, so that every single strouded human being in the Collective just woke up to what has been done to them or, if the damage is too severe, died."

It felt to Shrad as if ice was forming down his spine. He reached down, drew his sidearm, turned. The man, Mark, was on his feet facing him. Shrad fired once, the bullet snapping the man's skull back and blowing its contents out behind him. The head slowly swung forward again. One eye was missing.

"And that completes the deal," said Mark.

Shrad shot him four more times, the shots smashing into the man's chest and knocking him staggering back. Mark grinned. Then his legs gave way and he slumped to the floor.

*

Astanger secured his strap as the
Lenin
turned hard. The sound of the ship's guns impinged-an accelerating drone-and the power drain momentarily dimmed the lighting.

What happened to the Guard?

Some of them had just collapsed where they stood. One of those nearest him, a woman, was crouching beside a console, clinging with both hands, her weapon abandoned on the floor and sliding away from her. Her expression was one of horrified amazement, yet someone strouded usually didn't show emotion. Another, over near where Chadrick had taken position at the weapons console, was kneeling, his carbine propped upright before him. He seemed to be crying.

No matter. It might be that the
Lenin
would not even survive the next few minutes, so the condition of those aboard would cease to be of relevance. Again came the detonation of something that got too close before the guns took it out. The ship shuddered and smoke began crawling through the air from the bridge exit.

"It's going to be a hard reentry!" shouted Grade over the racket.

"Go to earpieces and mikes," said Astanger.

"Okay-I'm on," replied Grade.

"We've still got to drop velocity."

"Yup."

As they slowed into atmosphere, they would become a much easier target for the pursuing alien vessel, but Astanger knew that out in space the
Lenin
would end up smeared across the vacuum. Collective ships had encountered these dreadnoughts on a few occasions and been destroyed almost out of hand.

The
Lenin
began shaking, and Astanger recognized the muted but growing roar of atmosphere. Inertial forces tried to drag him out of his chair as the ship flipped nose-to-tail. He saw a member of the Guard slam into the ceiling above, then lost sight of him in smoke. Someone was shrieking, short jerky shrieks like those you might hear in an asylum, not from anyone in pain. A body slammed down with a wet crunch nearby, then smeared blood across the floor as deceleration dragged it away. Grade had gone for a full emergency landing: not dumping the drive section, but decelerating down toward the planet on the drive flame.

"Will you bring us down close to the
Breznev?"
Astanger inquired.

"Within a few miles of it-if we don't get hit on the way down," Grade replied.

"Chadrick-status?"

"It seems to be holding off, I don't know why."

I do
, thought Astanger.
If it destroys the
Lenin,
then we all die. The Grazen wants us alive to play with. I wonder how long-

"Captain!" Chadrick shouted.

What now, some weapon he can't stop?
Astanger knew that Chadrick must be in considerable emotional distress to use the old politically incorrect title, even if the Guard were down.

"What is it, Chadrick," he said calmly.

"The moon… look at the moon."

What?

Astanger cleared the pursuing alien vessel from the viewing cylinder and trained the ship's scanners on the moon, and then just stared in shock, even though he had known there was something odd about that satellite. There was a line drawing across the surface, longitudinally. It flickered-an arrow-straight firestorm. On one side of the line was the surface he had earlier viewed, on the other side… on the other side was something else. He saw massive pylons, steel plains, and valleys cutting through either buildings or clustered monolithic machines, transmission or reception dishes the size of calderas, giant throats glimmering with lights and webworks of scaffold, ships bigger than anything he had ever seen gathered in frameworks like bullets in an ammunition clip. It was impossible to take in the vast complexity of it all. The moon was obviously some vast vessel or station.

Owner space?

Yeah, now he knew for certain why it remained so. Whoever had constructed this thing possessed more resources, more plain unadulterated power, than entire galactic civilizations.

But how did it affect them, right now, aboard the
Lenin
? It didn't. If they didn't get down to the surface of that planet soon, they would be dead. Moon or otherwise.

"Keep your scanners focused on the Grazen, Chadrick," said Astanger. Then switching to general address, he said, "When we're down, I want someone to break open the weapons locker. We grab what we can and we get out—that ship will be on us in minutes."

"What about… the Guard?" inquired Chadrick.

"What about them?"

"I… I don't know."

"We ignore them." Astanger took a steady breath. The G-forces were high now and it was becoming difficult to talk. "Something's got to them… through their strouds… maybe some Grazen… viral weapon."

The muted roar had now become a full-throated one. And the ship was shuddering around them. The Guard were probably irrelevant, since anyone not strapped in an acceleration chair when they began their descent was probably either dead now or suffering from multiple fractures. Maybe he and his crew should be merciful and kill them on the way out. No, they wouldn't have the time.

Blackout.

When consciousness began to fade back in, Astanger realized that the roaring he could hear now was only from the engines. He felt the pressure rapidly dropping away from him. Judging by the pull of gravity, the ship was coming down at a steep angle. This was going to be bad. The
Lenin
settled with an almighty crash and the drive cut out. Then, with an awful creaking and groaning, the ship toppled and slammed down flat on whatever it had landed on. The impact flung Astanger sideways in his chair, but the side padding absorbed most of the shock. He was now sideways to the pull of gravity. Peering down to the bottom of the spin section, he saw a tangle of bodies, blood, and some exposed broken bone where the Guard had ended up. Some of them had landed on Citizen Breen—Astrogation—but she seemed okay because she was pushing them away and unstrapping herself. She climbed through the tangled mass over to the spin-section controls and hit the step-motor button. The section shuddered and began to turn, and she walked around with it. Step by step it brought sets of acceleration chairs down to ground level, and the crew unstrapped. Astanger released himself from his chair last and eyed the bodies that had tumbled around like stones in a polisher. A few of them were still breathing. One was bubbling blood from her mouth and muttering.

"Okay, let's get out of here."

Those from Engineering had broken open the weapons locker and, when Astanger arrived, were passing out carbines, sidearms, and loading up two shoulder-held missile launchers.

"Should we get food?" enquired someone.

"No time," Astanger replied.

The loading ramp was nearly underneath the ship, but its hydraulics managed to lift the cargo section enough for them to crawl out. Outside, a pall of smoke obscured much, and the ground was blackened and in places still burning. Checking a notescreen map and positional indicator, Astanger led the way toward where the
Breznev
was down, and toward where that house lay. After a few hundred yards, light penetrated-reflected from that awesome terrible moon as it breached the horizon-then a breeze began sweeping the pall aside to reveal a nightmare perhaps a mile to their left.

The Grazen ship.

The thing possessed no aerodynamics, no recognizable engine or drive section, nothing remotely equatable with human technology. It was a loose tangle of meter-wide pipes, the color of charred bone, nearly half a mile across. Within this tangle was a nacreous and vaguely spherical core. Some of the pipes, their mouths open to the air, were moving as if questing for the scent of something. Astanger had a fair idea what they were searching for.

"No-keep moving." He slapped an engineering assistant on the back as the man raised and aimed the missile launcher at the ship. "You'll only attract its attention."

But what was "it"? Was he talking about the ship itself or what it contained? He'd seen pictures of organic fragments from destroyed nests, but there were so many different kinds of those that no Collective Societal Asset had managed to put together an entire Grazen. He had little idea of what they actually looked like, how big they were—anything, really. The Collective described them as alien maggots-but that description was politically motivated and predicated on charred evidence gathered from the bombed nursery world.

"Keep moving."

Surely their luck could not hold for much longer.

It didn't.

A sound issued from the ship-the sighing groan of caves. Astanger glanced back at it and saw some of those pipes inclining toward the ground, coming together, then leveling so that he could see straight down their throats.

"You two! Hit that!" he shouted at the two carrying the missile launchers.

Both of them turned and went down on one knee, their shoulder launchers bucking. There was something coming down the pipes as the four missiles struck. Red fire bloomed, spraying bony fragments everywhere, but out of that flame a twiggy wheel two meters across rolled at speed toward them.

"Run!"

The thing seemed to hesitate for a moment, then it made its choice. It accelerated up behind one of those with a launcher and slammed down on the man. Astanger skidded to a halt, then ran back to look down into a terrified face. Encaged in the gnarled jointed mass the man struggled. Astanger had heard about this; the man would begin to scream in a moment, for spikes would soon begin easing into his flesh. He drew his sidearm and shot the man twice through the forehead-the only mercy possible. Then, looking back toward the ship, he saw its core open and its pipe components snake across the ground toward them—the whole mass disassembling and turning into a rolling avalanche of alien technology. And within that mass, commanding it, swept along with it, controlling it, came the Grazen itself. Obeying his own command, he turned and ran just as hard as he could.

*

Kelly guessed it didn't really matter what had happened. Though the Guard were completely out of it, the Doctrinaire still held a gun and she and her companions were still bound.

"Astanger! Report!" Shrad kept screaming into his communicator.

Any minute now, that would change. Either this Astanger would report or he wouldn't. Afterward, Doctrinaire Shrad would return his attention to his prisoners and, strouds no longer being an option, he would probably settle the matter with his gun. Kelly knew him. He represented everything she hated about the system she had tried to escape. He was also the one who had led them into the fight against the Grazen in which many of her friends had died, quite often as a result of his incompetence. She strained at her cuffs, but they were still hardened steel and unbreakable. Maybe if she could get to her feet, she could kick the weapon out of his hand. Maybe the others…

She turned and looked at the other five. Elizabeth was down on her side, her head in her father's lap. Slome looked ill, and anyway, he was old and fat and would probably be no help. That left Traviss and Longshank. Both of them were focused on the Doctrinaire. Kelly caught their attention and nodded her head toward Shrad. Longshank, who was closest, began to ease a leg forward, ready to hurl himself at the man. The sidearm abruptly whipped around, the barrel aimed straight at Longshank's forehead.

"I don't think so," said Shrad. He lowered his communicator and clipped it back on his belt. Kelly felt herself deflate.

Shrad continued. "Obviously the
Lenin
has encountered some difficulties."

The man looks crazy
, thought Kelly.
No telling what he might do now
.

"But difficulties aside, you are all still criminals and betrayers of the Collective. Unfortunately, it seems that the strouds no longer function correctly." Shrad gazed around at the Guard. Not one of them remained standing. Some were sitting, some sprawled and unmoving, some kneeling with their foreheads against the carpet. "No matter-this is easily settled." He focused his attention back on Longshank. "For your crimes against the collective will, Daniel Longshank, I now execute sentence on you."

Shrad pulled the trigger. There came a hollow thunk, and the Doctrinaire looked with puzzlement at his weapon. After a moment, puzzlement turned to shock. He yelled and flung the weapon away. Tracking its course, Kelly saw it bounce on the carpet and begin smoking, then, with a multiple crack, it exploded, flinging fragments in every direction.

Kelly began trying to get to her feet. Then she noticed something: the Guard, those of them that were not obviously dead, were all now standing. She hadn't even seen them move.

"Citizen Guard One!" said Shrad with relief.