Posleen War: Sidestories The Tuloriad (18 page)

“And me lose my free will?” Sally scoffed. “Make ready,” she said to the designated executioner, who lifted his halberd a foot and a half to add to the power of his impending stroke.

Dwyer took two steps forward and knelt down next to the Indowy. If nothing else, it might make Sally and the Switzer hesitate about swinging that halberd.

“Better come up with something quick, Aelool,” the priest whispered.

“I can't!”

“Perhaps I can help, myself and my AS,” Guano offered, through the Artificial Sentience. “Tell me, Indowy, is your coded message able to work on an AS?”

“Yes!”

“Will it have any harmful effect on the AS?”

“No! Certainly not, if it isn't in control of a ship.”

Guano reached down with both claws, lifting his AS from around his chest to a place near his face. Guano's crucifix chain, half intertwined with the AS' chain, dangled between them.

“Old friend,” Guano said in Posleen, “I will not order you to do this. Yet I think if you do not, the little fuzzy one will die. Are you willing?”

“For the Lord God, above, and the salvation of our people, I am willing, Guano,” the AS answered, in English. “Choose me, Lord,” it said, more softly.

And so the sacred seven

Clustered like loyal cosslain

About their lord ingathered

And fought their way toward home

—The Tuloriad, Na'agastenalooren

Anno Domini 2010

Posleen ship Arganaza'al

From the outside, looking in, it appeared that hundreds of centauroids, clothed in EVA suits, clustered about the ship on the side facing away from the star. Some sliced off sections of ruined landers. Still others carried the pieces inside through the airlocks. That outside observer could not have seen the reason for carrying in those pieces of metal, though he could have surmised those reasons from the finished sections of chain that still other suited Posleen carried out. These built, piece by piece, until sixteen long silvery strings dangled out and away from the main ship.

Goloswin, watching from the view screens on the bridge, said, “I've been over Finba's calculations a dozen times, Tulo . . . no, two dozen. It ought to work.”

“It ought to work if they finish before we are much closer to that star,” Tulo corrected.

“Well, yes, there's that. It will be close.”

Hemaleen was a great burning presence on the ship's lower side. Three landers, their engines facing out, remained fixed to the ship, clustered around its own landing engine. On the upper side, four landers, clasped together, strained at the leash.

“Begin,” ordered Tulo'stenaloor.

Essthree took a deep breath and said, “C-Dec engine, one hundred percent thrust.” The ship shuddered with the strain. It did not halt its progress toward the sun, though it did slow. “Affixed landers, one hundred percent; towing landers, seven percent.”

Still more the ship slowed. “Towing landers, ten percent thrust,” Essthree said. “Fourteen . . . twenty-two . . . thirty-four . . . fifty.”

“We're stable relative to the sun,” Esstwo announced.

“Towing landers, seventy-five percent thrust,” Essthree ordered, then waited until that was achieved. “One percent increase per five beats to one hundred percent thrust.”

Faintly, the shrieking protests of the metal chain links fashioned to Finba'anaga's specifications worked their way through the shackles and through the metal hull down to the C-Dec's bridge. It was eerie and unnerving but, as the Essthree said, “I think we're going to make it.”

A normal Posleen invasion took on the attributes of what the humans sometimes called, “The Eye of Baal.” Space was rent, kinetic energy projectiles and various beam weapons raised great clouds of dust which swirled and sparkled above. Fires on the ground added their smoky glow. And then, in a mass, through the swirling maelstrom, the landers began descending.

This was nothing like that. After escaping from Hemaleen's gravitational pull, the ship and its landers made for the nearest inhabitable world, the one that, with the asteroid belt, still told of a great war using the greatest of weapons. Around that it assumed orbit, scouting for a suitable landing site.

Below, there were no cities. If there were any pyramids of the old time kessentai, they were deep-buried under the collected soil of ages, with perhaps only their barely noticeable caps protruding.

Most of the planet below was forest. That forest was criss-crossed with clear cut areas, each as much as one hundred human kilometers across.

“We've identified nineteen great herds down below,” said the Esstwo.

“Herds of what?” asked Tulo.

“Herds of us . . . well . . . not us, exactly. We sent down a low probe. They're normals, not even with cosslain. Stunted normals, at that, maybe three-fourths the usual size. Hundreds of millions of them in a mass. They move across that world in straight lines, pretty much, eating everything in their path down to the roots. It looks like they've been doing it for a very long time.”

“What kind of weapon would do that?” Tulo asked.

“A genetic one, clearly,” Goloswin answered. “And it might still be hanging around.”

“We have to know before we can trust a landing,” Tulo said.

“I don't know that we'll have any choice,” Golo pointed out. “We need more refined metal and that's about the best source.”

“The asteroid belt,” Binastarion offered.

“Not for all our needs. Oh, yes, the metal's there. But we can only employ a fraction, a small fraction, of our work force at getting it at any given time. Down below, if we can land and survive, we'll be able to use every being.”

“I don't see why we're worrying,” Binastarion said. “As a people we're pretty much immune to every disease.”

“There are hints in the scrolls,” said the Rememberer. “The people who made us immune to every disease they could identify or even conceive of are quite likely also the people who attacked the world below with a disease we were not immune to.”

“The Aldenata?” Tulo asked.

“The Aldenata.”

Esstwo pored over his screens. While Tulo'stenaloor had agreed to a landing, in limited force, and for no more than exploratory purposes, the precise spot for that landing made a difference.

Touching one claw lightly to the screen, the Esstwo thought, There's a great deal of refined metal there, under the surface of that spot. An ancient city? It seems likely. Will it also be an epicenter for disease? Will the disease, if it's real, still be active?

The site upon which the Esstwo concentrated was also at a juncture of the cleared paths left by the hordes of what he had come to think of as the subnormals.

And that, too, is odd. All the other possible sites, as well, are either at such crossroads or along the harvested paths. Mere herd instinct? Some sort of racial memory of what once was? I wish I knew.

But there'll be no knowing until some of us go down and look.

To a human, the planet would have been the height of ugliness. To a Posleen, it was positively homelike. Everything appealed, from the grit crunching underneath, to the orange-red foliage, to the relative absence of surface water.

Not that there wasn't water. There were rivulets and creeks aplenty. But few or none of them, and none in the landing area, were so deep than even a fairly short Posleen couldn't wade right through.

Goloswin hadn't been allowed down in that first wave. Instead, his assistant, Finba'anaga had gone in his place, along with forty-nine other kessentai, a like number of cosslain, and three hundred normals. For this, Tulo had ordered arms broken out and issued. The C-Dec had been ransacked for anything that might be of use.

Essthree was in command, with Esstwo by his side. Tulo had wanted to descend, himself, but those two had prevailed upon him to stay in the C-Dec. In this, they had been joined by Goloswin and the Rememberer, as well as Binastarion. In the end, that weight of opinion was enough to keep Tulo, safe and chafing about it, off of the landing party roster.

One good thing, Essthree thought, as the lander screamed through atmosphere; at least there are no human planetary defense bases below to swat us from the skies as we descend. Better still, there'll be none of the metal threshkreen, or the humans' damnable war machines, to contest possession of the ground we land on. For this, I thank thee, o spirits of the ancestors.

Of course, being the ancestors, what they may have in store could be much, much worse.

Essthree powered a microphone and said, “All kessentai, landing in . . . thirty beats. Standard drill.”

The Arganaza'al had been nearly denuded of EVA suits to outfit the landing party, only half a dozen members of which—all normals of little or no more than normal attributes—had been denied suits. This was to see if whatever it was on the planet that withered the People affected those who were already full grown. Those half dozen had also not been given weapons.

All the rest, but for the lander's own bridge crew, formed in a mass before the ramp. They swayed and shook on their feet as their craft was buffeted by winds and atmospheric vagaries. In unconscious imitation of human Soldiers or Marines closing on a hostile beach or landing zone, many of the kessentai stroked talismans, or whispered prayers to half forgotten spirits.

Each God-king stiffened as he heard the warning, “All kessentai; landing in thirty beats. Standard drill. Twenty-eight . . . twenty . . . ten . . . five . . . three . . . two . . . one.” The lander shuddered and rocked with the touchdown.

There was a loud whine that signaled the opening of the ramp. Inside, the darkened hold grew brighter as first a thin streak, then a bar, then a square of light opened up. When the ramp was approximately thirty degrees above the horizontal, the whining cut out with a loud, ship-shaking clang. The ramp then dropped under the power of the local gravity to the ground, bounced twice, and came to a stop.

The four kessentai selected as group leaders were in the van. As soon as the ramp ceased bouncing, their claws began churning at the metal, propelling them outward. One went straight ahead and stopped several hundred meters from the ramp. Two turned to the right, of which one went straight and the other galloped around the lander to its far side. The fourth cut left.

There was no particular order to the debarkation. Each kessentai chosen for leadership had bonded with a certain number of cosslain and normals; each chief was followed by a dozen or so junior kessentai. These tracked their leaders and lords through pheromones left on the ground or hanging in the air, even as their normals and cosslain tracked them. In what seemed to be no more than a few beats, the apparently disorderly mass had separated out into four streams following their chiefs.

Vegetation was trampled and rocks and gravel propelled upward by the Posleen claws as they raced to form a square around the lander. Even as they did, the lander's own heavy weapons emerged from their position of repose within the hull and began to sweep for signs of danger. A last few normals and cosslain filled in the gaps in the four lines oriented around the ship and then . . .

“That's it? Nothing else?” the Essthree asked, rhetorically.

“I think you've grown paranoid from dealing with the humans,”

Esstwo answered.

“It's impossible to be paranoid when dealing with humans,” Essthree countered. His voice grew contemplative as his head cocked to one side. “Somehow, your wildest imaginings of doom never quite equal the reality.”

“Point,” Esstwo agreed. “What now.”

“As I said, standard drill.” In Low Posleen, “Standard Drill” translated, approximately, as, “This place sucks. Dig in.”

When Finba'anaga emerged, wearing Goloswin's suit, he saw half of the cosslain and kessentai standing guard with a mix of the heaviest weapons available. The rest, the normals, dug like furies, blasting into the ground with their rail guns, half of them, and scooping the spoil out to form a tall, broad berm, the other half. The height of the berm was matched to the height of the weapons mounted on the lander in order to give them good fields of fire without endangering the Posleen behind the berm.

None of my business, Finba thought. My job is to figure out if this is clear for the rest of the crew to land.

Behind Finba traipsed the half dozen suitless normals. They seemed happy enough, not having to wear the heavy and uncomfortable EVAs. Finba thought, Little do you idiots know . . .

Finba walked around inside the rapidly forming perimeter, kicking at this or that, and occasionally bending to examine something. Since the lander had touched down on a clear cut area, whatever there was to be seen was there right on the surface. Much of what there was were the shard of broken eggs of the People.

And those look normal enough.

Oddly, not all of the eggs were broken. There were quite a few that were unbroached. Funny, that doesn't usually happen. In fact, it's quite rare.

Finba'anaga had a sudden thought. “AS,” he asked of the artificial sentience bouncing against his chest, “can you do an analysis of the mass of the egg shards here and match it against the mass of the unhatched eggs, minus their contents?”

“I can do a rough one, lord,” the AS answered. “Can you walk me around the entire area so that I can measure?”

“Yes. I will do this.”

Finba bent over and picked up one unhatched egg. Examining it by eye, he saw nothing abnormal. Wonder what's inside.

He dropped the thing to the ground and then, while it was rolling to a stop, drew his boma blade. He took two steps over to the egg, and placed the edge of the blade right against the shell. Gently, he pressed, neatly slicing the egg in two.

Resheathing his blade, Finba bent to pick up the two halves in his claws. He was careful not to let the contents fall out. Upon close examination he saw the halves of a hatchling, neatly sliced but not noticeably different from any others.

Finba dropped the egg halves and continued walking, while to the edge of the camp the berm grew.

The sun had gone down and risen and the unsuited normals seemed . . . well . . . normal. Finba had stopped to slice apart and examine several dozen more unhatched eggs and still nothing struck him as unusual.