Serpent's Reach (41 page)

But Pol did not go on firing. He laid his head against the rock, staring blankly before him. Raen touched him, bent, pressed a gentle touch of her lips to his brow.

“That’s once,” Pol said faintly, and the face lost its life; a shudder went through his limbs, and ceased.

Raen averted her face, looked instead at the wave of majat that was breaking, flooding back toward the walls.

And with a curse she sprang up and ran; Merry followed, and other azi. Jim slipped his hand from Pol’s shoulder and snatched at his rifle to follow, past the cover of the rocks.

A dark body hurtled into him, spurs ripping. He sprawled, went under, body upon body rushing over him, until pain stopped.

Agony… Mother existed in it, in each powerful drive of Her legs that drove Her vast weight another half-length. Drones moved, themselves unaccustomed to such exertions, their breathing harsh pipings. Workers danced back and forth, offering nourishment from their jaws, the depleted fluids of their own bodies, feeding Her and the Drones.

Their colours grew strange, the blue mottled light and dark, with here and there a blackness. The sight disturbed Her, and She moaned as She thrust Her way along, following the new tunnel, the making of the Workers.

Mother,
the Workers sang,
Mother, Mother
.

And She led them.

I have made the way,
the Warrior-mind reported, one of its units touching at Her.
Enemies are retreating. Need of Workers now to move the stones
.

Well done,
She said, tasting of life fluids and of victory.

Warrior scurried away, staggering in its exhaustion and its haste.
Follow this-unit,
Warrior gave taste to Workers.
Follow, follow me
.

“Sera?”

Raen caught herself, caught her breath between the wall and Merry’s solid body. An azi-light swung from her wrist. She blinked clear the subway, the vacant tracks coursed by majat. One of the men offered her a flask. She drank a mouthful; it went the round among them, forlorn humans huddled at the side of the arching tunnel. They panted for breath, lost in the strange sounds, the rush of chitined bodies, of spurred feet. One of them, hurt, slumped in a knot against the wall. Raen reached and touched him, obtained a lifting of the head, an attempt to focus. Another gave him a drink.

They were twelve, only twelve, out of all of them. She swallowed heavily and rested her hand on Merry’s shoulder, breathing in slower and slower gasps.

“City central’s up there,” she said. “Blues have A branch. The reds are probably in E, that goes to the port. Greens… I don’t know. Golds…likely C, due south. They’ll mass in central, under ITAK headquarters”

“Three hives against them,” Merry said faintly. “Sera, the blues can’t do it.”

She slid her hand down, pressed his arm. “I don’t think so either, but there’s no stopping them. We’ve kept them alive this long. Merry, take the men, go back. Go back from here. I’ll not throw the rest of you away.”

“Sera—send them back, not me.”

Other voices protested, faces anxious in the blue glow.

“Any of you who wants to stay back, stay,” she said, and rose up and started to walk again, slung the burden of the riflestrap to her shoulder.

They came. Perhaps it was fear of the majat without her. She thought that it might be. She suspected something else, that she was too rational to believe. She wiped at her face, struck the tears away with no realisation of hurt or grief, only that she was very tired and her eyes watered. The tunnel smelled of majat, like musty paper; and they passed strange sights as they walked, found vehicles frozen on the tracks, wherever they had been when power failed; and terrible sights, the sweet-sour reek of death, where betas had died, some sprawled on the tracks, some in vehicles the glass of which had shattered, dead of majat bite or terror—brushed constantly now by the steady rush of Warriors.

But now there appeared. other types amid the press…blue-hive azi, staggering with exhaustion and mindless with haste; and after them, Workers, fluting shrill, plaintive cries.

“They’re all going,” Merry breathed beside her. “Even the queen will follow. Sera, is it wise to be here at all?”

“No,” she said plainly, “it’s not.”

But she did not stop walking, or hesitate. The Worker-cries became song, that filled her ears, ran through her nerves, and banished thought.

Daylight shafted down ahead, where bodies milled, that vast terminal that was central, zero, with day falling down from skylights. Song came up from that heaving mass, and Warriors within it surged this way and that. Workers added themselves, climbing over the bodies of others.

More, Raen thought, far more than blue-hive alone: all, ail hives, met there.

And majat died there, of weakness and wounds, crushed down. The song numbed. Merry held his ears and cried out soundlessly in the chaos; and Raen pressed hands to her own, all of them seeking the retreat of the walls, any place aside from that flood of bodies which kept coming.

The ground shook, the walls quivered.

A faint far glimmering in jewels and azi-lights, Mother came, struggling forward.

Mother drew breath, heaved forward, breathed again, dazed with pain. Her own limbs, reaching out and shifting again out of view, were mottled now, bright blue and dark. About Her moved insanity, Warriors whose colours had gone mad, whose bodies glowed blue and extremities red, whose midlimbs gold, all mottled with green.

Queens were at hand: She heard Them, others, other-hives. Desperation possessed Her, the instinct certain now of direction. There was nothing else.

She saw Them, in a seething mass of colours, among Warriors and Workers and Drones who had gone mad. One of the queens was red, with darker mottlings: She, fiercest; one gold, tinged with red; one green, with shadings of blue, incipient chaos.

Red queen shifted forward, ominous, and went for green, for the tainted and nearest one, breathing out hate.

Red was the killer, the Warrior-fragment, as green was the Worker-mind.

Mother hesitated, trembling, and saw green die, life-fluids drunk.

Blue,
red queen breathed, and the Warriors quivered aide, pressing themselves out of the way in terror.

A second queen was dead. Raen shuddered, the hard grip of her azi about her, putting their own bodies between her and the press, a small knot of humanity, blue-lit. Other azi sheltered with them, naked creatures male and female, trembling and holding their ears against the battering sound. Lighter majat clambered over them, Drones, glittering with living jewels, perhaps adding their own screams to the thunder of the queens.

Merry shivered against her. Raen caught his hand and held it, that crushed bone against bone in hers: likely he had no wit left to know; she had none to care.

The battle raged in ponderous slow-motion, hazy shafts of sunlight enveloping the queens atop the living hill, reflecting jewel-colours. Strength held against strength: then came a darting move.

The third queen died, head severed.

The hill of bodies came undone about the survivor, sweeping over and about Her. Drones streamed through, to gather with other Drones; and Workers with Workers; and Warriors with Warriors, ringed about the living queen. The dead were hauled away. The living circles widened, spread throughout the terminal.

The queen moved, shifted position; so did all the others. She breathed out a note that made the walls shake, and after that was quiet.

A human wept, audible, soft sobs.

Raen leaned against Merry a moment, then gathered herself from him, from all the azi, and rose—walked among the still shapes of majat, Warriors, Workers, with the badges of blue-hive, red-hive, green and gold comingled. The rifle was stiff slung from her shoulder. She realised it, and dropped it echoing to the pavement, for there was no way out but to kill a queen, the last Mother of a world, and that she would not do.

She walked within reach of Her, without weapons in hand, and gazed up into the great jewelled face, the moiré eyes, heard the sough of Her breathing.

It was a gold. The pattern was on Her, for those who could read it.

“Mother,” she said, “I’m Raen a Sul, Meth-maren.”

Air sucked in. “Meth-maren,” She sighed, and the huge head lowered, sought taste.

Raen kissed Her, touched the scent-patches, waited for the vast jaws to close; and they did not.

“Meth-maren,” Mother said. “Kethiuy-queen.”

It was blue queen’s memory.

The sun was unbearable. Jim felt the burn of it before he felt anything more, and struggled to shade his face from it. He was held, and had to think which way to turn; and that meant consciousness.

His hands met spines and hair and chitin. He focused at that, and shoved in horror at the stiffening limbs that lay over him, the intertwined corpses of a majat and an azi.

All about him were corpses, shimmering and running in the tears the sun brought to his eyes. He struggled to pull the visor which hung about his neck up to his eyes, to see—and found nothing living anywhere.

The house was ruined, gaping rubble; and bodies lay thickly over the garden, save in one vast track which led to the broken walls…bodies majat and human, naked and clothed. Insects flitted about him as they settled on the dead; he batted at them, fought with fingers stiffening with sunburn to fasten the sunsuit.

Rock moved, a shifting outside the wall. He gathered up a rifle, staggered in that direction, his senses wavering in and out of focus.

He climbed over the rubble, blinked, saw a shadow on the ground and whirled, whipped the rifle up, but the majat’s leap was faster. The gun went off, torn from his hands. Another was on him, pulling from the other side. Chelae gripped his arm, cutting flesh.

Red: he saw the badge and tried to pull from it; the badge of the second was green. It lowered its head, jaws wide, and the palps brushed his lips, his face.

And it drew back. “Jim,” it intoned.

He lived. The fact numbed him. He ceased to struggle, understanding nothing any longer.

“Meth-maren sendss,” red Warrior said.

“Let me go,” he asked then, his heart lurching a beat. “Let me go, Warrior; I’ll come with you.”

It released him. He clutched his injured arm and followed it, trailed by the green, down into the circle of the street, into the dark entry of the subway, into the deep places of the city, where no lights shone at all. At times he stumbled, blind, and his hands met bodies, yielding ones of majat-azi or the spiny hardness of majat. Chelae urged at him, hastening him, lifting him each time he fell.

Blue lights drifted toward him. At first he shrank from meeting them, not wanting delay, not wanting to be left: but he saw
her
bearing one of those lights, and he thrust his way free of the Warriors and ran, stumbling, toward her.

She met him, held him off at arm’s length to look at him. “You’re all right,” she said, a question in her impatient manner; but her voice trembled. There was Merry by her, and other faces that he knew.

She hugged him then, and he nearly wept for joy; but she did not know, he thought, the things that he must admit, the knowledge that he had stolen, the thing he had made of himself.

He tried to tell her. “I used all the tapes,” he said, “even the black ones. I didn’t know what else to do.” She touched his face and told him to be quiet, with a shift of her eyes toward Merry and the others.

“It’s ruined back there,” he said then. “Everything’s ruined. Where will we go now?”

“In, for a time. Till the cycle completes itself.” Her hand entwined with his: he felt the jewels rough and warm beneath his fingers. She gestured, walked with assurance the way from which she had come. Warriors walked about them; armed majat-azi followed. “It’s going to be a while before I think of outside, a long while, perhaps. Majat-time.”

“I’ve nineteen years,” he said, anticipating all of them, and well-content.

Her fingers tightened on his.

Soft singing filled the air, the peaceful sound of Workers, with the stirrings and movings of many bodies in the tunnels.

“Hive-song,” she said. “They’ve long lives. A turning of nature, a pulse of the cycle, to merge all colors, to divide again.
This-sun,
they say now.
Home-hive.
Against those cycles, my own life is nothing at all. Wait with me.”

There was a ship, he thought, recalling Pol. There were betas who might live, who might serve her. He objected to. these things one by one, and she shook her head, silent.

He asked no more.

Moth,
the voices shouted,
Moth, Moth!

Eggs,
she thought back at them, and mocked them for what they were.

A different sound came through the speaker, the shrilling of majat voices, the crash of metal and wood.

From the vents came a curious paper-scent. Human voices had ceased long ago.

Moth poured the last of the wine, drank it.

And pushed the button.

The hatch opened, let in the flood of evening air, the gentle light of the setting sun.

“Stay put,”
Tallen heard,
“Sir, we’re picking up movement out there.”

“Wouldn’t do to run,” he said into the com unit. “Whatever happens—no response, hear me?”

“Be careful.”

Majat. He heard the ominous chirring, and walked forward, very slowly.

Newhope had stood here. Weeds had taken the ruins. At centre rose a hill, monstrous, where no hill had been. He had seen the pictures smuggled out, heard the reports and memorised them, along with family tales.

And in the long passage of years, in the fading of the Wars,
this
waited, where no Outsider dared trespass, until now.

We were wrong, the one side argued, ever to have relied on them.

But governments rose and fell and rose again, and rumours persisted…that life stirred in the forbidden Reach, that the wealth which had made the Alliance what it had been was there to be had, if any power could contrive to obtain it.