World Killers Page 18

  He lowered his voice craftily. "And then won't my wife, my precious Regis, come begging for forgiveness, eh?"

  Edwards saw only an empty, echoing hall in the background behind the Regent. Great suns! He's mad as a march hare!

  But he was the general's only hope for survival. "I want you to think for a moment what will happen if the council gets me now. The REF will be reconsolidated into a pure fighting force with nothing holding it back, and there'll be nothing to stop the combined forces of the near stars to come after you! Am I getting through to you?"

  It seemed he had. The Regent swayed for a moment, a new clarity coming into his voice. "We can't have that, can we?"

  "I want you to send your army to get me and the people loyal to me," Edwards pressed on.

  The Invid asked guilelessly, "But why should I, when you have an army of your own right there?"

  The Invid Brain! The Inorganics! "Damn you, explain!" Edwards grated. "There's no time for games!"

  The Regent wasn't so demented that he had missed Edwards's point about the REF; he activated controls at his end of the connection that displayed instructions at Edwards's end.

  "Do stay in touch," the Regent bade him, and his image vanished.

  But Edwards was already busy, switching on the Living Computer, the artificial Brain the Invid had left behind under Tirol in the wake of their defeat. His personal guards looked on uneasily as the massive globe of specialized tissue came to life in its vat.

  From the catacomb rooms where the inert Inorganics had, at his command, been stored like so much cordwood, Edwards heard stirrings.

  His lips drew back from his teeth in a canine smile; his good eye became glassy. He looked as insane as the Regent.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Consider humble clay.

  Small amounts of it can speed chemical processes by a factor of 10,000. Its phenomenally intricate layered-sheet structure gives one pound (Earth norm) of it as much total surface area as fifty football fields. It can store information as patterns of ions. It's perfectly plausible that self-replicating crystals brought forth a "proto-organism" as the jumping-off point of life on Spheris.

  But those who travel the Crystal Highways are unimpressed with such theorizing. They explain it all with a name.

  A. Jow, The Historical Haydon

  "Max! Pay attention!"

  "Uh?" He blinked.

  Jean Grant, infinitely patient, still had a way of letting someone know that she wouldn't put up with their shortcomings.

  "Just take it easy, Max; babies've been getting themselves born for ages now. Besides, this is only a drill, capisch? All you have to do is help a little." She smiled down at Miriya. "Relax, soldier."

  Miriya stopped her breathing exercises and chuckled tiredly. She was pale and drawn

  from the ordeal that her second pregnancy had become. But she squeezed Max's hand, their I love you code.

  Max squeezed back twice, but he was still worried. This pregnancy shouldn't even have happened. Apparently, conventional birth-control methods didn't apply to a Human-Zentraedi union.

  Her first pregnancy had worked changes on Miriya's body that Jean still hadn't figured out completely. The physical readouts on her were getting more and more peculiar, and nobody, not even the saintly, floating Haydon IV healers, could say why.

  Max resisted the impulse to sigh, there where Miriya could hear it. Instead he crouched by her, pointing at the window that ran from floor to ceiling in her bedroom.

  "See there? The urban core's almost rebuilt, and about seventy percent of the underground systemry's back up to snuff. Vowad says the whole planet'll be like new in less than two months."

  "It's good that-" A sudden spasm of pain overcame her, and she clamped down on Max's hand with a grip so hard that he involuntarily yelped in pain.

  Jean was there in an instant, reading the bed monitors. The Haydonites had built Miriya's room so that it was a virtual duplicate of the quarters she and her husband had shared back in rebuilt Macross City-their happiest home-but the place was actually a well-camouflaged intensive-care unit.

  "Code red," Jean called into the empty air; not two seconds passed before the wall slid aside and Haydonite healers floated in. Miriya was losing consciousness.

  "Talk to her, Max," Jean whispered to him, then turned to her own job.

  What to say? He wasn't used to making conversation; that was one of the reasons he had been a loner until he and Miriya found each other.

  "And-and, the interstellar trade's already starting up again," he babbled, squeezing her hand but, to his terror, getting no response. "I've got a place all fixed up for you and me and the kid, outside of town-"

  "Sorry, Max." Jean moved him away from the bedside and he didn't resist. She and the Haydonite healers, and medical machines that looked like hovering seashells and airborne spores, all clustered around his wife.

  Max Sterling stood at the foot of the bed. "We're losing her," one of the faceless healers said, and Max bit his lower lip until blood ran, so that he wouldn't scream.

  "Talk to her, Max," Jean repeated, without looking up from her work. "Keep her with us."

  "I...I..."

  "You're fixing up a place for her," Jean prompted him, still without breaking her own concentration.

  He drew a deep breath. "We can stay there until you're ready to go home, Mir." He felt like crying, but Jean gave him one quick look.

  "C'mon, ace," she told him, and went back to what she was doing.

  C'mon, ace...

  "Dana's gonna be some big girl when we get back, huh?" he found himself saying.

  The lifesign monitors made a slightly different sound; Miriya managed to form a word. "Dana..."

  "Uh-huh! God, she wants so much to go to the academy, and Emerson says if she doesn't behave, he's gonna put her in a convent, remember?" He was wiping the tears from his face and his glasses. "And Bowie said that if Dana goes, he goes." He was laughing and crying at the same time.

  "She'll be...a big girl," Miriya said.

  The lifesigns were stabilizing. With effort, Max swallowed and said, "Think of all the things we'll have to tell her when we get home, Mir. She's gonna be waiting to hear them."

  Miriya Parino Sterling smiled as she hovered on the edge of a coma then came back to him.

  He stood looking down on her as she slept, after Jean and the healers and the machines left. Miriya's pregnancy had seven months yet before it came to term.

  But that was only by Human calculation. According to the lab workups, it could happen any time now.

  In the barracks of the security forces posted to Dr. Lang's complex, the officer of the day lost patience with pounding on the door.

  "Linc? Lincoln? Goddamn you, fall in!"

  But Right Officer Isle, REF Service # 666-60-937, wasn't there. The duty OD looked around and found the man's flight suit missing. Oddly, there were also hair clippings and shaving-lather residue in the cramped quarters' tiny sink.

  Isle always was a strange one, but this was pushing it some. "Isle, you sumbitch," the OD muttered. "What now?"

  They were like dolphins in the sea, or eagles cutting the winds.

  Baldan soared, following his mother, through the netherworld of the Crystal Highways. The mineral lattices stretched away in every direction, making their own landscape for the beings who swam in the bosom of Spheris.

  Baldan found that he knew his way around there. The emanations from the various compounds and strata were like signposts and streets-a three-dimensional highway system.

  He zoomed over to catch up with Teal on a thoroughfare layed down from the molten condition. There was a lot of veering and dodging because of the magma chambers, but the scenery was spectacular.

  Disembodied, they flew through the very structure of their world. Baldan found that he knew how to avoid metamorphic structures, knew how to slide along the crystallographic axes.

  There was no gra
vity, except as a somewhat abstract force; electromagnetic and thermal and nuclear imperatives were the rules of the road.

  And before long, he could hear the voices of his people.

  Baldan understood that he was nothing but a disembodied intellect, seeping along the boulevards that molecular forces had drawn. But it seemed that he was corporeal, flying like some character out of the Humans absurd comic books, in an element that was his to command.

  It was a world suspended in space: here, the juttings of a tectonic rift; there, the sweep of a rhodonite seam that virtually girded the planet. They navigated currents of chrysoberyl, emerald and corundum, rode the piezoelectric waves, fought through schist and body surfed in tourmaline.

  Then he became aware of the songs, and they drew him. Teal noticed that he was veering away, and followed. They understood through unspoken communication that the longing

  he felt wasn't to be questioned. She gave in to an impulse that she had only marginally resisted until then, and found she wasn't one person anymore: she was two. Herself and her son.

  In a place like a cathedral made of living mineral, or a megaplex encysted in a jewel of perfect clarity, he encountered the first of his race he had ever met aside from his mother and a few shipmates.

  Their voices drew him, the sound resonating through the world. Baldan found to his surprise that emerging from the warp and woof of the planet was harder than melding with it, and understood a little better how his father died.

  There was a tremendous strain as he fought to free himself from the Crystal Highway; it was as if Spheris didn't want to let him go. Baldan came forth halfway, like some tormented cameo; he was sucked back again and nearly consumed. He fought and kicked and flailed his way clear, reborn once more.

  Teal was standing nearby, and he knew instinctively why she hadn't been able to help; there was only one road test for riders of the Crystal Highways, and it was very Darwinian.

  Their very substance was changed. They were now of smokier stuff, harder and more given to sharp angles, than they had been above and in the ship. Baldan understood that each time he emerged from the Crystal Highways, he would be of different composition-would be of the stuff that made up the area from which he exited.

  So; I'm truly part of my world now.

  Teal and Baldan had come into a place that was dazzling with shards of pure light in a million shades and haunting in the tones that sprang from every cusp and facet. It was like heaven's own house of mirrors, a sound-and-light show that no non-Spherisian would ever be able to comprehend.

  There were thousands upon thousands of his father's people there, contemplating eternity and the Universe in small nichelike chambers, or communing with one another, or working to enlarge the boundaries of their sanctuary. Some looked around in surprise at the arrival of newcomers.

  One in particular dropped a caving tool that rang like a bell on the vitreous floor of the place. "Baldan!"

  It was an elderly female of his race, Baldan II could see. Before she had taken two more steps, her posture and the aura she emitted changed. Joy and disbelief gave way to uncertainty. "But-you're not Baldan, are you?"

  "I'm his son." On Spheris, it went without saying that a great deal of the parent was born again in the child. "Baldan is dead. I am Baldan II."

  "My son is dead," the old one said as if the words were incomprehensible. "But then-who shaped you?"

  Teal stepped forward. "I knew you would want to meet the boy, Tiffa."

  "You!" Everyone knew the story: how a flighty female of no discernible talent or promise had coincidentally been taken prisoner with Baldan, a champion of his species.

  Tiff a struggled for words, plainly displeased at having a new in-law thrust upon her, and one who enjoyed no great prestige or status at that.

  "Do try to conceal your joy," Teal said dryly.

  By now, there were a lot of other Spherisians looking on and listening in. They saw in Baldan II the image of their fallen resistance leader and hero.

  Teal faced them. "We might as well get all this out in the open right away. This is Baldan's son, Baldan II. I Shaped him. I didn't ask for the obligation, but we don't always get to choose the Shapings of the Protoculture, do we? I want it known that I'm proud of this boy and I love him very much.

  "Now, we've come back with allies, to free Spheris from the Invid. I know a lot of you would prefer to sit down here in safety and comfort and wait for them to go away rather than fight them, but I say to you that the Invid won't go away."

  That had people murmuring to one another. They had hidden in the bosom of Spheris-a defense that had never failed them-but many were growing restive. No invader had ever been as tenacious as the Regent's hordes.

  "The Sentinels have already removed the Invid from Karbarra, Garuda, and Haydon IV," Teal went on. "And we mean to do the same here. We're not asking your permission, because this war will be fought to the death whether Spherisians throw in their lot with us or not. But the outcome lies in the balance, and your help could make all the difference."

  Tiffa was looking at Teal with a troubled expression. Wasn't this the frivolous, whimsical girl who had been the despair of her parents and who, most had agreed, would come to a bad and probably meaningless end?

  Who are these "Sentinels," Tiffa wondered, that their companionship should bring Teal home so vested with wisdom and purpose? Perhaps the Invid had met their match at last.

  But there were voices from the crowd now. "Leave us in peace and go!" "We want no war!" "We're not fighters!"

  "Yes, you are."

  Teal had been about to try to shout the doubters down, but Baldan spoke first. Now he took three steps forward, so that they could all get a good look at him.

  "Yes, you are," he repeated. "The memories that Baldan gave me tell me that. These nice safe strongholds in the planetary womb are no protection anymore; the Invid will crack this world apart with their Protoculture devices if it comes to that.

  "Spherisians have fought before, long in our past. Now it's time to fight again-that, or kneel and wait for the hammer to fall on our naked necks."

  He walked a few steps to one side, to where a spar of shimmering agate stood out from the wall of the sanctuary. "I mean to raise rebellion. I mean to rally every Spherisian who remembers how to fight or is willing to learn. I mean to throw the Invid off this world or die trying."

  Teal went over to stand by her son proudly. A wisecrack of Jack Baker's came back to her, and she decided this was a good time to use it. Putting her arm around her son's strong young shoulders, she fixed Tiffa with her gaze.

  "Maybe we're not much to look at, but we're all you've got."

  "From here we go to the Great Geode, to ask for aid there," Baldan announced. "Follow us, any who are willing, or carry the word to other sanctuaries." He hesitated, unsure if the last thing he wanted to say was fair, but the impulse was too strong to deny.

  His voice dropped an octave and became the voice of Baldan I; a different look came into his eyes. Through him, his father said, "It is good to see you this one last time. I love you all."

  Baldan II vibrated a little, coming back to himself, then turned to merge with the spar of agate. A moment later, Teal was gone too.

  The Spherisians looked at one another, the sanctuary resonating with the hurrahs of some, the doubts of others. There were troubled glances everywhere.

  That was when Tiffa stepped to the outcropping where her grandson and daughter-in-law had disappeared. She spread her arms like a high-diver, leaned slowly, and melded with the stuff of Spheris.

  In another few seconds, people were thronging to the walls of the place, or lying flat to dissolve into the very floor. Those who doubted or had other reservations found themselves in a dwindling minority. Many remained behind, but now the sanctuary was a hollow-sounding, mostly deserted place of more silence than sound, more emptiness than life.

  Out along the Crystal Highways the folk of Sp
heris flew, energized by a force before which piezoelectricity and Protoculture and logic itself must bow. Toward a thousand destinations on the planet's crust and under it they went, to free their homeworld.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  This may sound strange, coming from me, but I want to take a moment here to speak in defense of the Ghost Riders-a unit with a long and proud history going back to United States naval aviation-until those events on the SDF-3 mission.