i e4a5a8edf2d8eda0 (21 page)

makes a great deal of sense.”

He listened with horror, disbelief, then anger as the council members repeated the story of

the origin of the tendrilless. Gray suggested that the entire tendrilless race was a mere

temporary offshoot, never intended to survive for more than a few centuries. The very idea

appalled him. Worse, his own father and the Tendrilless Authority seemed to believe the

ridiculous notion. Gullible fools! It was obviously a trick of some kind, an excuse to lull the

tendrilless into doubts.

He saw only one way out. Covering his true mood, Jem bowed formally. “Father, this

summit meeting will be very important, and it must be done with exquisite care. Perhaps I

have been overly hard and aggressive in order to protect our race, but I can be cautious as well.

I know Gray’s mannerisms and schemes, and I can spot a trap. Please allow me to go to Earth

as your representative.”

Bleary-eyed Altus perked up. He seemed pleased with his son’s apparent change of heart.

“A mutually beneficial solution will be best for all of us. Listen to what Gray has to say.”

Smiling carefully, he bowed. “If it is not a trap, then I am willing to consider alternatives.

No one knows Earth better than I do. I can handle this.”

“We never wanted the option of complete annihilation, as you well know,” Altus said.

“Make us proud.”

Inwardly furious with the soft passivity of the Authority, he went to the transmitting center

and opened a channel. “This is Jem Lorry. By now, President Gray, you will have realized that I

was a tendrilless slan working in your own government. My father is the leader of the

Tendrilless Authority here in Cimmerium. He has delegated me to work out the details of the

summit.” He paused, considered his words carefully. “I am skeptical about what you have said,

but I will listen with an open mind. Tell me how to meet you, and we’ll proceed from there.”

When enough time had passed for a return signal to be received, he paced the floor, waiting

and annoyed. The responding voice that came over the transmitting system, though, was a

complete surprise to him. “Lorry, you’re a bastard! You worked with me, and you worked with

the President, and you fooled us all. You were a snake in our midst.” It was John Petty.

Jem wished he could have seen the great slan hunter’s face when he’d learned the

President’s chief adviser was a tendrilless turncoat.

Then Petty surprised him even more. “We are two of a kind, Lorry. It galls me to be here

with the President, who has revealed himself as my greatest enemy. You and I have something

in common—we each want to get rid of Kier Gray, so listen to me well. We’ll set up this

summit, but I propose a double-cross. I’ll deliver Gray’s head on a platter.”

Jem’s eyebrows shot up. At first he didn’t trust the suggestion, but he and Petty had known

each other for years, both of them ruthless and ambitious. He had to admit that a double-cross

sounded like Petty—a way to turn the tables on the government in exile, to kill off Gray, his

slan daughter Kathleen, possibly even Jommy Cross. It was an opportunity he simply couldn’t

pass up.

Hoping that his signal would not be intercepted by the wrong person, Jem answered

immediately. The slan hunter should still be there at the communication console awaiting his

answer. “I like your proposal, Petty. What I really want is to destroy President Gray and

eliminate the government. Despite what my foolish father says, I have no interest in suing for

peace with slans or with humans. Why should I? We’ve already won. You’re a realist. Maybe I

could find some way to make accommodations for you and a few other human beings. I’m

willing to compromise.”

Jem smiled to himself as he signed off, knowing Petty would accept the terms. It was all

coming together. And once they had everything set up, Jem thought, why stop at just a
double

-cross? This meeting would be the convenient answer to everything.

«
^
»

When Jommy arrived back in Centropolis, cautiously dodging debris and trying to avoid

detection, he saw that the grand palace wasn’t the only thing utterly destroyed.

He had driven through the night, keeping his vehicle out of sight whenever possible.

Hidden in the darkness, Jommy had seen bright signal lights overhead indicating the flybys of

bold enemy spacecraft. Parked under a dense stand of trees, he sat waiting in his dark and

silent car until the tendrilless patrols passed out of sight.

Though the airships were a threat, he knew these were just scouts, not outright attack

squadrons. With Earth’s defenses already crushed, the bombardment of cities had stopped.

The invaders’ vanguard forces expected no further resistance from the vanquished people of

Earth.

But Jommy and his friends still stood against them. He had his father’s notebooks; he had

superior slan technology; he had President Kier Gray. Unfortunately, Kathleen’s father had not

been able to contact any of his slan operatives from the old government, and Petty could not

reach his secret police, who—he claimed—could form an organized resistance. One of Jommy’s

other hopes for this mission was to find the hidden enclave of slans in ruined Centropolis, the

ancient highly secure hideout his father had marked in his logs. He knew some of his people

must still be alive, and they had to be willing to fight.

The remaining slans had certainly been driven into hiding, but what had once been a

superior race couldn’t have been so utterly exterminated. But where were they? Why hadn’t

they fought against the invasion? Could it be that the true slans were even more afraid of the

tendrilless? Jommy knew he wasn’t the only one willing to fight for his planet.

He’d been striving to find the lost slans all his life. If a large population did survive, he

doubted they were anywhere on Earth—and if they
were
still here and had chosen to do

nothing, then perhaps he didn’t want to know them after all…

When the night sky was clear again, Jommy drove his car along the deserted roads. At last

he arrived at the outskirts of the main city as the first light of sunrise painted the east with

colors of blood and fire.

The streets of Centropolis were a mad turmoil of collapsed buildings and hollow-eyed

survivors. Fires had gone unchecked, and entire blocks had burned down. For all their military

superiority, the tendrilless had not attempted to mitigate the wanton destruction. They could

have assured their victory with far less carnage. Did they really want to take over Earth if they

left nothing but a charred ball? It made no sense.

As he drove along, always wary, Jommy understood that the desperate survivors might not

be rational. They had gone through two days of hell, and at the very least would try to take his

vehicle from him. Though the controls were keyed to operate only to his touch, the mob

wouldn’t know that. He would have to shed a great deal of unnecessary blood in order to

defend himself—and they weren’t his real enemies.

Hoping to prevent that, Jommy found a quiet alleyway full of long shadows cast by the

intact buildings. With the extra awareness from his tendrils, he listened to the static of frantic

thoughts and fear, but sensed no one watching him. He drove the already-scuffed car into a

partially collapsed shed structure, then quietly piled debris around the hood and roof. The

camouflage wouldn’t bear careful inspection, but most people glancing at it would assume the

car had been buried during an explosion.

Taking careful note of the car’s location, Jommy trudged out into the dangerous streets. He

wore nondescript clothes and carried only the small tracking device that would help him locate

his disintegrator tube, wherever it might be buried in the palace rubble.

As the morning brightened, he passed people going about the business of survival. They

pushed wheelbarrows, carried rucksacks full of canned food or jewelry. Looters ran in and out

of stores, breaking open display cases and ransacking cash registers. Pale and frightened faces

stared out of darkened windows.

He heard sporadic gunfire, screams, and laughter. One man ran past him with long

chickenlike strides, carrying three overstuffed bags filled entirely with colorful hats. Jommy

couldn’t understand what the man was doing, but a second red-faced man chased after him,

yelling, “Give those back! They’re mine. Bring them back!”

Moments later, somebody shot at Jommy. He dove out of the way as ricochets peppered

the pavement and the building walls next to him. He couldn’t see where the shots were coming

from or whom he had offended. He got to his feet and ran out of range.

Across one main thoroughfare, someone had strung barbed wire and built a rough

barricade of old furniture, a refrigerator, and automobile parts. A huge sign bore dripping red

letters that said MY TERRITORY. Three mangled bodies were strung on the barbed wire like

gruesome trophies. Jommy chose an alternate route.

When he finally reached what had once been the grand palace, he saw only a wide

rubble-filled crater. Somewhere buried inside that wreckage, hopefully close to the surface,

was his powerful, one-of-a-kind weapon.

“Like finding a needle in a thousand haystacks,” Jommy said aloud. “But at least this

particular needle has a locator beacon.” He held out his tracking device, and tiny flashing lights

indicated the scan of the area, the search for a signal.

Smoke still rose from the pile of rubble, curling out from hundreds of fires still smoldering

in vaults and smashed office levels below. He climbed over the debris like an explorer in a

dangerous new mountain range. He found thick reinforced walls broken in half, leaving jagged

edges like the teeth in a skull.

He balanced on fallen blocks, then climbed on top of a battered metal desk half-buried in

the rubble. From there, he pointed the tracking device into the wreckage, turning in a slow

circle. Nothing but gray static filled the screen. Leftover thermal signatures from cooling

girders and simmering fires masked the signal.

Jommy ventured deeper into the rubble, walking precariously on fallen blocks. He poked

into dark and dead-end passageways that looked like dangerous mine shafts, hoping to catch

just a flicker of the signal on the detector. Once he determined the weapon’s location, though,

then he would be faced with the even more difficult task of digging it out, perhaps under a

mountain of debris. That would put his slan physical strength and his engineering ingenuity to

the test.

By noon, painted with sweat and dust and soot, he sat down to rest, trying not to be too

disheartened. As he propped his elbows on his knees, he suddenly caught a faint signal on the

device’s screen. Startled, he pointed the nose of his locator device downward, increased the

gain, and picked up a louder ping. When he made his best guess of the location, he pocketed

the device and used his bare hands to shove the fallen rock plates aside. Uprooting a broken

metal pipe, he used it as a lever to pry away more heavy debris.

With no one around in the bombed zone, he dug down with renewed energy and

enthusiasm, scraping rubble, gravel, and broken plaster away. Then he found an armored

hatch. Confirming that the locator signal came from the chamber behind the hatch, he

continued to dig until he uncovered a massive door, sealed and locked. He couldn’t believe the

detector had picked up any signal at all through such an obstruction.

After another hour of tireless excavation, Jommy realized that he had found an entire

isolated chamber, like a self-contained bank vault—just like Petty had said. The armored

chamber had remained intact even as the rest of the palace collapsed around it. Now the

cubical vault rested in the rubble, tilted at an angle, like a treasure chest buried in debris.

Activating the detector again, Jommy saw that the static was thinner, the signal stronger.

Yes, the vault’s thick metal walls had blocked much of the beacon, but the disintegrator tube

was definitely inside the chamber. He had to find a way to open the heavy door! Now that he