Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail (43 page)

And now simultaneously deployed special warheads went off simultaneously around the entire globe of Medusa, their heat so intense the very atmosphere was inflamed, and the crust began to melt. Great sheets of steam rose from the oceans and the ice, and the world turned slowly from bright white to a dull crimson as the magma underlying the Medusan surface was freed and fed by the material at the top.

It was a gruesome sight that yet so fascinated him that he couldn’t take his eyes off it.

“Any moment now …” Morah said expectantly, then: “There! It’s begun!”

He stared hard at the image, now blood red, and for a moment saw nothing he hadn’t expected to see. Abruptly, he frowned and rubbed his eyes, as the image seemed to lose its consistency and become fuzzy and distorted. Medusa seemed no longer to be a disk at all, but some sort of stretchy blob of reddish-brown goo going off in all directions. And it seemed to be growing abnormally larger, until it was twice the size it had been, and he could only scratch his chin and mutter, “Now, what the hell?”

The glob seemed to flow in a single direction, then separate into two distinct masses, one of which clearly again was a planetary body of Medusa’s size. The other mass, however, of almost equal size, congealed and writhed and twisted—and
moved.
Moved outward, gaining speed as it did so,
moving toward the Confederation task force
that immediately began throwing everything it had at the on-rushing mass.

The Altavar fleet, in a wide, inverted V, moved in behind it, matching speed and direction.

“Close-up!” Morah snapped. “I want a close-up on the Coldah!”

His staff did what they could, and found at least one view from somewhere out-system that showed the mass of the writhing, terrible planet-sized thing that had emerged from the bombarded planet.

It was a monstrous, ever-changing shape, mostly energy but with some matter, taking no clearly defined substance for more than a second before changing into something else, like a mad ball of lightning gone completely berserk.

And yet it was not berserk—its course and speed were deliberate, and it continued to close on the fleet, ignoring all that was being thrown at it, absorbing module after module that could destroy a planet.

It was on the fleet before any counteraction could be taken, just wading in, shooting off tens of thousands of tendrils of fire and flame into the hearts of the ships, exploding whatever ordnance they still carried. Both war stations went up in blazes that matched Medusa itself, but much of the outer task force, beyond immediate reach of the Coldah’s tentacles, began to fan out and those were now engaged by Altavar ships from the edges of the great fleet’s wedge.

The agent angrily pounded his fist on the table. “Of course! Of course!” he muttered to himself. “Why the hell didn’t
I
think of that? Not one species—two! That wasn’t the damned Altavar computer I sensed on Medusa, it was the mind of this other thing!”

Morah couldn’t take his eyes off the pictures, but nodded. “Yes, two. The Altavar serve and protect the Coldah.”

“This—this Coldah. What the hell
is
it? What’s it made of? How can the damned thing even exist?”

“We don’t know. The Altavar, who have been studying it for thousands of years, don’t know, either. They’re not many in number, these Coldah, so we have no idea how numerous they might be or even if they are native to this galaxy or even this universe. They roam solitarily throughout the vastness of space until they come upon a world of the size and type and position they need for whatever it is they do. Long ago, thousands of years ago, when the Altavar were an expanding empire like the Confederacy, one came into an Altavar system and made one of their worlds its home. They are energy, they are matter, they are whatever they choose to-be whenever they choose to be. In settling into that Altavar world, they killed three billion inhabitants. Naturally, that started a long and dirty war.”

He nodded, seeing the possibilities.

“Of course,” the security chief went on, “they attacked that first Coldah much as we just did, and with similar results. They made the thing irritable. It went right through their forces to another inhabited world and did the same thing. They continued to fight it, to chase it, to harass it as much as possible while trying to learn as much about it as they could. It became an obsession with the Altavar, as, of course, it would with us. But while the Coldah don’t like company they
can
communicate with one another over great distances, and after a few centuries more of them showed up in the Altavar systems. Eventually the Coldah learned to anticipate the Altavar attacks and take measures ahead of time. The Altavar losses were gigantic, and they finally had to stop their continual, useless war and take stock, learn a bit more, then try again. Every time they failed. For thousands of years they failed. They learned a lot, though. When the Coldah inhabited a planet, it added little or no mass, apparently remaining in an energy state, and it sent out colonies of organisms to create within it a disguise of sorts—a perfect, natural disguise.”

“The Warden organism,” he breathed.

“The concept is not unknown in nature. As to why they always prefer our kinds of planets, and remake them into our kinds of planets, nobody really knows. They are the classic alien—so different from anything we know, any form of life we know, any life origins we can understand, that they are totally incomprehensible to us. Your man on Medusa once made a fringe contact with this one. Do you remember it?”

He nodded. “I thought it was the computer.”

“What was your impression?”

He thought a moment. “It was aware of me, but didn’t have much of an opinion about it. I got the impression of a sense of utter superiority out of the thing, and I had the feeling it noted me, then flicked me aside as we would a fly.”

“I have been—far deeper—in contact over the years,” Morah told him, “and I find it an impossible, frustrating task. I’m not even certain that what we get into our minds really correlates with the real Coldah. There is an undeniable sense of power—and why not? They have it, that’s for sure. Beyond that—who knows? They are certainly aware we exist, and they are even aware of who their friends are, but that’s about it. Perhaps, one day, we
will
know, but I somehow doubt it. All we can do is study them and learn what we can. They’re impossible creatures, but whatever they do they seem to obey the laws just as we do. They just might know a few more laws than we do.”

The viewscreens were blank now, except for the long-shot view of Medusa, still molten hot yet cooling even now, swaddling itself in an incredibly thick and violent layer of clouds. He turned to the plot board, which showed no white dots or forms whatsoever and yellow forms only in the mop-up battle operations. It was over. The greatest task force ever assembled by man had been met, and bested, partly by a better assembled force that had an easier time on the defense, and partly by a creature they could neither understand nor believe in even as it was killing them.

“Where’s this thing going now?” he asked Morah.

The security chief shrugged. “Wherever it wants. Probably to another of our planets, to burrow in once again. They go from system to system until they find a planet within our life zone around a stable sun, then they burrow in and remake the surface out of matter and energy. It’s never the same twice, but always something familiar to us, even the atmosphere. It’ll stay there a thousand years unless disturbed, as this one was, then rise again, move on, find the next planet, and start it all again. You know, when they leave on their own they do virtually no damage to the planetary systems their little symbiotic riders create? They just leave ‘em. I think a number of mysteries about how so many worlds have formed within our life tolerances may be answered by the Coldah. As random as they are, most of the planets they use are not initially inhabitable, but they leave them that way. Once they leave their little symbiotes don’t destruct, as they do when in residence and taken away, but just sort of fade out. Normal evolution follows.” He chuckled. “You know, it’s even just possible that our own race, and the Altavar, grew up over the millions of years because of Coldah lifestyles. It’s a fascinating concept.”

“But the Altavar—they fought these things. And now they seem almost to protect them.”

“That’s true,” Morah agreed, telling one of his aides in an aside to get them all strong drinks, “but in the thousands of years they fought and studied the Coldah, a funny thing happened. Somewhere along the line they got tired of it, just got sick of futile head-knocking, and sort of mentally surrendered to the big bastards. To the Altavar, the Coldah became their whole life, and in a probably gradual switch they came not only to accept the existence of these creatures but to actually work
with
them. Don’t ask me to explain it—it’s certainly religious, or mystic, in a way, and those are unexplainable even when we’re talking about
our
faiths, yet they are coldly and scientifically devoted to the great project, as they call it. They protect the Coldah from outside interference whenever possible, and they try with their fleets to nudge the Coldah into worlds that need some work. Don’t ask me how that’s possible, bat the Coldah, once the Altavar started helping rather than fighting, seemed to go along with it.”

He nodded. “But not here.”

“Well, it was impossible, for one thing. When the Coldah originally came to the Warden system we were still stuck knee-deep on old Mother Earth. These four worlds were pretty piss-poor rock piles with nasty atmospheres and surface pressures, just perfect. And when a particularly big, fat, Coldah arrived, it did something the Altavar, with all their experience, had never seen before. It reproduced by fission. It made triplets, in fact, and the one old and three new ones entered into the four Diamond worlds. Shortly after, they released, or made and released, or whatever, their little beasties, and they went to work on the world, making it over. Lilith, with the original mama Coldah, had the most rigid system imposed on it. Then the Altavar moved in. In the years they have studied, fought, then served the Coldah, they learned a lot. They can make their own Wardens, and they can give orders to these synthesized versions, too. Within limits, they can even play games with the Coldah versions, and they did here. Looking at the climates, they elevated one species on each to dominance.”

“I figured that much out. Reptiles on the warmest world, insects on the lushest, water breathers on the wettest, and mammals on the coldest.”

“Right Part of their own grand project, really. Since the Coldah
can
leave, although not arrive, with a minimum of fuss—it’s sort of like a big mist rising, they tell me—leaving the worlds to natural laws, they’ve been trying to influence their direction. It’s a very long-term concept, naturally, but they are really trying to learn what factors and conditions produce intelligence one place and not another. Ifs pretty complex. Of course, our arrival screwed up the project here.”

“And because, somehow, the electrochemical wavelengths on which the human brain operates were just slightly off the wavelengths used by the Coldah to command the Warden organisms, we developed these wild talents.” He paused for a moment, then added, “I assume the Altavar are nowhere near those wavelengths?”

Morah chuckled. “No. Oh, they can tune in, as it were, mechanically, but not biologically.”

He whistled low and grabbed a drink as it arrived, drinking a bit more in one gulp than he should. He needed it. Finally he said, “Then we became the project.”

“Yes.
We
became the project. But in order to control it, and to minimize interference between ourselves and the Coldah, the Confederacy was in the way. The Coldah are headed, generally, in our direction—or back to it, I don’t know which. The idea of
our
race, who can, as it were, tune in on at least one Coldah band, threatened the Altavar, their lifestyle, their system of beliefs. I think they were actually afraid that, if we followed the same pattern as they did, we could eventually establish contact, even
rapport
with the Coldah. Maybe we can, although I think they may simply be too alien ever to understand or communicate with on more than a basic level.”

He smiled wanly and shook his head in wonder. “Then, to the Altavar, were the demons.
They
were scared of us stealing their gods. If the results weren’t so tragic they’d be almost funny, you know that?” He thought a moment. “But if we were that much of a threat to them, the snake that could steal their Eden, why not just wipe out everybody but the project people—the )iamond?”

“They intended to do just that, as the old Altavar told us. But they are an enormous, mostly mobile population, spread out over half a galaxy, wherever there are Coldah. They faced an empire of vast proportions and unknown capabilities. They had to know how we thought, what our tactics were like, how we’d fight, all the rest. They had time. It’s still three hundred years until the scheduled hatching, or breakout, or whatever it is the Coldah do. It was over four hundred when we first arrived here. They spent fifty years or more just getting to know us through the Wardens, watching us work, and realizing just how different our relationship to the Wardens was from theirs, and only then did they really send for their fleet, which must be assembled from incredible distances and then can only be spared in small pieces. It was easier for them to establish factories on worlds beyond the Confederacy, even Warden worlds themselves, and build the force they needed, along with using the Wardens to breed the Altavar necessary for the fight. By the time they had their fleet and their military ready, Kreegan was Lord of Lilith.”

“And he stumbled on the whole truth?”

“Much as I did. On each world there was one point, one weakness, that was the Coldah’s window to the outside. Don’t ask me how it works or why, I don’t know. But there was one point, usually in an inaccessible and nasty place on the globe, where this happened. On Lilith it’s very near the north pole. On Charon it’s a small island off the southern continent. I don’t know how Kreegan happened on the north pole, but considering that the descendants of the original exploiter team had set up a planet-worship religion on Lilith they must have put him on to it. The signal strength, as it were, at each of those points is so strong it bleeds over directly onto ours, exciting our own Wardens and our brain’s awareness and control.”