Sly Mongoose (30 page)

Pepper helped unsuit Momotzli. He leaned in close when the sweaty, exhausted teenager stumbled on his own toward a bench. “What happened?”

Momotzli had his forehead in his arms, panting. “He took me toward the storm. And then at the turn-back point, he made me leave him and return on my own. He kept going.”

Itotia left with Heutzin helping her along. Momotzli’s chastened-looking father dragged him away.

They left Pepper alone on the docks facing the empty and still-steaming-hot groundsuit.

Heading into the depths of the storm made sense.

Risking his life for his city, that was admirable.

Pepper rubbed his face, tired. Beneath the weariness was a small trickle of anger.

Tough universe.

Yet, Pepper thought as he turned away from the groundsuit, he wanted that death to balance out somehow. And the only person that could guarantee to remember to tip the scales for Timas was him. Itotia, Ollin, everything would be gone soon. Yatapek couldn’t resist the Swarm.

Even with him helping.

Pepper checked the power level. He had two and a half hours of constant use left.

It was time to get to that escape bubble and leave Yatapek. Then he would return and destroy the Swarm from above.

T
his is all so typically human.” Skizzit stood in a corner of the room, while Claire folded her arms and sat in a chair with an annoyed look on her face.

“What do you mean?” Timas asked.

The birdlike Nesaru waved a quilled hand at him. “Your kind. Barging in, causing drama. No finesse. No civilization.”

“My kind? We didn’t create the threat that’s coming,” Timas snapped back.

“Well was it Nesaru who did it? I doubt it. Besides, who’s creating chaos right now?” Skizzit shook its quills and ducked its face in them, cleaning them with its beak. “Your wars are spilling over again. Your violence and darker impulses come to light once more.”

“It was the Satrapy and your kind that enslaved humanity. Would we be fighting so much if we hadn’t been reduced to so little? You took us off the mother planet and scattered us across the Forty-Eight worlds. And you did worse.” He thought back to Van’s scars and behavior.

Skizzit puffed out its quills, doubling in size. “Your own kind sold you to the stars from your mother planet happily. Your kind starved in the millions on its own planet. We developed your other planets. We brought technology and civilization. Without us, you would
never
have gotten this far. You should be grateful to us for the lives you now live.”

“You took advantage of us, exploited us, and now you pay for your sins.” Aliens everywhere ran to hide from humans now. That made Timas feel good.

“My sins? My sins?” Skizzit stepped forward, and Timas stared at the needle-sharp tips of his quills. “I’ve never had any of you for a pet, nor taken any of you from Earth. Those things were done hundreds of years ago, human.”

Claire watched the argument with a bored expression, but Timas turned to her next. The more he understood about these people, the more he might be able to get them to realize that the Swarm threat to
them was real. “And what about you? How can you work for creatures that have done the things to us that these have?”

She smiled. “We have an agreement.”

“What kind of agreement could be worth doing what you do?”

“How old do you think I look?”

She had small lines around her mouth, a hint of crow’s-feet by the eyes. “Maybe thirty-five.”

“I’m ninety-nine.” Claire looked at Skizzit. “The prize is a life measured in the centuries, for one century of service.”

That was the price it took for this woman to turn her back on her own kind and identify with the aliens, then. A tempting price. Without the city to return to, if they kept him here, what would he choose to do?

“Do a lot of people that you rescue on the surface stay here and take that prize?”

Claire nodded. “Wouldn’t you?”

Timas changed the subject. “I was on the surface not too long ago. I saw one of you. And my friend died down there, when his suit got damaged. Why didn’t you help us?”

“There was debris. It was too dangerous, or we would have. We do keep an eye on your surface activities. If you get too close with your mining machine or your people, we act to stop discovery.” Claire stood up and looked out the door.

Another thought occurred to him. “If the wormhole is closed up, is that why one of you gave Heutzin a box to deliver?”

Claire looked off at the wall. “We are self-sufficient. There is no need to send anything. The ones who try to make outside contact . . . pay a dear price for breaking the rules.”

Timas wanted to ask more, but the ticking from the timer stopped. It buzzed until Timas turned it off.

“What was that?” Skizzit asked.

“My air timer. As of now, the people who sent me think I’m dead.” Timas sat down with his back against the wall with the timer’s chain wrapped around his forearm. He dangled it just above the floor. His parents would be grieving, just like Cen’s, for his death now. What a depressing thought.

Claire took a deep breath and squatted in front of him. “It is I, Amminapses.”

“Yes?”

“You brought a dangerous thing here. Tell us exactly where you got this and what is happening.”

Timas repeated everything he knew. Pepper’s original encounter, the spread of the Swarm throughout the Aeolian cities, the attack on the processor, and then the news that a massive fleet, thousands of airships, now moved on this location.

“And there are people up there who suspect, strongly, that we exist down here. Not just the Swarm?”

Timas nodded. “Yes.”

“Yatapek readies for this invasion. Pepper thinks the League of Human Affairs will come and clean up,” Amminapses said. “But alone you will not be able to face it. Pepper is right, you need my help.”

Skizzit jumped toward them. “No, you cannot do that! We have achieved stasis here again.”

Amminapses held up a hand. Claire’s face contorted into a strange and frozen expression of anger. “That is
not
for you to say. You will be quiet.”

The words had the crack of authority, and anger at being challenged. Timas flinched at them, as did Skizzit, who folded its arms and backed away.

“This weapon you delivered, it’s an extraordinary measure. An emergency tool. It is used to destroy civilizations and races.”

“You made it?” Timas asked.

“Others made it, we are familiar with it. Organic DNA-based computing that uses clustering to achieve computational power at an exponential spread, with a goal-oriented artificial intelligence laid over the top. There’s been a safety modification: a four-hour incubation period. As well as the new target. Us here.”

“But can you help stop it?” Timas asked.

“We have worked in the past on a counter-infection. I will use drones and a ship to get you back to Yatapek. We need to at least slow this attack, yes.”

Timas hated to do this, but he had to ask. “What do you mean, at least slow it?”

“It may be impossible to stop. It gets more intelligent as it grows. By now it is a formidable foe. As we infect it, it may be able to study what is happening and it may withdraw to find a cure. Our best ally is time, the virus is coded to let its host starve. It is designed to rage through a people, engage them in war, and then when it has spread all throughout, let them starve and whither away so that in time, the universe will hardly have known that the infected race even existed.” Amminapses stood Claire up. “It’s beautiful, elegant, and brutally effective. When the Satrapy ruled the Forty-Eight worlds, we never had the courage to deploy it. Our loss.”

“We are released,” Skizzit said. The door had unlocked itself. The alien held it open, and Claire walked through.

Timas got up and followed them out of the building. He gawked again at the giant arch of rock far over his head, lights blazing away from its apex, as well as the twinkling from the hundreds of thousands of windows in the rock’s sides. Dwellings for humans, aliens, all living here.

But now the quiet of the gardens and the cavern had lifted. Activity spread all throughout. Timas looked at the sight of thousands of people, mostly human, moving crates and ferrying aliens in small electric carts toward the center of the cavern.

Timas saw the kind of alien he’d first spotted on the surface. A four-footed creature with a bulky chest, thick neck, and massive mouth. It opened its mouth wide to reveal tongues with multiple ends that would pick things up, or flick buttons and levers.

“Stop staring at the Gahe,” Skizzit said. “They get annoyed, it’s a challenge for them.”

Timas stopped. “What’s going on?” Everyone had exploded into action.

Skizzit pointed at the giant dark spot at the center of the cavern. “They’re getting ready to leave. They’ll fire the nuclear charges in the asteroid to clear it free of the other side of the wormhole, reopening it. Then we evacuate.”

Amminapses added, “The threat of the Swarm is very serious. We need to delay it long enough to get off this planet.”

Everyone here ran for safety, while Chilo’s humans laid their lives down to slow the Swarm. He wouldn’t forget this. Timas looked at Claire. He was really looking at the enemy of his enemy, he felt. A creature that had helped enslave mankind, and still thought of its fiefdom here as its own world.

Allies for now, but a friend, no. Claire, and the intelligence behind her, was something else. Dangerous. Like the ancient heresies: monsters manipulating humans and their fate. He was, Timas thought, facing a kind of devil. And making a deal with it.

A
mminapses remained in control of Claire. It led Skizzit and Timas across the long width of the cavern into a new corridor, up a flight of grand sweeping stairs, and into a subchamber with heavy-looking, thick spheres. “Our transport back to your city.”

“You have the cure already?”

Another Nesaru waited for them. It stepped forward and handed a black briefcase to Amminapses, who tapped it. “We adapted a counter-infection for your genome a while back, it just required synthesizing. It does not have a four-hour block.”

“And you’re going to give it to us merely to slow it down, while you run away? You expect nothing out of us?”

Amminapses looked at him, contorting Claire’s face into some emotion that Timas couldn’t identify. “You will be fighting it, correct?”

“Yes.”

“That’s all we need.”

Skizzit tapped a five-number sequence on a translucent pad on the pod’s shell. Timas paid close attention, trying to memorize the numbers. Just in case.

The hatch opened up and Claire stepped into the vehicle. She picked one of the five seats facing one another in a circle deep inside the armored sphere. They angled slightly up.

The seat reacted to her weight, shifting and adjusting its headrest to cradle her neck and head. Then padded arms reached out to hug her body into itself.

Skizzit went next, and the seat it chose radically reconfigured itself to accept Skizzit’s anatomy.

“You’re going with us?” Timas couldn’t believe that he would be showing back up to the city with an alien in tow.

No one could deny he’d seen an alien on the surface now, could they?

Timas chose his chair and let it wrap around him.

“Ready?” Skizzit asked.

“As I can be.” Timas tried to shift, but didn’t budge.

“Clear.”

The interior of the sphere fell dark. A small screen revealed the rocky roof a hundred feet above them. The sphere rumbled and rose toward it. Timas flinched as they appeared to dash themselves against it, but at the last second a pinprick of a hole grew into a large opening.

They shot through the tube in the rock until a point of brown light appeared, grew, and then they popped out into the heart of the Great Storm.

Instead of climbing, the sphere moved slowly near the surface.

“It’s tough to keep a good connection to the cavern,” Amminapses explained. “We keep the clouds of this planet well seeded with metal-consuming spores. That makes it hard to catch any leakage from Hulbach, or for radar to hit the surface. We can’t afford discovery. We’re keeping close to the surface to use a laser link to keep communications while in the storm.”

Timas stared at the familiar murkiness as the sphere bumped and trembled along.

Amminapses released the chair restraints and sat up. “Among us, there are conflicting memories, early traces of a group story. Call it legend, creation myth, or maybe it is memories of our distant past.”

“Okay.” Timas sat up, and the chair let go of him.

“You should not tell them these things,” Skizzit said. “You will give them leverage over you.”

“I’m the last Satrap of the Forty-Eight worlds, but I am still a Satrap. I will do as I please, and you will be
quiet
now, Nesaru.” Amminapses didn’t believe in using the names of those who worked for it, it appeared. Claire’s face turned back to Timas. “We are a created species, we understand this by examining our genetic heritage. We are massive so we cannot depend on rapid mobility like most species. We are forced to be symbiotic. Our tendrils can penetrate a conscious mind, adapting to the species after several attempts, and now with technology, we have extended these abilities and our range. We hunger for interesting new thoughts. And why would something like that be created? you ask. It is important, now that we face a new threat that may undo us both, that we understand this.

“You humans believe we are the enemy, out to destroy you, or at least inhibit you. That is true, but . . .”

Amminapses stopped, mouth open, and Claire shook her head. “Where are we?”

“Interruption,” Skizzit said. “Lost a laser link.”

Claire froze. Amminapses returned. “Among ourselves, we see that intelligence breaks out, flourishes, spreads, and eventually, inevitably, it comes to war with itself in its various forms. It fights, consumes, destroys, and upsets the balance of the universe.

“Farther out into the universe where you have yet to venture, this has played itself out with repetitive regularity. And the universe, whether as some larger organism, or whether via creatures that regard themselves as its stewards, has developed mechanisms to combat the ill effects of intelligent life. They seek out and destroy it, balance it, and through evolutionary pressures, force the creation of races that are better equipped to know their limits and cease their natural instincts.