Starhammer (24 page)

"Put it down to professional curiosity. Military Intelligence wouldn't tell me much about you. Now's my chance to get some answers."

Eblis Bey smiled slowly. "You were good, they say."

"At tracking?"

"And the rest."

"They trained me until that kind of violence became second nature to me. I do not enjoy it."

"Yes, of course. I understand." Eblis Bey nodded.

"But you didn't tell me where you were born."

"All right!" The Bey threw up his hands. "I shall satisfy your curiosity then. I was born in the city of Sector Three. It's on the continent of South America. But I spent most of my life in the So Cal Dome in North America. These are places that are hard to describe. Enormous beyond anything you can imagine—forty billion TV screens and the oceans are dead! The diet is poor except for the elite and the elite live in dread of the masses. The masses would happily devour the elite, because they blame them for what has happened to our world. That is Earth. It is not a pleasant place."

"My ancestor Jenjamin Iehard, he was from a city called Airstrip Five. Do you know it?"

"A South Pole colony, I believe, one of the older domes. No, I've never been to the polar continent. It was once completely covered in ice, did you know that? A beautiful shining sheet of ice without a single city! The littoral was home to a multitude of wild creatures, and in the surrounding oceans lived the whales, who foraged in the rich waters. But the whales were eaten by the barbaric Japanese long ago, and later all the other animals died out when the ice melted and the clouds filled the sky. It is the same as the other continents now, just wind, desert, and domes."

"How would the Elchites renew the Earth then?"

"First there would have to be mass emigration, which at the moment the laowon will not allow. Then we would turn to all the terrestrial species that have been exported to other systems. As the pollution rates were lowered terraforming bacteria could take a grip. We would cool the planet with solar deflectors and cause more of the water vapor to fall out as rain. In time, that would wash out the carbon dioxide again, and that would allow the planting of adapted trees and sea kelp to renew the ancient cycles."

"But why won't the laowon allow emigration?"

"Because a weak, decadent Earth suits them. A renewed Earth would only give humanity something to unite around and that would pose a problem."

He saw Jon's eyebrows knit.

"Yes, you are correct. It will take a long time, but we will do it. We are determined. Once we have shaken the laowon from our backs."

Jon nodded vigorously. "I wanted to ask you about that. Where are the aliens that can help us?"

Eblis Bey smiled. "You and your friend Meg made some astute deductions, young man—quite frightening really, considering how little evidence you had." He looked about Jon for a second as if afraid of eavesdroppers.

In a hushed voice he said, "Did you know that there is an alien species that the laowon fear? Twice in the past thousand years they have been forced to burn entire worlds. They used nuclear weapons, until no life of any kind survived."

"What is this? What are you talking about?"

"On both occasions they burned small laowon colony populations. On the most recent occasion they burned a small human population as well, which is how we in the brotherhood came to hear of it."

"But why?"

The Bey seemed to calculate something in Jon's eyes. "Because apparently this is a more dangerous universe than human thinkers have allowed themselves to believe. The laowon are afraid of an alien lifeform that they refer to only as the 'advanced parasitic form.' On both occasions that they burned worlds they did so to exterminate this lifeform."

Jon's brows furrowed. "Are we going to find this lifeform?"

Eblis Bey gave a bitter laugh. "By the gods, no! Let us pray that we be spared that!" Jon saw that actual tears were running from the old man's eyes. He dabbed at them, unembarrassed.

"I'm sorry." Jon felt awkward. Why did he weep so?

Eblis Bey recovered himself. "No, we're not going to seek out that lifeform. And I hope that none of it will find us. But it is connected with our destination. You see, young Jon Iehard, you are correct to a degree. We are searching for something alien, something that will break us free of the laowon tyranny. We seek a remnant of an ancient world, a talisman of hope from so long ago that when it was built there was not so much as a clam on the Earth to feed on the algae."

"When?"

"A billion years ago, I mean. We were saved, before we were even born, by the heroism of an early race, a tragic race of high attainment."

"Who were they?"

"Sadly we cannot even pronounce their name in their own tongue. We can't speak much of it at all; we lack the rattle pods and throat drums that were so important to them. Their gift of vocalization was as much beyond ours as ours is beyond that of lower mammals. Their languages were like terrestrial Chinese, dense in phonetic nuances.

"They were batrachian, soft-skinned amphibians that evolved considerable intelligence. Theirs was a rich emotional and cultural life, built around the mating dances with songs of great length and metrical complexity. Yet there was also the inherent tragedy of their breeding rate. They were forced to devour their own young as a method of population control. They called themselves the Wisdom Wishing, and they were a gentle people. They fled from our universe long ago, their world shattered and dying. Before that, however, they had rendered a great service to the rest of our Galaxy."

"Why, what did they do?"

"They stopped the Vang."

"The what?"

"It is one of the very small number of words in the batrachians' languages that we can pronounce easily. To the best of my knowledge, it translates as 'omniparasitic vermin.' I think it was the same lifeform that has so frightened the laowon."

"But if they stopped it—"

"Oh, they did, they smashed the Vang power, but they could not completely annihilate all of it, or them. The Vang appears to be a complex species with many physical forms and aspects. It seems that small particles were somehow left and dispersed into the Galaxy like a bacterial infection. Twice now the laowon have encountered this infection. Both times they have responded by burning an entire world."

"How horrible."

"Yes, indeed, though it is interesting nonetheless to know that the laowon are not invulnerable."

"And your ancient race, what happened to them?"

"Ah, the poor batrachians—they were a slow, profound folk. Matured by aeons of slow evolution in the swamps and coastal littoral. Their sciences of biology and conservation were their highest, but when they had to, they developed tremendous technologies in mere decades and left ruins of such size and complexity that we still stand before them in awe and amazement.

"What happened?" The Bey shrugged. "The details are few and far between but I have researched them diligently all my working life. Unfortunately the archeological records are scattered, and much of the best information is today in laowon hands. However, we do know that they were advanced in sciences like astronomy, but not in ballistics. Eventually, though, they sent out astronomical probes beyond their own solar system. It was then that they discovered vast fleets of colony ships heading toward their system. The ships were slow NAFAL so they had a century or more to prepare. The batrachians built enormous astronomical instruments utilizing the complete spectrum. The great telescope was apparently constructed in outer space and had a distance of many millions of kilometers between the giant lenses. With such instruments they observed that beyond the advancing fleet were worlds upon worlds inhabited by a single lifeform. In addition, colony fleets were crawling across space to many other systems surrounding the Vang homeworlds. They clearly faced a terrible peril."

Eblis Bey sipped coffee, considered his words. "The batrachians had been a slow people. Their cities were low and quite unremarkable, built in harmony with the estuaries and tidal mud flats that they preferred, none of the glories of human or laowon architecture. But then they rose up and welded the entire resources of their planet together in a crash program of defense."

"Did they manage it?"

"Not quite, they were unversed in war. The Vang advance forces arrived and swept aside their defenses with contemptuous ease. The batrachians had completely underestimated the ferocity of combat. Their losses were dreadful, but certain methods of Vang warfare helped them to rethink. They swung to the opposite extreme, the ruthlessness of the weak. During their great program they had discovered a physics of supergravity that is still far beyond us. They turned to it to forge a weapon with which to destroy the Vang fleets and Vang homeworlds. But even as they did so, Vang lifeforms were dropping onto their planet. The batrachians realized they were doomed. They had wasted most of the useful mass in their solar system as gravity potential for their weapons. All they could turn to then was their own sun, which they used to transport what was left of them into the flow of time and, I believe, to the remote future."

"But what happened to their planet?"

"Its sun gone, it was flung into the interstellar void at orbital speed and drifted there for a billion years or more."

"How do we know of it then?"

"It was captured by a young blue-giant star, some time in the last few thousand years. More recently it has been colonized by human beings." The Bey stood up. "Come with me and I will show you."

A few floors above they came to a small room that Eblis Bey had appropriated as an office. They entered after he had carefully checked the corridor.

"No one we cannot trust completely may know this until we get there. Not even the young acolytes of Elchis."

Eblis Bey took a small holocaster from his sleeve and set it on the table. A sharp little hologram sprang into place, a star system.

"The primary is Pleione, one of the seven sisters of the Pleides. She is hot and she is young."

The star was tinged blue-white. The representation made it seem tiny and far away, a hot speck of fury.

"Of course she is much too young to have planets of her own. In fact, it is doubtful that she will burn stably long enough for planets even to form from what is left of the nebula that surrounds her."

Nevertheless, outside the ring of gas and dust particles a small brown planet rolled past in the projection.

"But, you see, she has a planet, a captured wanderer, a most interesting little world that we humans call BRF, or colloquially Baraf."

Jon stared at him. "Baraf," he sputtered, and pointed at the resting mote. "Where the mote was found!"

"Indeed. And it is there that we will find the Hammer."

"The Hammer?"

"That smashes stars, the ancient weapon of the batrachians. With it, we can free humanity of the laowon yoke."

The Baada drives functioned perfectly for the last two enormous jumps across the stars, but when at last the great battleship hung on the fringes of the Pleione system the left drive broke down with an appalling howl of tortured metal. A few moments later the computer shut everything down except the auxiliary power supply and left them shaking in their seats with their fingers stuffed in their ears.

They crowded around the astronomical screen on the bridge. Not far away a small dark planet orbited. A pall of dust hung over most of the northern hemisphere, but here and there narrow strips of blue water laced the surface.

A conference was held. No one was prepared to stay aboard the crippled
Churchill
, and thus the spaceboat would be heavily crowded on the short hop to the planetary surface.

The great Testamenter battleship would be left to float on in solar orbit, a near hulk.

Eblis Bey pointed to the small planet on the screen. "Behold the planet called Baraf, wherein resides our last hope for human freedom.

"As you can see, the oceans are greatly reduced. Most of the ancient seabeds are now exposed. The dust belts are one result, since the primordial oozes have dried and been taken into the upper atmosphere."

"What happened to make the oceans shrink so much?" Jon asked.

"A sad side effect of the little planet's salvation from eternal freezing. Baraf was plucked from the interstellar void about twenty thousand yeas ago. For most of that time the planet was safe. It warmed up, the ice melted, the oceans circulated once again, and in time life might have returned. But the orbit is eccentric. About two thousand years ago Baraf passed close to Pleione and was scorched. The oceans largely boiled away."

"How did anyone ever come to discover this planet?" Officer Bergen said. "Who would want to colonize here, surrounded by these giant white stars? There's too much radiation."

"True, and indeed it was only by the remotest chance that Baraf was discovered at all. Just another aspect of the case that gives encouragement to the view that there really is a God of the humans, or at the very least a merciful God that looks upon our struggle for freedom with favor."

He smiled at them. "But the fact remains that it was discovered by three survivors of a shipwreck long ago."

"Way out here?" exclaimed Jon. "We're far beyond the outer limits of human exploration."

"Their ship was the
Stapledon
, one of the earliest High Corporate exploration vessels. Very fast NAFAL, the crew were kept in hibernation. But the computer malfunctioned, accelerated to maximum speed, and kept it up for centuries."

"I wonder why?"

"Apparently it had formulated the 'Two God' problem for itself, a noted hazard with some early generations of advanced computers, especially the so-called tenth generation. It was a mathematical black hole from which they hardly ever recovered, becoming obsessed with the need to prove that they were, or were not, God incarnate.

"However, after several centuries it decided the problem was just an irrelevancy and made a rare recovery. It began to decelerate and to wake the crew, but already the ship was on the verge of a dense interstellar dust cloud. They abandoned the ship just before it blew up in the cloud.