Starhammer (33 page)

"Those are heavy snaps. Must be consuming the entire node with each shot."

"Snaps?" Jon's forehead furrowed.

"Another fragment of the ancient race. Very useful for jewelry, microsurgery. They can cut as finely as our best lasers, but they require no external energy source and, even better, they can cut the interior of something without cutting through it."

"That sounds very useful; they must be very valuable."

"At another setting they explode with considerable force."

More thunder whammed down from the north.

"Will there be anything left of the fort?"

"Oh, yes," Umpuk chuckled. "They'll just toss those big eternite plates around and they'll fall down in another configuration. The old fort will never be the same, that's what they say. This will be the third time in memory that Pinshon's pile of plates was tossed around by the Hardscabbies. Blood Head will definitely be sung of for a long, long time by the tribes of the belt."

"If there's anything left of them when the laowon military are through with them," Jon added a grim note.

"I think it's time we got moving," the Bey said. "While the mutants battle the laowon behind us."

They turned the mantids and followed the turtle, which had to back down part of the way, to the desert surface once more.

Angle Umpuk led them south and east, staying ten or twenty kilometers east of the Oolite trail.

Behind them were a few more flashes of bright light and great cracking blasts echoed through the machines.

Then there was silence but for the moaning of the wind in the latter part of the long afternoon.

When darkness began to fall they were almost two hundred kilometers south and on the fringes of the Inland trail, which curved around the Mock Mountains and down into the first of the Great Boneyards.

Angle Umpuk halted, the other machines slowed and idled. Umpuk came across to their mantid and climbed in.

"We have to choose our course now. Do we head east and go round the mountain and down into the Boneyards or west and take our chances on the Old Oolite?"

"The Oolite ought to be the faster route south," the Bey said.

"Indeed it is."

"But the laowon military will surely be racing down it after us," Jon interjected.

"That is something we must consider." The Bey looked solemn; he pointed westward. "What lies beyond the Oolite and the Hardscabbies?"

"If you head south and west?"

"Exactly."

"A thousand kilometers of dust and then the continental shelf and the ocean bed."

"What if we went that way?"

"The ocean bed is always hard terrain. In the North Ocean there are other hazards."

"Such as?"

"Upwind of the remaining oceans there are frequent hurricanes, sometimes with snow and hail the size of a man's head. Some early expeditions were crushed by the force of what they encountered. Of course, making your way over crevasse country in such weather is even more taxing."

The Bey thought it over. "What of the Boneyards then? That's the way I traveled before."

"You have been south before?" Angle Umpuk's eyes widened.

"Yes."

"And you wish to return there?"

"We must."

"Nobody ever wants to go back. Not even the craziest archeologists." Umpuk rubbed his chin. "I have been as far as the northern fringe of the crustal pit zones. You have seen them?"

The Bey nodded. "Yes, quite astonishing."

Umpuk agreed, "That would describe it." He gulped. "You have gone further?" A note of genuine awe was audible in his voice.

"Yes."

"And that is where you want me to take you?"

"Exactly."

"Good grief!"

"We seek the great equatorial machines."

"The legends—but you must know the risks."

The Bey swallowed. "Yes, I have seen it, I have seen the—"

"The jelly-that-is-flesh, the flesh-that-is-steel," Angle breathed.

"You know the mutants' tales then."

Umpuk nodded. "Among the guides there are many grim tales of old Baraf, but none to match that. They say the equatorial Zun people sacrifice to the horror."

"How ghastly."

"I had a friend once who went south with some archeologists, he was leading them to the equator. He never came back. I often wonder if that was his fate."

"Pray that he met a cleaner death," the Bey said with a strange passion in his voice. They fell silent. Eblis Bey brushed brilliant dust from his trousers.

"Anyway, enough of this. What of the Boneyards? Can we take that trail far enough south to be able to get past the laowon on the Oolite?"

"The trail sweeps two hundred kilometers inland, up the ancient estuaries. Then it passes through the first fossil beds, then through the ancient city sites, and then across the limb of Bolgol's Continent to the southern coast where it meets the Oolite again. It's shorter but it's a rougher ride. The interior is mountainous and volcanic. Which is why most treasure groups go by the Oolite trail around the continental margin to the south coast Boneyards."

"What are the risks in the Boneyards?"

Angle sighed. "Well, there are many bandits' holes to be avoided. Plus there's the outer Hardscabbies and the farther south you go the more Zun people. Attacks by the Zun have inexplicable results and tragic consequences."

Eblis Bey considered the alternatives. His instincts told him the Superior Buro would go down the Oolite trail first. If his party made good time perhaps they could get into the Boneyards before the Buro caught up. Once in that maze they would have a good chance of losing any pursuers. And they could buy relatively safe shelter at one of the numerous holes.

"We go by the Boneyards, all the way to the Guillotine Stone," he announced. They nodded their agreement and returned to the hovercraft. The engines kicked into life and they rode south.

Melissa Baltitude was amazed to be still alive. It felt as if she had gone through enough perils for several deaths by then.

On reflection, her interrogation and programming aboard the battlejumper had been child's play compared to the rest. She gasped again at the pain from her shoulder; she had surely broken some bones. Somehow it hurt far more than she had ever believed it could. To try to push the pain away she reran the memories.

First had come the active battle descent, with the laowon shock troops dumped into insertion orbits at high speed by the military battlejumpers. They had strapped her, her Buro minder, Claath, and a cyborg shock trooper into a descent pod and dropped them with the rest of the shock battalion. Claath had warned her it would be tough, but not even Claath was really ready for it.

The laowon military dropped hard, and of course the cyborg troopers were built to take it, but for ordinary mortals it was an intense experience. The shocks emptied her lungs, her stomach, and finally her bowels.

When they were floating down the last few thousand feet the wind caught their parachutes and tore at the patterns, but the chutes minimized the dispersal and kept them in the drop line to within one hundred meters of Fort Pinshon.

Despite the heavy goggles, the sky had seemed to burn with the solar fire and the ground sparkled like some monstrous jewel chest, whenever the dust cleared long enough for it to reflect light.

Then she'd been swallowed up in the dust and deposited on the surface by the chute, which of course was programmed to deliver cyborg fighters. Fortunately young human women who keep fit are remarkably flexible creatures. Melissa survived, and even brought off a good roll to minimize the impact.

Nevertheless she lay on the ground afterward like a dead thing, every scrap of strength wrung out of her.

Then Claath had come out of the dust and dragged her to her feet. She'd followed him into a low entranceway beneath what appeared to be a lopsided pile of huge plates, stacked randomly.

Inside she found herself in a big dim space stinking of death. The hall had recently been the scene of a fierce little battle. The "tame" mutants had risen at the entrance of the laowon and their shock troops. They had shaken out weapons, for a half minute they had confronted each other. Then a drunken mutant fired accidentally and the cyborgs had swarmed upon them.

Overawed by the blinding speed of the cyborg attackers, which flitted like flies through the great space and cut the mutants down with dreadful ease, the fort operators surrendered quickly to the laowon.

Burochief Claath and his officers immediately took charge of the fort and began brainwiping everyone, sifting for images of the fugitives. They set the booths up right by the front entrance and hauled the people out, sat them in the brainfield printer, and then tossed the incoherent wretches into a pile where they thrashed helplessly, their brains emptied of all thought patterns. The bodies sometimes lived for days, twitching, thrashing, as long as the heart pumped.

Before the task was half completed there was an alarm. A drumming noise filled the air and from out of the southern dust came a force of vehicles on balloon tires.

Claath ordered the cyborgs to attack, but before the platoon had even reached the gates, the mutants fired several snaps into the fort. Each snap lifted huge plates of eternite and flipped them over in the air. At the first blast Melissa found herself simply hurled a hundred meters across the ground to land with a force that drove all the breath from her body and left a pain in her shoulder. She watched in stunned awe as the enormous, indestructible pieces of the fort, each weighing thousands of tons, rose into the air in a fountain of dust and people and fragments hung for a moment, and then returned to the ground. The desert shook from the impacts.

Beneath the eternite plates were the smashed remains of a battalion of shock troops and two dozen laowon officers of Blue Seygfan, including Burochief Claath.

The mutants fired another round of snaps shortly afterward, turning the whole mess over once more. Melissa had dragged herself another hundred meters away by then, but was almost smashed by an errant disk that grounded not twenty meters from her spaceboots.

The dozen or so remaining cyborgs attacked the mutants, and a horrible carnage ensued from which only a small number of Blood Head's followers escaped, by taking immediate flight.

The cyborgs returned, dripping blood, and lined up in precise parade-ground drill, awaiting fresh orders.

From the sky fresh patterns of troops and laowon officers dropped. Melissa awaited them with a terrible dull ache in her shoulder and nausea in her belly. Tears rose in her eyes. Her mission was aborted, and through no fault of her own. Would they let her live? Would they let her go home?

Through the paling purple twilight the expedition moved down the Boneyards. Around them were piled the fossils of billions of the ancient race. The mantids led, the turtle lumbered behind.

Mounds of forkbones, skulls, and loricae were fused around them in grotesque statuary dozens of meters high. Skulls in rows were propped up in lines on frozen vertebral columns in parade-ground formations hundreds of meters deep. It seemed as if an army of dead beings was marching out of the planet's crust itself.

"The burial sites of an eon of civilization, Mr. Iehard," the Bey said. They stared around them as the hovercraft raced up winding gulleys cut through the enormous graveyards.

"They were a tidy race when it came to burial then."

The Bey smiled. "It may have been an adaptation to the problem of numbers in a successful planet-wide civilization. They were marsh cultivators, harnessing the richness of wetlands. Astonishingly frugal—they used no burial ornaments, for instance. Although there is evidence, if you go deep enough, that in earlier eras there was horizontal burial and burial ornaments were common. When their numbers grew to threaten their own habitat they adopted thrifty ways that allowed them to prosper for a very long time."

The hovercraft passed down canyons cut in the orderly stacks of fossils. Around them, where the dead had been exposed to wind and rain, they had eroded into spines and spires of ribs and vertebrae, but in the long eon when Baraf had wandered the void, frozen, the processes of erosion had slowed to a crawl. Now the endless winds had carved the huge stacks of dead into endless friezes, honeycombs. Drifts of toppled fragments skirted the steep canyon walls.

Jon studied the skulls as they passed. They were massive, with projecting, crocodilian jaws. The occipital lobes bulged out behind the faces. The staring eyesockets marched, rank on rank, into infinity. He wondered if any of the ancient creatures—it was hard to think of them as people like humans and laowon—survived.

Beneath them the shining crystal of the machine belt had long since been left behind. Now the dust filled with fragments of fossil. For long stretches they passed over enormous beds of small bones and skulls.

The shadows of twilight coalesced into a deeper gloom, as they navigated the meandering passages of the ancient estuary beds. "This must have been a huge river in its day," Jon commented, awed by the seemingly endless expanse of channels and bone mounds.

"There is much evidence to suggest that it was artificially enlarged and that the ancients flooded as much of the low-lying landmass of their world as possible in an effort to maximize their favorite, swampy habitat."

They fled on through the expanses of the Boneyards.

Toward midnight they pulled in at the three red globe lights advertising Bengo's Hole. They parked in the courtyard, inside the energy fence, under the guns of the turret set into the mound of bones over Bengo's limestone cavern.

Inside considerable excitement was in the air. At the bar, which cut across Bengo's big room, Bengo himself was buying toasts to commemorate the Hardscabbies' great battle.

"It was on the radio," one merrymaker explained. "The laowon Superior Buro dropped from the skies on Fort Pinshon. Such arrogance, such power! They were in the process of wiping the brains of every poor fool they took when the Hardscabbies came up to avenge the destruction of their larder. The laowon were severely handled by the mutants of Blood Head. Hundreds of laowon casualties, the whole place was turned over."