B00BFVOGUI EBOK (13 page)

From a distance, Leel resembled a peeled apple: vaguely spherical, white,
and featureless. The Black Butte, as the humans had named it on approach, was
the solitary deviation: a half-kilometer-high mass of opaque ice, it housed the
Leelites’ auction hall. The surrounding area was said
to resemble an empty Yukon mall parking lot — except during the once-a-decade superconductor
auctions, when it looked like a
mostly
empty lot.

Today, however, it was a war zone — and
dashing from the only entrance to the butte, Jamie found himself in a no-man’s-land.
A hundred meters ahead to his west sat
Indispensable
,
towering and boxy in its current trading configuration. Between the ship and
the butte, eight members of Surge Sigma’s second team were in a chevron
formation, kneeling and firing their weapons, seemingly at him.

Ducking back inside the
passageway, Jamie quickly realized his teammates outside were shooting at the Xylanx. The black-suited warriors from the auction hall had
emerged before he had and now were headed for their own vessel, which sat to
the north. More Xylanx soldiers had fanned out in
front of the ship, attempting to screen their compatriots’ escape from the butte.
Many meters separated them: Jamie thought the parties were using more serious
ammunition, here outside the auction hall. It was keeping both groups well
apart.

The Xylanx
transport was a curious thing. Built from smaller modules, as all whirlibang-using craft had to be, the ship seemed to have
cheese-shaped wedges for its basic building block. That gave the overall
vehicle a spiky look, with sharp angles rising from a long horizontal body. Two
slender guns rotated atop the vehicle, firing green pulses at regular intervals
to cover Kolvax’s party’s escape.

Behind Jamie, the ice mountain
shook. He looked back to see the far end of the passage he’d emerged from
collapsing. Afraid, he turned and charged into the snowfield…

…only to slip
immediately and land faceplate first in the open.

“
Trader!
” a voice called out over Jamie’s audio system. From the
ground, Jamie looked across the dirty snow to see the husky form of Victor
Gideon, second team squad leader, charging from the human forces’ flank. “I’ve
got him!” Gideon yelled.

Jamie scrambled to his hands and
knees. Cave-in or not, the sight of Gideon charging toward him caused Jamie to
think seriously about going back inside to face the monster again. Gideon had
scared the hell out of him at every encounter. The man’s HardSHEL
armor looked as if he’d worn it through a fall from orbit: dented, banged, and
pockmarked beyond belief.
Doesn’t Quaestor spend billions outfitting these people?
Jamie had
thought on meeting him. The guy could use a chamois and some touch-up paint.

And instead of the Spraecher 300s that Bridget’s crew used, Gideon carried
around a cluster of smaller weapons soldered and riveted together — presumably,
Jamie imagined, so he could fire them all at the same time. And incongruously
with the rest of his high-tech equipment, Gideon also had a shotgun slung over
his shoulder. Or at least that was what Jamie thought it was: it looked like
the thing Elmer Fudd had carried in the musical that
won the Tony Award in 2136. He was surprised Gideon hadn’t gone for a caveman
club instead, to match his personality.

Xylander warriors happily took potshots
as Gideon dashed across the open ground. A blast from the alien craft struck to
his left, and then to his right. If Gideon paid any attention, he didn’t show
it. Between Leel’s three-quarter-gee gravity and his
outfit’s sensors and servos, he dodged one snow-scattering blast after another.

Seeing the live fire chasing
Gideon toward his own position made the decision for Jamie. He turned back and
lunged toward the shelter of the still-standing exterior opening to the butte. But
no sooner did he reach the icy stoop than he fell again.

“Trader down!” Gideon yelled as he neared the
entrance. Throwing his body into a crunching roll, the forty-five-year-old
tumbled to a stop. Squatting on top of Jamie’s armored form,
Gideon turned and pointed his gun cluster out at the Xylanx.
The squad leader screamed a bloody oath and began firing a variety of things.

Jamie hated Gideon.

“Let me up, dammit!”
the trader yelled, squirming.

“Nothing
doing!” With
a face cracked like Mars, Gideon set his teeth in an angry scowl and continued
blasting. Return fire peppered the ground ahead of them until the rest of Surge
Two’s members shifted position to better protect them.

Gideon’s silver-flecked brown
eyes lit up as the Xylanx fire diminished. “That’s
right, that’s right!” He laughed loudly and spoke into his helmet mic: “Gideon here, trader secure!”

“Is that even your real name?”
Jamie asked from the ground. He’d heard a whisper that Gideon’s real name was
Eustace Clemmons.

Gideon grabbed at Jamie’s space suit
and hauled him up. “Is that your real ass I just saved?”

“They weren’t shooting at me,”
Jamie said, pulling away. “They were shooting at
you
. When you came here,
then
they were shooting at me.”

“Maybe you’d like to take them on
alone!” Gideon elbowed Jamie hard, just beneath the merchant badge. Jamie stumbled a step back.

“Whatever.”

As Gideon returned to blazing
away at the Xylanx, Jamie dusted himself off, glad
that his outfit had absorbed most of the blow. If Gideon was supposed to be one
of his bodyguards, Jamie thought, he’d sure missed the class on not hurting his
charge. Not to mention a couple of stages of human evolution.

Since he’d met the guy back on Altair,
Jamie had found Gideon alternately terrifying and ludicrous. With close-cropped
brown hair and no neck to speak of, the older man looked like a child’s
military toy. There was no mistaking why: everyone on the team knew what
Gideon’s problem was. Early experiments using nanoids
to stimulate the adrenal glands had turned a whole cadre of human guinea pigs
into rage machines. The microscopic robots inside Gideon weren’t active any
longer, but they’d messed with his sense of self-preservation, blackened his
outlook on life, and tensed him tighter than a rubber band around a basketball.

“Dreadcases”
who partook of the therapies were quite pleasant: Jamie’s mother had a faithful
bodyguard who played third flute in the National Philharmonic. He didn’t know
why Gideon hadn’t gotten treatment, or why Bridget entrusted him with any
authority. Perhaps he had once eaten a lion that had threatened her.

“These guys, these guys,” Gideon
said, blasting another armored Xylander at long range
to no effect. The whole battle scene seemed bizarre to Jamie: combatants on
both sides struck by projectiles would either shrug them off,
or at most tumble backward, only to recover. Gideon’s lower faceplate fogged
and smeared, and Jamie couldn’t tell from the man’s expression whether he took
his targets’ refusal to die as a personal affront, or worthy of admiration.

“Who are these guys?” Gideon
asked, to no one. “They won’t go down!”

“They’re called Xylanx,”
Jamie said.

“Lots of Xs. I like it. Sounds
crunchy.”

“These are the same people who
got me on the depot.”

“I know that, dishwhip.
I was there,” the squad leader said. “They came in here fast — jamming our
transmissions before they landed. Set up a screen of fire so their people could
reach the butte.” He pointed to the top of the Xylanx
ship, where Jamie saw the small cannons blasting away. “When their team left
the auction hall, they stopped jamming, but I still can’t raise Yang in there.
What’s going on?”

Jamie quickly described the scene
inside the auction hall. Gideon’s eyes narrowed when Jamie got to the part
about the jorvil, and the squad leader actually
seemed to growl a little.

“Big monster,” Gideon said,
seeming to consider the choice between saving Bridget’s crew and continuing to
shoot at enemies who could take what he had to deal out.

Jamie was doing some considering
of his own: he was considering cowering in a corner to wait for a decision when
Lissa Trovatelli’s voice
piped into his ear. “Q/A here,” the quartermaster said from
Indispensable
. “Gideon, Unknown One is
powering up to go,” she said, referring to the Xylanx
craft.

Gideon groaned audibly. “Yang’s
team’s in trouble. Hate to leave this—”

“We need to grab one of these
guys,” Trovatelli said. “I want to know more about
them.”

“It’s mutual,” Jamie piped in.
“They stole our knowglobe.”

“I saw,” Trovatelli
said. “I’ve been trying to send a purge code to wipe the memory, but they’ve
blocked that somehow.”

“Stinkin’ thieves!” Gideon said, firing faster.

Trovatelli spoke more firmly. “We need to
stop them, Gideon. At the very least, capture one, so we know—”

“I’ve been trying!” Gideon
snarled and spat angrily, the spittle striking the inside of his faceplate.

So
that’s what the smear is
,
Jamie thought.
Gross.

“You guys were the ones who
didn’t want to arm the ship — you and your low-risk, low-reward mission,” Gideon
said. He slowed his rate of fire almost imperceptibly, seemingly having had a
thought. “Hey, maybe we could ram their ship with ours. Or at least park on top
of ’em—”

“Hell, no,” Jamie said. The
bauxite aboard wasn’t that valuable on its own — except, for whatever reason, to
the Leelites — but he was damned if he was going to be
stranded here. “
Indispensable
’s
my call, right? I say no!”

Gideon’s jaw locked. “Puny, pissant trader…”

Jamie pointed back toward the
collapsed tunnel. “Bridget! Monster! Remember?”

Gideon looked to Jamie as if he
was struggling to concentrate.

“It would be easier if you
stopped shooting at things,” Jamie said.

“Shut up.” But Gideon did stop
firing — one of his guns, at least. He spoke in a calmer voice. “Scan Unknown One
if you can, Q/A. Trader’s safe and we can’t take on their ship guns. We’re
going in after the monster!” He paused. “And — uh, to extract Surge
One.”

Trovatelli transmitted her disapproval. “We
may not get this chance—”

“I’m in charge,” Gideon said,
glancing back at the cave-in. “Get me a reading on what’s blocking the
entrance. We’re going in.”

Jamie looked outside. The firing
had ceased. “You can go in,” he said, “and have all the monsters you want. I’m going
back to the ship before my pulse rate needs a comma.”

“You’re not going anywhere.
You’re safer with me,” Gideon said, turning into the darkness of the cavern.

“You haven’t seen that thing down
there,” Jamie said.

“It hasn’t seen
me
.”

I
don’t believe it
,
Kolvax thought as he reached the steps of the
X-560
.
They’re going to let us go.

Kolvax hadn’t come here to wipe out the
human expedition, as enjoyable as that might have been. But it was useful to
take the humans’ measure in battle, nonetheless. The trader’s defenders on the
surface were good, he had to admit. The forces outside the auction hall had
exchanged fire with his team for a long time, with the humans taking only one
casualty — and even that was just an injury.

Kolvax had seen the human’s squad
leader — “Gideon,” the transmissions called him — carry
the incapacitated soldier over his shoulder back to the cargo ship before
resuming fighting. Later on he’d seen Gideon run across a field of fire to
protect his trader. Foolhardy acts both, but the sort of defiant behavior he
liked in a warrior. This Gideon had the heart of a Xylander.

He quickly dispelled the
comparison from his mind. It was distasteful to think about the ways the Xylanx and the humans were similar. And he’d already
discovered another likeness he didn’t expect. The humans didn’t have any
ammunition that could pierce the Stalker armor of the Xylanx,
but neither had the Xylanx brought any ammunition
that could pierce the armor of the humans.

That’ll
change
, he
thought. He’d succeeded in his mission, despite things not going exactly as
planned. His ship had fired the first shot at the butte, rocking the auction
hall and giving him his advantage of surprise. He hadn’t counted on the
appearance of the jorvil, evidently awakened from its
hibernation by the blast, but it had taken out the trader’s defenders inside
and made stealing the knowglobe simple.

With the Xylanx
transport’s engine rumbling, he watched as his underlings carried the human knowglobe up the steps. Some of the data would be instantly
available: that which the team shared with everyone. But most Signatory Systems
expeditions used their knowglobes for logistical
assistance. There would be other information in the database ready for the
taking. Useful facts about humanity — and about these humans in
particular.

He had a lot of studying to do.

“Keep digging! I’ll cover you!”

Bridget watched the jorvil warily as Dinner toiled below. The infrared visuals
weren’t much help to Bridget in seeing the cold-bodied jorvil,
so her armor’s motion-tracking sensors had pitched in to paint the creature
into what she saw through her faceplate. Sadly, the darkness wasn’t keeping the
jorvil from chasing — and finding — the Leelites. With her connection to the Leelite
knowglobe gone, at least she was spared hearing the
screams.

In the pit, Dinner, his helmet
spotlight activated, shoveled away massive chunks of
ice with his gloved hands. The big Hawaiian was throwing his back into it, she
saw. The armature within their uniforms multiplied the wearer’s strength; with
Dinner, that hardly seemed necessary.

“I’ve buried a few buddies,” he
said. “Never had to dig any up!”

The good thing was that he wasn’t
alone in the work now. Cowling, Wu, and Lopez-Herrera had been unearthed — perhaps
un-Leeled was the better term. Cowling was already down
in another pit, digging. And while Lopez-Herrera was seeing to Wu and her hyperextended arm, she was using her armor’s sensors to
help locate the remaining four soldiers beneath the cold debris in the dark.

“I think I’ve got O’Herlihy,”
Leah Cowling said. “I need more light down here!”

“Star shells,
embed mode,” Bridget ordered. From wherever they stood, her troops above the
ice adjusted their rifles. Together, they fired gleaming red shots toward the
ceiling.

Driving into the frozen wall, the
hissing munitions made like the ancient projectiles that were their namesake. The
star shells glowed, blazing and crimson, giving the hall beneath an eerie cast.
Now she saw more clearly the surviving Leelites,
flitting past like insects around a bug zapper — and the jorvil,
still after them.

Her armor did the counting. Just
twelve Leelites left in the atrium. The rest had
already closed and sealed the door leading down into their underground home. She’d
joked about it before, but now needed to worry: What would the behemoth do when
it finished off the hors d’oeuvres?

“I can’t believe we just let them
leave,” Trovatelli said, standing in the broken-down passageway
leading into the Black Butte. “Your Xylanx, I mean.”

“Not
my
Xylanx,” Jamie said, leaning against
the wall as a load of snow went past. Surge Two had brought in the tracked
cargo tenders
Indispensable
had transported
to help deliver the bauxite with; now the soldier-driven vehicles were hauling
away the debris blocking the entrance. Q/A had established that the tunnel was structurally
sound and had concocted the plan to remove what had fallen. But nothing, it
seemed to Jamie, could lift the woman’s spirits.

“We really should have done something,”
she said, clearly unhappy. “They were in our depot. And now
here?” She looked at Jamie. “Too coincidental.
It doesn’t feel right to you, does it?”

Jamie shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I
haven’t felt right since I started eating cheese from a squeeze bag.”

Trovatelli frowned. She was beautiful and
smart, as he’d always known, but she hadn’t seemed this worried before. The
young woman he’d met on Altair had seemed very casually driven, certain her
talents were up to any technical problem. Bridget had been the overserious one. Since the fight aboard the Dragon’s Depot,
however, the Xylanx had concerned her greatly.

Oh
well
, Jamie thought.
Securing their base was partially Lissa’s
responsibility.
No one likes having their
turf invaded.

“
Al
…
most
…
there!
”
Gideon called,
rearing back with his arms to swing a great pick again. The squad leader was
out ahead of the vehicles, chopping the hell out of the roadblock. Jamie
imagined how happy Gideon must have been to find the heavy implement in with
the freight.

“Think you’ll start carrying one
of those, Vic?” Trovatelli said, brightening with
amusement.

“
Yeahhh
,” Gideon said lustily,
smashing the pick into the ice. “I’ll take two!”

Jamie rolled his eyes. The jorvil was about to have its turf invaded, too.

Michael O’Herlihy
crawled out of the hole Cowling had dug. Seeing Bridget, he staggered toward
her and pointed to the rifle in her hands. “I think that’s mine,” he said.

“Finders keepers,” Bridget said,
holding the weapon and watching above. “Mine blew up.”

“So much for
getting your deposit back.”
Arms sagging and clearly exhausted, O’Herlihy took a
deep breath and straightened. “What’d I miss?” he said gamely.

Bridget stared into the space
overhead. “I’m wondering what
I’ve
missed.”

Near the ceiling, the count of Leelites had held steady in the last few minutes. And the jorvil had seemed increasingly agitated. Again and again,
it facepalmed — an old slang expression that was
exactly descriptive here — against the high wall of the atrium, missing its prey.
The wispy aliens would appear a split second later, hovering close to the
still-burning star shells. The jorvil would then
twist and writhe, brushing the Leelites back into
play with the ridged fins of its long “neck.”

But the Leelites
were tiring, she could tell, and the jorvil’s
movements were growing more frenetic. Was it hungry? Had it been above the
surface for too long? Or…

The answer reached her literally
in the form of rays from above. “It’s the star shells!” she said. Nothing else
they’d fired had hurt the jorvil. But it was moving
in such a way that it did not expose its “face” too closely to the sizzling red-light
sources. “Mike, what’s in those things?”

O’Herlihy knew fireworks like no one else,
having caused the evacuation of a chicken restaurant in his teens. “Basic tracer — strontium nitrate and magnesium. Burns redder
than hell’s own damnation,” he said. “Give the old worm heartburn?”

“Maybe,” Bridget said. She lifted
her weapon — his weapon — and swore. “Out. Anybody else?”

“I fired all mine,” Dinner said.

“My Spraecher’s
still under all that somewhere,” Wu said, nodding to the ice pile from which
Bridget’s last team member had just been retrieved.

Another rumble shook the room.
Bridget switched back to live ammo and spun — just in time to see a cargo tender
punch through the darkened hole that had been the entrance. Against the faint
light from outside the tunnel, she saw the tender’s driver disembark.

“Surge Two reporting,” Gideon
said, standing outside the cab as his other troops
filed in. He picked up his weapon from inside and looked up at the jorvil. He whistled. “Wow. The dink wasn’t kidding.”

Bridget clambered over a pile of
ice to address him. “Gideon, do you still have any of your star shell charges?”

“I’ve got all of them,” he said.
“Never use ’em. They’re noncombat
items.”

“Today’s different. You’ve got
four charges?”

“Eight,” he said, pointing to the
homebrew multi-rifle.

She turned back and looked up. “I
think we can blind the thing if we can hit it in the face somehow,” she said.
But looking up, she realized that the jorvil’s head
was never lower than fifteen meters above, and there was no good angle on it
from below. “How do we bring it down here?”

“Don’t worry about that,” Gideon
said, slinging his rifle and pulling a pick from the cab. “I’ve got this.”

As the man clambered over an icy
obstacle, Bridget looked back to see Jamie and Trovatelli
entering.

“He’s crazy,” Jamie said, face
white. “Certifiable. A loon—”

“Careful, he’ll hear you,”
Bridget said.

“I don’t care. He nearly brought
the cave down on us twice. He’s twisted like a bag of bread!”

“I know,” Bridget replied,
grinning. She turned to see the leader of her second team charging up a large,
slanting slab of upturned ice. Thanks to the internal servos, HardSHEL armor wasn’t hard to run in, and the lower gravity
was also working in Gideon’s favor. But anyone else would have looked at the
sheer ramp as forbidding — not to mention what awaited
at the end: the enormous tubular trunk of the jorvil.

Not Gideon, who launched himself
from the end of the makeshift ramp. Positioning the pick in front of him, he
drove its head into the stone-encrusted body of the jorvil.
Prying open a spot he could use as a handhold, he grabbed on with his free hand
and swung the pick again.

“Stay ready,” Bridget said to her
team on the ground, most of whose guns were trained on the creature.

“Ready for
what?” O’Herlihy said, weaponless.

Bridget blinked. “Well, I don’t
really know,” she said as she watched Gideon chopping his own ladder up the
massive freestanding spine. “But stay ready anyway.”

Beside her, Trovatelli
marveled. “It’s like Jack and the Beanstalk,” she said.

“Yeah,” Jamie said, likewise
spellbound. “Was Jack a homicidal maniac?”

Bridget chuckled — and then raised
her rifle again as Gideon approached the top of the creature. “We’ve got to
give him a second when he gets up there,” she said. “Lasers,
Spore nucleus package. Target the facial claws — and don’t hit Gideon!”

Around her, the members of her
team focused on the top of the jorvil. It might have
sounded like a tall order, but this was a surgical-strike team accustomed to
firing with pinpoint accuracy at tiny moving targets. The lasers were really
only designed for slicing open Spore nuclei — they hadn’t bothered using them
against the Xylanx, whose armor’s refractive coating
would have diminished their power. Bridget didn’t really expect them to do
anything to the monster now either, but she hoped they might get its attention.

They watched as Gideon shimmied
toward a gap between two of the six fingers splayed around the creature’s
facial orifice. Another moment and the pick fell from his hand. When the man
reached the writhing creature’s facial level, Bridget saw the facial talons
begin to flex faster than any Venus flytrap ever moved for a kill.

“Fire!” Bridget yelled. A dozen beams
appeared in unison, two targeting a finger each. That breakdown was just luck,
but Bridget’s hunch was correct. The claws stopped moving for a moment, short
of the armored body of the man now crouching on the jorvil’s
face, gun pointed into its maw.

“
Eat this, ugly!
”

Gideon fired one star shell
charge after another into the creature. A cavernous-sounding pop-pop-pop
followed, resonating through the creature’s mouth. Bridget imagined what was
happening inside: as designed, the missiles were seeking walls to bury
themselves in — and instead were finding themselves nice niches in the alimentary
canal of a giant alien serpent. By the fourth popping sound, she could see
Gideon wrapping his body around one of the facial fingers.

It was a necessary move, because
in the next instant one of the final blasts went off deep within the jorvil — almost at Bridget’s ground level. All around the
circumference of the creature, the stony rings crackled and crisped, and chunks
of its exterior started to fall off. When Bridget saw the jorvil
swaying in her direction, she wasted no time in shoving Jamie and Trovatelli into motion.

“Go! Now!”

 But the jorvil did
not fall like a mighty tree. Rather, it crumbled from the base, sinking like an
imploded building under demolition. A colossal din echoed through the atrium.
From her position safely away, Bridget saw Gideon riding the corpse down, a man
on the strangest elevator ride ever. When the last section tipped over a few
meters from the ground, Gideon finally released the dead “hand” and dove away.
He landed in a somersault that quickly ended in a chest-first splat on the soft
but jagged ground.

The giant jorvil
was now a pile of gigantic, ashen Christmas wreaths, the interiors of some
still glowing with the blazing star shells. Whatever drove the body of the
great worm, the surge team had found something it could not handle. From above,
the surviving Leelites floated gently to the ground.

“Medic!” Bridget rushed around the debris
to Gideon’s side. “Don’t try to move,” she said, looking at his armor, even
more banged up now.

“Ow,”
Gideon simply said. But she could see him smile.