Drifter's War (24 page)

The bounty hunter picked up a disk and slapped it against her forehead. Her crossed arms and defiant expression said it all.

Lando sighed, shook his head ruefully, and reached for a disk. It felt cool against his skin.

Slowly, reverently, the constructs chose a disk and placed it on their foreheads. A lot of things happened at once.

Wexel-15's eyes rolled back in his head. Dru-21's normally expressionless face convulsed with pleasure, and the humans felt something akin to an electric current surge through their bodies. It brought neither pain nor pleasure, but was distinctly uncomfortable. Lando was in the process of reaching for his disk when the feeling disappeared. He heard a voice inside his head. It felt big, powerful, confident.

"Greetings." The single word seemed to reverberate through every cell of his mind.

Lando stirred uneasily. It felt weird to have someone or something else in his head. It was confusing too. Were thoughts sufficient, or should he speak out loud?

"Thoughts are sufficient," the voice said. "The Lords used thought to communicate with me, and I shall use it to communicate with you. Geeber dorx."

Lando frowned. "Geeeber dorx?" What the hell did that mean? He waited for the computer to reply but nothing came.

Thoughts that felt like Della flooded into the smuggler's mind. A telepathic conference call! It seemed God had a number of tricks up his electronic sleeve. "We would like to discuss the current military situation."

Lando felt God return. "You are to be complimented, Dee-1. Your tactics have been successful. Issle fleeb garbex noghorn… planetary rotations from now."

Lando looked around the table. Della shrugged, Wexel-15 looked confused, and Dru-21 was visibly concerned.

The smuggler's worst fears were confirmed. The gibberish was not part of God's normal communications patterns. He swallowed hard.

"Are you aware that some of your thoughts are reaching us in the form of gibberish?"

There was a five-second pause, as if God were checking on something. "Your powers of observation are flawed, Lando-1. All of my primary and secondary systems are operating at or above ninety-seven percent effectiveness."

Wexel-15 looked absolutely stricken, Dru-21's frown became even more pronounced, and Della looked thoughtful. Her thoughts were even, deliberate, as if speaking to a child.

"We believe that the Il Ronnians are trying to find you. If they succeed, their technicians will take you apart and remove you from the planet."

"That is umberlak."

Della shrugged and looked at Lando. He decided to give it a try. "Tell us where you are. We will send troops to protect you."

"I am everywhere ibor nowhere at all."

Lando forced himself to be patient. "That is impossible. Everyone is somewhere."

"Ardo klonk."

There was silence for a moment. All of them felt the same sense of dismay. Della chose her words carefully. "Did you order an attack on the valley that the Il Ronn call 'Holding Area Two'?"

"Yes."

A sensible reply. Expressions brightened.

"It was a poor decision. Many constructs died because of it. Why did you do it?"

There was a long silence followed by: "Nander pog 77784321 orbo."

More gibberish. Faces fell. There was another long silence. Their thoughts were the same. God had suffered some sort of mental breakdown. Why? There was no way to know.

Lando waited for God to read their thoughts, to deny the problem, but nothing came.

Wexel-15 spoke for the first time. His question was appropriate for the general that he had recently become.

"We need information about the Il Ronn. Supply dumps, communications, troop placements, anything you can give us."

"UCKERGAT!"

The thought had an urgent feel.

Dru-21 was the first to respond. "Could you repeat that, please? We did not understand."

"UCKERGAT! UCKERGAT! UCKERGAT! UCKERGAT! UCKERGAT! UCKERGAT!"

Lando shook his head slowly. "I hate to say it, but God is a few planets short of a full system."

Dru-21 tried once again. "God? Are you still there?"

"Abernom 6666 XXXX demidog."

Lando peeled the disk off his forehead and dropped it onto the table.

Slowly, reluctantly, the others did likewise. They started to rise but stopped when the table started to vibrate. Suddenly, without warning, large sheets of paper began to appear from under the tabletop. They hit Wexel-15's knees, startled him, and slid to the floor.

"What the…?" Lando got off his stool and dropped to his knees. He saw that a large black box had been mounted under the tabletop. A printer of some sort. It whined softly as sheet followed sheet onto the floor.

God, or the part of God that was still rational, was responding to their request for information. Or was trying to anyway.

The process continued unabated for a full five minutes until it stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Lando estimated that more than two hundred sheets of paper had been delivered.

Humans and constructs worked shoulder to shoulder to retrieve the printouts and stack them on the table. However, due to the fact that Dru-21 was the only person who could actually
read
the printouts, the rest were forced to watch while he sorted them into piles.

Dru-21 found that many of the sheets were covered with total gibberish, while others made partial sense, but were useless because they dealt with crops, warehouse manifests, or other mundane matters.

Still, he found that some of the printouts contained what appeared to be valuable information about Il Ronnian defenses, troop movements, and so forth, not to mention the beautiful, almost flawless satellite photos of the planet's surface.

It took time to sort them out, select what seemed like the most important, and shuffle them into some sort of order.

So, while Dru-21 worked on that, Lando took the satellite photos and taped them to the wall. They at least were something he could understand without Dru-21's assistance.

The first thing he noticed was that all of them had been obtained from Il Ronnian rather than indig satellites. In fact, knowing the Il Ronnian tendency to steal anything that wasn't nailed down, Lando supposed that the local satellites, if any, were safely stashed in the belly of some warship.

The smuggler couldn't read or write Il Ronnian, but it didn't take a linguist to see that the photo captions featured the same twisted script that he'd seen on captured cargoes, and in numerous documentaries.

The photos were Il Ronnian all right, which meant that God had the ability to tap into their communications systems without them knowing, and steal whatever he wanted. Or had been able to do so anyway, since his abilities seemed more than a little impaired at the moment.

Like Lando, Della was immediately attracted to the photos, and the information that they contained.

The first thing Della noticed was that while the photos were intended to provide the Il Ronnians with intelligence about the constructs and their activities, they worked in reverse as well. The damage caused by the destruction of villages,

factories, and artifact sites were like open wounds on the planet's body.

The resolution was excellent. Many of the shots were wide and showed thousands of square miles, while others were closer in and covered a third or even a quarter of that area. And some were tight, so tight that she could make out the identification numbers stenciled across the top of Il Ronnian vehicles, and count heads in a holding area similar to the one that they had attacked the day before.

Quickly, instinctively, the bounty hunter looked for strength and weakness. Where could the constructs attack and cause the most damage? Which areas were so heavily defended that an attack would end in almost certain defeat? What if anything could she predict about the near future? Those thoughts and more churned through her mind as Della studied the photos.

Lando saw the military significance of the photos, but lacked Della's military training, and was drawn more to the wide shots than those that focused on specific installations. He was first and foremost a pilot, a smuggler looking at the target for the first time, fascinated by the overall network of cities, villages, and roads.

What he saw was a series of orderly patterns. Cities packed with rectangular buildings, surrounded by a maze of squared off interlocking streets, some dead-ending, some blocked at both ends, some connecting with others via traffic circles.

And then, radiating out from the cities, the smuggler saw arrow-straight roads and highways that only grudgingly gave way to obstacles like rivers, hills, and mountains. Roads and highways that served as connective tissue, binding hundreds of hilltop villages and lordly estates together, reaching farther and farther out until blocked by climate, terrain, or water.

Like Della, Lando was struck by the extent of the destruction that the Il Ronnians had wrought. Half-excavated cities, devastated villages, blown bridges, severed roads. They were everywhere.

The smuggler was struck by something else as well, the uneasy feeling that there was something familiar about the photos, something he should recognize but didn't. He looked at them in different ways. He turned some of them upside down. But the thought, if thought it was, refused to come.

Finally, unable to put his finger on it and tired of trying, Lando gave up. Della needed help sorting and interpreting tight shots. But even as he worked Lando couldn't escape the feeling that he had missed something, something that was big, and something that was very, very important.

18

Cap squinted into the slowly setting sun. It hit the top of the warehouse and threw a long hard shadow across the plaza.

Children, Melissa included, played a game in which they pretended that the shadow was a cave. A cave filled with the same killer constructs that had terrorized their ancestors. The youngsters laughed, squealed, and screamed in play-pretend terror as they ran back and forth.

The children, and the village they were part of, were like all the others that he'd seen. Buildings on a hilltop, houses ringing the slopes, streets twisting and turning down to the valley below.

Cap looked around. It was early yet and the rest of the tables were empty. Good. He had the pub to himself.

He and Melissa had been on the road for five or six days now. A long dreary affair during which they traveled at night, mixed with the local villagers during the day, and answered the same questions over and over again.

Where are you from? What is it like? How did you get here? It was, Cap decided, enough to make you drink. He picked up the mug and took another sip of the beerlike brew.

The reason for the tour was to build support for the resistance movement, improve morale, and recruit more troops. That's what Lando
said
anyway.

The truth was something different. Cap knew that the
real
purpose of the tour was to get him out of the way, protect Melissa from harm, and make friends among the constructs.

"Hi, folks! No dangerous-looking teeth, buggy eyes, or long pointy tails here!"

Melissa had objective number three in the bag. The constructs loved her. She looked to make sure that Cap was watching. He nodded and she performed a series of cartwheels that left her peers gawking in amazement.

Cap grinned and lifted his mug in a mock salute. Melissa was the one and only thing that he'd done right, and even she'd been conceived while he was more than a little drunk.

There was a noise, a series of noises actually, but they were distant and unrelated to his present thoughts. Cap ignored them, reluctant to leave the warm, hazy embrace of his own thoughts.

After all, he deserved some relaxation, didn't he? Having dragged his rear from one village to another for days on end? Putting himself on display like some sort of freak in a sideshow? Damned right he did.

But the noises refused to go away. They became louder, and louder, until they couldn't be ignored. What was that anyway? Not helicopters, it couldn't be helicopters, because this area was too remote to be of interest to the Il Ronnians. That's what they'd told him anyway.

Then Cap heard the
thump! thump! thump!
of automatic cannon fire and was peppered with tiny bits of debris when a shell exploded not fifteen feet away. An engine roared and a shadow swept over him.

It was a reconnaissance by fire! The Il Ronnians hoped to drive resistance fighters out into the open. The only problem was that there weren't any. Not yet anyway.

Cap staggered to his feet. There were screams as constructs ran in every direction.

Their guide, a heavy named Lana-8, appeared at his side. She wore a translator and looked terribly distraught.

"Tell us, Captain Sorenson! Tell us what to do!"

Cap felt dizzy. Tell them what to do? No, someone else should handle that. Someone sober. He remembered the sound of klaxons as the
Star of Empire
died around him and a multitude of desperate voices asked him what to do. He had solved the problem by passing out and leaving the decisions to someone else. If only he could do that now. Unfortunately he was sober, well, not exactly sober, but not sufficiently drunk to pass out either.

Melissa ran toward him. Hair flew around her head. She looked concerned, the way a parent looks when their child is in danger, the way
he
should look but didn't. "Run, Daddy, run!"

He took her words and repeated them. "Run! Disappear into the countryside! Take my daughter with you!"

Lana-8 had followed orders all of her life. She grabbed Melissa by an arm and ran.

Melissa screamed, "No! Let me go! Daddy!" But it was no use. Lana-8 was strong, too strong to resist, and Melissa was forced to follow.

Cap watched his daughter go, tears streaming down her face, struggling to break free. He wanted to reach out to her, give her comfort somehow, tell her how much he loved her.

But time had run out. Almost all of it wasted, squandered, and spent on things of little value. It had to do with decisions made long ago, with promises never kept, with responsibilities never fulfilled.