Lords of the Seventh Swarm (2 page)

Chapter 2

“Och, this is no proper place for a bear,” Orick growled. He sniffed at the dead monster at his feet.

The creature looked like some huge gray slime mold. It had just come slithering out of the stream not forty feet distant, and Gallen had been forced to fry it with his incendiary rifle. Now it lay, burned and quivering, just outside camp. It was the third monster Gallen had killed in the past three hours.

Orick shook his head, wondering if the slime was edible. “My mother always said that you’d bring me to Ruin, Gallen, and here we are.”

“It’s just the name for the planet—because of all the alien ruins hereabouts,” Gallen said. He grunted, pulling at some vines near the edge of camp, trying to get them from the ground so that he could burn them for a campfire. The little bear, Tallea, went to his side and began pulling with her teeth, trying to help Gallen out.

Orick glanced off at the skyline. Ruin was a strange world—too far from its primary sun, which sat directly overhead like a child’s purple ball. It gave the landscape a violet hue.

Here, strewn across the desert, were huge red boulders, shaped like eggs, lying in the sand, and farther in the distance, a wind-sculpted sandstone mesa rose above the desert floor like some castle. Odd bushes grew all around—some sprouting like hair, others all thick and rubbery. The plants filled the air with alien scents.

Only the sound of the stream, burbling as brooks will, reminded Orick of home. No, Ruin was no proper place for a bear. Still, Orick wouldn’t have minded it so much if he could actually
see
some of these famous ruins that the planet was named after, but Orick had no such luck. It was, after all, just another alien landscape.

The gray mold at Orick’s feet quivered, whether in dying throes or in an attempt to escape, he didn’t know.

“Maybe we should move the camp away from the brook,” Orick said. “I think it attracts predators.”

Gallen didn’t answer. He’d got some of the dead vines over in front of the spaceship and was trying to set them afire. Tallea was out looking for more wood. Perhaps Gallen was building a fire in the hope of scaring off predators. Perhaps he did it because they planned on camping here, next to this stream, and Gallen was just used to having a campfire. They didn’t really
need
a fire, as far as Orick could tell. Though he’d grown sick of riding in a spaceship these past few weeks, he still thought it safer to sleep in there than to sleep out here in the open, on an alien world.

Why couldn’t Gallen find some nicer planet to camp on? Surely there were worlds in the process of being terraformed hereabouts, places where forests grew and the grass was green. Proper places for a bear. But, no, Maggie wanted this planet because it wasn’t listed as inhabitable on the star charts: “A good place to hide from the dronon,” she said. They were already well quit of the Milky Way. Here in the Carina Galaxy, they’d come to the fringe worlds, on the edge of civilization.

Gallen quit fiddling with the wood, looked up at the ship. The
Nightswift’s
landing lights blinked violet and ivory. It was a sleek ship, some sixty meters long and thirty wide.

The headdress of black ringlets that Gallen wore over his long hair glittered in the soft lights, the crystal disks of memory for his mantle jiggling as he drew ragged breaths. A single sapphire gem began to glow in the center of Gallen’s mantle. Gallen had just chosen that moment to download his memories into his mantle so that if he died, his memories could be placed into a clone.

After a few heartbeats, the gem quit blazing so fiercely. Maggie was still in the ship, resting. Being nearly five months pregnant was taking its toll on her energy levels.

Gallen gazed down at Orick. “I’ve been thinking,” he said softly, so as not to be heard through the ship’s open door. “We could move this ship to another camp—or maybe we could go back the way we came. It’s time to quit running from the dronon. I have to fight them sometime.”

Orick had been Gallen’s friend for years, yet he felt no less loyal to Maggie. He didn’t like having to side with one or the other.

Orick said, “Fighting is too risky. For every minute you keep running, that’s another moment of freedom you give to every man and woman in the galaxy.”

“That’s where Maggie is wrong!” Gallen said, voicing an argument that had been going on for weeks. “The dronon are setting outposts on every world, searching for us. They’re killing those who help hide us. The very threat of invasion keeps our people in fear: what kind of freedom is that?”

“It’s a devil’s bargain,” Orick agreed, “but you have to admit, Gallen,
you
don’t have an answer to this problem.” He looked down at the quivering mold, pondering.

“What do you mean, I have no answer?” Gallen said. “I just told you my answer.”

“I know, I heard you. Kill Kintiniklintit. But you’ve been killing outlaws and usurpers ever since we met,” Orick grumbled. “And what has it got you? You killed the Lords of the Sixth Swarm, and now you want to face the Lords of the Seventh Swarm. And when you beat them, maybe you’ll have to fight some more, or maybe you can go back to killing folks who are no better than dronon, though they have human shapes. And do you know what it’s got you, Gallen: you’re a slave. You’re a miserable slave!”

“A slave?” Gallen said, amused by Orick’s tirade. “Maybe so, but … I was
born
to be a Lord Protector.”

“Yeah, so you’re a clone of some famous Lord Protector,” Orick grumbled. “That doesn’t mean you have to follow in his footsteps. As I remember the story, didn’t he eventually get martyred? Are you going to follow in his footsteps? Are you going to let somebody else decide how you’ll live your life?”

“What else can I do?” Gallen said. He began pacing, hardly daring to look at Orick.

And at that moment, the answer came to Orick, an answer he had felt in the depths of his soul but never had been quite able to voice to Gallen. “Ignore evil,” Orick said. “Jesus said to forgive others. If a man comes to you, though he has sinned seventy times seven, and asks forgiveness, then you forgive. Ignore evil.”

Gallen shook his head angrily. “I disagree! ‘Resist Satan, and he will flee from you’! God strengthened David so he could slay Goliath. God ordered Joshua to destroy the Hittites and the Jebusites.”

Orick grinned, a glint in his eye. “The devil quotes Scripture, too. You’re not a religious man, Gallen. When did you start quoting Scripture?”

Gallen laughed. “I warmed my share of pews as a kid. You forget, I’ve got more than one priest in my family.”

Orick felt chagrined. He said softly, “Sometimes, sometimes God has commanded men to fight. But I’d like to know Gallen, are you so eager to fight because that’s what God wants of you, or is it just in your nature? Sometimes God tells people to run, too. Moses took the children of Israel and fled from Pharaoh. Joseph and Mary were told to flee Israel when Herod sent his soldiers to slaughter the babes. Sometimes you should run from evil. Maggie’s right in this, in asking you to run. Her life is at risk as much as your own. And there’s the babe to worry about. She has to make the choice for her own life.”

Gallen opened his mouth to argue, yet nothing came out.

Orick looked up at Gallen, then shook his head in despair. “Gallen, my oldest and dearest friend, I think it’s time for me to leave you.”

There, he’d said it. He’d been thinking it for months, and now he’d finally said it.

“Leave?” Gallen asked, astonished. “Where would you go?”

“Anywhere. We’ve been on a dozen fine planets. Home, maybe. Back to Tihrglas.”

Gallen’s mouth just worked of its own accord, as if he would speak but couldn’t find the words. He’d been totally unprepared.

Orick felt weary, sick at heart. “Oh, don’t you see it, Gallen? I’ve been thinking about this for months. The night the dronon came to Tihrglas, I almost left you for good. You know I’ve always wanted to be a priest. I wanted to serve God, but you’ve become a slave to evil, and I can’t watch it anymore. You sicken me, my friend. You’re destroying yourself!”

Orick’s eyes watered with tears. It hurt to say these things.

“What do you mean, I sicken you?” Gallen asked. “I haven’t changed.”

“Oh yes you have!” Orick said. “Remember the day we first met?”

Gallen looked at Orick, confused, and shook his head.

Orick reminded him. “We were on that hot August road that runs through the hills by the mill outside Gort Ard, and you was hunting for that killer, Dan’l O’Leary?”

“You mean the
very
first time we met?” Gallen asked. “You were with that friar, what’s-his-name.”

“Friar Bannon,” Orick said, remembering the thin old fellow with the rotting teeth, his head shaved bald. “A godly man—one of the best there has ever been.”

It had been a scorcher of a day, and Gallen was tracking a murderer and had lost the boy’s trail somewhere along the road. Dan’l O’Leary had managed to leap off the margin of the highway into some brush. Gallen could not discover his trail. Yet Gallen also knew the general area where the boy had vanished, and he’d asked Orick to sniff the killer out.

Now, Friar Bannon had known the killer. Dan’l O’Leary was only fifteen, but he was a big kid, and dumb. The kind who figured it was easier to make it as a highwayman than as a farmer. So one summer’s night he waylaid a wealthy traveler, brandishing a cudgel. When the fellow was slow to get his purse open, Dan’l hit him in the head, hoping to subdue him, but in his excitement he hit the fellow too hard, knocking his brains all over the dirt road.

While Dan’l stood over the corpse, looking for coins hidden in the man’s boots, his own mother rounded the bend in the road and discovered her son was a murderer.

In her shame, she ran into town and told everyone what had happened. Dan’l took off into the woods, where he foraged off the land and sometimes visited Friar Bannon, telling how he was tom by the desire to return home, wanting to repent, knowing he’d hang if he did, suffering from the pain of a damned soul. So it was that Orick came upon Gallen, hunting for the killer, and Gallen asked Orick to sniff the boy out.

“What will you do to him if you catch him?” Orick had asked, for Orick was a young bear, and having heard of the boy’s grief from Friar Bannon, he was not sure if it would be appropriate to help apprehend the youngster. Friar Bannon felt convinced that the boy would repent, and he hoped that the law would be lenient with the child—perhaps give him a good beating rather than a hanging. The murder was a youthful mistake, after all, not the act of a hardened criminal.

Yet the boy compounded his crimes by not turning himself in. Friar Bannon had said that given one winter in the wild, this boy
would
become a hardened highwayman—or the weather would break him, and he’d come to his senses. Friar Bannon hoped for the latter.

“I don’t know what I’ll do with this one,” Gallen had answered Orick thoughtfully, sitting down on the roadside. “It’s been bothering me. Gut him, maybe. I don’t want to put the kid through a hanging. The wait and embarrassment. His poor mother is beside herself already. He isn’t a mean lad. So I think I’ll kill him swiftly. Looks like that would be about best for everyone.”

“Not for Dan’l,” Friar Bannon had said quickly.

“Maybe not,” Gallen had agreed. “But I can’t just let him go free.”

“No, the best thing for the boy would be to make his peace with God and man,” Friar Bannon had said. “If only he would run far away and start his life over, but I think the lad is sort of like a dumb calf that hasn’t realized it’s time to wean from his mother. He still wants to go home, and there’s no telling him otherwise. “

Gallen had looked the friar in the eye, just held his gaze for a moment.

“I helped you hunt Dan’l, for three days,” Orick said, wondering if his message would get though, “and when you caught him, what did you do? You gave him some money from your own purse, pointed him toward the border, and kicked him in the pants as you sent him on his way.”

Gallen’s face took on a closed look. “It was the best thing I could do, it seemed. Like Friar Bannon, I hoped he would change.”

“A devil’s bargain,” Orick intoned. “A year later, Dan’l became a highwayman, and we had to track him down all over again, and that time you gutted the lad.”

“I thought he’d go straight,” Gallen whispered. “But he murdered three more people. Do you think I did wrong letting him go the first time?”

“No, you idiot. Don’t you see it? You did
exactly
right.” Orick replied. “You exercised compassion. You hoped for the best. It wasn’t our fault the lad didn’t live up to our expectations. It was his fault. He deserved what you gave him—both the forgiveness
and
the punishment.”

“So what is your point?”

Orick grunted and frowned as he considered. “My point is this: when I first helped you catch that boy, I almost didn’t do it. I only came with you that day because you were trying to do what was best for everyone. Sometimes, we have to make a choice, and hope that it’s best for everyone, and offer no blame to ourselves or others if we’re wrong.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to do,” Gallen said.

“No. Ever since Dan’l let you down, you’ve found it harder and harder to exercise common sense. Jesus said that ‘In the last days, because wickedness shall abound, the love of many will wax cold.’ Well, Gallen, your heart has been waxing colder and colder ever since I met you. You’re a hard man now, hot for vengeance, hot to kill the dronon. You’re willing to go die under a tide of your enemies, while your sweet, sensible wife just wants to get away from this mess.”

“Sensible? We have a duty,” Gallen said. “She isn’t thinking of other people, her obligation to humanity. She’s afraid for herself.”

Orick countered, “She has a duty to her child, too. And she has more brains in her right ear than you have in your whole head! Gallen, I know you have faith in yourself, but that first win against the dronon was a fluke. The dronon know how you beat them, and Kintiniklintit won’t make that same mistake again. Maggie’s right to ask you to run. If you had any sense, you wouldn’t be talking like this!”