Midworld (28 page)

“I see. A few of these serve as lightning rods for the whole forest, protecting the other trees from the nightly storms. Except,” and he had to fight to keep from shouting, “last night that charge was directed elsewhere.”

“Not directed sir—drawn.”

Hansen looked grim. “No wonder it blew out every circuit in the place. And of course, nobody saw anything unusual prior to this?”

Blanchfort looked unhappy. “No, sir. Cargo is still chewing out some of his people, I’m told.”

“That’ll do us a lot of good. Black Horse, it’s done.” He quieted, kicked at a scrap of curdled acrylic. “What does Murchison say about this?”

“Murchison’s dead, sir.”

Hansen muttered to himself. “All right, Mamula’s in charge then.”

“Yes, sir. He thinks he can eventually repair some of the leads, and we’ve got replacements for about twenty percent of the wiring and circuitry, but we need a complete new generating facility.”

“Any cretin could see that. There’s a hole where the old one was big enough to fly a skimmer through.”

“The big block of solar cells is cracked—that’s got to be replaced. Climate control is completely gone—that means no air-conditioning, among other things.”

“Among other things,” Hansen echoed disgustedly. “What have we got left?”

Another glance at the sheaf of hastily scribbled reports. “All hand weapons and four uncharging rifles intact, so we’re far from defenseless. Mamula’s cannibalized a fresh transformer and all the small batteries he could scavenge to keep the refrigeration units for the hospital going. And we’ve got plenty of prepackaged emergency rations.”

“Communications?”

“Shot, of course. But the transceiver and tridee in the shuttle still work fine. All its internal systems are operating.”

“Pity it’s a shuttle and not a Commonwealth sting-ship. When’s the next supply ship due?”

“Two and a half weeks, sir, according to schedule.”

Hansen nodded, walked to the nearest door and strode out onto the porch that still encircled the station. “Two and a half weeks,” he repeated, putting his hands on the tubular railing and studying the distant, rustling wall of green, the green-brown treetops beneath. “Two and a half weeks for a fully equipped first surface station designed to stand off anything up to and including an attack by a Commonwealth frigate to somehow survive a siege by two half-pint loin-clothed hunters—the bastard religious-fanatic offspring of a bunch of misdirected colonists!”

“Yes, sir.”

Hansen spun at the voice, roared at the newly arrived figure. “Think your people can handle that, Cargo? Or do you think we’re outnumbered?!”

Cargo drew himself up stiffly. “I’ve got to do with what I have, sir, specifically, the best personnel the company could buy.” The intimation was clear: there might be certain things not even the parent corporation could purchase.

“If you wish, sir, I could assemble a pursuit force. We could scour the perimeter until—”

“Oh, come on, Cargo,” Hansen muttered, “I don’t need a sacrificial lamb, either. Your suicide wouldn’t salve anything. You’d never be able to tell them apart from the rest of the fauna. They’d pick off your people one at a time—or else just stay clear of you and let the forest finish you off.” He turned back to the emerald ocean.

“I still can’t figure out what prompted them to such violence, though. The desire to escape, sure. To trouble us, sure—but to counterattack? They’ve got to be awfully confident, or awfully angry at something. I know that Born disapproves of our intentions here, but he didn’t strike me as the homicidal type. We’re missing something. I’d like another chance to talk to him, just to find out how we’ve provoked him so strongly.”

“I’d like a chance to cut his slimy little throat,” Cargo responded briskly.

“I hope you get your chance, Cargo. But I wouldn’t count on seeing him before he sees you.”

Cargo relaxed his stance but not the stiffness in his voice. “Sir, I spent thirty years in Commonwealth forces before deciding it was thirty years wasted with no future. I’ve been with the company four years now as a Special Projects Security Director. If this midget gets within arm’s length, you can bet your administrative certificate I’ll break his neck before he can kill me.”

“I’m betting more than that on it, Sal.” He looked skyward. “Going to be another hot—mother of god, what are those?”

Cargo’s head turned and he looked into the faint blue-green of the southern sky. Three drifting shapes were slowly nearing the station. Each of them was half the size of the structure.

“Have we any turrets operational?”

“No, sir,” Cargo told him, still staring at those apparitions. “But we’ve still got the rifles.”

“Set them up in the dome. Leave a few people to watch the three support trunks and get the rest of your people up there, too. Leave the guard on the tunneled trunk, also. I don’t want any surprises from that direction while we’re occupied with
those.
Move.”

Shouts and orders resounded throughout the damaged outpost. Anyone with an operational handgun was directed to report to the dome. No one had to question why—the three Photoid floaters made no attempt to camouflage their approach.

Logan and Cohoma were among those who found themselves clustered beneath one of the now retracted polyplexalloy panels. Three laser rifles were also set up there, the long tubes aimed skyward now.

Hansen saw the two scouts arrive, beckoned to Cargo and stalked over to them, “Ever see anything like those before?”

Logan studied the bloated monsters, fascinated. “No, Chief, never. I don’t recall Born ever discussing anything like them.”

“Any chance your pygmy might be controlling them, somehow?” asked Cargo.

Logan considered. “No, I don’t think so. If they’re dangerous but manipulatable, I think Born would have summoned them to protect us when we were traveling along the treetop level.”

The floaters were gigantic gas bags, roughly ovoid and showing rippling, saillike fins on their backs and at the sides. The steady fluttering of the body-length protuberances propelled them lazily through the air. The gas sacs themselves were a pale, translucent blue through which the sun shone clearly. Beneath each bag lay a mass of rubbery-looking tissue that folded and refolded in on itself like knotted cables. Suspended from this was a series of short, thick tendrils which shone like the mirror vines Logan remembered from weeks in the forest. Colors flashed from turning, spinning organic prisms, giving the whole creature the appearance of a balloon trying to hatch a rainbow. Longer tentacles dangled well below this glittering, polished conglomeration. These had a more natural appearance, in hue a light blue like the gas sacs, and seemed to be coated with a dully reflective mucuslike substance.

They continued to drift toward the station while a little knot of scientists huddled by the ruined deep space transceiver debated whether they were primarily plant or animal.

“Ready on those rifles!” Hansen commanded. So far the creatures had made nothing resembling a hostile move. But their sheer bulk was making him jittery. The eerie silence with which they approached did nothing to improve the state of his nerves.

“If they approach within twenty meters, fire,” he told Cargo, “but not before.” The security chief nodded.

One of the floaters shifted toward them, those trailing cablelike tentacles twitching in the air. It stopped outside Hansen’s critical perimeter and hovered there. Despite the fact that it displayed nothing resembling an organ of sight, Hansen could not escape the feeling that it was studying them. It continued hovering there, long fins rippling rhythmically to hold it steady, while the tension within the dome and the rest of the station rose unbearably.

Someone shouted and all eyes went down and out. The other two floaters were drifting over the shuttlecraft—the last remaining contact with the company, with the rest of the universe, with help. One long tentacle dipped, to curl around the shuttle’s bow. The tentacle pulled curiously, effortlessly. There was a screech as the shuttle slid a little within its flexible moorings.

A pencil-thin beam of intense red light reached across the intervening space to strike the curious floater. Cargo spun and yelled at the rifle crews. “Who fired? I gave no order to—!”

The beam contacted the gas sac and seemed to pass straight through at an angle. The floater dropped slightly at the strike, then regained its altitude and position. On impact a slight wisp of smoke had risen from the point where the laser had struck. There was a faint, barely audible whistling sound, that might have been a sigh. The floater started to rise, forgetting momentarily to release the shuttle. Distant pings sounded clearly across the cleared treetops as one mooring cable after another snapped like piano strings.

Someone fired a pistol then, and the other rifles opened up. Cargo raged among his people, but the rising panicky cries within the station all but drowned him out. Burst after crimson burst lanced out to strike at the massive floaters. Whenever one struck a gas sac the injured floater would drop slightly, then puff itself up and regain its former height. Bursts which landed among the forest of tentacles glanced off the reflective stubs and mucus-covered tentacles.

From their position behind a tangle of singing comb vines, Born whispered, “They are very patient, for floaters.”

“Perhaps they will not chose to fight,” Losting worried aloud.

Behind him, Geeliwan growled. “Floaters’ anger comes slow, lasts long.”

Whether stimulated by the irritating, persistent stings of the lasers or by the noisy milling of the tiny shapes in the station, the floaters finally began to react. Their shorter, almost quartzlike tendrils shifted, forming complex patterns, instinctive defensive alignments—even as the red light from below continued to stab at them. The sun was high and hot. But within the newly arranged complex of short tendrils the sunlight was internally concentrated, reconcentrated, magnified and remagnified, shuttled and focused and jimmied around through a farrago of organic lenses, intricate enough to put the human eye to shame.

From the two nearest floaters beams of immensely concentrated sunlight struck the station. By and large the walls of the outpost were honeycomb aluminum and not duralloy. Where the angry sunlight struck, it melted away, to burn what lay within.

Hansen fled the dome. So did Cohoma and Logan and most of the other personnel. Cargo stayed with his crews, cursing their inaccuracy and ineffectiveness. He did not realize that the gas sacs of the floaters were compartmentalized, did not recognize the speed with which they were replaced, with which fresh gas was generated in the newly rewalled cells. He failed to recognize the futility of the laser rifles, which could bring down a shuttle or major aircraft; failed to even as the ultraintensified light projected by the third floater struck the dome, melted away the tough polyplexalloy, melted away the rifles themselves, melted or ignited chairs, consoles, flooring, and instrumentation. He realized the failure, however, just as he and the last rifle crew were carbonized.

The angry floaters remained for half an hour, drifting back and forth across the station. They continued playing energy into the ruins long after the last flicker of desperate red rose from the smoking wreckage.

Eventually they tired, whatever they possessed for minds finally sated. Leaving the station pockmarked with gaps and scorched slashes, fires consuming its innards, they drifted off to the south whence they had come.

“Now, let us finish it,” rumbled Losting.

“There may be some left,” Born argued. “Let us wait until the flames have finished their work and the sun has begun its dying.”

As happened now and again, the nightrain began before evening that day. It was still light enough to see as they entered the ravaged hulk of the station, water dripping around them. Droplets sizzled and hissed where they struck the still superheated metal. In places the corridor walls had run like butter under the floaters’ assault. Recooled metal leaped and plunged.

The hunters entered the outside corridor with snufflers loaded and ready, though neither expected to find anything alive within the smoking structure.

“Even necessary death is unpleasant,” Born observed solemnly, sniffing the penetrating odor of carbonized flesh. “This is not a place to linger long.”

Losting agreed, pointing down the curving pathway. “I will take this half and meet you on the other side. The sooner we conclude this and start Home, the better I’ll feel.” Born nodded agreement and started off in the opposite direction.

The big hunter waited until his companion was out of sight before following Geeliwan. He did not encounter many corpses. Most had either been buried beneath rubble and slag, or else burned beyond recognition.

Losting considered the annihilation wrought by the floaters. Once he had watched while a curious one prodded with a tree-thick tentacle at a sleeping hunter, only to leave the dreamer in peace and proceed amiably on its way. He had also seen one of the normally gentle scavengers have a tentacle bitten in half by a startled diverdaunt. The floater had proceeded to tear the carnivore’s tree apart and reduce its upper trunk to splinters before trapping and roasting its attacker.

He wished there had been another way. They were passing through the far end of what had been the big skimmer hangar. The swift exploratory disks it had housed were hardly recognizable now. Most had their transparent domes crushed in, their hulls reduced to slick lumps of fused alloy. One uptilted fuselage held the melted remains of two giants still in the small circular cockpit, their bones welded whitely to the metal. Had the surviving giants not pressed the fight as long as they had, the floaters probably would have grown bored and eventually drifted off to their nesting grounds in the south. Instead, these bulky, panicked assassins had fought to the last, their weapons of red light pathetically useless against the nervous systems of the translucent Photoids.

Geeliwan suddenly growled and leaped ahead. The furcot had smelled the smell— too late. It had been masked by the miasma of the burning station. The light caught him above the eyes in midjump. He fell to the floor, a silent, crumpled heap.