Phthor (21 page)

Soon the equipment arrived. “What’s this?” Arlo inquired, picking up a Xest artifact.”It looks like a hammer.”

“It is a power mallet,” Torment translated.

“The Xests’ limbs are not as strong as those of many other creatures, especially on high-gravity surfaces. So Xest force is amplified by means of specialized tools. With this mallet one Xest can pound apart solid rock without personal fatigue.”

“Could I use it?”

“It should be feasible. Merely hold it firmly and depress the stud in the handle. It vibrates at sonic frequency.”

Arlo tried it. He put it to the wall and touched the stud with the thumb of his gauntlet. The stone powdered out beneath the point of contact.

“Very nice,” Arlo said. “Do you have a larger model?”

The Xest produced a version whose head was the size of Arlo’s two fists. Arlo tried it, and watched the thing blast a head-sized hole in the wall with one strike. Evidently that did not count as an explosion, or Chthon’s repressive field would have interfered. But it was powerful! “Thor’s Hammer,” he said.

“Now Chthon undoubtedly knows what we have been doing,” Arlo told Torment. “So we’ll proceed according to schedule. Meanwhile, I’ll finish my nap.” He lay down on the rock.

Torment looked at him silently.

“Hold my hand,” he told her. “Put me to sleep.” Perchance to dream...

She knelt and took his hand. Arlo gave his turmoil and apprehension free rein, knowing that it came through to her like sweet music. He was leading the forces of life into disaster—and he had no counterplan. What was he to do?

Torment smoothed his forehead with her cool hand. “You darling boy,” she murmured.

After a time he slept.

“He hasn’t returned,” Vex said. “Life has lost, as was fated at Ragnarok. Coquina is confined to her cave. What remains for us, in these few hours remaining?”

“Love,” Aton said. “As it was fated to be.” He took her into his arms.

Arlo wrenched himself awake. “I’m going home!”

Torment restrained him. “Don’t make decisions now; you’re crazed by a dream-projection.”

“Go sit on a stalagmite—a sharp one,” Arlo snapped. He sent a mental summons to his two goat segments.

“This is of course in poor taste to suggest,” Torment said carefully. “But is she worth it? We need you here, as the battle begins. We have women very like your minionette to console you, and far more experienced.”

“I’m aware of that. You come with me. Bring one member of each Vanir species—no, make that four EeoO, one of each sex. Relinquish command of the Life campaign to the Lfa leader.”

“The Lfa!” Now she was alarmed. “There will be no imagination! Completely predictable procedure, child’s play for Chthon to counter!”

“If you aren’t coming, I’ll go alone!”

She ran after him. “Arlo, you’re lovely like this! I can hardly refrain from embracing you. But can’t you see— Chthon put that dream into your mind! I was with you, I felt it—the same signal the Xest picked up before! When you sleep, your guard goes down—”

“If I had a way to hurt you, I’d do it!” Arlo told her wrathfully. “But it’s impossible right now.” That damned inversion—his rage, her bliss. “So you just shut up and fetch the Vanir.”

“Stop and think!” she cried. “Chthon wants you out of here and back at your home-cave. You’re playing into its scheme.”

Arlo came up to his chippers, who had stopped grazing and were ambling toward the sledge. “Unseal the main exit.”

“No.”

He backhanded her across the face in fury. Torment accepted the blow unhurt, unable to repress her smile of pure animal pleasure despite her need to convince him intellectually. “We won’t let you walk into Chthon’s trap.”

Arlo hitched the sledge, cursing as he struggled with the unfamiliar and crude fastenings. He finally got it right and started off. When he got to the sealed exit he dismounted, took his great hammer in his gloves, and pounded a gaping hole through the mortar.

By the time he finished, Torment had returned with a Xest, a large Lfa, and four EeoO units: translucent blue, green, yellow, and pink. “If you insist on this disaster, we’re your bodyguard,” Torment said, and they all piled onto the sledge.

“Suit yourselves.” He snapped the reins, though his real command was mental: the bits were gone. The two chippers, recharged by their rest, took off. The sledge was heavy with the weight of the group, so that the fibers of it sagged, but the chippers were so powerful it seemed to make little difference. They careened through the passages at a dizzying rate.

As they moved, Arlo spoke into Torment’s ear. “I doubt Chthon can hear us talk right now, or read your signals, and we’ll know if there’s any myxo siege against any of our little group. I believe you all understand that it is not madness but doom I have brought you into.”

Torment didn’t bother to translate. “We know,” she agreed grimly.

“Small as we are, we are the real invasion spearhead. The main attack, back at the sealed cavern, is only a decoy, a diversion.”

“Yes.” But she looked surprised.

“By seeming to fall into Chthon’s trap, we lull it into complacency. But we shall soon be ambushed. We shall have to elude that trap just before it snaps, seemingly by accident. Now let me talk to the EeoO.”

Torment signaled to the four translucent entities.

“Soon we shall pass a series of dry holes,” Arlo said. “They are ancient gas vents, long since inactive. The vents are narrow, and they twist through the rock, so that no solid living thing of any size can pass through them. But a liquid might—and the holes drain into a common chamber in the heart of the planet. It is very near Chthon’s wave-generating circuitry.”

Torment signaled, then gave their reply. “We comprehend.”

The sledge came to the vents. “I can’t stop the chippers without giving it away,” Arlo said. “The EeoO will have to jump.”

The E, e, o, and O entities jumped, bouncing up like balls to get free of the moving sledge. They landed, rebounded, and rolled across the rock behind. They would soon liquefy, dissolve into pools, and seep through the vents until they merged in the deeper caverns Chthon thought were secure. But Arlo had learned more than Chthon had told him, during their interaction; he knew many of the secret secrets.

Mindless in their melted state, the E’s and O’s should broadcast few telltales of sentience. With luck, the new little EeoO emerging from the generative pool would be able to disrupt Chthon’s circuits before the mineral entity caught on.

“Now the Lfa,” Arlo said. “Can you disassociate, then reform as two or more subentities in some unobserved cavern?”

“Yes,” Torment translated. “It is not normal procedure, but in emergency—”

“We shall soon pass the major gas crevasse of the planet,” Arlo said. “The gas from this section funnels through to the fires near the prison region. If you can ignite the crevasse itself, Chthon’s thermal ecology will be disrupted. The animals will panic, perhaps throwing off Chthon’s control, and the mineral intellect’s own circuits will suffer.”

“I shall make the attempt,” the Lfa signaled.

“Here,” Arlo said. And the Lfa tumbled off, breaking up into scattered parts of junk as it struck the stone.

“Now the Xest. We are approaching the probable site of ambush. We shall try to avoid it narrowly, distracting Chthon so that the activity of the EeoO and Lfa is not noted. You brought the Taphid?”

“Yes,” the Xest signaled. It was now almost blindingly orange.

“Thaw it in a hurry. Even Chthon will require some time to establish control over hungry Turlingian Aphids, and meanwhile they will provide excellent distraction for us. We shall drop them in the path of our pursuers.”

“But then we cannot—”

“Have no concern. In this situation, your personal debt limit is off. You may—and may have to!—replicate as copiously as possible. I presume your fragments reform into sentient entities rapidly?”

“Virtually instantaneously. That is why we require the Taphid, for it acts rapidly without separating any individuals. One is loath to dispense with it. Are you sure—?”

“What is the debt limit for saving the existence of all life in the galaxy?”

“That is not our mode of appraisal,” the Xest replied. And Torment added on her own: “Their whole philosophy is to restrict the spread of life, so that their resources will not be squandered.”

“So that the restricted population can live comfortably,”

Arlo said. “But there have to be some survivors. Wouldn’t the debt you incur by unrestricted fissioning be theirs to expunge? Wouldn’t they be ready to assume that debt, as the price of life itself?”

“You make it wonderfully clear,” the Xest responded.

Had he—or was the creature merely being polite to a savage? Well, he had its acquiescence, and that sufficed. “Our shock troops have already been launched. It is the job of those of us who remain to make as impressive a distraction as possible. Chthon must believe that we are the shock troops. It will watch us most closely, uncertain whether I have been fooled by the dreams. That uncertainty is our asset.”

“A return to your home-cave would not distract Chthon,” Torment said. Arlo was not clear whether she spoke for the Xest or for herself. “Better that we make a direct attack that can not be ignored.”

“Yes,” Arlo said. “Since I had not planned on that, it is good.” He realized that this probably meant he would not see Vex or his parents again. But this was war, and he had a job to do. “There are regions of the caverns I have been barred from. So has my father. He spoke of a blocked passage beyond ice caverns... With these gloves and this hammer I can break through. That should really alarm Chthon—and we’ll have one hell of a fight.”

“That is our purpose.”

“I sense the ambush, between us and my home-cave. It is the wolf-thing.”

“From your mental image, it is not a thing we can readily conquer,” Torment said for the Xest. “Best to avoid it.”

“My inclination is to bash it on the skull with the Hammer,” Arlo said. “Therefore, in the interests of unpredictability, I shall not. Like cowards, we shall flee it.”

Torment put her hand on his arm. “Your sentiment becomes you.”

“No doubt!” he said, half-angry. He guided the sledge down the tunnels he knew, fearing and enjoying their forbidden nature. One was an almost vertical ice shaft, where the moving air was forced down into an opening funnel where it expanded and cooled rapidly. This was not the river of ice where he and Vex had played, but an entirely separate region. The walls and ceilings became coated with crystals, patterns of faceted ice, and the floor was a narrow glacier.

“We shall never thaw the Taphid here,” the Xest complained.

“Just wait,” Arlo said. Soon they debouched into a veritable snowstorm—then, suddenly, into a warm side tunnel and a dead end. The chippers had to stop.

“I christen this the Cave of Odin’s Eye,” Arlo said with a flourish. “Only recently did I learn its significance, though I have been here before.” He got out, hefting his hammer. “You’re both telepathic. If Chthon-creatures come—and it’s likely they will—warn me.”

“There is a creature beyond that wall,” Torment. “I feel it: large, very large, loving. The Xest says it is the most powerful animal in the planet, and semitelepathic. Unsafe to approach.”

“Now I am even more curious,” Arlo said. He had picked up the same emanations. “This must be one of Chthon’s secret weapons.”

“It may destroy us.”

“Our first line of defense is the Taphid.”

“Still too cold,” Torment translated for the Xest. “It takes time for the grubs to thaw. And once they do—”

“I know. I’ve seen them operate.”

Torment lifted an eyebrow. “You have been to space?”

“In a vision. I have seen the future—when Chthon wins. I mean to see that that future never comes to pass.” He clenched a fist, not in violence but in concentration, noting how the scales of the glove slid smoothly by each other no matter how tightly compressed. “We’ll wait on the Taphid, then. Torment, stand guard with the chippers. We don’t know what we’ll find, other than large and dangerous. But no doubt an excellent distraction.”

The Xest came to stand beside him. Arlo bashed the wall with the hammer—and it powdered out beautifully. In moments he had broken open a hole large enough for them to step through conveniently.

They entered a round tunnel, fifty feet in diameter. There was a rank odor, as of the dung-region of a dragon’s lair. Arlo had an uncanny sensation of familiarity.

“Let’s fish for it,” Arlo said. “I’d like to see this thing.”

He formed a mental picture of a huge fat chipper stumbling about uncertainly: ideal prey for a large predator. Suddenly the picture intensified, so that the chipper became almost tangible. The Xest was adding to his picture!

Somewhere, a hugeness took note. The telepathic monster of this tunnel perceived the image, and there was a hunger. Arlo felt the massive motion begin.

It frightened him. The presence was too large, too menacing. Yet it was a weapon of Chthon, and he had to understand it, learn its weaknesses, so that the forces of Life could eliminate it. And he wanted to make a really formidable distraction, to hold Chthon’s attention. So he waited, projecting the fat chipper image as augmented by the Xest, making it so bumbling and fat and real that his own mouth watered.