Stardogs (50 page)

She spotted him. That puzzled her. True, he had taught her as much as he could, but she knew he could move across broken terrain like a ghost. She slipped from her lookout on the launch-pad with the vial in her hand. The stuff was in a dilute acid-base, designed to etch skin. Once it was in the system… it would locate Sil-alloys within minutes, and then feed, using them, and replicate itself. She wished she had thought to loot Caro Leyven’s gear for an atomizer. Just breathing it would have been enough, perhaps. She had to get to him, and get to him fast. She knew his chances of living through the last twenty yards to the cable were very small.

The nanomech surgeon’s visual input remotes detected her. The Nanomech recognized the human. The implications were unpleasant. She had got here before him. How had she known where he was going? Well, the host was a superb killing machine. And if the host was destroyed before it could reach the cable base that would have little effect on the supertough nanomech. It was not made of the frail flesh and bone of the host. It could survive pressures of up to 25 of these feeble gravities, and withstand immersion, acids and extremes of heat that would instantly turn the host to ash. But it was small. And covering ground-distance would be laborious without the host, now that it had adapted itself for cable climbing. It would take the host as close to cable-base as possible. The first step was to kill this human-woman. Whatever she held in her hand was probably a weapon. First it would destroy that.

The mountaintop was full of wind-sculpted rocks. She dodged among them. If she could get above him and pour the stuff over him… Abruptly they were face to face. If it were not for the croak of warning Deo uttered, she would have lost the hand that held the vial. As it was the knife shattered the vial she had instinctively parried with. The knife’s razor edge peeled a long strip from her palm before it skittered along the stationer-fabric of her protective jacket. A few drops of the precious liquid ran down her fingers onto the raw flesh. The acid stung. Desperately she flicked the blood and acid at him. The nanomech dodged the host back, perceiving some kind of threat. The last of the precious fluid fell onto the bare rock. Now she only had what was within her.

“Tanner.” Deo used the out breath to say it, though nanomech had clenched his teeth. It might as well have been Greek to the nanomech, but it was a clear message to Shari. It brought tears to cloud her eyes. She blinked them away. She could not afford to cry yet. Garuda Tanner had been a bodyguard, who, when paralyzed in an ambush, had told his diminutive employer to fire at the attackers through his body. Deo was telling her to kill him.

Shari was unarmed, but she still wore her stationer-jacket. It would stop bullets and knife thrusts. It was no use against the laser-weapon. She hoped it wouldn’t decide to use that. The nanomech had in fact decided to save the laser for the final approach. It forced the host’s body into a high speed knife attack.

Deo had long since established that he could move the toes of his left foot. He waited for the opportunity to use this tiny advantage best. He knew this strike for neck, so, at the crucial moment, the toes curled down, dragging. He closed his eyes, even though it appeared whatever possessed his body could see even when they were closed. He’d tried to kill himself earlier that way but had failed.

The slight stumble was enough. The blade struck her stationer-jacket protected body instead of her exposed throat. She chopped at the knife-arm, as he had taught her. The nano mech was faster, however. Her blow should have hit the knife-blade, which would have been enough to sever it. But Deo saw that the hand of the Dewa truly protected Shari. Her wrist intersected the knife just at the point where the frill-snake hydra’s muscular twitch had taken a piece out of it. Instead of her losing the hand, the nanomech lost the knife.

And she wrapped her arms around him. She was kissing him. His lips were still his own, and they opened and responded, even as the nanomech brought his hands up to throttle her. Her mouth was full of blood from where she had bitten her own cheek and tongue. As those terrible hands squeezed, and the world blackened, she bit his lip, before frantically kicking herself free.

The nanomech drove the host forward, coming in for the kill. And one of the remote vision sensors on the host’s nose suddenly died. It was only one virus, tinier even that the remote, and it only affected a few molecules of Sil-metal. They just happened to be part of the transmitter. But, finding food, the virus fed, and bred, and stripped more essential molecules out of the Sil-metal. A few other viruses in capillaries were transported elsewhere. A second remote died. The host decided to close its eyes again. And now the vision of the Nanomech was indeed somewhat impaired. The kick aimed at the woman’s head missed. She scrambled away.

The nanomech decided to bypass her and press on. She’d poisoned the host, it decided. It must use the host while it still could. There were only a hundred yards to go. That was nothing to the host, but a long, long way to a mechanism less than a sixteenth of an inch high.

It forced the host to a run. The heart rate increased, and blood circulated faster. Of course the brain always gets the first and the best of the blood supply. Another vision remote went down. And the host tripped over a stone.

She saw him stumble. But he was always as sure-footed as a cat! It must be working. Somehow she ignored her pain and ran after him. She had to slow him down, give the virus time to work, before he reached the kill-zone around the cable-base. But then she saw it was unnecessary. He blundered like a drunk in the darkness, his face wreathed in a broad smile. Then abruptly he collapsed, twitching epileptically. She ran to him. Would it try to kill him in a last act of defiance?

But deep within the Dagger of the Goddess, the last war between the Sil and Denaari had already been fought and lost by the Sil nanomech. The fate of planets and empires had been sealed with a kiss.

EPILOGUE: ENDS, ENDS AND BEGINNINGS

You have failed to recognize that governments possess a life of their own. They can best be described as colonial organisms. All organisms have one primary overriding need: to survive. The organism you term ‘a government’ seeks both immortality and reproductive success, as both of these are ways of achieving the primary need. The basic tenets of genetic engineering hold true for governments too: For society to be served by (instead of being the servant of) government service must be intrinsic to the survival of the organism.

The Denaari Biocomputer Central.

At first it good enough just to have survived. Good enough to have a future. But eventually they had to decide what to do with it. What to do with themselves, what to do with Central, and what to do with several thousand other humans in Denaari-Biozoos. There were the Neanderthals too. They could not just be left… especially with Central planning to repair the Biozoo. They were at odds with Central about this. The Biocomputer did not accept that a certain level of intelligence made you ineligible to be a zoo-specimen.

They had returned to the Roost-towers on the edge of the Stardog plain for their council. Sam was still too frail to be moved anyway. Una-Celine and Juan had reluctantly agreed to leave their new-hatched Stardog. They’d been on the long cable-ride up to the ballast asteroid at the far end to watch the creature take its first flight. They’d left it and the other four new-hatched Stardogs grazing in a defensive clump around the asteroid. The wild Spacedogs could still endanger small pups. Fortunately an adult who had been off surfing the new worlds had come back and was now guarding them.

For this was the situation. Many Stardogs had returned, their eggs had hatched, and they had mated and returned via the cable to space, cruising between the worlds discovered since the collapse of the Denaari dominion. Exploration continued. And there were many worlds that the Denaari had shunned, that humans would find more pleasant than any Empire world.

Central had reached its decision. There were fifteen crowns outstanding. A wingclaw of Denaari fives might survive somewhere. They might even have bred, and have hatchling upon hatchling. It was its duty to keep Denaar against their return. But the humans were allies and also victims of the Sil. And, although the species lay somewhere between the Sil and Denaari, it had decided that humans tended toward the Denaari viewpoint. It had been grown to serve. Too long now it had been purposeless. It would serve the humans too, given certain conditions.

There were eight of them, sitting, looking out onto the breeding-plain, in a Roost-room so like the one in which Martin Brettan had finally awakened the sleeper-side of her that it still made Una-Celine shiver. The ninth councilor, Central, listened from the walls.

“We can’t go back,” Shari said determinedly.

“But why not?” Caro asked. “I thought that was what we were trying to do?”

“Don’t you see? New Stardogs, new worlds. We’re a lifeline to the Empire and the League.”

“Without Stardogs the Empire and the League will die, but so will a lot of people. All the stationers for starters. My mother and father. All the riders. We can’t just decide to run out on them.” Juan had grown up. He was no longer afraid to challenge the Princess, just because of what she was. “With an independent and unreachable base like this we could provide anti-toxin to all the Stardogs in months, not years. Besides, I know my father expected the Empire to start coming apart soon. The social-scientists on Brandahar-station predicted it should start to happen any day. If it has already happened, the stations, Stardogs and riders will need us desperately. And if not… there are bound to be more sleepers like Una was. The ISPCA work must be discovered soon.”

Shari was surprised at the vehemence of his declaration. But then she had not shared the story of Una-Celine’s life as he had. She turned to Deo for support. He nodded. Not to her, but to Juan. “It would be possible to return to Imperial space secretively, according to Central.”

“But Deo…”

“The scourge of the Holy Church must come to Arunachal. It is not right that my people should be puppets to aliens. Especially ones such as the Sil.” Deo wore a Denaari mnemonic crown now. Having his body stolen had led the Arunachali assassin to question deeply the hate-training about the works of the Denaari. He had studied the information Central had given him long and with a great deal of thought. He was not a trusting man, but he would not forgive the aliens for making him and his beliefs into a pawn in their war. As he had said to Shari, he had been indoctrinated from infancy to believe the Denaari intrinsically evil. Had the Sil device merely asked him to destroy Denaar by taking it to the cable base-station he would have done so. The realization that the killings which he had taken to be holy compulsions had been mechanically orchestrated was enough to make him consider atheism… after revenge.

Central had modified its voice. They had all decided to contribute mnemonic data to it. Now it was no longer Juan speaking. It was shades of all of them. It spoke. “The orbiting watcher reports that a dying Stardog has just come into the system. It has released a metal object. Ground Control reports that the object is sending radio messages. Shall I relay them here?”

There was a silence. Then Shari nodded. They’d all been there.

“….. Mayday Mayday. Can anybody hear me? Mayday.”

“Can we transmit? Can we do anything for them?”

“With the Stardogs at the ballast satellite we can prevent their entering the atmosphere. I will send transmissions on the same frequency. Speak.”

“We hear you, ship sending Mayday. Over.”

“Station! Thank God. Where the hell am I? The Stardog has dropped us and the rider’s flipped, poor bastard. We’ve got half a dozen badly injured. A bunch of Imperial system craft jumped us. Come and get us… please. Over.”

“We’ll do our best. What ship is that? Over.”

“Free Systems Alliance Starbarge Salimar. Lieutenant Balsam, ranking survivor. I’m a space-marine and know bugger-nothing about spacecraft.” There was a longer silence than could be accounted for by the transmission gap. Then a suspicion tinged voice came across the airwaves: “What Station is that? Are you Alliance or Imperial? Who
are
you?”