Starhammer (36 page)

"Ah ha!" Angle Umpuk exclaimed. "The famous wanderers. Once they were placed in the south tropics, far below the equator. They have been lost and rediscovered many times. If they are nearby, then they have moved again, for we are still a little to the north of the equator itself."

"Mr. Umpuk is correct, though there are several other mobile machines in the equatorial belt. The one we seek however is different from all the rest. Most are defensive weapons. They produce a barrier field of some kind through which nothing solid can pass. I think it may have been used to keep their terrible enemy from bombing them or invading. However, I only hazard that as a guess. The machine we seek is the other side of the ancient's blade, an offensive weapon of a power beyond anything we or the laowon have ever developed. I have seen it, I have seen the records in the main control room. This is an awesome power."

"What does it do?" Officer Bergen asked after a short pause.

"It creates a gravitational flux in the center of a target. For a small target, like a spaceship, this is enough to disrupt the engines and explode them. In a large target, like a star, it causes a nova, a momentary implosion followed by a huge outpouring of stellar material and heat."

There was a longer pause.

"Oh, my God!" Bergen said.

"No wonder the laowon are expending such energy," Angle Umpuk said in awe.

"The Starhammer," Owlcurl Dahn whispered. "It exists!"

"Yes, it exists and we will use it if we have to, to wrest our freedom back from the laowon."

Jon stared at M'Nee. Was he imagining things or did M'Nee give a little shudder as those words were spoken?

The Bey cleared his throat. "However, it is also guarded. A maze surrounds the central command room. And the Keeper, a powerful robot, rules all the central sections. It is inimical to all outside influences, which I suppose it regards as threats to its purpose, which is to maintain the machine in case the builders ever need it again. Therefore, the Keeper will have to be neutralized. For this purpose I have formulated a plan for communicating with the Keeper with Rhapsodical Stardimple, which we hope will solve the problems we faced the last time we were there. Rhap Dimple will also open the outer door of the machine's airlock. The machine, you see, was originally designed to operate underneath the oceans, a further impediment to attack. The structure is enormously strong. However, Rhap Dimp was grown by an operator of the machine, I cannot pronounce his name, but it appears to translate as 'Stargazer-with-flat-feet-firmly-on-the-ground.' Seems to have been a humorous fellow all right, but he and his fellows in the machine died despite all their defenses."

"How did they die?" asked Jon.

"Their enemy reached them. Too late to save itself from destruction but in time to doom the operators of the machine. They worked feverishly to transport the surviving population of their planet to safety, far far away, and then succumbed to a horror that had penetrated the interior."

The echoes of this ancient struggle to the death seemed to wail around them still in the tormented dust of the dying planet.

The Bey moved on to practicalities. "Once we are close to the machine, a small group will undertake a first reconnaissance. Then, the prime assault group will go inside. This will consist of myself, Gesme, Aul, and Dekter. Should we not return or give a signal within thirty minutes, a second group will enter, consisting of Jon Iehard, Officers Dahn, Wauk, and Bergen."

Jon saw M'Nee and Chacks exchange looks. The Bey had pointedly excluded them.

"On this taper, which I will entrust to Mr. Iehard, I have inscribed the route to take once inside. To the best of my recollection it should guide you through the interior to the control chamber."

The Bey collected himself before continuing. "Inside the machine we will face another danger and thus I must add a final warning. Heed it. If we do not signal within the proper time, you are to think of us as dead men! If you subsequently enter the machine and see us, apparently alive, open fire at once. If you can it would be best if you could destroy our bodies. Use explosive bullets, make the bodies inoperable."

They stared at him.

"And then get away from the scene. On no account whatsoever should you approach such a body, even after you have broken it into pieces."

Owlcurl Dahn voiced the general puzzlement. "Why would this happen? What would have happened?"

"The machine is contaminated by a weapon from the enemy of the ancient race. The enemy that virtually destroyed them, the enemy that they finally annihilated. The enemy that they built these vast machines to defend themselves against."

"What enemy was that?" Dahn said.

"They called it the Vang Oormlikoowl." The syllables rang with an eerie sound. The Bey continued in a hushed voice, "Of course, my pronunciation of the words is incorrect, so Rhap Dimple tells me anyway, but that is approximately the ancient's term. As best as I understand it, it translates as 'High Intelligence Omniparasitic lifeform.'"

"What does that mean?"

"A complex lifeform that sees all other life as nothing but food or an 'environment' of one grade or another. A lifeform that is fundamentally opposed to any like our own. There can be no communication between us and it. To it, we are either food or a hindrance, or worse. To us, it can only be a dire threat."

"What is in that machine, Mr. Bey?" said Officer Bergen in a trembling voice.

"A military form, a deadly peril."

"The jelly-that-is-flesh, the flesh-that-is-steel!" Angle Umpuk said quietly.

"Yes, Mr. Umpuk, exactly."

Haltingly, the Bey described the few characteristics of the mysterious devil inside the machine that he recalled. When it came time to tell of the fate of his beloved Aleya, he forced himself to describe everything, even the weird alien organs that the thing had grown from her, that wobbled like pink ferns in the air behind her as she walked toward him that last time, her eyes conscious, her mouth constricted in a terrible scream of agony but her limbs completely under the control of the other, the slimy thing that winked at him under her skin.

When he had finished they broke up in a somber mood and returned to the hovercraft. They set off again, south and slightly west. Everyone was preoccupied with the tasks ahead.

Enormous military motion was in train all around them as the components of the Grand Sector Fleet, Admiral Grahsk in command, with poor Booeej locked in his cabin, were assembling in orbit above Baraf.

Aboard the jumpers, battalions of shock troops were readied for deployment. Drones were released into the atmosphere to probe the dusts of the equatorial region.

Superior Buro troops aboard heavy tanks were rumbling across the basalt seabed only a few hundred kilometers behind the Elchites. They were but part of a huge force that was sweeping into the equatorial zone.

Aboard the leading battletank, Melissa Baltitude rode beside Magnawl Ahx. She was right in the cockpit, privy to the activity going on all over the system. The laowon were throwing everything they had into the chase. If they failed, they were preparing to sear the planetary surface with nuclear fire. If they failed, Magnawl Ahx was prepared to sit on the surface and wait for the sterilizing fire rather than the rage of the Heir and certain expiation on Laogolden. That meant Melissa would sit and wait with him.

The tank was a monster, thirty kilometers in length, riding six pairs of heavy treads. It still kept up a steady eighty kilometers an hour over rough terrain. On the flat it did better, edging up to over one hundred.

Arranged in holding pods in rows under their feet were the shock troopers, who would be fired out in ejection harness should they be needed.

Melissa stared out into the murk, and even the massive batteries of lights aboard the laowon battletank couldn't cut the dust for more than fifty meters. The clouds hid everything, and made the going fearsome in among the crustal pits.

Her thoughts roved forward to the fugitives and Jon Iehard. In her heart she prayed they would not catch them. She didn't want to see Jon after the laowon had broken him. She knew he would be broken very small before they allowed him to expiate.

But if they didn't catch him, then there would be the nuclear fire and after that, nothing at all. If she'd had tears left to shed, Melissa would have wept.

For an hour they probed southward through the dust. No sight of anything larger than dust grains, or smaller than the seabed presented itself. Throughout, they observed radio silence.

Then they saw a light floating past them to the north. The Bey ordered an immediate halt as he and Jon tried to get an image of the light, but it disappeared too quickly.

"A laowon probe?" said Jon in concern.

"Most certainly, we must accelerate our timetable."

They ran for the hovercraft and returned to the trail of the great machine. And almost immediately they sensed something up ahead, a mass loomed out of the dust.

"The machine!" Jon cried.

But the Bey shook his head. "No this is just the rear marker machine. A rear guard for the Hammer."

"If it guards the Hammer, won't it fire on us?"

"I think it is only programmed to fire at targets up above, in orbit, not on the seabed. In either case it has been dormant for eons. Probably awaiting instructions."

They swung out and around the machine, a hemisphere a half kilometer in diameter. It rested on immense caterpillar treads that were barely visible at its base. The upper surfaces were pitted and marked with lines that seemed to form enormous eyes, a face, something between a toad and a crocodile. The expression was undeniably fierce.

"The face of the ancients," Jon exclaimed, pointing to the markings. The Bey followed his indication and then turned and nodded.

"A strange characteristic for so advanced a species, to decorate a weapon with a ferocious face. Like the peoples of human antiquity in the preindustrial economies. They carried the fetish decoration of weapons a long way. Early body shields wore faces, the prows of ships were carved in the figures of women and fierce beasts, and even during the early industrial era slogans were written on shells and ferocious designs painted on combat aircraft. Of course, we have progressed far beyond that now, our weapons are not decorated anymore, they have become purely utilitarian, surely a signal of the highest civilization."

Eblis Bey's irony was lost on Jon, however, who as yet knew little of ancient history. "Perhaps these were their first high technology weapons. You say they were not warlike. They just hadn't ever done it before."

"And yet, these peaceful beings discovered the most terrible weapon of all."

The still machine—silent, huge, and ominous—vanished behind them in the murk.

"More lights, to the north." Jon pointed out the window of the mantid.

A laowon probe was swinging in their direction, its engines failing, screaming in complaint as the dust ruined them, its lights like probing fingers in the clouds. It passed eastward and disappeared from view.

They came upon tracks, colossal tread marks one hundred meters across, dug a meter deep into the seabed itself.

"We are close Mr. Iehard, very close now." The Bey was consumed with excitement.

They moved directly west, following the north side of the treadmarks. The wind had dropped further as night drew on, the dust was clearing.

Far ahead, Jon saw something huge, round, humping up against the horizon. The dust hid it again, then the veil fell away and he saw a shape in gray-green eternite, like a hen's egg with the pointed end uppermost. It was cradled at its base within huge tubes or folded arms in a rectangular configuration.

The Bey had seen it, so had Gesme, at the wheel. Eblis Bey raised his binoculars to his eyes.

"At last!" he exulted in a quiet voice. "After thirty years I have returned. I will keep my oath to them, who lie entombed within that dreadful hulk." He stared at the distant shape with eyes widened by the proximity to doom.

Jon felt the sweat in his palms. He was trembling slightly, his eyes locked on the distant, smooth shape. It was absolutely colossal, he realized.

And then there were blazing lights, suddenly, almost above them. A laowon probe, a black metallic X-frame swung past at a height of fifty meters. The lights speared them momentarily through the dust. It swung past on its trajectory and stopped, swung back toward them. Jon called Aul to halt the mantid. He sprang out with the grenade launcher and raised it to his shoulder. The probe returned, engines laboring, coming in about thirty meters up. When it was almost overhead Jon fired three grenades. The first two missed, exploding harmlessly behind, but the third blew up in the left side engine and the probe dipped smartly into the ground in a fireball of hydrogen.

"Onward!" the Bey screamed. "We have no time left, we must reach the machine."

Their position was no longer secret. High above them, the battlejumpers would be targeting the drop zone. Cyborg pods were snapping into ejection tubes like cartridges into firing chambers. In seconds dozens of other probes would be swarming toward them.

Their mantid leaped ahead, a gap opened between themselves and the rest. Then the turtle suddenly accelerated. Jon and the Bey exchanged a meaningful glance.

Painfully, slowly, the machine before them grew until it seemed too large to be possible, to be comprehensible, and yet it continued to swell larger and larger ahead, becoming overpowering in scale. It was a bald colossus, the size of a small space habitat. The smooth gray surface bulked into the sky for several hundred meters.

Then the perspective made it seem almost spherical, resting on a base of four monstrous pillow shapes, each of which was supported by a pair of treads more than a kilometer in length.

Jon had been prepared for the thing to be a giant, but the creation was so huge it went beyond understanding. How anything so vast had been constructed planetside, to run at the bottom of a deep ocean no less, was beyond his conception of engineering possibilities.