Further: Beyond the Threshold (31 page)

Our attackers must have lain in wait, hidden behind the towering cairns. When Jida stumbled upon them, they’d chosen their moment to fire. The initial barrage of particle beams and larger projectiles rendered our mantles completely rigid and almost entirely opaque so that we were all momentarily trapped and immobile inside our shells. When we’d regained mobility, we’d been dragged together to the edge of the cairn forest and disarmed, our projector cuffs taken, my holstered cap gun with them.

We were surrounded by a dozen or more figures, all armed with some sort of bladed weapons, all wearing segmented pressure suits that looked as though they were made of black iron, giving them the appearance of large insects. But the voices shouting at us over the radio waves, harsh and hate filled as they sounded, were all too human.

I was on my knees, Jida to my left, Zaslow and Bin-Ney to my right.

::What are they saying?:: said Zaslow. We’d scarcely exchanged five words, but I could tell he was close to some sort of breakdown.

::I don’t know,:: I said, trying to sound braver than I felt. Our interlinks were struggling to translate whatever language our attackers were broadcasting to us, without much success.

::I swear I’ve heard that language somewhere before,:: Bin-Ney said.

Through the interlink, I could sense Jida’s sudden gasp, and when I looked over, I saw that she’d lifted her hands to her throat, defensively, though she’d seemed unharmed just a moment before.

::Oh dear,:: sounded her voice in my head.

::What is it?:: I asked. ::Are you hurt?::

::I know what they’re saying. I know who they are.::

Jida looked at me, and though her faceplate was partly opaque in the hard X-ray glare, I could still see terror behind her eyes.

::The Iron Mass.::

PART THREE

I was never military. But for a while I was a cop.

In her former life, before being reborn in the Human Entelechy, Amelia Apatari had been a soldier-flyer, a volunteer with the United Nation’s standing army, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations. As a Peacekeeper, she’d been trained to fight, trained to kill. Of course, all she really wanted to do was to fly, and to see new places, but she’d had the training, if needed. And she’d needed it, on occasion.

Me, I’d signed on with the Orbital Patrol because I wanted to go into space, and it seemed to offer the best chances. A division of the Department of Outer Space Affairs, the Patrol had been chartered for emergency response and search-and-rescue operations under the original draft of the Outer Space Treaty, before it was revised and ratified in the early 22C. The 1967 draft of the OST was pretty down on the notion of any militarized use of space:

The moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all States Parties to the Treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes. The establishment of military bases, installations, and fortifications; the testing of any type of weapons; and the conduct of military maneuvers on celestial bodies shall be forbidden.

Needless to say, that language got tweaked a bit once extraplanetary colonies started declaring themselves sovereign nations—to say nothing of the growing numbers of “pirate kingdoms” based in the asteroid belt, the Jovian moons, or wherever smugglers and thieves could lay their hands or equivalent cybernetic appendages on a bit of real estate. In short order, the idea that space was solely for peaceful purposes seemed quaint, like steam trains or poodle skirts.

The Peacekeepers, who to that point had been limited to strictly terrestrial operations, were given expanded operational authority to allow them to deal with brush wars and border skirmishes on the colonies, belts, and elsewhere. That just left crime to contend with.

So while the Orbital Patrol hadn’t been chartered for law enforcement, by the time I was a kid it’d been given limited jurisdictional authority. But there were still old guards in the General Assembly who weren’t crazy about the notion of an interplanetary police force, and so the UN only granted interdiction authority to a small subset of Orbital Patrol officers.

When I’d signed on board
Cutter 972
, I’d been tapped as an Interdiction Detachment. As with most ID officers, I’d had secondary responsibilities as a crewmember, but when circumstances demanded, I was authorized to board other craft. Most every patrolman got trained in Interdiction Negotiation, a multidisciplinary approach incorporating elements of psychology, military strategy, negotiation tactics, and martial arts, even if only ID officers ever used the training, just like all patrolmen were trained marksmen even though ID officers were the only ones authorized to use energetic firearms in the field.

A few times, after boarding smugglers’ ships or pirate vessels, just me with no backup but my cap gun and the jurisdictional authority of an Interdiction Detachment, I’d found myself taken prisoner—a crook had gotten the drop on me or managed to disarm me, or whatever the case might have been—and a time or two, I wasn’t sure I was going to make it out alive. But I’d never been completely without hope, had never given up on the notion of escape.

It had taken twelve thousand years, and an exiled group of genetically engineered religious fanatics, but I was coming close to breaking my streak.

I expected the Iron Mass simply to end us, there in the shadow of the cairn forest. From the tone of their voices and the words our interlinks were quickly learning to translate, it certainly sounded as if they had the will to do so. But for reasons of their own, they limited themselves to hurling invective at us, brandishing their strange long-bladed, long-handled spears. The handles of the spears appeared to be extensible so that they looked like scimitars with the handle collapsed or like Japanese
naginata
when at full extension. There were no signs of any other weapons, but the fact remained that they’d hit us with
something
. For all I knew, they had something like a projector built into the carapaces of their black insect armor.

They had no interest in our weapons, whatever the case, dumping them unceremoniously into some sort of mesh bag, which one of them then slung onto his back. Or her back. Or eir back, I suppose. In the armor, it was impossible to say, and after the last few weeks in the Entelechy and on board the
Further
, I wasn’t about to hazard a guess.

I tried to interlink Maruti and Xerxes to tell them to keep out of sight, but we’d apparently moved too far away for the signals to carry, or the cairns and caves were producing more interference than I’d anticipated. Still, our captors didn’t show any indication that they were aware of the chimp and the robot, so for the moment, they seemed to be safe. The same, I’m afraid, couldn’t be said for the rest of us.

After a while, the attitude and postures of our captors seemed to shift, and one of them stepped forward—the leader, I assumed. The others fell silent, and without saying a word, only using broad gestures, the leader indicated that we should stand up.

::What should we do, Captain?:: Bin-Ney sent.

::At the moment?:: I answered. ::I think we should stand up.::

When we were on our feet, the Iron Mass leader pointed at us with his weapon’s blade, turned, and started walking. The Iron Mass behind us and to either side gestured angrily with their own spears, and it didn’t take too much to work out that we were expected to follow him.

Our captors outnumbered us more than two to one, and were armed. We were hardly defenseless, our mantles capable of withstanding a considerable amount of damage, but the Iron Mass’s first attack made it clear that they could immobilize us with little effort. If we tried to run, we wouldn’t get three steps before the Iron Mass shot our legs out from under us with particle beams—but from where? Were there beam weapons incorporated into the handles of their spears? And besides, as amazing as our mantles were, I didn’t fancy testing their ability to withstand a continuous barrage of firepower from twelve angry attackers.

I’m not sure how long we walked. I suppose I could have instructed my interlink to display a counter in my field of vision, or recite the time for me, but it couldn’t have been more than thirty or forty-five minutes. It seemed longer, though, an interminable death march—to what destination, we didn’t know.

Finally, we arrived at the edge of what appeared to be an enormous canyon. It was impossible to get a sense of scale, but it seemed at first glance large enough to rival the Grand Canyon on Earth, or even Valle Marineris on Mars. It was colossal, mind-numbingly big. In the base of the canyon below us, something large and dark and metallic lumbered, like a giant scorpion.

The sides of the canyon sloped down at a steep grade, and as the Iron Mass forced us at the point of their spears to climb down, we had to struggle to maintain our footing. As we slid down, kicking up scree as we went, I realized that the sides of the canyon were grooved, tiered like shallow stairs. It wasn’t a naturally occurring formation, but was man made.

As we neared the base of the canyon, which was covered in the same grooves as the canyon walls, I got a better look at the giant scorpion-looking machine, which was producing enough noise that I could feel the vibrations even through the thin atmosphere of the pulsar planet.

The machine was almost a kilometer wide and seemed a strange assemblage of different elements. A wide platform perched atop a central pole, which appeared to be driven deep into the surface. Beneath the platform, a long armature extended from the pole out to a distance of more than half a kilometer, from which a giant hunk of machinery descended, digging down into the surface, spinning at a high rate of speed like a drill bit. Above, on the topside of the platform, there was a central dome of some opaque material, with a large rectangular structure on one side and an upright, slender, cylinder-looking edifice, almost like a large cannon, on the other.

As we approached, heading for the central post underneath the enormous structure, in the sickly green illumination of lights running on the platforms underside, I saw that the giant drill at the end of the armature was slowly moving from the end of the arm toward the center.