Hellhole Inferno (54 page)

Now the chatter grew louder, more excited. Bolton's reassurance had dulled the edge of panic.

Escobar stood like a statue beside him. He didn't twitch, didn't move a finger. Bolton had never seen the man so motionless. When the excited chatter died down, Escobar spoke again. “The rescue ships are irrelevant, because we have a far higher calling. Our time is short, and this is your last opportunity. I add my voice to the urgings you have heard before from the Xayans. Believe me, the only way we can truly end this crisis forever is if our Xayan allies achieve
ala'ru
. They need your help.
I
need your help. If you will join us in the slickwater pools and participate in the resurrection of the glorious race, you can help us accomplish what no other human has ever done.”

His eyes were intense, shimmering and spiraling. The prisoners seemed confused.

“I am a shadow-Xayan now. I was barely clinging to life, mortally wounded, and now I am stronger than ever before. The slickwater pools and my internal companion Tarcov saved my body as well as my soul.” His voice grew louder, insistent. “I want all of you to go to the pools and join the greatest force in the history of the universe. You can be part of something incredible—it's not too late.”

The POWs were uneasy at Escobar's comments, as was Bolton. “That wasn't part of our agreement,” Bolton muttered, loud enough for the others to hear.

“But we're going to be rescued!” shouted one of the uniformed men.

“We just want to evacuate, sir,” said one of the nearby soldiers. The murmur grew louder. “When is Commodore Hallholme sending down the transports?”

Escobar closed his eyes, as if he continued to shout in his mind, then opened them and turned to look across the wasteland, and up into the sky. High above, a tiny dot grew larger, approaching swiftly. To Bolton's surprise, the Original alien Encix drifted in from afar, borne along by her powerful telemancy. She landed gently on her long, sluglike lower body, and raised her torso to face the crowded prisoners.

Although he had come to know Jonwi during their time in the red weed oasis, Bolton could not read the expression on Encix's strange face. She seemed displeased, determined, and her alien eyes took in the crowded, fenced-in humans … thousands of displaced people, stirring restlessly.

Her voice rang out like thunder. Bolton had never heard anyone speak so loudly without artificial enhancement. “The Ro-Xayans are coming to destroy us all! This planet is doomed, but I refuse to abandon my race's destiny because of a lack of will. I will do what I must!”

Escobar-Tarcov looked at Encix, then turned to Bolton. “This is our last resort, Major Crais. We can no longer wait.”

Bolton felt a quaver of fear. “What are you talking about, sir? The Commodore's ships are coming down. We'll all be rescued.”

“Therefore we must act before then,” Escobar said. “Don't you understand? If all these potential converts go away, it will be too late.”

Flying in from behind Encix like a flock of birds, hundreds of shadow-Xayans used telemancy to swoop in from their nearby settlement.

Seeing them, Bolton's throat went dry. “What is this, sir?”

Escobar joined the arrivals as they alighted gently on the ground. The POWs backed away from them, confused and intimidated.

Bolton hurried after him, continuing to press, “Redcom, tell me what you're doing! We've already solved—”

Encix and all the shadow-Xayans raised their hands in unison. “We do not have enough combined telemancy to accomplish what needs to be done … but we are so close that our agreement can no longer be honored. We need all of you to become shadow-Xayans—
right now
!”

The ground began to rumble beneath Bolton's feet, sharp shocks from deep beneath the camp. The tremors intensified. Somehow, Encix and the shadow-Xayans maintained their balance like poised dancers, while the panicked prisoners lost their footing.

A jagged crack split the ground, and the POWs backed away in different directions to keep from falling into the fissure. The fence surrounding the camp prevented them from escaping. The General's guards staggered forward and waved their weapons as the ground lurched, but the shadow-Xayans paid no attention to them.

Bolton stumbled to his knees, fought his way back to his feet. Escobar grabbed him by the arm and held him up, but somehow the grip did not feel supportive or comforting.

“Observe,” Escobar-Tarcov said. The tremors began to dissipate, but the ground cracks widened.

With a wave of telemancy, Encix and all the shadow-Xayans pulled at something deep underground. Silvery bubbles appeared, flowing ripples—and shimmering slickwater rose up like a flash flood, filling the cracks and spilling out onto the upper surfaces. The shadow-Xayans added their telemancy, but they stood unaffected. The flow of quicksilver liquid swirled around their feet, then surged like a living thing toward the fence, and all across the camp.

Bolton tried to break free of Escobar's implacable grip, but the Redcom refused to let go. Slickwater bubbled up from crevices inside the camp, surging energetically, frothing and foaming. The prisoners backed away, trying to avoid its touch.

Shimmering waves splashed over the fissures in the ground. Crackles of static electricity bounced from wavelet to wavelet. Colored lights and sparks of psychic energy flickered like a kaleidoscope of reflections—glimmers of memories from an entire population whose lives were stored inside the crystalline liquid.

Encix commanded it, and the shadow-Xayans added their power. The flow of slickwater surged up from the ground. Struggling, Bolton heard shouts of dismay from the thousands of prisoners in the camp. The General's guards couldn't flee either, couldn't open the camp gates in time, although they tried. The soldiers tumbled into the sinister liquid.

Escobar-Tarcov tightened his grip on Bolton's arm. “This is our chance for
ala'ru
, Major! Everyone on this planet must become a shadow-Xayan.”

Bolton fought, but Escobar had a mad strength, enhanced by telemancy. The Redcom picked him up, and Bolton was helpless.

Escobar hurled him like a toy into the slickwater.

 

72

Responding to the alarming transmission from the Ankor spaceport, Cristoph had flown away from Slickwater Springs in the refueled scout craft. While racing actoss the continent, he tried repeatedly to get any response from the control center, but received only static and silence. No one answered, not the launching operations, nor any of the shuttles.

Ankor was one of two major spaceports on the planet. Right now, Hellhole needed the full launch capability of both—every shuttle, every craft of any kind that could ferry people off the planet in the little time they had left. But riots over interrupted fuel supplies had caused delays in Michella Town, and now Ankor had fallen entirely silent.

Swearing, he nudged his aircraft to greater speed. Even now, he should have been rounding up settlers from scattered mining operations, farm complexes, and other areas. But if they couldn't get the ships launched again, it was all a moot point.

By the time he reached the Ankor complex, it was midmorning beneath a hazy, greenish sky—a color that often foretold bad weather. A severe Hellhole storm could further disrupt spaceport operations—and there was no time for that!

He saw other ships coming in, cargo craft loaded with passengers rounded up from outlying villages, atmospheric craft scouting for more refugees. Chatter over the comm came from many of the inbound ships; everyone sounded agitated because they were receiving no answers from the Ankor headquarters. Some ships circled the spaceport, sending more and more frantic transmissions. Others just landed wherever they could.

Exasperated, Cristoph took his heavy scout craft to one of the landing zones, alert for other ships that might get in his way. He saw many spacecraft, upboxes, passenger pods, even military personnel transports, just waiting in the paved launch zones. None of them were taking off.

Alarmed, he began breathing harder. People needed to be filling those passenger pods and shuttles, heading up to the stringline hub where they could be whisked off to safer planets in the Deep Zone. There was no time to be idle! On the ground he saw people crowded around the landed passenger pods, the launch areas, the gantry complexes. Fuel tankers sat motionless—probably empty.

After landing, Cristoph disembarked and ran to the crowds around the admin building. He heard a rising roar of angry shouts, loud commands from security officers who failed to keep the crowds under control.

“We need to get aboard shuttles or passenger pods!” someone demanded. “Why is this taking so long?”

During his flight, Cristoph had learned things over the broad-channel comm. Now that the Commodore and General Adolphus had joined forces to evacuate as many people as possible, all operations should have resumed by now. He feared that Rendo Theris had suffered a breakdown, unable to cope with the stress—and these people were going to pay with their lives if the launch activity didn't resume.

He made his way through the multitude, heading for the headquarters building. If Administrator Theris had indeed collapsed, Cristoph would have to take over—and he was willing to do it. This would be far more difficult than running the iperion mines on Vielinger … and infinitely more important. Every delayed shuttle and passenger pod departure would cost lives.

The people milling about were terrified, with good reason. Given how little time they had before the asteroid impacts—less than two days!—they knew many of them wouldn't make it off-world. But oddly, as he fought his way toward the main building, many of the people seemed calm and unaffected.

Then he realized they were shadow-Xayans—a great many of them mingling with the regular humans, as if to dampen their panic. He could identify the converts by their demeanor, the strange sheen in their eyes. Now, in the background noise of the crowd, he heard many of the converts speaking in thrumming voices that had a distinctive alien tone. It gave him an uneasy feeling, and he sensed that something even more strange was happening here than the incomprehensible spaceport shutdown.

Before he reached the headquarters building, though, Cristoph felt a crackling energy in the air, a skin-crawling intensity of increasing levels of telemancy. Luminous tracings of light appeared in the air above the shadow-Xayans, growing brighter. Scattered throughout the crowd, the converts seemed to be concentrating, doing something together.

The crowd noises shifted to shouts and cries of immediate alarm from the normal humans, and then the pavement quivered under Cristoph's feet. The press of the crowd shifted, people screaming as they scrambled away from a jagged crack that ripped open the wide landing field. Secondary cracks rippled away from the main fissure, and the ground tore open so violently that people tumbled into the openings.

Many of those standing around, though, were not running away at all. Shadow-Xayans stood along the edges of the largest fissure, doing absolutely nothing to help the people who had fallen in and were trying to scramble back out.

A flood of thick sparkling liquid welled up from below and spilled across the pavement. Slickwater! The shadow-Xayans were actively drawing from the aquifers beneath the spaceport, flooding the crowded landing grounds with the liquid. They were doing it on purpose!

Now the converts moved with unexpected speed and determination. They selected regular humans in the crowd, using telemancy to propel them into the slickwater. As the fissures continued to fill with shimmering liquid, the shadow-Xayans began a wholesale, forcible immersion of everyone in the area.

Several hundred meters away, one of the towering gantries collapsed, and the ground gave way beneath its foundation, which was swallowed in a widening sinkhole.

Cristoph finally made it to the headquarters building and pressed his way inside. The lobby was already crowded with masses of people, presumably others trying to escape the insidious flood of slickwater—and then he realized that these were shadow-Xayans. All of them.

As he turned to run, the converts reached out to him, and he felt an unseen force spin him around and propel him back out onto the field. He could not break free of their telemancy.

Helpless, he was flung forward, borne on a psychic wave toward the slickwater. Victims were being hurled into the liquid, the whole crowd converted at once. Hundreds of new shadow-Xayans climbed back out of the fissures as they began to assimilate their new alien lives and powers.

Cristoph could already hear the screams diminishing as more people were replaced with the strange alien voices, a wave of mass conversions.

And then the telemancy plunged him into the flowing slickwater.

 

73

The orbiting fleet lost contact with not only the Ankor spaceport, but with Michella Town as well. General Adolphus felt as if he had gone into freefall. Critical evacuation sites were offline.

He had been prepared for the unruly disorganization of people trying to escape a planet before Armageddon. Chaotic crowds would rush to the two spaceports by any means possible, frantic to get to the dubious safety of orbit. Neither spaceport had the capacity to hold so many people. It was a disaster that was no longer waiting to happen.

After battling one setback after another, with the delays caused by the fool George Komun and then the arrival of Commodore Hallholme, Adolphus already faced an impossible challenge. Now, with the compressed timescale as the asteroids accelerated, he realized that it was simply not possible to succeed, even if he had the complete cooperation of everyone, even if every step went precisely according to plan.

He had begun something the number of lives that would be lost—not by his own failures, but because the universe had thrown so many sucker punches at him. Yet he was General Tiber Adolphus, and he refused to admit defeat. He would keep striving and fighting, saving as many people as he could.