“How’s it going?” Festina asked. She sounded like someone trying not to sound anxious.
“See for yourself,” Plebon said. He pointed over the parapet wall, across the palace grounds and past the first canal, to a Sperm-tail twinkling down from the black sky. The tail tip lay pressed against the side of the old Hushed Museum, a memorial to every Mandasar who’d died in the last 144 years. (That’s supposed to be how long Mandasar souls stay in the afterlife before getting reincarnated again.) I was happy to see the museum had survived the war…even if it looked like the Sperm-tail had choked up against the building and wouldn’t come any closer.
“Is the tail stuck?” I asked.
“It’s held,” Plebon answered. “We increase our power; the tail comes toward us. Then the other side adds more power to
its
anchor, and we lose ground.”
“Okay,” Festina said, moving into line with Tobit and Dade. “Cut me…before Queen Samantha finds more juice.”
She spread her arms to expose the front of her tightsuit. Plebon hesitated a moment, then picked up a scalpel that’d been lying on the parapet wall—a regulation navy scalpel, taken from an Explorer’s first-aid kit. He skimmed the knife up one side of Festina’s rib cage, across at the shoulders, and down to the waist. A flap of heavy cloth fell open in her suit, baring the electronics beneath. Plebon carefully slipped his hand in among the wires and began feeling around for the power cable.
“Kind of an erotic experience, ain’t it, Admiral?” Tobit leered. “Having your clothes cut off, then getting groped.”
“Shut up, old man,” Festina mumbled. Her voice sounded like somebody blushing.
While Plebon worked, I looked over the edge of the parapet. The first thing to catch my eye was a Laughing Larry, hovering halfway between the palace and the surrounding palisade. At the moment, the Larry wasn’t giggling its full hyena laugh—just a light chuckle, as if it knew a joke we didn’t. The gold ball spun two stories above the ground, a good height for slaughtering soldiers when the shooting started, but from down there, they wouldn’t hit us up on the roof. Larries fired out the bottom and sides, not the top; they weren’t designed to butcher people who’d reached higher ground.
Another Larry hovered over the first canal, just beyond the west gate of the palisade. In the darkness I couldn’t see more of the metal balls, but I didn’t doubt they were out there—when Tobit had reported four of the nasty things, he’d been using his Bumbler as telescope and IR scanner.
Four Laughing Larries, and the Balrog inching up behind us. Not good. I noticed the five Mandasars had planted themselves at the top of the ramp, between me and the creeping moss. Counselor was grimly holding Festina’s flaming lantern; she obviously had plans to show the Balrog a hot time if it tried to attack her
Teelu.
I turned my eyes toward the Sperm-tail, still plastered against the side of the Hushed Museum. The tail seemed to be quivering with excitement…but maybe it was just vibrating under tension as our anchor pulled one way and Sam’s pulled the other. Behind me, Dade yelled at Plebon, “Hey, be careful! If you feed too much power, you’ll fry the whole anchor.”
“He knows that,” Festina said in a tight voice. “Let the man work.”
“Almost there,” Plebon grunted. “Here goes.”
Suddenly, the tail slithered away from the museum wall. It snapped up into the air, high, high, halfway to the thin clouds, then stabbed down again, straight at us—like a colored tube of lightning, and the anchor was the lightning rod.
Whish. Contact. Locked down.
I lifted my hand to my earphone and waited for someone to tell
Jacaranda
we were ready. Five seconds passed in silence. Finally, I said, “Um…shouldn’t we call the ship? Say we’re ready for transport?”
“No radios,” Festina replied. Her voice came straight out of her tightsuit, with no amplification. “Our suit power is shunted into the anchor. But there’s nothing to worry about: the ship can tell when its tail has been snagged. Give them a few more seconds to establish an air-pressure gradient. Then we can start—”
She was going to say we could start transporting up. But she was interrupted by stuff transporting
down:
three Laughing Larries and a twentyish version of me.
One slight difference: the younger me had a chest made of glass.
41
GREETING THE NEW ARRIVALS
They came out of the Sperm-tail in a whoosh, spat onto the parapet through the tiny tail tip and suddenly exploding to full size. One of the Larries smacked against the parapet wall with a metallic clang; the other two bounced against the stone floor, then flipped over the outer wall, where they dropped almost all the way to the ground before stopping their fall. They spun down there, howling as loud as banshees…as if they were furiously angry and screaming for someone to kill.
The man nearly went over the side too. He shot out of the Sperm-tail and landed unbalanced on his feet, staggering forward out of control till he lurched over the stomach-high wall. I barely managed to catch him by the tail of his vest. It was a leather one, exactly like Mr. Clear Chest had worn on Celestia.
As I pulled him back to more solid footing, Festina wheeled around, ripping her connection away from the anchor. Her right fist caught the man hard in the jaw; he seemed so dizzy from the Sperm-tail ride, he didn’t see the punch coming. The impact nearly sent him over the wall again, but I kept hold of his vest and hauled him in. That brought him back into range for Festina to hit him with a left in the solar plexus and a knife-hand to the side of the neck. He slumped unconscious, his limp body staying upright only because of my grip on his vest. Gingerly, I lowered him to the ground, keeping a wary eye on Festina.
“Um,” I began to say…but behind Festina’s back, the anchor box shot up a stream of sparks that hissed and fizzed in the darkness. When she’d torn herself free, some circuit must have shorted out. With the anchor discombobulated, the Sperm-tail snapped loose and whipped past our faces, making a beeline for the other anchor, somewhere in the middle of the Black Army.
Dade howled, “No!” A moment later, he spun to face Festina. “Do you know what you did? You ruined our chance to escape! They told me you were crazy, but…” He clamped his mouth shut.
Festina only sighed. “Dade,” she said, “that wasn’t our Sperm-tail: it came from some other ship.
Jacaranda
sure as hell wasn’t carrying Laughing Larries…and I would have noticed a crew member who looks so much like Edward.” She shook her head. “There must have been a second ship in this system. When we arrived, it hid behind an asteroid or something; but as soon as
Jacaranda
left, the ship came straight to Troyen. Obviously, this pretty fellow didn’t want to miss the final offensive. In so much of a hurry, he forgot to make sure his Sperm-tail had landed on the right anchor.”
“But…” It was obvious Dade still wanted to blame someone. “You didn’t have to rip away from the anchor and break it. You didn’t have to
hit
the guy.”
“No?” Festina knelt beside the clear-chest man and patted him down. At his hip, she found a holster holding a standard-issue navy stun-pistol: very bad if the man had been given enough time to start shooting. Even worse, Festina opened a zipped inner pocket of the leather vest and pulled out a palm-sized electrical doodad—a control box of some kind.
She held it for Dade to see. “Command module for those Laughing Larries,” she said. “Voice-activated. He didn’t even have to pull it from his pocket; all he had to do was shout. One word, and his three nasty pets would have sliced us to ribbons.”
Dade stared, his eyes growing wide. He whispered, “How did you know?”
Festina shook her head in despair. “I didn’t know, Dade—I made a snap judgment, based on inadequate facts. That’s what Explorers
do.
Sometimes you’re right, sometimes you’re wrong. Sometimes it doesn’t matter, sometimes it’s life and death. You never know till it’s over…and often, not even then.”
Slowly she got to her feet. Tobit took the controller from her. “Let me have a look at this,” he said. “If I’m lucky, I can hot-wire the voice-recognition circuits, so it obeys one of us instead of sleeping beauty there.”
“No need,” Festina told him. She took the box back and held it out to me, like a microphone I should speak into. “Edward, say, ‘Rise two meters.’ ”
I did. The three Larries that’d just come down the Sperm-tail whirled themselves up a couple meters higher. I swallowed hard, but Festina only shrugged. “Clones. You and this guy look the same, so I figured you’d sound the same too. At least close enough to fool a simple-minded voice-recognition system.” She tossed the controller to me. “Congratulations, King Edward. You’ve got three killing machines. I’m curious as hell what you’ll do with them.”
Giving me the controller was a test: I knew that. Festina wanted to see if I’d go crazy or something. I think she still was inclined to trust me, but considering how I’d smashed that anchor, she couldn’t be sure I was on the side of the angels. If I’d tried to talk to the Larries, maybe she would have punched me just like the guy on the ground…or shot me with her stunner. She’d turned a titch away from me, so I couldn’t see either her holster or her gun hand.
But none of that mattered—I had no intention of using the Larries for anything. I came close to throwing the controller off the parapet, so I wouldn’t be tempted…and so the spirit that sometimes possessed me couldn’t use the Larries either. Instead, I just handed the little gizmo back to Festina. “You keep it,” I said. “If you need the Larries to do something, I’ll give them your orders; but I don’t want my own army.”
“Lousy instincts for a king,” she muttered. But she took the controller and tucked it into a pouch on her belt. Glancing down at our new Mr. Clear Chest, she asked, “What do your instincts say about him?”
“Um…maybe shoot him with your stunner, just to make sure?”
She looked like she was considering it, but Dade spoke first. “If you shoot him, he’ll be out for six hours. Suppose we need to interrogate him or something.”
Festina looked at the boy. “Interrogate him? What about?”
“I don’t know,” Dade answered, not meeting her eyes. “But it’d be nice to have the option. And maybe we could use him as a hostage…if he’s important to York’s sister.”
“You think my sister would care?” I asked.
“She might,” Festina admitted. She knelt beside the unconscious man. From a pouch in her belt, she pulled a coil of copper wire (probably for making electrical repairs to her suit) and began trussing our prisoner’s hands behind his back. “Dade,” she said, “if you’re so interested in this guy, you’re in charge of him. No matter what else happens, don’t take your eyes off him. Shout when he wakes up. Can you do that?”
“Yes”
Dade answered, sounding all huffy with indignation. Festina didn’t comment; instead she turned to me.
“This fellow is a clone of your father, right? Or possibly of you yourself.”
“Since I’m a clone of my father, there’s no difference.”
“There’s a difference. If nothing else, your father’s fully human; you have that pinch of Mandasar. I suspect this fellow has Mandasar genes too—all the better to produce babies with your sister.”
That made me gulp. “Babies? But that’s, umm…”
“Incest?” she suggested. “Absolutely. But it still produces healthier offspring than cloning the clones of a clone. How old was your father when you were produced? Sixty, something like that? So your own genes were sixty years old the moment you were conceived. YouthBoost can compensate to some extent, but sorry, Edward, you don’t have the hundred-and-sixty-year life expectancy of a normal human. A hundred and twenty, tops. And if we cloned
you,
your progeny might not make it to eighty.
“So,” she went on, “since your sister wants to generate a dynasty of superkids, it’s best to avoid more cloning and just use the old-fashioned approach. A mummy and daddy love each other very much…and they mass-produce fertilized ova which are farmed out to surrogate mothers all over the Technocracy.” Festina gave a rueful grin. “Your Samantha is the mother, and I’ll bet this fellow is the father.”
“Oh.” It made me kind of sick, thinking this copy of me might have been
with
Samantha. For all I knew, they could have produced kids already. But when I thought about it, that wasn’t so likely: Sam had been so busy running the war, she wouldn’t have time to go through pregnancy; and on Troyen, she’d have a hard time finding another human woman who could act as surrogate mom. All the humans had been evacuated twenty years ago.
Still, this clear-chest guy—this version of me or my father—it made me feel horrible, thinking of him and Sam together. Was he smart? It was such a dumb jealous question, but was he smart? Was he witty and charming and all, a real equal who could keep up with her and not some halfwit moron who always needed to be babied? Because if he was stupid, maybe I could stand the thought of him with Sam, her giving him orders, do this, do that…but if he was so smart that sometimes he got the better of her, and sometimes he said, “This is what I want,” and she did it…
That would make me truly, truly sick. I don’t know why but it would.
Kneeling beside Festina, I bent over the man and sniffed…as if I could somehow smell whether or not he was clever. I couldn’t tell you what I expected to find, but I do know what actually hit my nose: the odor of buttered toast.
Uh-oh.
The hairs on the back of my neck curled cold and clammy. I was remembering something from back on Celestia, as die glass-chested recruiter stood in the hatchway of his skimmer. There’d been that tiny dot of red shining in his belly, like the tip of a ruby laser…but back then, I hadn’t known enough to be terrified of little glowing specks.
Gingerly, I flipped the man’s vest all the way open. Inside the glass torso, his lungs lifted up and down; his heart thudded behind his ribs; and there in his gut, tucked among the folds of his small intestine, was a glowing pinprick of red.
“Look,” I said, pointing. I made sure to keep my finger high above the glass.
Festina squinted, then sat back abruptly. “Jesus Christ Is that Balrog?”
“Smells like it,” I told her.
“In his stomach. How could it get into his stomach? How could you
smell
it in his stomach?”
That was a real good question. For the first time it occurred to me maybe I wasn’t really smelling stuff at all. Maybe I was just kind of
sensing
it, the way Kaisho could see things even though her eyes were covered with hair. That could explain why some people smelled like sounds or colors: I wasn’t actually using my nose. Or at least I wasn’t using it for everything. Mandasar queens might secretly have a sixth sense, like ESP or something…and now I had the same thing. Considering how Balrog spores were supposed to be all telepathic, maybe other telepaths could sense them pretty easily—as if they were giving off strong signals on the ESP channel.
But I could think about such things later. I told Festina, “I don’t know how I smelled it, I just did.” I took a deep breath. “That other guy had a Balrog too. The recruiter on Celestia. I noticed a little red speck glowing in his stomach, but didn’t know what it was.”
“Oh,
fuck”
Festina whispered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” She quickly turned to Tobit, and snapped, “Put a Bumbler back together. Fast.”
Two minutes later, we were staring at the Bumbler’s vidscreen, looking at a mocked-up anatomical diagram made with X rays and ultrasound. The clear-chest man did indeed have a Balrog in his belly; but it was locked in a thumb-sized containment chamber that must have been surgically implanted. The chamber itself was glass, which was why you could see the spore glowing inside; but it also had a set of black tubes sunk into the intestinal wall, and a bunch of wires leading back to the man’s spinal cord.
“Got to be some kind of life support,” Tobit said. “Those tubes into the intestines—they’re probably siphoning nutrients from the guy’s digestive system. Feeding the damned moss.”
“And everything is glass,” Plebon pointed out. “Balrogs need sun as well as food, correct?”
Festina nodded. “They have to get solar energy every day…and some warped fool must have replaced this guy’s chest with glass, so light could get in. Drastic, but it does the job. That’s why he prances around in just a vest—a shirt would get in the way.”
“But why would you want a Balrog in your belly?” Dade asked. “If that glass container ever broke…”
“It can’t be real glass,” said Festina. “Neither is die man’s chest. They’re both some transparent polymer…probably as tough as armor.”
“But why keep a Balrog at all?” Dade insisted. “Dangerous little parasites, who can see the future and read your mind…”
Something went click in my head. “Communication system,” I blurted out.
“What do you mean?” Plebon asked.
“Festina said some folks believe all the Balrogs are in telepathic contact with each other…instantaneous communication, no matter how far apart individual spores might be. Suppose someone figured out a way to use Balrogs as, um, relays. You lock one up inside you, hook it to your brain—through those wires there, straight to the spinal nerves—then you kind of use it like a broadcast link. This guy’s thoughts go into his Balrog, and get transmitted instantaneously to Mr. Clear Chest on Celestia. Mr. Clear Chest’s thoughts come back the same way. They constantly hear what each other is thinking.” I stopped a second. “For all we know, their thoughts may go back and forth so fast they scramble together. Like one joint brain inside two separate heads, light-years apart. A little hive-mind of their own.”
“Bloody hell,” Festina whispered. “If your father can not only make superhumans, but keep all their brains in synch so they don’t fight among themselves…staying in instantaneous contact even when they’re spread across the galaxy…”
“They’d be worse than the damned Balrogs,” Tobit growled. “Speaking of which, imagine how the mossy little bastards feel about this: their fellow spores taken as slaves and used as someone else’s phone line.”
“They hate it,” Festina said softly. “And they hate the people who built it.” She turned to me. “That containment chamber looks like Fasskister technology—Fasskisters are masters of hooking machines to organisms and vice versa. Remember what Kaisho said back on the orbital.”
I nodded.
The Fasskisters know full well why it’s right and proper to lock them in their precious metal suits, with physical needs taken care of, but their minds slowly going crazy.
That’s why the spores had taken over the Fasskister orbital: tit-for-tat vengeance against the folks who’d sealed up spores in little glass cases.