Authors: William H. Keith
Grimly, he targeted the ground in front of that writhing, misshapen serpent and triggered a long burst of high-explosive shells. The Cyclan autocannon slammed off three rounds, the heavy
thud-thud-thud
rocking Hagan’s strider back with the recoil. The detonations walked across the Cobra’s path, a triple burst of man-sized explosions that tore up the ground and splattered the crawling horror with stinging shrapnel and rock.
The Xeno machine ignored him, writhing over the cratered ground with an almost comical haste. Hagan took aim again, this time targeting the machine-creature’s flattened hood. Katya had vanished into the thing’s swollen mid-section and must be there still. Perhaps he could kill the monster by cutting off its head, then free Katya before the thing crushed or smothered her.
He fired again, a second chain of autocannon fire barking and snapping across a range of nearly one hundred meters. With enhanced, telescopic vision, he could see the shells slamming into the Xeno’s neck just behind the raised and quivering cobra’s hood, saw the explosions savage that black-gray hide from the inside, blowing out great, gaping holes with each impact.
Lipinski, controlling the Ghostrider’s 100-MW laser now, added his machine’s high-tech violence to the attack The Cobra’s hooded head seemed to deflate suddenly, then dropped away, literally blasted from the Xeno’s body.
But the Xenophobe machine kept moving, crawling now, if anything, faster than before. Hagan could see the body reshaping itself as it moved. The swollen rear portion was smoothing over now, the spines and tentacles reabsorbing into the rest of the body mass. The stump behind where the head had been rounded itself off, the ragged end smoothed over, and Hagan felt a sick, jabbing anguish at the realization that this, this
creature
did not keep its brains in the same place that terrestrial animals did.
He’d
known that, of course, but he’d had to try. The “head” lay discarded on the barren crater floor, already fragmenting into deadly Xeno Gammas; the rest of the Cobra continued to slither toward the tunnel entrance, half a kilometer away.
Lipinski loosed another laser bolt, searing the Cobra’s side.
“Hold fire, damn it!” Hagan barked.
“But… but…”
“Look, kid,” Hagan said, rage and terror and hope all draining from his thoughts at the same moment, leaving him terribly tired. “If she’s dead, there’s not a damned thing we can do for her. If she’s alive, we could kill her. Either way…”
He didn’t add that maybe, horribly, Katya was still alive and
wishing
she were dead, because trapped inside the Xeno she didn’t have a chance. Her life support pack and mask would give her a couple hours of air; she might live that long, if the thing didn’t…
digest
her before that.
Hagan’s strider AI recognized the symptoms of a profound psychological shock building within Hagan’s brain and body; had the man been in his body, that body would have been violently sick. Skillfully, the AI interceded, interrupting a series of C-socket impulses that could have thrown the Scoutstrider on its side, all coordination and control gone. As it was, the RLN-90 stumbled to a halt, autocannon arm tracking back and forth helplessly, almost as though it was trying to make up its mind.
The Cobra reached the tunnel entrance, nosed into it, and vanished as slickly as a snake slithering down a hole.
Katya was sure that she was going mad. When the Xenophobe’s mass engulfed her, cocooning her in suffocating blackness, her old claustrophobia had risen from nightmare corners of her mind, a haunting horror thought dead, now demonically alive and hungry and wildly raging through the fragmenting shards of her awareness.
She couldn’t move, she couldn’t see, she couldn’t hear. With her eyes wide open, she was surrounded by a dark more profound than anything she’d ever experienced, worse by far than that time, years before, when equipment failure had awakened her, isolated and alone, within the linkage capsule of a starship and nearly driven her insane. She could feel her captor’s body—bodies?—pressing around her. Where it touched clothing or survival pack or comel she felt only pressure; where it touched bare skin she felt a wet, faintly cool clinginess that reminded her of thick mud. It was like drowning, like being buried alive, her worst, worst nightmares given substance and form and texture.
Her throat was raw; she thought she must have screamed, even though she had no memory of it. For a horrible several moments, she felt she was going to be sick in her breathing mask, but by clenching eyes shut and fists closed and jaw tight she battled back, fighting the choking, gagging raw terror that threatened to consume her, and pushed it back, holding it, by main force of will, at a metaphorical arm’s length.
Strangely, when she was able to think again at all, she was steadied by the presence of… something that seemed to be with her inside her skull, an awareness not her own that manifested itself, not in words, but as impressions.
…
curiosity…
… fear—pain
—
need-flee-Unity…
… wonder…
Most powerful of all was the realization that she was alive, that the Xeno had not killed her. She could not move; the interlaced cells were pressed roundabout her, covering every square centimeter of her body. If it hadn’t been for her mask, she would certainly have suffocated… or drowned. It felt as though she’d been stuffed into a barrel filled with some heavy, viscous liquid. She could feel the Xeno’s movements as a rippling, almost peristaltic surging, but her cocoon muffled the sensations and protected her from injury.
I’m aboard a Xenophobe combat machine,
she thought… and she was scared by the hysterical edge that grated around the borders of that thought.
It’s… taking me for a ride.…
Where?
Though she’d lost all orientation when she’d been swallowed, the blood pounding in her temples, the congested feeling behind her mask felt like the sensations of being upside down. Desperately, she tried to organize the limited data reaching her panic-shocked brain. Yes… it definitely felt like she was upside down, or nearly so, moving in a generally downward direction. It was a little like sliding headfirst through a dark and cramped tube, like, she imagined, dropping down a garbage chute while trapped in a wet and clinging mass of garbage.
That imagery did her no good. Again, she very nearly vomited, and claustrophobia gibbered insanely somewhere behind her disorientation and fear.
Katya concentrated on what she knew. It seemed the only way to hold madness at bay.
She was moving downward, and that meant the Cobra had gulped her down and bolted for its tunnel. What, she wondered, had Vic and Georg made of that? Though the cell-body of the thing holding her had completely engulfed her, it hadn’t hurt her, at least not yet. Its grip was paralyzingly strong. She couldn’t move, couldn’t even free her right hand enough to reach her holstered pistol. She had the impression that, had the Xeno chosen to do so, it could have exerted a tiny fraction of its potential strength, and she would have been pulped into a homogeneous mass of blood, tissue, and splintered bone.
But it
hadn’t,
it
hadn’t.
What did that mean?
That it was taking her somewhere.
Where?
Underground, obviously. Back to… wherever it was that Xenophobes came from when they emerged from their light-less deeps.
So little was known about them.
What? Review the data, girl! Work it out! Your life depends on knowing the answers!
But damn it, what’s the question?
Dev’s brief contact with the World Mind of Alya B-V had revealed the Xenophobe’s racial cycle. That Xeno—it had called itself the One—had been a single mind embracing some trillions of Xeno “cells” networked throughout the planet’s crust. That was the so-called “contemplative” phase of the Xenophobe, when it could expand no more and had settled down to a lifetime that might well be measured in geological ages, absorbing heat from the planet’s core and…
thinking,
thinking about whatever it was that such minds thought about.
The Xenophobes of Eridu, and of every other human-colonized world where they’d been encountered, had not yet reached that stage. They were still in the “acquisitive” phase, active, growing, and scattered as hundreds or thousands of separate organisms, each consisting of millions or billions of head-sized cells. Until this moment, no one had even been certain that the acquisitive Xeno stage was intelligent. Rational thought, it was suggested, might arise only after the One had ejected planet-seeding bits of itself on the magnetic winds of the “great void” which they thought lay at the center of their universe of rock. Only then, perhaps, did they settle down to become a peaceful, nonaggressive, and intelligent world mind.
That, Katya realized, was not entirely true. She had felt…
something
when her comel had first touched that black pseudopod, and she felt something now. The impressions were vague, more instinct and blind hunger than anything else, but there were flashes of something else.
… expectation…
… urgency…
… Unity…
That last tugged at Katya’s awareness, and at her curiosity. There were—were they truly memories?—yes, distance-dimmed memories of… of completion. Of wholeness. Of something called “Self.”
What would a finger feel, given a mind of its own, when it was sliced from its hand? This was like that, an urgent need to reunite with something far larger, far more powerful than the mind Katya felt in the black, rippling mass around her. She sensed intelligence there, a curiosity… and, weirdly, a fear of
her
that was at once both reassuring and disquieting.
If it was afraid of her, what might it do to her to protect itself?
Other impressions were clearer, but at the same time more jumbled, confused, and fragmentary. There was a memory-picture of the battle, shapes that might have been thermal images that were almost unrecognizable; they
would
have been unrecognizable had it not been for the landscape that gave her a sense of up and down, of moving across terrain. The—call it the sky—was black and cold and empty save for a vague white flare of warmth and radio noise that must be Marduk. It carried with it a sense of horror and dread:
lonely-deep-Void-emptiness-not-Rock.
Opposite was Rock:
warm-solid-shelter-food-safe.
She sensed »self« clinging to Rock, drawing security from it. She sensed…
others,
things not-Self and not-Rock and bewildering in their contradictions—and those others were
threat,
pillars of intense heat, moving across rock, hurling death and pain.
Is that how Xenos see us?
She shuddered. It was a wonder it hadn’t just crushed her and fled.
Then she realized that, though it was hard to judge scale in those alien memories, the pillar-things she was “seeing” were the heat images of warstriders. Individual humans were little more than shimmering patches of warmth and—taste?—chemicals, nearly invisible, indistinguishable from unmoving pillars of warmth that might be Eriduan vegetation, easily overlooked.
Why did the Xeno fear her? She was sure that she detected that emotion in that confused bundle of comel-relayed impressions. Indeed, it felt as though
fear
might be the one emotion she had with a clear counterpart in the Xeno’s thoughts. No amount of questioning or concentration or inward listening revealed the answer, however. She did get the impression that her captor was trying its best to be gentle with her, to protect her from harm.
Nice of it,
she thought.
Maybe it’s saving me as a snack for later.
But she dismissed that, an undisciplined thrust of black, gallows humor.
One thing’s for damned sure,
Katya told herself.
When this is over, girl, you’re either going to be cured forever of claustrophobia or you’re going to be drooling on the carpet.
When this is over? She had no way of telling how long she’d been trapped in this black shroud, but she did know that she’d started out with two hours’ worth of air in her life support pack… and that was two hours based on a slow and regular breathing rate. In the past few minutes, she’d been panting and gasping like a beached fish, driven by panic to gulp down air at a far higher than normal rate. If her support pack hadn’t been automatically monitoring the CO
2
in her breathing and constantly adjusting the gas mix accordingly, she’d have swiftly hyperventilated herself into unconsciousness.
It’s got to want to talk to me,
she thought, thrusting away unpleasant specters of suffocation, alone in the depths of cold, crushing rock.
I came here to communicate with one of these things, and by God, I’m going to communicate!
I just hope I don’t run out of air first.
The thought images that had reached »self« from the not-Self thing it had captured were disturbingly like the impressions exchanged between two »selves« in momentary direct contact, except that they were… strange, so distorted as to be almost unintelligible. There were no impressions at all relating to such primary senses as magnetic field or electrical flux or chemical composition or even direction.
Of the thoughts that did come across, strongest, perhaps, was the feeling of being enclosed and trapped and surrounded, of being buried beneath a vast and crushing mass of rock. What was puzzling about that image was that the feelings of security and warmth and life and union that were normally associated with the sense of being closed in were missing, replaced instead by a gnawing, scrabbling, frantic urgency that tasted like raw fear.
Fear of being closed in? For »self«, that was an oxymoron, a statement as paradoxical as, say,
enjoyment
of the aching, yawning emptiness of the central Void.