Seeds of Earth (48 page)

I will break him and crush him, then break all you Hum in rabble and your talking pets!'

The big hand released Greg's jaw and the Sendruk in turned aside, his face altering once more, as did his stance.

'You will be working with us for a long time to come, Doctor Cameron,' Kuros said as he moved towards the double doors. 'Reconcile yourself to your part and you will reap the rewards. Now I must leave to deal with the current crisis and ensure that peace and stability return to Darien.' He left, both doors closing silently behind him.

Seated there, bound to the chair, Greg's thoughts dwelled on Kuros's words about that vapour of engineered particles, and imagined the worst.

The peace of death,
he thought.
Or the nearest thing to it. Is this what they have planned for us, infecting us with their vapour, turning us all into happy, compliant serfs? God help us ...

And what were they going to do to him, or even make him do? Be the Human mask for their operations on Darien? Betray his friends, perhaps? - that might be the worst thing that he could imagine, but he had no doubt that the vapour's designers had dreamed up a few more.

As he sat there he could hear other occupants moving around in the big house, the muffled sound of voices, the tread of feet in the corridor outside. Then one of the room's double doors began to open quite slowly to a quarter of the way before closing again, gradually, without haste and without anyone entering. Greg stared, thinking dully that maybe a guard had started to come in, then changed his mind.

'Friend Gregori. . .' came a whisper from nearby.

And before his eyes the air darkened and Chel emerged like someone stepping through a liquid door. Then the diminutive Uvovo staggered over to lean on the table, the short fur on his face and neck bristling and all four of his new eyes glaring out at the surrounding room.

'Forgive me, Gregori. . .' Chel began.

'Chel! - in the name of . . . how did ye get in here? How did ... I mean, you were invisible.'

'Observation is alteration, friend Gregori - these eyes create strange avenues.' Chel was recovering, standing straighten 'I have found that I can perceive hidden meanings and consequences in what I see, but I can also temporarily alter consequences, like making the air become a concealing shell which enabled me to climb aboard the zeplin that took you away, and then to find my way here after the landing.'

'You look exhausted,' Greg said.

'Well observed,' Chel said as he turned to regard Greg with all six eyes, whereupon he froze on the spot, staring. And Greg knew what he was seeing and knew that Chel would still try to rescue him.

'I see them,' Chel murmured. 'And they can see me . .. Greg, what are those things?'

He tried to explain the concept of nano-engineered particles as a mechanism of control but had to settle for the idea of 'the dust of the Dreamless', a kind of ghost entity put in his head to compel obedience.

'And I don't see how it's possible to get it out again,' he said. 'So that makes me a danger to you and everyone else - you really should leave me here and go ...'

Chel blinked in sequence, a bizarre sight to behold, then he reached down to Greg's bonds and released him.

'I understand your reasoning, Gregori, but you are my friend - I cannot let you face this alone. And after we leave this place, I shall take you to the nearest daughter-forest and see what the root-scholars can do about this Dreamless poison.'

Greg nodded, feeling a stab of emotion at this show of solidarity and brotherhood. He cleared his throat.

'So how
are
we going to get out of here?' he said.
While avoiding the sound of Kuros's voice.

'I confess, Gregori, I do not know,' Chel said. 'Maintaining the air-shell concealment requires a great effort -1 could not keep both of us hidden long enough to reach the front door, never mind the entrance to the grounds.'

'Maybe you could go for a hunt around this place and find some weapons,' Greg said.

'I think I could do that,' said Chel, just as they heard the distant sound of gunfire coming from the front of the house. They looked at each other for a moment then Greg started to get up, but Chel pulled him back.

'Listen!'

The gunfire was louder, or there were more guns firing. There were also shouts coming from other parts of the house, orders being given, and the thudding of boots. And one pair approaching the room. Chel's eyes, all six, widened as he grasped Greg's shoulder ... and the air turned to swirling eddies of shimmering opacity shot through with emerald gleams, a flux of slow currents with Chel as their hub.

The doors flew open and in strode a Sendrukan soldier who took one look at the empty chair and dashed back out, bellowing at the top of his voice. The glittering curtain faded and Chel said:

'Quickly, over there in the corner . . .'

Greg followed the Uvovo's directions and went to crouch in the corner with Chel kneeling next to him, eyes staring with a burning intensity into some facet of reality that Greg would never know. The air darkened into languid swirls of glimmering fog a moment before Kuros hurried into the room, followed by one of his aides. He went round to the chair, examined the loosened plastic cuffs, then stood and surveyed the room.

'How could the Human have escaped, exalted?' said the aide.

For a moment, Kuros said nothing as he studied the room, the walls, the tall, curtained windows, even the floor.

'The floors in this hovel have a substantial gap between the boards and ceilings,' he said, crouching down, the palm of one long-fingered hand resting on the polished wood. 'There may be an access or a trapdoor ... is that where you are hiding, Doctor Cameron?'

His voice was low and deadly as he then began to intone the words Greg feared most, that phrase, the key ... He felt the alteration begin, the shiver of surrender in those subservient particles, their collective eagerness to comply as Kuros continued, 'Are you here? - show yourself now!'

But something stifled that rush to obey, kept the muscles from engaging, the mouth from speaking. Chel, it was Chel! - Greg knew it had to be him, somehow altering the consequences and suppressing the parasitic particles' automated response. Yet the strain was showing in the Uvovo's face, his strength was ebbing and soon his intervention would fail. While Kuros stood there, watching, waiting . . .

And that was when the wall and part of the ceiling fell on him, a cascade of brickwork, joists and plaster dust. Greg saw the High Monitor go down and when the soldier went to his aid a massive metal claw punched through another part of the wall, showering him with rubble, knocking him senseless to the ground.

There was a raucous machine roar coming from beyond the half-demolished wall. Greg realised that he was in control of himself again while finding that he was having to support Chel's semi-conscious form as he got to his feet. Then a face appeared at the hole in the wall, hazy through the clouds of dust.

'He's here!'

A second face replaced the first - it was Rory.

'Hey there, Mr C - how's it goin'? Just a sec and we'll have ye outa there!'

A moment later, the mechanical claw swung down again and gouged part of the wall down to floor level, raising further pale and billowing clouds. This is it, he realised - we have to make a break for it now!

Shouts were coming from the hallway outside the wrecked room as he slung the insensible Chel over his shoulder and hurried towards the jagged gap in the wall where Rory and others were waiting, beckoning. As he clambered over rubble and broken ceiling beams, he risked a backward glance and saw Sendrukan soldiers running towards the room entrance, curve-snouted handweapons coming to bear. And as his gaze swept back he spotted the dust-caked form of High Monitor Kuros crawling from beneath the wreckage. Their gazes met for a split second, and a surge of fear propelled Greg on through the gaping hole to where eager hands took Chel from his shoulder.

Gunfire like high-pitched, rasping bursts came from within and was met with return fire including, he noticed, a couple of crossbows and handfuls of caltrops. Greg just had time to register the huge mechanical digger with its hydraulic arm buried in the side of the house, and Rory tugging on his arm, urging him towards the waiting hillcar, before Kuros's voice came to him, those deadly words carrying over the noise of the firefight.

The world about him seemed to drain away, leaving only wavering views of the house, muffled sounds of weaponsfire, Rory yelling at him to stop, but he knew that he had no control, that the nano-particles were only obeying their master. Then someone grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back, but the particles made him struggle and cry out until something struck his head and the light and the house and everything crashed down into darkness.

PART FOUR

47

ROBERT

The shifting ivory glow that illuminated the bottom of the immense, winding cave barely reached the narrow ledges and precarious paths which notched the upper reaches of its sheer walls. As he paused to peer over a low rampart of mineral deposit as smooth and nacreous as melted opal, he glimpsed the shadows of large creatures and heard them squawk and whoop to each other between the grunts and snorts. Which was the most he had witnessed since arriving here over a day ago, but then his escorts had kept him from venturing along am passages leading downward with emphatic warnings of deadly danger. The temptation to leave them was tempered by his natural caution and amplified by his lack of company.

'Must keep moving, Human Horst,' said a tinny, scratchy voice. 'Conveyance 289 awaits us at the Great Terrace - it will take us to the upgate and thence to the Construct.'

It was one of his small mechanical escorts, the one he had come to think of as Tripod-Reski: the others were Track-Reski and Hover-Reski. They insisted that they were elements of a single entity, a kind of machine-mind collective going by the name Reski Emantes. TripodReski was a foot-tall mech with three jointed legs supporting an odd glass torso which contained blurred, many-coloured components that flickered and glowed, and was wrapped in a black mesh carapace. A squat ovoid sat on top, encircled by an ocular band.

'And how long will it take to reach this Great Terrace?' he said.

'Hours rather than days, Human Horst,' said the tripod. 'If you make no further delay. Delay means we miss the upgate, and means adversaries gain advantage.'

Robert sighed and moved on. The little mechs spoke of adversaries but would not say who they were. Likewise this vast cave, which they referred to as the Refulgence, or the Great Terrace or the Broken Dome, amongst several others which he assumed were also imposing caves buried deep beneath the mountain ranges of Darien. Yet all they would voice was the preposterous notion that he had been dispatched far into the depths of hyperspace to some kind of collapsed continuum, the kind of fanciful idea one might hear from the shaman of a primitive culture and which he would normally have handed over to Harry to deal with.

But Harry was silent and had been so since that terrifying ordeal in the Uvovo chamber. As was Rosa's intersim device which he had put in his gown pocket back at the Gangradur Falls. He knew that the batteries were fully charged yet when he turned it on it remained inert, unlit, blank, empty.

Like me,
he thought.
Without Harry and Rosa I feel... alone.

The path they were following was uneven and strewn with gravel, and damp with the water that seeped in from above and collected in a myriad little puddles. Up ahead, Track-Reski was waving one of its retractable stalk-arms at them from a side tunnel out of which a pearly runoff trickled.

'We must take this stone lane,' it said. 'Enemies wait further ahead along Refulgence.'

'Enemies?' Robert said, alarmed.

'This way leads to the lithosphere of Abfagul,' said Tripod-Reski. 'That regime is inimical towards AI mechs such as we.'

'True, but it is even more inimical towards our pursuers,' Track-Reski said.

'I have seen no pursuers,' Robert said. 'Who are these enemies?'

A humming sound drew near and he turned to see his third escort bobbing and gliding along on an air cushion generated beneath its oval hull.

'Enemies behind,' it said. 'Enemies across . . .'

Gazing across the stalactite-bearded ceiling, Robert saw a black shape move in the gloom, long and writhing like a snake made of black smoke. As he watched it stretched and flowed up to the ceiling and began to advance across it.

'We must go!' said Hover-Reski. 'Go now!'

Urged on by his escorts and a jolt of unreasoning fear, he climbed up the sloping passage, quickly follow ing the glowing beams shining from Track-Reski's headlamps, gradually slowing as his strength ebbed. Yet still he stumbled along as the passage widened, its walls rising higher, and became a rocky path winding along the bottom of a long, gloomy fissure while an irregular, semi-musical clanging noise went on far above. Soon the narrow path became a tunnel again, which dipped downwards for a stretch, took an odd twist and turned back upwards, its dank darkness broken by the escorting mechs' wavering lamp beams.

A grey oval emerged from the dark up ahead and soon Robert was clambering out of a hole on a grassy slope dotted with huge, mossy boulders. A thick, grey mist hung low in the cold, still air and the light was meagre and diffuse, like twilight or pre-dawn. Off to one side was a still, reflective pool of water, over which a group of odd insects with long writhing tendrils buzzed and spun and danced. Feeling weary he sat on the ground, heedless of the damp grass, watching the insects as he got his breath back.

'This is the lithosphere of Abfagul,' said Tripod-Reski as it presented to Robert a square tablet of the fibrous ration that the mechs had been feeding him since his arrival.

'Who or what is Abfagul?' Robert said as he bit and chewed.

'Species and hierarchy,' said Hover-Reski as it glided past, heading downslope to scout further ahead.