Stardogs (49 page)

“Where is Deo?” asked Shari.

Central replied. “The other human is some distance away, climbing towards the base of the geosynchronous line. I am unable to locate him precisely. We are still attempting revival of the man called Sam. His heart is too damaged to allow effective infusion with freezer buffering solutions.”

“He’s dead.” Tanzo said it with finality and heartbreak. “He knew he was going to die. He was always right.”

“Technically he is in fact dead. Surgeon organisms are keeping the brain supplied with Oxygen in a soluble solution. There is a 17.3 % chance of successful revival.”

Shari was wary. Deo… why had he gone? Was it the head injury? Was it to escape this alien… computer? She couldn’t think of it as a computer. It was a being in its own right. “Central… Why did the other human leave?”

“Evidence suggests that he may not have done so of his own will. The mnemonic helmet records a belief that he is possessed. Spectrographic analysis of a metal weapon carried by the man are identical to those typical of Sil manufacture. His naive assessment may literally be correct. He may be possessed by a Sil mechanical-organism”

“Where or what is a Sil?”

“They are our ancient enemy. They are the species who destroyed the masters. In appearance they not unlike your species. The chameleon-wall over there is capable of displaying images. Look at it and you will see the Sil”

Only to the Denaari could the two species be described as similar. They were both bipedal and tailless. But the Sil had four arms, a blue skin and impressive fangs.

“The wrath incarnation of the Kali-Dewa.” She’d seen the picture many times before. It was on the inside cover of the Arunachali Kaiita, the Holy New Veda-Gospel that Deo had always carried.

“You have encountered this species?” Central had found no such recognition in Juan’s mnemonic record.

She explained as best she could. “What could he be trying to do? Or what is whatever is controlling him be trying to do?”

“He appears to be heading for the geosynchronous line. Perhaps he wishes to escape or thinks to damage it.”

“What is it?”

“I can best explain it as a cableway to space. You should be familiar with them. Sixteen of them had been grown on planets of the Denaari Dominions, where gravity and planetary dimensions permitted. The carbon-carbon bond was not strong enough to allow us to use the cable elsewhere on larger worlds.”

Shari felt sick. Sixteen… Tanzo had told her about sixteen worlds too… the evidence of war, the
only
evidence of war on the formerly Denaari worlds. The destruction must have been horrific. Even after more than 3000 years the scars of those bombardments could still be seen. “Have you been able to associate the names we use with the planets the Denaari colonized?”

“To a large extent. Juan Biacasta has studied celestial navigation, but unfortunately he spent the examination time patching the examining computer into the Space-station web. The data are therefore less extensive than they should be.”

“Was the world we call Amritsar one of those which had this cableway?”

“Yes. Juan’s memories indicate no knowledge of such a thing. It is virtually impossible that it should be unknown.”

“The only other two planets names I can remember are Sarbia and Brandahar. Did they have lines too?”

“The planet you refer to as Brandahar, yes. Sarbia is not in my data-set.”

“Amritsar, Bendic, Brandahar, Carab, Gehenna, Intigua II, Jyr, Kammab, Lingua IV, Nambour, New Tambor, Sarbia, Starkadd, Tibetsi, Verena and Xi. The bombed worlds. Please, how is my Sam doing? Is there any change?” Tanzo had plainly been listening.

“Eleven of those names are those of planets with geosynchronous lines. The other five are not in my data set. The human called Sam is not progressing well. The surgeon animals inform me of considerable success in surgical repair. He should be recovering but the brain-output is still diminishing. It is almost as if the creature is trying to die. The surgeon creatures have resorted to electrical stimuli to try and reactivate it.”

“He is dying! He knew he was going to die, so he is. He is a precognitive telepath. My God! Let me get to him! Please!”

“Very well. The risk of operative infection is small compared with the probability of brain-death at this point. Take the door to your right.”

Tanzo ran out as fast as her short legs could carry her.

Shari was left thinking, “Could these alien enemies have somehow made this cableway explode?”

“No, the cable-beasts are not capable of explosion. But the cable is 16459 miles long. It hangs balanced between gravity and centrifugal force. Should the cable be somehow severed, the lower part will fall. Several thousand miles of falling superstrong cable will be more cataclysmic than any bomb. It will destroy many organisms in the equatorial zone. I, myself, am made up of many modules, but some of these will undoubtedly be destroyed. Then I will cease to exist as a coherent entity. I am dispatching all motile organisms to stop the Sil-carrier, by any means possible. I have vials of Sil-metal digesting virus on hand, but if need be the man you call Deo must be killed. You are confined here until this is done.”

She went cold, but controlled it. The death of a world compared to the death of this one person had become unimportant. She knew it was wrong, but it was still true. She shrugged with a superb imitation of unconcern. “You have what Deo would call a time of grace to make your peace with your Goddess. I suggest you pray, or do whatever you do to prepare for death. Or you get me to the bottom of your cable with some of that virus. That man out there is an Arunachali. The mountains on Arunachal make this hill look like a plain. You’ll never find him, let alone catch him. He is also an assassin. The best, I believe, of many thousands. Anything you send to stop him will die.”

“This concurs with and explains some of the data from the mnemonic helmet he discarded. Very well. I will transport you to the cable base-station.”

Two minutes later she left, clinging to something more like a gigantic arrow than an animal, with an unhappy Otto left behind. Then a surgeon beast now free from its mammoth labors on Sam came and took Mark Albeer off to attempt to repair his shoulder. Caro refused to be parted from him. That left Juan and Una-Celine alone to comfort Otto. Or not quite alone. The Stardog pupa below stirred in its pupal sleep. Felt them there and reached for their love.

The tunnel was both deep and dark. But at the far end was a clear white light. Sam moved towards it, slowly, inexorably, despite all the efforts to drag him back. Then his fleeing mind was flooded with hers. And he knew abruptly that while he’d been certain he would die if he did what he had chosen to do, his vision of the future had included another variable: her actions. She had pulled him down as they had fallen. The shot which should have hit his head had struck him in the chest. And now… she would not let him die just because he believed he had to. She believed he
would
live. His body was being repaired. He
could
live. He received all this from the mnemonic crown that she’d thrust onto his head regardless of the extensive damage she caused in the process. Damage could be repaired. Life could not be brought back.

The clear white light receded and there was only darkness, with just the tiniest of glowing sparks.

Then darkness and one heartbeat. One EEG trace.

And then a second one. After a brief burst of electrical stimulus a second heartbeat too. Weak. Erratic. But beating its way up, up. Out of the darkness.

Even the saint may carry an assassin within his heart. So too can an assassin carry the saint. We are what we choose to be. Well, most of the time anyway.

From the collected sayings of Saint Sugahata the Reviled.

Deo resisted. Or wished to resist. He was powerless, however. The surgeon had not re-established full control over quite all of the muscles, but having briefly lost control in the roost, it was keeping a careful watch over its host. Still, minor muscles, like those of the face, vocal chords, and the toes of the left foot were uncontrolled.

Unwittingly Shari had lied. For the Denaari’s creatures to catch Deo on a mountainside was virtually impossible. For them to catch the nanomech surgeon and its unwilling host would have been easy. The Surgeon suspected, rightly, that Deo would kill himself rather than assist with the climb. The surgeon had all the skills, in theory, to move the host wherever it wished. In practice, over rough terrain, the Surgeon was slow and clumsy.

On the pupa-transport monorail inside the mountain Shari travelled far faster. The Geosynchronous cable base-station was typically Denaari-unfussy. A 36 inch thick cable, a cargo deck and a flight ramp. No frilly bits for the place from which the Denaari wings had stretched their wingtips to the furthest stars. From here and other equatorial localities seven other cables had taken the Denaari and their genetic engineering genius into space. At other places an equal number of down-cables had brought back the wealth of their vast Dominion. The cables were alive, self-aware and self-repairing.

Shari knew now from Central that if one cable should fall… the others would follow. None of the so-called ‘bombed worlds’ had had more than one cable. The devastation here would be of an unimaginable scale. It would mean final extinction for a myriad species, not least, the Stardogs. As a trivial aside it would almost certainly mean the death of herself and the other surviving castaways. Shari wasn’t worried about that. She knew if she failed, it would be because she was dead. Central was saving its greatest strength for defense of the cable itself. She had been allowed the outer perimeter of the cargo deck and flight ramp. She had a small vial of the viral cocktail. As a standby, and last resort, the stuff was in her too. She’d swallowed a good half pint of it. She hoped that was why she was feeling a little queasy.

The nanomech surgeon was struggling. The energy demands of the host’s body were high. The processing requirements of making the host climb a mountain, even by the easiest route, were high. The mountain was high too. And it still had to spare enough of its processing capacity to re configure its body, and to extract the various necessary elements from the host’s body. Part of the host’s liver had been redesigned to do just this, but right now the climb’s metabolic demands on the host were slowing processing down. The surgeon with its nano-circuit brain was less than a 16th of an inch in total length. It had to climb the cable, it calculated, to at least 7 000 miles. This was going to take it months, using solar power, and patience. It would use those months to analyze the cable composition and develop a catalytic degenerative chemical treatment to cause failure of the cable-bonds. It was, in a way, the reverse of the way it was designed to deal with toxins introduced into the host’s body. The nano-surgeon was rather self-satisfied about it all. It would, with a single blow, destroy its creators’ enemy, or at least severely damage their home world.