Timeweb Trilogy Omnibus (166 page)

Thinking back, he recalled that he had used his own arcane powers to heal wounded podship flesh, and had received a tremendous inflow of data from the sentient spacecraft. It was as if they wanted him to have the information—whatever it was—but first they had to make sure he was qualified to receive it, and that he would not use it for the wrong purposes. The Aopoddae had only given him
access
to the critical information. He still had to prove he was worthy of it. How could he do that?

A chill ran down his spine, as it occurred to him that the secret of a powerful weapon might be what was inside the armored core of data. Doge Anton had suggested that Noah might be surreptitiously generating a super weapon inside the cocoon. Noah had dismissed it as an idle comment, but what if the idea had an element of merit? What if the amalgamated podships could generate a powerful destructive force?

If it was a weapon inside the armored data core, that would explain why the sentient spacecraft were not sure if he should receive it. Even now, facing their own destruction, they could be hesitating. Had the Aopoddae looked into his soul for his motives, and if so, what had they seen there? His demented twin sister, Francella?

Precious seconds ticked by.

Taking a deep breath, Noah touched a thick section of flesh on the outer wall. It was soft and almost liquid beneath his fingertips. As before, he let go, and the flesh oozed down onto the deck and flowed over the floor. This time, however, instead of flowing across the room, it pooled around him and rose up around his ankles. The alien material was warm and wet against his own skin.

Noah felt like screaming in terror. It had very little to do with fear for his own personal safety. He had survived so much, had been through so many harrowing experiences, that he didn’t worry about such things much anymore—except he didn’t want his followers to lose their inspiration, their guiding light. And beyond that, Noah didn’t want to be lured into a place from which he could not escape, or used by some diabolical outside entity for its own purposes.

So far he felt as if he could go back, that he could reverse the process and step away from the advancing cocoon flesh. But the sentient stuff was probing around the skin inside his shoes and socks and on his ankles, delving into his cellular structure, seeking to flow further upward on his body. If he allowed that to occur, could he still go back? And did he really want to go through this, to achieve an indeterminate
destructive
power?

Noah sensed that he was subconsciously trying to talk himself out of going further. He had always been a person who followed his instincts, so he asked himself some hard questions now: Did he really sense danger if he proceeded? What was his gut telling him?

This time, when he needed it most, his viscera didn’t send him any signals at all. He found this troubling, because it suggested that he was losing contact with an important aspect of his own humanity, a means of perception and survival that had always worked well for him in the past.

Noah tried to command the cocoon to open the fortified data core, and to show him what was inside. But nothing happened, other than a flurry of agitation in the ancient, linked minds of the creatures.

He knew the HibAdus could attack at any moment. The immensity and immediacy of this threat loomed over all others. For the moment, the Parviis were secondary, and even the crumbling galaxy. If the armada got through, it would be the end of the Liberator force.

Suddenly he heard a booming voice over the comlink, overriding other conversations. “This is High Ruler Coreq. You have ninety seconds to surrender, or we will annihilate you.”

* * * * *

After listening to Coreq’s announcement from his hiding place, Ipsy heard a loud buzzing noise, and looked up. The confined space where he’d been hiding was filling with tiny, droning machines, like a swarm of insects.

“Intruder alert,” a voice said. It was an eerie, synchronized voice, emitted by speakers on the bodies of the flying biomachines. Ipsy’s programs accelerated as he tried to find a way out.

Suddenly there was a loud clatter, and strong hands pulled the little robot out from behind the instrument console. Two Adurian soldiers dragged him to the center of the command bridge, where the High Ruler stood, waiting.

“How did you get in there?” Coreq said. He interlaced the fingers of his small, furry hands, then pulled them apart, then interlaced them again. A nervous mannerism, it appeared.

“Manufacturing defect,” Ipsy said. “The stupid Hibbils left me in there. I only recently came back to awareness, and wondered what I was doing on your ship. Those Hibbils can’t do anything right.”

“He’s lying,” the biomachines said, in their eerie synchronization.

“Yes I am,” Ipsy said. “And you just narrowed my options down to one.”

He saw the look of alarm in Coreq’s bulbous, pale yellow eyes. But before the freak could move or issue a command, Ipsy transmitted a chain-reaction detonation program he had set up, electronic signals that surged into the vessel’s operating systems.

“Get him!” Coreq screamed. But it was too late.

“Now you’re going to die,” Ipsy said in a matter of fact tone. He felt a wonderful sensation of internal warmth come over him as his circuits heated up, and then set off the explosive charges. Only a limited detonation to start with, killing everyone on the command bridge, and keeping his own artificial consciousness alive, in the enclosure he had armored for it.

He heard a piercing scream that filled the flagship and surrounding space. It was Coreq, dying.

Moments later, the flagship blew up in a fireball that took two nearby vessels with it, and damaged twenty other lab-pods, causing them to drop out of formation. In the midst of the HibAdu armada, the event was hardly noticed by Liberator observers. To them, it looked like a relatively minor problem with the fleet, so inconsequential that it had no effect on the massive force. The armada kept going forward, past the floating debris.

* * * * *

“Data projection,” Thinker said. “The HibAdus would prefer not to destroy our fleet of natural podships, since they are superior to his in numerous ways. But his priority is complete military victory, and there are always some wild podships to be captured in space. His deadline is not a bluff.”

Taking a deep, shuddering breath, Noah let go and the warm cellular material ran up his legs and thighs and waist, over the clothing and beneath it, covering him entirely up to his midsection. He felt a flood of data from the podship cocoon, flowing into his brain.

“Master Noah,” Thinker said, “are you sure this is wise?”

“I’m beyond going back,” Noah said.

Reaching down with his left hand, he immersed it in the thick fluid and felt it congeal around his Human bone structure. He immersed the other hand, and then let the malleable flesh rise over his torso, up to his neck.

Noah felt compression on his chest, making it difficult for him to breathe. He took deep, gasping breaths.

“Master Noah, are you all right?”

Without answering, Noah slid down into the flesh and flowed with it into the outer wall, where he began to swim. Behind him, he heard Thinker’s voice, but fading. Time and space seemed to disappear. Noah was in his own universe, swimming across vast distances of starless space.

In moments, he stood again. This time he was inside a new and combined sectoid chamber, glowing with an ancient green luminescence. He could move about freely inside the enclosure (which was at least five times larger than those of podships), and he felt confident that he could leave it if he wanted to do so. He was separate from the cocoon, but part of it at the same time. Just as every creature in the galaxy was linked, so too was he connected to this prehistoric life form that was both primitive and advanced.

He probed inward with his thoughts, seeking the information he so desperately needed. Then, in a wordless epiphany, he let go. Something this important did not depend on words, or even on an organized collection of data. The armored core that Thinker had been unable to access did not contain multiple bits of data.

It only contained
one
, and now Noah knew what it was, so simple and yet so complex.

Pressing his face against a wall of the sectoid chamber, he felt his own facial features enlarge and flow outward, so that he could be seen in bas-relief on the outside of the cocoon. But it was not a “man in the moon” appearance, and not like the reptilian faces that emerged from podship prows when Tulyans piloted them. Instead, Noah’s countenance was repeated many times all around the cocoon, as if each podship had assumed his features on its body. Through his own humanoid eyes now, he looked in all directions: to the farthest reaches of the galaxy, to the Parviis trying to gain control of the Liberator fleet, and to the advancing HibAdu armada, which was much closer than before, with glowing weapons ports on the warships, ready to fire.

Noah felt power building around him. Paradoxically, the Aopoddae were a peaceful race, but he realized now that they had access to a weapon beyond the scope of any others, and finally they were allowing him to use it. Higher and higher the energy built up around Noah until EcoStation became a brilliant green sun in space. Parviis and Tulyans had their telepathic weapons that could wreak great destruction, but this was potentially much, much more.

His eyes glowed the brightest of all, and beams of light shot from them on the sides facing the HibAdu ships, bathing the enemy armada in a wash of green. Then the ships detonated, in tidal waves of destruction that went through the entire fleet in great surges, until it was gone.

As Noah drew back, he felt himself shuddering. He had tapped into a source of galactic energy that might even reach the core of the entire universe. It was raw, primal, and volcanic. It simmered in his consciousness, waiting to explode. He could fire the primal weapon at will. The raw violence was awesome, simultaneously thrilling and horrifying to him. Again, he thought of the Francella element in his blood, and he wondered if his mind would hold together through all of its expansions and contractions, or if he would go completely mad and start destroying in all directions.

But his doubts lasted only a few nanoseconds. With his brain running at hyper speed, he didn’t have any more time to wonder about anything, or to worry. He only had time to respond.

Now he turned the powerful beams of light toward the Liberator fleet, where Parviis continued to scramble over the hulls of the ships, trying to get in. They were no longer veiling their appearances, and could be seen clearly as tiny humanoids. On the hulls of some vessels, Tulyan faces had disappeared, suggesting that the pilots had been overcome and Parviis had taken over. Increasingly he saw the reptilian prows diminish in number, and wherever this occurred, the ships moved away from the others and began to congregate. So far, this amounted to only a small portion of the fleet, perhaps five percent. But he could not allow it to continue.

Through his hyper-alert, organic connection to the cosmos, Noah figured out more possibilities than Thinker could ever imagine. He saw inside every podship in the Liberator fleet, to the individual battles for each craft, and to the mindlink that Tulyans were trying to use for their fellows, but which was much weaker away from the starcloud.

Remembering how he had originally lost the trust of podships because of his part in developing pod-killer guns for the merchant princes, Noah didn’t want to destroy any podships. He had something else in mind.

Focusing the energy beams precisely and governing their power, he detonated them inside the bodies of the attacking Parviis. Tiny green explosions went off inside his consciousness, and he sensed the anguish of his victims, heard their collective screams. And, as moments passed, he saw Tulyan faces reappear on every hull in the fleet. Secure again, the breakaway ships drew back together with the others.

Intentionally, Noah allowed the Eye of the Swarm and a small number of his followers to escape. Noah had always believed that every galactic race, even the supposedly most heinous, had redeeming qualities. The Mutatis had proven that, and he knew and loved one of the Parviis himself. She would be the mother of his child. Their baby would look like a Parvii, but would be a hybrid, not the same as the originals.

I am not about extermination
, he thought. Despite all of the changes in which he was immersed, Noah Watanabe remained true to his core values. A deep sensation of fatigue came over him from tapping into the raw primal power, but he fought to overcome it. From somewhere, a reservoir of strength, he summoned more energy.

Then, using his eyes like powerful searchlights to illuminate space, Noah scanned the vast expanse, questing. He sensed something else out there, more dangerous and destructive than HibAdus, Parviis, or even the crumbling galaxy.

Something he might not be able to stop.…

Chapter Seventy

Battles are never static. Even when they seem to be over, the tide can change.

—General Nirella del Velli

During the surprise Parvii attack, Tesh had fought for control of the flagship, trying to keep her own people from gaining entrance to the vessel. It was a battle within a battle, as the clustering humanoids tried to use neurotoxins to subdue the podship, and other ancient methods. Even with thousands of their tiny bodies all over
Webdancer
’s hull, they had faced a formidable task. Just one Parvii—Tesh—inside the sectoid chamber of the vessel could ward them all off, counteracting the toxins and keeping the Aopoddae creature under her sole control.

Then the equation had changed.

Woldn himself—the Eye of the Swarm—had joined the cluster on
Webdancer
. Tesh had sensed him out there, with his mind merging deeper into the others and dominating them more than ever. From his proximity and intense focus, powerful telepathic waves had slammed against Tesh’s sectoid chamber, like psychic battering rams. She’d fought back valiantly, but moment by moment she had been losing ground as the neurotoxins began to take effect on
Webdancer
and—soon thereafter—on her. Finally, the eager Parviis had streamed through openings they made in the flesh, like carpenter bees boring into soft wood.