A chorus of blatting noises filled the throne chamber. The three daughters were voicing their displeasure by expelling air through their foodtubes. “Did I hear correctly? Not only does this buffoon fail us as a commander, but immediately he begins to plan for the failure of the entire campaign! What can be gained by planning for gross error?”
“But with one blow we could secure everything!” retorted the nife, excitedly. His mandibles worked the air like frenzied snakes. “We must seize the moment and mount a second, massive assault!”
Further rude noises greeted him.
The Parent slapped her tentacles against her throne, calling for order. Truly, things had been more orderly before she had birthed her daughters. Not for the first time, she considered sending them away with an umulk each to begin their own nests. Let them mature through hard labor and independence. However, she stayed this decision, telling herself that they were yet too young. Perhaps by tomorrow or the next day they would have matured sufficiently to run their own fledgling nests. Thoughtfully, she sat for a time, listening to her digesters and feeling her birthing chambers contract and expand.
“I have made my decisions,” she said after a time during which the others had become increasingly restive. “You, eldest of my nife offspring, must gather all our strength in the polar region for one fatal thrust against the enemy. We will take the spaceport and the great ship.”
“Oh, thank you, my Parent,” cried the nife, his orbs wide and beaming. “You will not be disappointed, not in the least. I will—”
“See that I am not,” said the Parent, overriding him. “Or else you will be both gelded and expelled from this nest.”
The three daughters found this immensely amusing.
“I have further decided,” continued the Parent, “that my daughters are quite ready to face the outside world alone. Tomorrow, with a small dowry of offspring, each of you will be transported to a strategic spot on the continent to begin new nests in secret.”
It was the nife’s turn to laugh. The daughters all but swooned at the idea of leaving the home nest, but the Parent remained adamant.
The nife then proceeded to flirt with them all in his customary, brash manner, winking his cusps and massaging their birthing thrones suggestively. When he finally exited, it was with a handsome flourish that left them all with their hormones flowing.
* * *
By nightfall, Droad and Jarmo were walking the walls of Fort Zimmerman, inspecting the damage. It had all gone with surprising ease. Taking complete leadership of the militia had been easy after Steinbach had run off. That single action, combined with the generally cowardly performance of the militia leadership during the battle had done wonders for Droad’s popularity. The men were loyal to him now, he, his amazing mechs and his giants had saved them from the aliens.
Leaving the spaceport in the hands of Major Lee and a handful of his former staff, Droad and Jarmo led their small army against the fort. The assault on the fort itself had been little more than an exercise. It had been held only by a skeletal force of aliens, mostly the multi-armed, multi-eyed types that piloted the Stormbringers and the other vehicles they had captured. Captain Dorman had blown a hole in the outer fences and the rear wall of the fortress. Two lifters full of militiamen and mechs had stormed through the smoldering breach and slaughtered what resistance there was. The enemy had had only enough time to destroy the missile launchers before they were retaken.
“This easy victory doesn’t make me feel much better,” complained Droad, gesticulating at the fortress around them.
“At least we stopped the missile attacks on the city.”
“Yes, that’s excellent, but where are the enemy? There aren’t even any corpses left behind except for those octopus pilots of theirs. Where are our dead militiamen from last night’s banquet?”
“My initial investigation indicates that all the bodies have been removed and carried into the tunnels we found in the banquet hall.”
“What do they want with all the bodies?”
“The social structure of these aliens reminds me somewhat of insects,” said Jarmo, thoughtfully. A chill wind rippled his heavy coat. “The orderly way that they approach warfare and everything else; their lack of concern for their individual well-being. They are similar to ants, or termites. They even dig tunnels with fantastic speed.”
Droad stopped walking and turned to Jarmo, listening carefully. The clouds had broken over the polar region and the sun could be seen, scudding along just above the horizon. Its light was welcome, but seemed to provide little heat.
“I can only surmise that after a battle they would eat our people and probably their own dead as well,” concluded Jarmo.
“They eat their own dead?”
“Insects are very efficient.”
“But these things aren’t insects,” argued Droad. “They’re more like hot-blooded reptiles, like dinosaurs, than insects.”
“Physically yes, but not socially.”
Droad started walking again, and Jarmo fell in step beside him. He looked back toward the spaceport and the dark shaft of the space elevator that reached up into the sky, all the way to the orbital platform. It was like a metallic umbilical cord, stretching for miles right up into space.
“I still wonder why they pulled back. They must be regrouping, planning something big.”
“I agree,” said Jarmo. “They are probably massing in the mountains for a counterattack.”
“Get the fort’s battle computers online. I want them tracking all the appropriate radio frequencies. Find those aliens, Jarmo.”
Jarmo smiled grimly. “They won’t surprise us again.”
Nineteen
The weird, table-like creatures carried Sarah and the others down into the tunnels. Sarah was wrapped in womb-like blackness. For seemingly an endless time she rode on the warm, undulating back of her beast.
Dazed by her recent experiences she stared upward, watching nothing but the colorful after-images that played on her retinas. The darkness didn’t seem to bother the aliens; they apparently needed no help to guide themselves through their own tunnels.
Sarah began to feel a deep hopelessness, a pitiful despair that wasn’t familiar to her. She tried to get herself out of this defeatist malaise, to tell herself there was always hope, but somehow the blackness and the odd stinks and sounds drove the hope out of her. It was as if grotesque minions of evil were carting her into the depths of hell.
An unwelcome addition to her discomfort was the terrible headache she had from having been drowned. Oxygen deprivation had sent a herd of galloping horses through her head, pounding down the gray matter with sharp hooves. She wondered vaguely if she had sustained any brain damage—and whether or not it would be possible for her to tell if she had.
Slipping in and out of consciousness, she slept.
* * *
Mom?
Mom, are you there?
Sarah reached up and touched her itching nose. The itch didn’t go away however, as it was an alien stink, not really an itch.
“Mom?” asked a tiny voice from somewhere.
With a sudden intake of breath she came awake and sat up halfway. She only made it halfway because her head hit the roof of the tunnel that they still traveled within. “Bili?” she cried, ignoring the jolt of pain in her head. “Bili, where are you?”
“Here, Mom,” said Bili, not so far away. From the sound of it, he was on the next animal up. She noticed something in her eyes, something that stung briefly. It was blood from her forehead.
Something came out of the darkness and touched her. It was an alien appendage of some kind, a hard horny thing like the claw of a crab. It touched her and pushed her firmly back down. She realized, swallowing a great scream, that it was only the beast she was riding on, pushing her flat for easy transport. Feeling like livestock on the way to the slaughterhouse, she let herself lie flat again.
“Bili, what’s been going on? Are you okay?”
“You’re alive,” said Bili with intense relief in his voice. “The aliens haven’t hurt me yet, but something’s wrong with Daddy, he’s breathing like a walker on a mountainside and won’t talk to me. He just moans every once in awhile. I hope he dies, the fat bastard.”
Sarah felt a sudden added weight on her shoulders. She had been so concerned about Bili that she had blanked out all the recent events with Mudface and Daddy. She shivered, although the air in the tunnel was surprisingly warm, even hot. She noticed that her clothes were still wet from the pool, which meant that she couldn’t have slept too long. Now that she was more fully awake, she realized just how much pain she was in. Being murdered and then brought back to life played hell with your body. She felt like a bruised lump of overripe fruit.
“Daddy’s here? What about Mudface?”
“They offed him,” said Bili, sounding positively cheerful. “It was enough to make me cheer for their side. Almost.”
Sarah was again taken by a wave of guilt. This whole situation was her fault. She had gone for the money by dealing with Mudface and Daddy in the first place. She had even given the aliens her ticket for a ride down to the planet when they needed it. Worst of all, she had dragged Bili into all this with her, her own son.
“Oh, Bili,” she said, her voice weak in the darkness. “I’m so sorry for getting you into this.”
“It’s okay, Mom. Besides, I’m the one you did it for. I guess I’ll never get that regrow for my arm now.”
In the blackness, Sarah let tears run down her face, but she didn’t make a sound. It would only upset Bili.
After an unknowable length of time, during which Daddy made fitful mewling noises and breathed like a smithy’s bellows, they reached an opening. Sarah could feel the wash of moving air, the different reflection of sound.
“We must be in some kind of big chamber,” she said.
“You think this is where they’re going to eat us?” asked Bili.
Sarah blinked rapidly in the darkness. “What are you talking about?”
“Well, why else would they drag us down here?” asked Bili reasonably. “These things are just like the bone-cutter ants down in the jungles around Bauru. They dig tunnels, attack everything that moves, carry food back to the nest on their backs.”
Sarah could think of nothing to say. The boy was probably right.
After crossing the great chamber, which took long enough to convince Sarah that it was truly huge, they reentered a smaller side tunnel again. Soon they became aware of a growing glow of light from down the tunnel. Sarah raised her head and saw the dim outline of her son, crouching on the next animal up ahead.
The column stopped, and they were unceremoniously tossed into a shaft that branched off from the tunnel. Inside was a small, low chamber, perhaps thirty feet deep, six feet wide and three feet high. The room contained several people, in the midst of whom sat a tiny, portable glow-lamp, which was the source of the illumination.
They turned to look back at the beast of burden and were just in time to scramble out of the way as the massive form of Daddy rolled into the cramped chamber. At the entrance, one of the carrying types levered a heavy thickness of some kind of transparent material into the opening. Another type that they hadn’t seen before, a small spidery creature with many eyes and appendages, squirted a substance around the border of the transparent material, sealing them in.
“Let me introduce myself,” said a resonant, half-familiar voice behind her. “I’m—
.
”
Sarah and Bili had turned around to face the speaker. They all three froze.
It was ex-Governor Rodney Zimmerman.
Before she knew what she was doing, Sarah had punched him in the face. His head jerked up, striking the roof of the low chamber. She followed up with a kick to the belly that probably hurt her sore body as much as it did Rodney, but the effect was gratifying. He rolled on the tunnel floor, groaning and trying to get away from her.
“Restrain her!” he shouted to the others, his nose bubbling blood. “She’s a murderess, she and the brat. Killed a whole farming family and—Ow!”
Bili had produced a rock from somewhere and bounced it off the ex-Governor’s tender nose. “The aliens got that family, you bastard!” shouted Bili. “The same way they got us now.”
Muttering something about treason, Rodney withdrew to the rear of the chamber and squatted there.
Sarah and Bili pulled back from the rest of them, which was almost impossible in the cramped chamber. She did her best to avoid both Daddy and the ex-Governor. The other miserable-looking people in the chamber made no threatening moves against them.
Sarah, head still pounding, curled herself protectively around Bili, as she hadn’t done since the accident when he had lost his arm. She watched the others closely. There were eight people in the chamber, including themselves, Daddy, Rodney Zimmerman and four others. She turned her attention to the ones she didn’t know. There were two women, a little girl and a tall thin man with a pallid face and long limp hair that was so blond it was almost white. She noted the red streak across his face and knew him to be a skald, a member of a peculiar religious sect of Garmish origin.
The skald looked particularly distressed by his captivity. His body was frequently racked with spasms of twisting motion, seemingly without purpose. His eyes were haunting holes of blackness. The others were doing their best to avoid him.