part0013

“If I am not mistaken—but one must be so cautious, so wisely indecisive in...” the Thrumpit droned on. It lectured Tarkos still on the marvels of Amazon fungi, though nearly two hours had passed since their introduction. Tarkos had lost most of the first hour nodding while the creature talked on, but then it dawned on him that, with three independent brain lobes, the Thrumpit would surely not be insulted if he started doing his work. It would just assume he was dedicating some third or other fraction of his thought to menial tasks, the way a human would barely notice if another human scratched during a conversation.

So Tarkos started setting up camp outside the ship. The Thrumpit followed him, talking the whole time. Periodically, he would say to the Thrumpit, when it seemed to end one of its interminable sentences, “Fascinating!” Dr. Yeats seemed to be following the Thrumpit’s explanation a bit more closely, and had even asked a few questions about gene sequencing, but she took to Tarkos’s lead as he unloaded packages from the ship, and followed his whispered instructions, while the Thrumpit followed along, talking talking talking, seemingly unconcerned and undaunted even if they both talked to each other.

Tarkos bent down and set the tent pack on the grass. It turned green, matching the background color. He pulled the cord and it began to inflate, unfolding.

Tarkos whispered to Yeats, “We should sleep outside. That way, we let Bria sleep in the ship and set the atmosphere for a mix more natural for her.”

“Sure.” But then she frowned. “Together? You mean?”

Tarkos flushed. “No. Sorry. The tent allows dividers. We can make it two rooms.” He should have said that at first. Yeats did not seem to like him, and he felt perhaps he deserved it. He’d been in combat for almost a year. He had grown distrustful, and she seemed to sense and resent his distrust of humanity. It had started during their dinner in New York. While Bria tore huge bites out of a leg of Parma ham, he had looked at Yeats, meeting her eyes and meaning to shrug by way of apology, but her piercing gaze had instead frozen him in place. She was watching him as he looked around the restaurant, judging his fellow humans, anxious to be sure no one acted in a way that offended Bria.

Tarkos said now, quickly, “But I think there is a second tent. I can put up two tents.”

“No. It’s big enough,” she said, gesturing at the now-inflated tent.

Tarkos nodded. He looked up. The sky turned yellow with the approaching sunset, and now the loud cries of birds filled the surrounding forest.

The Thrumpit waved a tentacle. “.... and most remarkable, I’m confident you’ll agree, is the unusual frequency of convergent evolution in the chitinous membranes of widely diverse fungal species, which, when measured against comparable cases from widely dispersed galactic organisms and ecosystems, demonstrates a true rarity so worthy of study that Wicklepick finds itselves wholly embarrassed with the riches of good fortune visited upon this fortuitous research opportunity, which—”

Tarkos bent down to pull at the tab on the door zipper. He had the tent half open when he realized suddenly that the Thrumpit, for the first time since they met, had fallen silent. In the middle of a sentence.

“Tarkos,” Yeats whispered, her voice intense.

Tarkos straightened. Before them, a few paces away, a human woman stood. She looked to be of middle age, not tall, but thin and lean. She wore torn rags for clothes. In fact, Tarkos realized with surprise, the rags were the remnants of a suit liner—the kind of single-piece that one wore under a spacesuit. She was barefoot, her mud-covered feet pressing down the tall grasses. Dried blood streaked her legs. But most striking, she had no hair, and her naked skull was split open. From the raw cavity rough surgical grafts of black machinery rose, like dark metal fingers from her brain.

She looked at them with bloodshot brown eyes.

“Hello?” Tarkos said. This, he realized, must be the mad woman of which the Yanomamo had spoken. He had not imagined something so shocking. The grafts in her skull were savagely crude and cruel. Someone, likely someone not from Earth—he hoped and prayed someone not from Earth—had done terrible things to this woman. “Are you.... Can we help you?” Unconsciously, just from the shock of the sight, his hand drifted to the pistol on his belt. “You look very hurt. Please. Can we help you? There are medical facilities available in my ship.”

She looked at each of them, mouth open. To Tarkos it seemed she did not even breathe. Then she spoke English in a furious, loud rush. “It is here, I hear it, it is here, I hear it, it is here, I hear it....”

And suddenly, instantly, the loud calls of all the birds fell silent. The monkeys bit back their howls. Silence rang through the forest surrounding them.

The mutilated woman looked to the trees. “I’ve followed it across stars and listened to it across space through space it hurt me it hurts me and now I let it know I am near, now I call it I shriek at it because you are here and you will bind it break it make it talk make it pay make it give me back mine mine my lost little my lost mine my lost love my little my—”

“Please,” Tarkos interrupted. “I’m Amir Tarkos. I’m a member of the Harmonizer Corp. These are Doctor Yeats and Doctors Wicklepick. You seem to need help. We can help and protect you. Would you come in the ship? We have a autodoc.”

But the woman continued, uninterrupted, her desperate cry. It rose to a shout, then a scream: “It comes it comes it comes furious evil evolution commando wicked coming furious coming now prepare Harmonizer prepare for it prepare!”

A crash sounded in the forest behind them. Tarkos turned. Something was running through the brush. The snapping of sticks grew closer. Whatever approached must be large and heavy: some of the cracking branches sounded massive. Tarkos drew his pistol, staring at the dark forest, holding his breath and waiting to see what came out into the field.

“Get into the ship,” he told Yeats and Wicklepick. But both of them froze in shock. Wicklepick waved his tentacles. Yeats started, open mouthed.

Tarkos called to his implants. He sent a message to his armor in the ship. It began to assemble itself so that it could walk to him. Then he called to Bria.

A black shape exploded out of the forest, smashing a small tree at the field’s edge as it bounded out onto the open grass. It moved furiously fast, leaving a mixed blur on his retina. Yeats shouted in disbelief. Wicklepick began to whine a new interminable sentence. The strange, mutilated human woman shrieked a high, thin note.

And, worst of all, Tarkos saw, in a glimpse, what came after them.

He recognized it. He knew its kind. He was one of only a few Galactic Citizens still alive who had seen one of these creatures.

A thing of legend ran at them, a thing that literally filled a billion nightmares. Its kind haunted the dreams of every creature that could dream in this vast galaxy.

Razor edged black limbs scythed towards him. The rhinoceros-sized monster of dark chitin and spear-like teeth and black shining eyes and lightning-fast scorpion legs that rushed across the grass was an—

“Ulltrian!” Yeats shouted.

Tarkos fired. The pistol’s tracer bullets streaked yellow lines through the air. His aim was true, but the exploding shells of the bullets snapped angrily a meter away from the Ulltrian, smashing into some kind of field, or perhaps intercepted by some kind of defensive weapon. The explosions rang out and echoed, crackling toward the horizon. The Ulltrian came on unabated.

In seconds it was nearly upon them. Yeats and Wicklepick finally moved. They both dove down into the grass below the ship. Tarkos stood his ground, firing his weapon.

The Ulltrian leapt, a hoard of dagger pointed black legs scratching at the air. It slammed into the earth by the tent. In a single motion one of its black legs threw down, tackled, and snatched up the mutilated woman.

Then it was gone, running away, leaving tossed clods of dirt. The punctured tent deflated in its wake.

Tarkos could not wait for his armor. It would have to follow him. He ran after the Ulltrian, shouting over his shoulder to Yeats and Wicklepick, “Get clear of the ship!”

“What horror, what ghastly and blasted vision is this that....” the Thrumpit shouted through all its mouths.

Tarkos switched over to radio. The Thrumpit was talking on radio too, clogging up the airwaves, “...that shatters my three minds into three voices vying in a chaotic cacophony of fear, each crying that no, surely this uncertain appearance, which were my senses to be credited would auger ill not only for our afternoon picnicking....”

Tarkos ran after the flashing black form, firing. Each bullet exploded an arm’s length behind the Ulltrian. Its defenses did not flag as it rampaged straight for the Yanomamo village. The mutilated human woman, held close to its body with a single sharply bent leg, shrieked a high, furious note.

“Bria, you getting this?” Tarkos shouted, his implants radioing his words.

“Yes,” the Commander called. “Hear you and Thrumpit, and see from ship.”

The Thrumpit’s transmission continued unabated: “...but augurs terrible ill also for this glorious planet, its promising civilization, and even our vast Galactic Order—for this organism is naught less than a representative instance of that most dreaded—and, as the universal will supposed, long extinct —species, the uncompromisingly warlike terrors of the....”

The scorpion form of the Ulltrian made it to the huts of the village. Tarkos’s armor caught up with him, running at his side, a hollow human form. But he could not stop to put it on now. He kept up his furious run.

Then, out of the black forest burst Bria. She ran at her fastest pace, a thing that Tarkos had seen only a few times before. She ran straight for the Ulltrian. Involuntarily, Tarkos called out to her, “No!” It would be madness to attack the Ulltrian in her bare flesh. But he watched as the Ulltrian tossed something aside—the human woman, he realized, thrown like a doll across the tall grass. She rolled and tumbled violently, bouncing high into the air, limbs flailing. The Ulltrian turned to face Bria’s onrush, rearing its front legs in threat.

“Yeats, can you check on her?” Tarkos radioed, hoping that the doctor had her implants tuned to receive him. “On the woman? She’s down. Probably hurt bad.”

Then Bria slammed into the Ulltrian. The Ulltrian was two times her size, a black scorpion with moire eyes. The Sussurat did not hesitate. Claws raised, head down so that she could drive forward with her shoulders, she collided with the black mass. They tumbled over in a rolling ball of fur and chitin, claws and palps, and slammed into one of the huts, exploding through the wall.

If ever he were to put on his armor, Tarkos realized, now was the time. He skidded to a stop on the grass. He dropped his pistol. The armor circled around, running to come behind. He held out his arms. “Come on come on come on,” he hissed. He could hear the Thrumpit still talking, still working its way through a single sentence — “…where all the dark corners of space, star studded, no horror hides greater than this that....”

Yeats ran past him, toward the woman in the grass.

His armor cracked open as it walked up close behind him. He stepped back into it. As the helmet closed down over his face, the hut that Bria and the Ulltrian had fallen into now keeled to one side, and began to collapse, the photovoltaic panels on its roof collapsing inward towards them.

The Ulltrian exploded out of the wreckage. Tarkos leapt. In two power-assisted bounds he landed beside the Ulltrian. Behind it was a stand of trees and then the river: Tarkos had a clean shot. He raised his arm and fired a laser into the blur of the Ulltrian’s six legs. It tumbled. In its wake, a pincer-tipped foot segment lay severed in the packed earth of the path, bleeding red and yellow bloods. All around them, Yanamamo women and children shouted, running away. The Ulltrian turned, a tight spider-like mass, and faced Tarkos, eyes above its mouth fixing him.

“Surrender!” he called in Galactic. He raised his arm and the armor parted, revealing a small missile. He wouldn’t use it here, but he meant to make a point. The anti-matter tipped missile could destroy a small starship. If the Ulltrian had decent sensors it might understand the threat.

Instead, the Ulltrian shrieked, and then crouched to jump at him.

Bria burst from the fallen hut. Her fur was matted, wet all over with her purple-dark blood. In two leaps she landed on the eye-studded front carapace of the Ulltrian.

Bria’s armor loped into the clearing now, coming to her call, but in the fierce fight it would be impossible for Bria to put the suit on.

Tarkos cursed. He could not fire into this twirling mass of fighting Sussurat and Ulltrian. He would have to jump into the fray.

An alarm pinged in his armor. A sensor array in his armor had been triggered. An immense probability field and an equally immense electromagnetic field grew around them now, ramping exponentially more powerful. Tarkos turned in place, looking for the source. His gaze settled on the river: something swelled up, bulging the surface, lifting a rising mound of swirling water.

A ship. A ship rose from the center of the broad river.

“Damn.” Tarkos sent a command to their cruiser, telling it to fire up the engines and come to him. Then he threw himself at the Ulltrian.

Just at that moment the Ulltrian kicked Bria with two of its strangely twisting chitinous arms. Bria slammed back into the wall of a hut, shattering through pale boards. Tarkos leapt into her place and struck the Ulltrian, but the monster retreated, stumbling away from him, and slipped around a Yanomamo hut. Tarkos did not dare fire a heavy weapon at it: as far as he knew, people crouched, hiding, in any or all of these huts.

He ran after the Ulltrian, following it toward the river. It dodged between huts, leapt over a stunned child, and swung around a tree, always five paces before Tarkos. He couldn’t catch up. And then the Ulltrian leapt past the edge of the village, and in a bound startling for its size shot over the river bank and into the current. A huge splash of brown water shot up in its wake.

Tarkos jumped in after it. The brown, muddy water closed over his field of view. He called up a sonar image, and saw an outline of the Ulltrian shoot away with surprising speed into the depths. The Ulltrians had evolved from amphibians, and were still fast in water, even given their bulk and seemingly unhydrodynamic shape. In a moment the sonar image became a muddle as the Ulltrian shot past fish and debris.

The water shuddered, a heavy pulse slamming into his armor: the Ulltrian ship had moved. Tarkos knew he couldn’t catch up down here. The Ulltrian would be inside the ship soon. He climbed back up the bank quickly, his armor’s boots digging deep into the muddy bank.

He reached the top of the bank in time to see the Ulltrian ship rise from the river, streaming brown water. For a moment, Tarkos’s training failed, and he simply stared in awe. A birdlike shape of black and gray, but covered all over with twisting black spikes, the ship looked more like some monstrous medieval torture device than an interstellar vessel. It looked like ire and death. The probability field around it made his head swoon, his gorge rise.

And then the ship disappeared, shooting for the horizon. The surface of the river exploded into white foam from the wake of its engines.

Tarkos called to their ship, now above the village. It slid toward him, snapping huge tree branches as it forced its way down to the river bank. The ramp on the bottom lowered. When it came within two meters of the ground Tarkos leapt, and caught the ramp with a single hand. The gecko grip fibers in the glove held tight, and the power assisted arm let him pull himself and the heavy armor up onto the ramp.

A boom shook the air. A second sonic boom from the Ulltrian ship echoing back across the forest.

“Damn,” Tarkos cursed. He would have to get into the pilot seat before he dared any aggressive acceleration. He scrambled up onto the deck, eyes adjusting to the dark interior. Water and mud streamed off his armor, puddling on the floor. He snapped open the helmet, and breathed the musty smell of the mud and vegetation that clung his armor. He crawled quickly to the control seats, and climbed up into the human command chair. Acceleration straps wrapped themselves around him.

Tactical screens showed nothing. The Ulltrian ship was radar and probably now visual light invisible. He told the computer to look for sonic and atmospheric disturbance, and use the speed of sound to project a location and course. That did it: the retreating Ulltrian ship appeared on the tactical screens, near the horizon and racing East toward the sea. He turned on the inertial dampers, but there was no time to wait for them to come up to full power. He pointed at the figure on the screen. “Pursue!” he shouted. “Maximum acceleration.”

His head slammed back, and he blacked out.

“Uh,” he grunted. The world came back in spots and shimmering stripes of color. He sank heavily down into his seat, but probably only at two gees. He’d not thought that last order through: the ship could accelerate at many e-gees. He looked at the tactical and saw they’d been moving at seven e-gees for forty seconds.

“I’m here,” he grunted.

“Slowed ship,” Bria said. “Too fast.”

“How are you?” he asked. “You looked pretty beat up back there.”

Bria ignored the question. On the tactical screen, Tarkos saw the Ulltrian ship pull far ahead, maintaining ten gees. It shot out over the Atlantic.

“I’m going to speed up to three gees,” he told Bria. “The inertial dampers are warmed up. They should kick in after a while.”

He sent the command and felt himself squeezed farther into his seat. But he did not pass out. He called up a downward view. Land shot by below.

“Why did it show itself to me?” Tarkos asked. “We didn’t know it was there. I never would have suspected that an Ulltrian was on Earth. It could have evaded us.”

Long silence followed. Tarkos knew Bria must be thinking hard. Finally, she said, “Human woman.”

“Right,” Tarkos said. “She said something about the Ulltrian did not know she was there, until she spoke to us. Until she called to it, I think she said.”

“She must be very important,” Tarkos agreed, “If catching her is worth exposing itself. Is she alive?”

“Broken neck. Many other bones. Bleeding, inside and out. Will live.”

To Tarkos, that didn’t sound like a diagnosis you could survive. But he would take Bria’s word for it. Yeats, and local medical facilities, were probably already on the case.

Shimmering sea suddenly filled his downward view. He checked the tactical view. “I’ve got a weak neutrino signature from the ship. I can track it now. Hey, wait a minute. The Ulltrian ship is deaccelerating. Hard. Almost coming to a stop. No. Wait. It disappeared.”

“Dove,” Bria said.

“Damn. You’re right. It dove. It had to slow: hitting water at the speed it was going would be like hitting stone. It came to a near stop, and dropped into the sea. I’ll be over the spot in a few minutes. I’m deaccelerating.”

He steered the ship low over the water, till he could see out of the crystal windows before him to the white caps of individual waves. When the ship slowed to a hover, he dropped altitude.

Even managing a slow descent, he hit the blue water hard, bounced in his seat, and then was slammed down as a big wave pummeled the ship. But in seconds the swaying stopped and he was under the surface. He closed the blast doors over the windows and switched to camera views and sonar.

The ship comms switched over to hyperradio, so it could transmit through the water. “I’ve got a sonar fix. It’s diving, hard and fast. Aiming for a deep sea trench.”

“Cruiser not made for high pressure,” Bria answered back.

Which was true. But their ship could take sitting on the bottom of the sea for a few hours. The real problem was that the stealthing, and the shields, could not work in the thick and conducting fluid. Nor would most of their weapons. He throttled the engines forward. The inertial dampers were warmed up now: he did not feel the change as the ship dove.

In a few minutes he was a kilometer below the surface. Visuals were useless: it was darker than space down there. He had the computer reconstruct the clearest images it could using sonar, and turned on every other passive sensor. The tactical showed them passing a huge cliff, plummeting into ever greater depths, still several kilometers behind the Ulltrian ship.

“It’s not moving fast,” Tarkos reported. “The Ulltrian ship is maybe too big to outrun me in this water.”

Bria did not answer. Tarkos started to wonder what he should do when he caught up with the Ulltrian. Demand its surrender? Find some suitable weapon that might work at these pressures and try to disable the ship? But Ulltrians were famed to have never surrendered. That’s why the war lasted until—or so the Galactics had thought—the genocide of the Ulltrian species. And he certainly knew nothing about the strange, spiked-covered Ulltrian ship. He wouldn’t know how to disable it.

“Bria,” he said. “I’m getting close. I could use some advice on what to—”

“Forgive the intrusion,” a familiar voice called, “but you must, if I may say so with as much urgency as courtesy—nay, even discourtesy—allows, you must retreat from this dark trench immediately.”

“Wicklepick?” Tarkos called. Even in his present circumstances, he was surprised by the brevity of the Thrumpit’s sentence. It must have been the equivalent of a short shout for it to use so few words. “How’d you get on this hyperradio frequency?”

“Implant,” Bria hissed.

Tarkos grunted. He’d never heard of a hyperradio implant.

“I’m sorry, Wicklepick, but—”

“Forgive again, I beg, this intrusion, Harmonizer, but consider: a Predator Cruiser—a fine ship I’m sure and one that a humble individual like myself, a mere mycologist, without adequate training in engineering, can only marvel at with admiration and admitted ignorance—nonetheless, such a ship, without shields, in a highly dense fluid, is vulnerable, the most basic physics would tell us, because of the vigor of the resultant shock waves that a single explosion could generate—which in turn, if one follows my reasoning and the very basic physics I mean to cite—could crush the ship, or tear it into shreds, given—”

“Ascend!” Bria ordered.

Tarkos flipped the ship around, and then aimed the nose for the sky, trusting the ship’s instruments because all visual cues were absent in the black down here. He gunned the engines. The ship responded sluggishly.

“Oh no,” he said, as he looked down at the tactical.

“What?” Bria demanded.

“The Ulltrian ship just took off at a godawful speed. It was just baiting me, drawing me into the trench. The trench, where the two walls will squeeze an explosion even tighter.”

He just started to gain speed when alarms howled as a blast of radiation slammed into the hull. Behind him, deep in the trench, an explosion had gone off. More radiation, and then the sound, washed over the ship. Tarkos knew the shockwave of the explosion would be shortly behind. He gripped the seat, and told his armor to close his helmet visor. He told the ship to turn on its shields, and promptly received an error message because the sea-water was shorting the field.

“Inertial dampers brace for impact,” he told the ship. “And maximize acceleration.”

The ship sped faster as it rose into less dense water. Dim light showed on the view ahead.

The explosion hit. Inside the inertial field, Tarkos hardly felt it, but alarms shrieked from the control panel. A grinding whine emanated from the hull. Spaceship hulls did not whine, unless things were very bad. The view ahead was filled with turbulence and bubbles, but it brightened, brightened—

And then the ship burst through the surface, and into the air. He switched the view to backwards, and saw a huge bulge of rising water form on the ocean, and then explode up, casting fuming white sea at him.

“Thanks, Wicklepick,” Tarkos said. “You just saved my life. That was a terrible explosion. Anti-matter bomb. Or a tactical nuke.”

“Serious lifecode violation,” Bria said.

The Thrumpit began a very long sentence explaining it was a pleasure to be of service. Bria cut in: “Other Predator ships come there to hunt. Return. We have what the Ulltrian wants. We have advantage. We protect the human woman.”

The ship felt uneven—some damage to the hull might have harmed the engines—but the inertial dampers were fully functioning still. Tarkos leveled the flight path, and headed back to the Amazon, a sonic boom screaming in his wake.