Insurrection Page 9

  “Lies!” the greenish Duergar shouted, pushing through the press of the others to stand across from Eliard. “We can all see that is Q’Lot, but that does not mean that the Valyien are coming back. Your thinking is as slow as any human’s always is.”

  “If this is Q’Lot tech, and it is here, alive, and dangerous, then can you really say with any certainty that the Valyien aren’t also back?” Eliard said. He might not know much about Duergar customs, but he knew how to talk. He knew how to haggle.

  There was more mumbling in the crowd around him, and Eliard knew that the mood of the crowd could go either way. He cleared his throat and spoke again, not taking his eyes off of the Duergar opposing him. “My friend, Val, your Hero of the Chenga Pass, committed himself to stopping this threat, and together we've lost comrades in the fight. And we have fought hard. He believed that the Valyien were coming back. He came here to ask for the help of his people. Of you.”

  He was skating on thin ice, he knew that. They could still turn around and say that he was a human and that they didn’t have to listen to him. He also knew that the only thing he had to barter with was the high esteem they held for Val Pathok.

  “If this human is right, Erkig,” said Ko, pushing his way through next to Eliard, “then we really do have only one enemy. The same enemy that we have always had—the very same ones who imprisoned us and killed us in our millions, who never gave a thought for our freedom or safety, and who used us as a child uses their playthings. The Valyien.”

  “If he is telling the truth,” the green-scaled Erkig grumbled. “I can understand the need to dethrone Pathok Ma. I can even understand the need to honor the commitments that one warrior makes to another—” There was a subtle nod to the captain at this. “—but I do not know about this Valyien business. Either way, we may still die if we attack the city. Look at our numbers!”

  The crowd broke down into more grumbling and arguments between Duergar and Duergar, as young and old argued how, and whether they should even attempt, to take the capital at all.

  “Tell me, Ko,” Eliard said through the corner of his mouth to the smaller Duergar. “Exactly how much support does Val Pathok have, across Duric?” He nodded back the way they had come, back toward the city.

  I don’t want to consider this. This is not how I wanted this to go, he thought. But he was willing to take this step…

  “The Hero of Chenga Pass is a household name. Young Duergar are taught how to fight circle-style, against opponents on all sides as he did, using his techniques.” Ko shrugged. “If he stayed here, at Duric instead of leaving the planet, then a lot of people believe that he would have challenged his father for the position of war chief and they would have welcomed him.”

  Oh great, the captain thought. What do I know of revolutions?

  “And now that Pathok Ma has declared him a coward? A thrall?” Eliard said quickly, eyeing the green-skinned Duergar in front of him.

  “Aye.” Ko nodded sadly. “A lot of the old families will side with the war chief. Weakness is seen as the worst crime for a Duergar.”

  Not that he ever showed any, Eliard thought, his emotions rising high. He couldn’t let another crewmember die, not for a mission that he was supposed to be in charge of.

  “But the younger Duergar? And the hearth-steaders? All of the Duergar like my family, who are deemed too small to be a warrior or who are better suited to working in the farms and hunting, we will all support Val Pathok. He spoke out for Duergar of our class, after the uprising,” Ko said passionately.

  “I guess it’ll have to be good enough,” Eliard said heavily, turning back to the crowd and raising his voice. “You will not be alone in your fight, brave Duergar!” he shouted. “We can raise the common people—”

  There was a look of confusion from the assembled dissidents. Ah, the Duergar probably never believed themselves as common. “I mean that—”

  And at that moment, the clearing really did explode, but this time with fire and bombs.

  “Where are they? Where is the enemy!” The Duergar were shouting and bellowing, seizing up their weapons as they scrambled for cover.

  Flames had erupted through the jungle, and Eliard was pushed and half-dragged to one side by Ko, who, despite being smaller than he was, was still many times stronger.

  “Ach, my leg!” he hissed in pain when Ko thumped him to the ground just inside the tree line. All around them came the sounds of the heavy thump of Duergar bodies, and the whumpf of energy weapons.

  “Never mind your leg. My people,” Ko hissed, unslinging the laser rifle and sighting along the treetops.

  Amidst the burning treetops and the heavy black smoke, Eliard twisted so he could see the movement of a large, dark shape. The undercarriage of some kind of craft, suspended on four turbine-rotors and made of a dark steel-grey material. Its carriage was distended like some insect about to give birth, and all along the rounded belly, Eliard saw the blue-plasma flicker of energy weapons. There appeared to be booths, like Val’s twin gunnery chairs attached there, four on each side, at which sat Duergar mounted into their chairs, covered in armor and firing heavy laser weapons down at the assembly.

  “It’s the war chief! He’s found us!” roared the green-scaled Erkig, still in the clearing as he pushed and helped the injured to the cover of the trees.

  WHUMP! A purple-white blast scattered across his back, throwing him to the ground as he grunted in fury. Eliard watched in horror, and, quite frankly, amazement as Erkig roared in defiance, seizing a boulder the size of Eliard’s chest and turning around, his back smoking and blackened, to hurl it up at the attack craft. There was a loud cheer as it connected with one of the hanging gunners, and even hit the craft with enough force to make it wobble and veer in its path. But Erkig was still badly hurt, and now he was weapon-less and the only standing Duergar in the clearing, as all the others were either dead or wounded.

  “He’s injured, we have to help him!” Ko said, surprising Eliard with his commitment to helping his most vocal detractor. But Eliard didn’t hesitate as he pushed himself up from where he lay.

  “I’ll cover you,” he said, leaping to the edge of the trees as Ko vaulted a downed tree trunk and ran to save his foe.

  The captain concentrated, punching his arm out. Give me something good. Something that will punch a hole through that beast, he thought as he bared his teeth.

  The Device did not disappoint, responding to his aggression and hatred to swell and interlock, the ‘fingers’ of the previous hand it had formed turning into the smaller turret-teeth of a rotating, alien weapon.

  BADA-BADA-BADA! Five darts of blue-white fire spat out toward the craft, and then in quick succession, five more, and five more. The Device had turned into some kind of personal railgun, and Eliard grinned as he saw the blasts explode along the side of the craft in a rippling line of fire.

  “Argh!” One of the enemy gunners was shot from his gunnery harness, his body smoking as he fell the forty feet to the ground with a heavy and final, mortal thud. Another gunner was killed as the weapon they were firing exploded, but the rest of the shots seemed to do little against the thing’s thick armor. Little could attract the attack craft’s ire, as it banked to concentrate its fire against the most dangerous weapon in the vicinity: him.

  “Oh, crap.” Eliard used the Device like a crutch, pushing himself back into the line of trees and then rolling, crabbing, leaping, and stumbling deeper into the jungle as the five gunners on the other side of the craft opened up on his location.

  WHUMP-WHUMP-WHUMP! Trees exploded just behind Eliard as he desperately scrambled, and the rich dark soil of the jungle floor became pitted and potted with craters.

  But the craft couldn’t see him here, and as he lurched to throw himself to one side, out of the firing arc, they lost him. The captain continued to run-stumble for ten more meters or so, then looked up, waiting to catch a glimpse of the craft through the canopy.

  “There you are!” He didn’t think or pause,
raising the Device to release another quick-fire barrage up at the craft, before moving again, almost as soon as the last shot had left the Device.

  “Captain, come!” Irie was suddenly beside him, one hand under an arm as she hauled, pushed, and stumbled with him as behind them, the jungle once again exploded in smoke and fire. “You’re a bloody fool, but at least they’re pointing our guns upwards now, and not at each other,” Irie whispered after they slid to the forest floor after their third attack.

  “What brings people together better than a common enemy?” Eliard croaked. He was starting to feel drained, the effect that the Device had on him was already taking its toll. As a part of his body, it used his own body’s stamina and resources as its power source. Precisely how it converted his DNA into a meson energy weapon was beyond him, but right now, he was glad that it did.

  “Look, the others are joining in.” Irie gestured through the trees to where more of the Duergar, those who weren’t either too injured to fight or dead, that was, were picking up their weapons and firing small, blaster-shots up at the craft before running to take up a new location. The craft was outnumbered, heavily outnumbered, and even though most of the shots couldn’t puncture its hull, they could take out the gunners. There were more screams and thuds from the Duergar gunners above, and Eliard started to hear the heavy whumpf of their guns diminish, for the higher-pitched fzt of the craft’s own mounted lasers.

  “But I know what is sure to bring it down.” Eliard hauled himself to his feet, propped himself against the nearest tree, and waited for his shot.

  The attack craft was turning and banking, presenting its thickly-armored belly at all times where it could to the skirmishing Duergar beneath it. But Irie had led the captain to the far outskirts of the conflict, and that meant that from his position, he could see the thing’s four rotors, keeping it afloat. He waited for the attack craft to bank and turn back, its rear end swinging over clearing—

  BADA-BADA-BADA!

  The war chief’s attack craft had clearly not been expecting another heavy shot from such a distant angle. One of its turbine rotors was hit by the full force of the captain’s Device. Meson flames burst over the outer hub and the blue of the contained blades. The Device-as-railgun might not have been powerful enough to punch through the armored shell of the craft, but the rotor blades would be a lot thinner than the outer hull. There was a squeal of grinding metal, and then a heavy, ugly clunk as something broke, and the rear right turbine-rotor snarled up under its own momentum. Machinery jammed, mechanical parts tore into each other, and circuits fried.

  BOOM! The rear right rotor exploded, sending the craft dipping and suddenly spiraling as it tried to regain its maneuverability, but to no avail. One of the forward turbine-rotors hit the tree line, and for a moment, it sliced the tops of the branches like a blender before it met the thicker, heavier branches of the jungle trees and it, too, caught and exploded in a plume of smoke. It was going down, and there were cheers and shouts as the thing slowly, helplessly, half-raised its nose cone before it smacked into the jungle, only to burst with fire and gouts of thick, oily black smoke.

  “You did it!” Irie said, clapping him on the shoulder.

  “We did it,” Eliard said, exhausted and his vision blurring. So that was too much, he thought. How did Ponos ever think that I was going to be able to take out Valyien if this Device fed on my own body?

  “Val Pathok would be proud,” growled a voice, and they turned to see that it was green-scaled Erkig with the smaller and younger Ko helping him at his side. It was Erkig who had spoken as he slumped to the floor, in clear pain with his back still blackened and smoking.

  “You have my agreement,” Erkig croaked. “You fought well, and I will fight beside you. We go to rescue your friend.”

  9

  Go. Come Back

  “Is that Earth Prime?” Cassandra asked the ‘spokesman,’ which was how she had come to think of the smaller Q’Lot with the wizened features. Her past few cycles’ involvement with him had shown her subtle as well as obvious differences between it and the others of this strange crew.

  And it is a crew, she thought, because I am on a ship. I think. Several times during her stay—it could have been hours or weeks, she had no way of knowing in this place—she had section delegations of the Q’Lot suddenly retire to the sides of various grottos and chambers, each filled with plants, to ‘tend’ the plants by adjusting them, closing various flowers or coaxing others. In response, the bio-luminescent patterns of the strange flora had changed and developed, and she had once seen the plants knit together into a shiny, almost mercurial film, displaying an image that she recognized instantly as the rich umbral fields of a warp-jump.

  So, I must be on a ship of sorts and we are travelling at warp, she had surmised.

  Her ‘days’ here—there had been no changing in the lighting other than subtle dimming periods in various grotto-like rooms, which she presumed was more for the benefit of the ‘plants’ than the Q’Lot themselves—had been strange and dreamlike. She had been returned to the original white chamber often, but only either to sleep when she had been tired or as an escape from the maddening world of the Q’Lot. On each of those occasions, the creature that had been Argyle Trent accompanied her, as if it too felt bewildered and lost. As far as Cassandra had noticed, they had barely paid much attention to Argyle Trent, and when the Q’Lot did have any interaction with him, they treated him with little more than a passing affection, reaching out to touch his skin or his giant praying mantis arms as if pleased with his growth.

  Like he was another plant, or a pet. She had shuddered. Which always led to the next, obvious thought: that she had become infected with the Q’Lot virus. She knew that the captain had injected her with the serums that Armcore had developed from the Q’Lot virus, in an attempt to try and save her life. She presumed it worked, because she was still alive.

  Not that anything had changed in her physiognomy. She looked at her body. It was still her hands, her arms, her legs. She hadn’t gone a strange grey-white color, or a viridian blue, or developed scales and praying mantis claws.

  So, what did that serum do to me, then? she asked herself, over and over.

  Right now, however, she was standing in a different room aboard the Q’Lot ship, and one that she hadn’t been in before. It was similar to her ‘sleeping chamber’ in that it was an almost solid white and made from the same coral-like substance that Cassandra was starting to think of as actual bone. She was walking through and on the bone architecture of this ship, she thought as she looked around.

  The room was a rough oval, with ribs running from the floor to the curved, domed ceiling—further heightening her impression of this place being an organic structure. A wide screen occupied one long strip of the curved wall and was made of the same translucent mercury-weave that she had seen the plants knit themselves into earlier. Behind her and the ageing spokesperson Q’Lot, the monstrous form of Argyle Trent shivered and shuffled, making erratic, small movements with his head and arms, although his eyes were not focused on the screen, or on them.

  The ‘screen’ ahead of them displayed a dark vista of space. The speckling of familiar stars was very faint, as it contrasted with the bright orb that occupied the central image.

  It was Earth Prime, Cassandra was sure of it, but it wasn’t the Earth Prime that she knew now from the news wires and data casts. No, the Earth Prime of today looked more like a giant space depot, with orbiting stations forever joining and reassembling their long arms and infrastructure to completely cloud the planet underneath.

  This looked like Earth as it was a thousand years ago: pristine, the clear swirls and movement of the clouds visible even from this great height.

  “You are correct,” the spokesperson said in his high bird-like language, which somehow translated itself immediately somewhere between Cassandra’s ears and her brain. One of the spokesperson’s wizened arms flickered, gesturing to the green and blue gem that was their ho
me world. “Earth,” she heard, although she once again experienced that strange doubling as her mind heard another word and struggled to translate what it was that the Q’Lot meant. “Soil,” it had said.

  “Yeah, I know that the name perhaps isn’t very imaginative, but all home worlds have the most fundamental name for matter…” she opined slightly. It was getting easier and easier to talk openly with the Q’Lot—not because they were eager to chat with her, but for the very opposite: most of the Q’Lot seemed barely to understand or register her words as meaningful. After the however many cycles that she had been here so far, she had started to just talk honestly. Good old House Archival training, she thought. She had been trained in the arts of scholarly librarianship that House Archival specialized in, but as an agent, her training had also extended to all manners of intelligence duties. Stealth, hand-to-hand combat, diplomacy.

  And House Archival Diplomatic Procedure 23 states: it is best to be clear and honest whenever possible, to avoid confusion. Unfortunately, she didn’t see any way that she could avoid confusion with these creatures whose entire being, technology, and evolution appeared completely different from her own.

  “No, soil,” the spokesperson said once again, the tiny praying mantis arm gesturing toward the planet.

  “I don’t follow. You meant dirt? Mud?” she asked in confusion. What did any of this have to do with defeating the Valyien?

  “Soil.” The spokesperson Q’Lot surprised her by turning to gesture toward Argyle Trent, and then to her, and finally itself. “Soil,” it kept on saying.

  “Oh, you mean us? Matter? Biological organisms?” she tried to say.

  The Q’Lot paid her questions no heed, and instead turned back to the screens as the scene shifted. She had encountered this same phenomena from him—she didn’t know if it was a him, or even if they had genders in the sense that she would recognize them—before, when the spokesperson would endeavor to impart some sort of highly important information to her, but wouldn’t waste any longer than appeared absolutely necessary to tell her what she must grasp. It was as if he was saying, ‘I have done my bit, now you do yours.’