Mech 4: The Black Ship (Imperium Series Book 5) Page 5

  “Follow me, and don’t lag behind,” the Engineer ordered.

  Quickly, the trio mounted the ramps and marched toward the bridge. They met the Captain and two of his Marines coming the other way.

  “Ah, there you are at last,” said the Captain. “Would you like to examine the treasure trove of equipment we’ve discovered on this rock? I’m sure you will be amazed. Perhaps we should abandon our current ship, rebuilding a better vessel with the amazing local components. We will fly to our target in luxury!”

  The Engineer was unaccustomed to sarcasm, but he understood the other’s meaning clearly enough: he was displeased. The Captain was freer of mind than most of the mechs aboard, who were conditioned to follow an assigned task with little in the way of errant thought processes. The Engineer was similarly unfettered, but his mind was not so free as to have a true sense of humor.

  “I would like to see that, yes,” the Engineer said, deciding to feign ignorance.

  The Captain growled in frustration. He reached out grippers and clamped them onto the Engineer’s shoulders.

  “So would I,” he said. “But there’s nothing like that here. You have misled the expedition. Valuable time has been lost.”

  For a moment, the Engineer cogitated. A new possibility occurred to him, one he had not previously considered. Perhaps the Captain had become unbalanced at some point. He did not know why, but the possibility could not be discounted. His commander was not behaving within normal parameters, and although the Captain wasn’t malfunctioning, he wasn’t entirely rational, either.

  “I’d like to point out that I did not recommend this course of action,” the Engineer said.

  “Ah!” said the Captain, his voice rising almost to a screech. “There it is! I knew it must come eventually. Your very first excuse. I can tolerate almost anything, Engineer. I can withstand ineptitude, treachery, even outright failure—but not excuses.”

  “I’ve never demonstrated any of the listed traits.”

  The Captain loomed near now, his plastic eyes seeming to bulge. “That’s your second excuse.”

  “No, sir,” the Engineer said. “You are in error. The statement of a pertinent fact is a justification, rather than an attempt to shift blame.”

  The Captain reached down with a trembling gripper to his belt and unclipped his disconnection device. He fumbled for the firing stud, as if he could not move fast enough due to his eagerness.

  “Perhaps I can aid you with that,” the Engineer said, reaching out a gripper.

  The Captain reeled back as if stung. “Back!” he cried. He waved his Marines forward. They shouldered their way between the Captain and the Engineer.

  “Your disconnection is long overdue,” the Captain said, aiming his device between the narrow metal waists of the two hulking Marines.

  “A pity,” the Engineer said.

  The Captain hesitated. “What do you mean?”

  “Clearly, you have searched the entire village, found their stashed equipment and plundered it. It is a pity the discovered equipment was not useful.”

  The Captain wavered. “Are you still claiming these primitives have advanced components? That they are hiding their true tech? Why would they do that?”

  “I could only speculate on their reasons. But I have built something that will allow me to discover the exact location of their most advanced systems.”

  So saying, the Engineer turned and tapped a gripper on the metal box his Technicians carried behind him. “That is the purpose of this device I’ve designed. It is very sensitive over a short range. We have only to walk among their domes until we find a strong signal.”

  “What if they have buried their equipment? What then?”

  “When we find evidence of it, we will persuade them to dig it up.”

  “How?”

  “As I understand human physiology, the removal of scraps of flesh is unpleasant for them. We will catch humans and trim them until they produce their treasures.”

  The Captain laughed and lowered his disconnection device. Everyone present relaxed somewhat, except for the Marines, who were so mission-focused they didn’t seem to be aware of the change in mood.

  A few minutes later, the Engineer found himself standing in front of the ramshackle gates. He looked at the village, aghast. The situation was far worse than he’d imagined. These people were more likely to possess a herd of goats than a useful subsystem. But like countless shamans before him, he was trapped. He would just have to bluff it through.

  The Marines completely burned down the gates with gouts of purple plasma. They ripped the remaining shreds of metal out of the way, and the party marched into the compound. Last in line were the two Technicians, carrying the Engineer’s strange, metal box.

  Eleven

  Gersen awakened drifting offshore the day after he’d fled the island. He was sprawled aboard his tiny boat. He groaned aloud and hung over the side, vomiting until his sides hurt. The sun was bright and directly overhead giving him a headache to go with everything else. Next, he turned a bleary eye downward to examine his injuries.

  He found numerous scrapes and perhaps ten embedded red spines. He plucked these out, and rubbed salve from the boat’s meager stores into the wounds so they would not fester. There were toxins in his system, he was sure of that. But very little venom had been injected. If he had received a large dose, he would never have awakened at all.

  When he felt better he sat up in his boat, which rolled on gentle swells. He was less than a mile from the island, and would have drifted farther if he hadn’t dropped anchor.

  He nursed his wounds, shivered from his ordeal, and chewed stale rations of dried fish wrapped in salted seaweed. Soft, edible corals sat in a pool of brine in the bottom of the boat. He chewed these tasteless but nourishing growths and studied the shoreline.

  He had an experienced eye when it came to pod-walkers. He knew their seasonal activities well. By his estimation, he’d left the island just in time. An army of walkers now roamed the rocky shoreline. Every beach was full of fresh pods dragged up from the sea bottom. They were beginning a new planting, working their way up and down the beach.

  The life cycle of the Faustian pod-creatures was a strange one, and only the humans that were native to the planet understood it in its entirety. Like some amphibians of Old Earth, the creatures changed forms as they aged in stages. Like salmon, these stages of life were spent in different environments.

  Every pod-creature began its existence as a lumpy growth on the bark of a pod-walker. When these podlings dangled from their parent creature, hanging from feeding tubers, they were ready for independence and were plucked free. The second stage of life began when they were planted upon the seafloor near a sandy beach. When they’d grown to a certain point, usually taking less than a terrestrial year, they were transplanted again by pod-walkers onto dry lands, usually near a coastline.

  Once seeded on the shore, they grew more and more mobile and toxic. It was during this initial planting on land that they grew ganglia, began to feel pain, and gained a primitive capacity for movement. They did not have true muscles, nor a true brain. Like the starfish of Earth, they lacked real cognitive abilities, but reacted to stimuli and their physiology was capable of limited motion.

  Eventually, when these plants ripened, they were harvested by the same pod-walkers that had planted them and hundreds of pods were all dumped together into deep holes in upland regions. They grew into a tree-like growth in the fourth stage until they finally split open and a pod-walker emerged from the swollen polyps that grew like tumors on every tree trunk. A given tree might produce new pod-walkers for thirty seasons before becoming barren and derelict.

  The pod-walkers were the only truly mobile stage of the life cycle. These strange beings marched about, enabling the various other stages of their species’ odd reproductive cycle. The walkers themselves tended to hibernate when not needed by any local podlings. They were influenced by the seasons just as the rest of their bret
hren were, and came alive and fully animated only when needed by their young.

  Gersen pulled up his anchor and made ready to set sail. This island had been a bittersweet experience—mostly bitter. He would gladly leave it behind.

  But something made him delay. He sat and watched the pod-walkers roving on the beach. There were a lot of them, all covered in seaweed and splashing with their broad, stumping feet. They walked on a tripod of limbs, each leg possessing a permanently bent knobby knee. Their legs were as thick as tree trunks, and their towering crowns carried between seven and twenty whipping vines. These vines were like small hands on tentacles. They could carry objects such as pods or captive prey. The vines often snapped off, in which case they shriveled and died like old leaves. New ones grew continuously to replace the lost limbs.

  No one knew how the pod-walkers had evolved. There were guesses, but the initial colonies had been so devastated by the first animated seasons they’d experienced that there was no botanist left who was qualified to answer these questions. They remained a mystery, and the surviving colonists lived in a delicate truce with them. As long as humans had no contact with the juvenile plants—and more importantly the walkers—no one died. Unfortunately, the pods in their myriad forms were the dominant life form on Faust, and not easily avoided.

  Gersen peered past the bustling walkers, looking beyond them to the village, which was hidden by the undulations of the land. It seemed to him that smoke wisped upward from that direction. He frowned. Just what were the villagers doing? What was Kerth up to right now? Had he perhaps staged a coup against the gullible Bolivar? Was Estelle enduring an assault even as Gersen floated on the waves?

  He sighed and turned his face away from the island. “Let well enough alone,” his father had told him long years ago. In general, that had always been his creed. He’d drifted through ten villages like this one, although most of them had been less isolated and his visitations less adventurous.

  In the end, he did not set sail and head for the mainland as he’d intended. With a growl of frustration, he took up the oars and rowed. He turned his craft around and headed back toward the beach.

  In his mind, he considered a score of reasons to take action: he was angry with Kerth; he wanted to see if Estelle was all right; his pride had been injured; and he sought revenge. All of these were compelling, to one degree or another.

  He was angry with himself almost as much as he was with the villagers who had chased him out of the settlement. He supposed it was pride that drove him back into danger, as much as anything else. He’d been freely abused, and he could not let that abuse stand unanswered. He also admitted to a strong desire to experience Estelle’s soft voice and even softer touch again.

  When he reached the point where the waves crashed upon the sand around him, he had to dodge the pod-walkers, who were beginning to sense his presence. In a rippling series of splashes, the monsters thumped down each of their three, stump-like feet in the surf with thunderous reports. At first, they trundled past his tiny boat without a care. They were blind, but they had excellent heat-sensing organs. They did not see in the infrared, but they could feel moving sources of warmth that came near them, even as a torch waved near a blindfolded man’s arm would inevitably make him flinch.

  Gersen tossed the anchor down when he could touch the bottom with a probing toe, but he didn’t simply make a thrashing run for the beach. Instead, he dove into the water and cooled his body off with the seawater. Sliding along just under the surface, he turned his head up to suck in infrequent breaths.

  He soon reached the shoreline. Lying in the surf with waves rolling over him, he attempted to time his next move. It was not easy, as the pod-walkers seemed to be everywhere.

  In the end, he hesitated too long. A pod-walker came splashing up behind him from the seabed. It was a big one, with no less than nineteen whipping vines hanging from a gargantuan crown. These vines dragged a load of fresh sea-podlings behind the monster, ready to be planted in the dry sands.

  Gersen realized he could not slip away to the right or left down the beach due to the proximity of more walkers. He did the only thing he could: he stood up and ran for the dirt track that led uphill to the village.

  The nearest three walkers froze for a moment, then slowly turned this way and that. They had the attitude of listening men. Like an escaping rodent, Gersen ran uphill between them.

  He glanced back when he’d reached the relative safety of the road. He put his hands on his knees and panted. He was not truly winded yet, but fear and poisoning had a way of tiring a man quickly. He could see the pod-walkers were curious and casting for him, like predators throwing their noses high to catch the faint scent of prey.

  He had evaded them. Now, he had a decision to make. He looked up the road again, but still couldn’t make out the village walls. The curl of smoke in the sky had thickened and turned black. He frowned. Something odd was definitely going on up there. He suspected Kerth was at the bottom of it.

  Gersen knew he couldn’t very well march up and tap upon the gates again. That would only gain him a fresh shower of crossbow bolts from the walls. Even Bolivar had said he couldn’t help. A stranger who broke their taboos had to be punished.

  Frowning, and wondering at his own sanity, Gersen walked to the nearest bed of freshly-planted sea-pods. These were the infants of the species. They were buried clusters of bulbs that were each no larger than a man’s eyeball. Later, these would turn into spiny pods the size of a man’s elongated head.

  Breathing through his teeth, he grabbed up the root of the plant and wrenched it loose from the sand. The vines began writhing weakly. Gersen produced a tiny blade he’d gotten from his boat and slashed open several of the podlings until they dripped a thick, greenish sap.

  Having been freshly transplanted from the bottom of the ocean to the beach, the pods were in no condition to defend themselves. They could, however, make a strange odor. Few men had smelled it before, Gersen himself being among that select group. The pods released a whistling sulfurous gas which he immediately recognized. They were calling for help.

  Gersen savagely ripped up another handful of squirming, fleshy tubers and slashed these open as well. The young plants released a powerful stink. He began to trot up the road with twin handfuls of vines. Sticky green sap dribbled behind him with every step.

  All along the beach, every pod-walker stopped stumping along the shoreline. They froze, crowns trembling. Then as one, they turned and thundered after him. They hooted and blasted tremendous, low-noted howls as they came. These noises served to call yet more of their kind. They had no ears, but could detect low vibrations which tickled their sensitive, hair-thin spines.

  The chase was on.

  Twelve

  Gersen doubted the wisdom of his actions when he glanced over his shoulder. There had to be thirty pod-walkers pursuing him, and those were only the ones he could see. Worse than those behind were the ones that might be ahead. They would seek to intercept him.

  As he topped a rise less than a half-mile from the village walls, his doubts grew. He could see a hundred or more of the walkers, all behind him, humping upslope rapidly. He now was fairly certain he was mildly insane. No matter, he told himself. He would most likely be dead within minutes, and at that point all recriminations would be in the past.

  He topped the final rise, expecting to see the vast plateau of juvenile plants ahead he’d passed through before. His vague plan had been to run for the hole under the boulders, which was too small for a pod-walker to enter. While they madly howled and thundered after him, surging against the walls, he’d hoped at the very least to give Kerth and his friends the fright of their lives.

  When he saw the actual scene, however, he was almost too stunned to take it all in. The field was still there, terminating in the stern line of boulders, but the pods were all burnt and dead. In the middle of the field was a new, ugly structure of some kind. Built of blackened metal and struts, it looked like a bloated spider
squatting on the land. The spider had a triangular mouth in its belly, and the mouth was open, the lower jaw forming a ramp that sank into the dust with what was evidently great weight.

  It took a second or two for Gersen to comprehend that he was looking at a spacecraft. He’d never seen one outside the vids, and this one was of an unfamiliar, alien design. He stumbled in his surprised, and fell to one knee. He quickly scrambled back up and advanced warily along the road.

  He was so stunned, gaping at the spider-like craft, he scarcely noticed the smashed gate and tumbled watchtower ahead of him until he reached them. He staggered to a shuffling halt and stared when these realities finally struck home.

  “What in the Nine Hells…?” he whispered to no one.

  At that point, the first of the pod-walkers crested the rise behind him. It hooted and trundled forward on its three churning legs. Gersen tried to think. The gate had clearly been smashed down by invaders from the ship. He recalled the streaks of light he’d seen in the sky—could this truly be them? Aliens from the quiet skies? No one came to Faust—no one. He could scarcely imagine a reason why anyone would want to bother his people in their meager existence, but he pushed those thoughts aside quickly. He wasn’t one for pondering unknowables, especially not when his life was under immediate threat.

  Not sure what else to do, Gersen whirled the podlings he still dragged behind him around his head three times, releasing them. They sailed into the open mouth of the ship. The pod-walkers would have a good time retrieving them. Then he turned and raced into the village itself, passing the disintegrated gates.

  As he trotted into the compound, his horror grew with every step. The bodies of villagers decorated the landscape. Twisted, burned, and chopped into bloody bits, people lay dead in every imaginable state of repose. They were hung from the struts of domes or left in piles of severed body parts. Some seemed to have been simply struck dead where they stood.