[Weapons of Chaos 01] - Echoes of Chaos Read online

  A much later time.

  “The fires burn closer,” Jerad said, all emotion gone from his voice. Death no longer held the fascination and fear for him that it once had. To be gone from this world of illogic seemed a worthier goal than continued life.

  “We can escape through the back,” said Cossia, always the more tenacious of the two. “The vaults are still months away from completion. We need to work harder if we…” Her voice trailed off. Her large, mobile ears rotated. Cossia frowned. The sounds carried on the hot summer winds were confusing.

  Then she felt what she feared most. Cossia spun and faced Jerad. Her friend, her lover, the most precious of all those left on this declining world jerked and twitched as if someone had attached wires to his limbs and sent electric charges surging. Jerad smashed hard against the thatched wall and fell to the floor, arms windmilling out of control, purple eyes wide and showing yellow sclera as vivid as his hide. Cossia ran to him, but his strength startled her. With the ease of someone ten times stronger, Jerad batted her away—and did not know that he did so.

  Cossia watched in horror as Jerad died from the epileptic seizure, as so many others before him had done.

  “The virulence,” she said, her voice low and choked. She had felt the onslaught, but it had taken Jerad so fast! Less than a dozen frenzied heartbeats had passed from beginning until death.

  Jerad gave another death jerk, snapping his spine like a dried twig. From past experiences, Cossia knew the twitchings would continue for some time. Jerad had died following the first seizure, but his body’s resilience persisted.

  Cossia looked at her own hands. They shook. Fear rose and died within her. “Reaction,” she said aloud. “Shock. Nothing more.” But Cossia knew she lied to herself. The epileptic convulsions that had killed Fordyne and Jerad would soon claim her.

  She felt it.

  With the rioters only a dozen paces from the door of the thatched house, Cossia burst into the street. She saw the demonic stares on the faces of the crowd, the expressions of lost hope. Cossia almost despaired enough to join them in their fear and frustration in burning down the city’s most magnificent edifices.

  Cossia turned her misted eyes aloft to the majestic spire of the Aerie where the Chief of Rules and his Council had once met around the Table of Rules to decide the proper path for all to tread. No longer. They had died in the riots, and now licking tongues of orange flame sampled the base of the mighty building.

  Cossia watched as the symbol of her world began to bum. At first only the lower levels filled with bright oranges and yellows. Then upper levels began belching black plumes of smoke. As the fire quickly spread, the top floors crumbled and the entire building’s integrity was compromised.

  The Aerie died, as did Cossia’s world.

  She let herself be carried away by the vortex of the crowd. Slowly, Cossia worked her way into eddies and backwaters, finally finding a deserted street leading into the countryside. Arms flapping in mock flight, she hurried along to the vaults. The others worked feverishly to complete the last of the accumulated displays, to seal them before the mobs thought about this final legacy and rebelled against informing future generations of their shame. But Cossia allowed herself a gut-wrenching doubt about the effectiveness of what she and Jerad and the others had done.

  For whom were the vaults constructed? Cossia had seen the statistics compiled by Fordyne and his successors. This world died. There would be no survivors, no successors to carry on civilization.

  Cossia felt it.

  TWO

  Michael Ralston floated in the center of the University starship’s main cabin, oblivious to all that went on around him, isolated by the sound-deadening effect of the lowered atmospheric pressure aboard ship. The trip to Alpha 3 hadn’t been a long one by current standards, but it had worn on him. He didn’t look forward to this dig; he expressed open hostility even to being assigned such a minor find when real work went begging on Vega 14 and Nuevo Seguro and Proteus 4.

  He inhaled deeply, then exhaled slowly at the thought of Proteus. That should have been his. He’d been on the initial planetary survey that had located the ruins. A civilization older than mankind, only the second ever discovered that had possessed space travel—and possibly a stardrive—and waiting for the careful analysis and loving care he could lavish on it.

  But it wasn’t his. Alpha 3 was his while Velasquez got Proteus 4.

  Ralston opened his eyes and noticed that the air currents caused him to drift slowly toward the wall section with the chipped blue enamel. He extended arms and legs, slowing the small amount of rotation he’d developed. He started when he realized he wasn’t alone in the cabin as he’d thought. Ralston faced a trim, small woman barely ten years younger.

  He stared at her as if a million years separated them. He might be Leonore Disa’s graduate advisor on this dig, but they had nothing in common. Ralston closed his eyes and went back into a self-pitying world. None of the students accompanying him shared his devotion to the field. Dilettantes, all of them. He had started on the flight with high hopes. He always did.

  Nothing had come of them. The students were lackluster at best. All knew this wasn’t the best expedition the University of Ilium had in space. That was Proteus. They were all second-rate students sent to a second-rate planet without sufficient equipment.

  Or drive or skill, Ralston mentally added. His early attempts to establish any kind of rapport with the students had failed, and the professor had not been sufficiently motivated to pursue the matter. Better to drift off, lost in his own thoughts, his own Pity-Proteus should have been his! Damn campus politics! Faint gabbling noises reached him, words altered by the lower than Novo Terra norm air pressure. Leonore Disa gestured for him to come closer. Ralston pulled in his arms and legs, increased rotation, and grabbed an elastic band stretched around the cabin. He collided hard, and then felt the band tighten and send him back across the room. With contemptuous ease, he came to a total stop beside the woman. She floundered a bit while turning simply. He took some small vindictive pleasure at her clumsiness. They had been in space for seven weeks, and the graduate student still hadn’t mastered weightlessness. “What is it?” Ralston asked.

  “The pilot says we’re about ready to shift out of stardrive.” Leonore spoke louder than necessary. She also still misjudged hearing distances in the low pressure.

  “Any guesses about how close to Alpha 3 we’ll be?” The incomprehension on her face told Ralston she had scant idea what he meant.

  “How much longer till we get into orbit around Alpha 3?”

  Leonore shrugged. Her brown eyes left Ralston’s pale gray ones and focused somewhere behind the professor. He pulled in his legs and spun to see another graduate student enter. Ralston had even less respect for this one. If Leonore Disa, with her expensive implanted glowing jewelry plates and perfect coiffure seemed a dilettante, Yago de la Cruz proved even more of a dabbler. Ralston had no idea why the son of one of the wealthiest men on Novo Terra bothered pursuing a profession of dubious social standing, with few creature comforts and no promise for riches.

  “What is it, Citizen de la Cruz?” he asked.

  “The pilot says we’re within a local A.U. of Alpha 3, Doctor Ralston. Shouldn’t be more than another ten hours before orbit.” Ralston watched Leonore Disa’s face go from confusion to understanding as de la Cruz reported. She wasn’t stupid, just ignorant, Ralston decided. Of de la Cruz, all he could say was that he didn’t like the man or the sarcastic emphasis de la Cruz always placed on Doctor when addressing him.

  “Good. Check out the equipment. Make certain we’ve got the monitoring station ready for grounding. While we’re in parking orbit, we’ll kick out the survey satellites.” Caught up in enthusiasm over being able to work again, Ralston forgot his distaste for his assigned students and the paltry results likely on Alpha 3.

  “At once, Doctor Ralston.” De la Cruz misjudged his trajectory, bounced off the wall in an inept move, turned and
glowered at Ralston, then shot through the door.

  “He’ll have a bruise off that,” Ralston said, finding that he enjoyed the idea of de la Cruz battering himself.

  “Doctor, may I ask a question?” Leonore’s cheeks glowed a soft purple in counter to the lush pinks and flashing greens marching in strict geometric patterns along her hands and arms. He wondered if the implanted jewelry plates responded to the woman’s emotions—some did—or if they could be programmed for random color display.

  “Of course. That’s why you’re here. Consider this a giant classroom.”

  She frowned. He realized his bitter tone mirrored Yago de la Cruz’s too closely.

  “Sorry,” he said, softer. “What is it?”

  “We didn’t come out of the shift very close to Alpha 3, did we? That’s why we have to spend another ten hours getting into orbit.”

  “Actually, the pilot is to be commended on his navigation. Some commercial flights do a lot worse.” Ralston looked around. The University of Ilium starship was hardly more than a space-going waste can. Reduced air pressure saved the cost of transporting expensive mass. Even the exterior walls were a light boron fiber composite hardly a centimeter thick—Ralston repressed a shudder at being so close to infinite space—and the cramped quarters had made him think that the University hadn’t gone to any great expense hiring a pilot. In that, at least, he’d been wrong.

  Traditionally and from preference, pilots interacted very little with their passengers. This one had proven no different, but Ralston had spoken to him twice in the seven weeks and had been impressed with his attention to detail and general knowledge of spacing. Ralston gave one over to the University for having the sense not to send out a novice pilot, even if this expedition accounted for little.

  Coming within a local A.U. of their destination amounted to damned good navigation. While some might call it luck, Ralston knew better. The lesser pilots always erred on the side of increased distance. Shifting out of stardrive at less than this might indicate foolhardiness. One A.U. showed true skill, being neither too close nor too far from the planetary target.

  “I’ve never been off Novo Terra before,” she said. It hadn’t been necessary for her to reveal this.

  “There’s not going to be much excitement,” he told her.

  “Not like there’d be on Proteus,” Leonore said. He looked at her sharply. “Really, Dr. Ralston, we all know you wanted that dig.”

  “Alpha 3’s not bad.”

  “It’s going to be hard getting a good dissertation out of it,” she said. Her frankness startled him. Ralston had maintained an aloofness from Leonore Disa and the others throughout the trip, contenting himself with the book he pretended to write. Whenever he had a few spare minutes he worked on it, but during seven weeks of unrelieved “spare minutes” he had done little more than jot down notes.

  “That’s one of the hazards in archaeology. You can’t know what you’ll find until you start digging.”

  “Where’d you do your dissertation?”

  He smiled as he remembered. “A sweet find on Archaenor 2. I was Benjamin Uzoma’s student. Great instincts, he had. Great. One look at a site and he knew where the real stuff was. We spent seven standard months there.”

  “What did your research cover?” Leonore seemed genuinely interested. Ralston reflected briefly on the difference when he’d gone to school a mere ten years ago and the students now. He’d scoured the university library for every publication Uzoma had written, studied them, evaluated the quality of the work and decided he could learn much from such a man before even applying to the department. Leonore had just admitted she knew nothing of his background; Ralston doubted de la Cruz or any of the others had bothered to check into his publications, either.

  That annoyed Ralston. The dissertation and the subsequent fourteen papers were his life.

  “The natives had evolved into a ‘social insect’ culture. My paper dealt with the relationship between such a communal existence and its effect on architecture.”

  Leonore looked dreamy, as if thinking about the Novo Terra Gala Ball rather than archaeology. Then she surprised Ralston by saying, “Something like the Earth termite.” Ralston waited for her to continue, to explain. “A few seem to have no function, but a dozen or more begin organizing into platoons and stacking pellets to the proper height and angle to make keystone arches.”

  “They manage to build very elaborate structures,” Ralston said. “One or two can’t, but a larger group seems to instinctively grasp complex relationships and know how to build in such a way to control the humidity and temperature.”

  “I remember reading that the termites worked together using chemical signals. I doubt the Archaenor natives did, though. Too much acid in that atmosphere.”

  “You’ve read my dissertation,” Ralston said. “That was my finding. They constructed on the basis of visual cues, being very sensitive to subtle changes in wavelength.” He watched in growing appreciation as Leonore’s jewelry plates flashed pastels. Someone with a good eye had programmed her plates; they heightened shadows on her cheeks, turning her face into something exotic rather than plain.

  “I called it up from University files,” Leonore admitted. “I was interested in seeing what your field of specialty was. We seemed to be stuck with one another.”

  “‘Stuck’ is a bit harsh.” He wondered why he had withdrawn so on the trip. He might have been disappointed—crushed—that he’d been assigned to Alpha 3, but that didn’t relieve him of his obligations as an instructor. He ought to have found out more about his students. As he had done with Uzoma, he should have investigated the strengths and weaknesses of his graduate assistants. It was, after all, what the University paid him to do.

  “We’re the lowest ranking students in the department,” Leonore said without rancor. “And you haven’t gotten tenure because of your involvement with the Nex.”

  Ralston stiffened. He hadn’t realized anyone outside the department staff knew of his youthful windmill tilting.

  “It must have been fascinating, being so close to a truly alien race. Is that what sparked your interest in archaeology?” Leonore’s question came out innocent and almost ingenuous, but Ralston sensed a sharp intellect hiding behind the facade.

  “Not really.”

  “They seem so… repulsive. The Nex, I mean.” Her brown eyes speared him, demanding a substantive reply.

  “I enlisted in their forces. I fought against the P’torra rather than for the Nex.”

  “Why?”

  Ralston had asked himself the same question repeatedly. The humanoid P’torra had commanded human sympathy and aid. The reptilian, virtually boneless, formless Nex triggered only fear.

  “If you don’t understand it, oppose it,” he said with a bleak smile. “That’s the way most people responded to the Nex. I saw firsthand the atrocities done by the P’torra, though. Complete planets devastated. They used chemical and biological agents to depopulate four Nex-inhabited worlds.”

  “The war was started by the Nex,” Leonore said. “They attacked the P’torra homeworld.”

  Ralston snorted. “I won’t get into the politics of it. The Nex are alien in many ways and their views of both human and P’torra are skewed. They thought a quick strike at the home-world would end the conflict. Instead, it only rallied support for the P’torra.”

  “They destroyed four worlds? The P’torra? I never heard that.”

  “Before war was declared, the P’torra killed two more. Six worlds turned into bacterial jungles. After the declaration of war, the Nex stopped them from harming any more of the planets, but the damage had been done.”

  “What did the P’torra gain? If the worlds are uninhabitable, they can’t use them, either.”

  “A good point. Like most wars, this was fought for economic gain. The Nex were becoming too efficient in markets the P’torra coveted. The racial overtones came into play only after the P’torra saw how we could be manipulated by it. Societa
l shame over our own beginnings on Earth still run deep.”

  “After what happened on Earth, why didn’t we rally around the Nex? A world destroyed is an awful loss, even if only the temperate zones on Earth are gone.”

  “Again, it’s the Nex failure to understand warm-blooded psychology. I doubt one in a thousand citizens even know of the P’torra world killings.” Ralston unconsciously distanced himself from Leonore, letting the lowered pressure isolate him again. Then he forced himself back within distance for easy hearing. Drifting in weightlessness and letting the bubble of silence formed a retreat to the womb. He might not like this dig or the promise held out by Alpha 3 or the students, but he had to make the best of it.

  “I don’t want to talk about that anymore. Get the others. We’ll meet for a quick conference in, say, fifteen minutes.”

  “Very well, Doctor.” Leonore Disa turned inexpertly, aimed herself for the door, and arrowed out, wobbling slightly around her major axis. All things considered, she did much better than de la Cruz had. And Ralston found himself glad for this, too.

  Ralston smiled. He remembered his first time in weightlessness. He hadn’t been able to eat and keep it down longer than a few minutes. But then the Nex food hadn’t been palatable, either. Only when they shifted to a supply planet and he had the chance to buy four cases of peanut butter, a few chocolate bars and coffee from a black marketeer had he found adequate sustenance.

  He made a wry face. To this day, he couldn’t stand the sight of peanut butter. It had been all he’d lived on for over two „ months—that and the vile-tasting Nex supplements that gave nourishment and damned little else.

  But Michael Ralston didn’t regret his decision to fight with the Nex and against the more popular P’torra. Humankind hadn’t been involved directly with the war—and had played an insignificant role in the final peace negotiations—but sympathies had been against any allying with the Nex.

  He had been lucky Benjamin Uzoma hadn’t carried such prejudices and had accepted him as a student. But even having such a noted archaeologist as an advisor and attending a school as prestigious as the University of Novo Terra did nothing to erase the resentment among his peers at Ilium. Velasquez got Proteus 4 and the first real chance at a spacefaring culture granted anyone in the department.