Almost as soon as he saw thunderheads looming, lightning at their crowns, they slowed, bursting into their envelope. Under sullen skies, the tangle gleamed wet. Dark purple trees thrust up in exotic corkscrews or folded on themselves like nautilus shells; others towered like giant hairs.
As the ship maneuvered through this growth, the wind drove rain against the viewscreens in steady sheets.
The storm here had worsened over the past two days. Gallen had never seen a deluge like it, as if the heavens poured out all the waters in the world.
Gallen changed course, let the rains cool the burning hull. He imagined how the ship must look from outside this behemoth oozing steam. If the dronon used infrared sensors, even these clouds might not hide the ship. Gallen only hoped that the rain would cool the hull soon.
The ship soared over something huge and pale, slightly pink, like a blind snake void of pigment, worming its way through the trees. The creature must have been two hundred meters long. and eight meters in diameter.
Zeus studied the viewscreen. “Mistwife,” he said. “It must be hungry to hunt in daylight. It comes up from the ocean.”
“At the bottom of the tangle?” Gallen asked. “Yes,” Zeus said. “They live in deep water and hunt on nights when rain slicks the trees.”
Perhaps they are amphibious, Gallen decided, or perhaps like large worms. In any case, it sounded as if they needed moisture. As the ship soared past the creature, Gallen suddenly saw dozens of others like it, worming their way out of the tangle.
“It’s excited,” Zeus said. “It senses our movement.”
Then Gallen understood. There were not dozens of mistwives. This was a single organism. He suddenly envisioned it, like an enormous anemone, sending up tentacles to fetch food. Yet Gallen found that almost impossible to imagine. The ship was two thousand meters above sea level, yet this creature sent dozens of tentacles up through the tangle, questing, searching for food. How large was a mistwife? How powerful?
Gallen didn’t want to find out.
He soared under the storm, counting on the steady throb of lightning, the ionization of the atmosphere, to shield him from the dronon’s electronic detection. The ship began to pick up urgent broadcasts from Lord Felph.
That could only mean that the dronon had turned off their signal jammers, so that they could begin their hunt. Gallen dared not answer Felph’s calls.
And be dared not stay airborne. The dronon would search the planet via conventional radar and with imaging detectors. The constant lightning that speared through the clouds should make it difficult for the dronon to search with infrared, but Gallen couldn’t be certain. If the clouds thinned, if the lightning slowed even for a few moments, he might be found.
The wisest course would be to land immediately, but not near this mistwife. It might crush the ship. Gallen wondered if he could find a region that would be safer, more secure.
But it wasn’t a hiding place that he wanted. They could hide in the tangle, maybe for weeks, but they’d run out of food, if the dronon didn’t find them first.
Now that the dronon had set a picket around the planet, he wouldn’t be able to blast off.
We cannot hide, and we cannot run, Gallen realized.
Which meant that he would have to fight. On a sudden impulse, he commanded the ship to return to the coordinates where he’d gone on his brief expedition with Lord Felph.
“Where are you going?” Maggie asked. “You don’t plan to look for the city?”
“The dronon will find us eventually,” Gallen said softly. “I won’t just hide. We have to do something.”
Chapter 28
Lord Felph had long tried to keep a low profile on Ruin. It seemed inevitable that the dronon would come to the Carina Galaxy, and he’d made certain that the coordinates of Ruin were kept quiet. The Carina Interplanetary Federation had removed the planet’s name from star charts. Conventional radio chatter on Ruin was kept minimal, and then broadcast only at low intensities on tight beams. Felph didn’t want the planet showing up under scrutiny.
As for ansibles, he didn’t own one. He knew it made him look reclusive to outsiders. Most planetary governments would have considered instantaneous communications a necessity. Not Felph. Billions of people had lived fine lives without the damned things, thank you. That’s what shuttles were for, carrying messages out to civilization.
But when the dronon appeared in the skies over Ruin,
Felph knew that some seventy years of painstaking precautions had been wasted. His world was the first in the galaxy to come under attack. The whole planet fell hostage in the blink of an eye.
Felph puttered about his palace, fretting all morning. Why this day, of all days? With Henn dead-Zeus and Gallen gone.
Felph tried, but after the dronon appeared, he couldn’t raise Gallen over the radio. The dronon’s jammers might have interrupted communications in any case, but Felph suspected that Gallen kept silent for other reasons. Even if Gallen couldn’t hear the transmissions, Felph reasoned he would hightail it back to the palace as soon as he saw the dronon. But apparently the Lord Protector knew enough to crawl under a rock when dronon invaded. Felph had to appreciate that.
At the same time, he wished he’d hired a more intrepid man. A real Lord Protector would have done something about the dronon.
Once Felph failed to contact Gallen, he decided to ask Arachne for counsel. That’s what he had created her for, but the woman was not at her loom, and a search by the droids proved she wasn’t in the palace.
As for Hera and Athena, neither of them had any idea why the dronon ships had arrived. Hera’s advice was, “Sit quietly, and see what happens.”
Athena was more practical. She set out to find Arachne, and by considering the places where the woman might have gone, she chanced upon several loose hairs and a couple of drops of blood in the lower corridors, by the launching bay.
She followed a trail of blood droplets into a droid access corridor, found hairs by a recycling shoot.
Moments later, she retrieved Arachne’s corpse, carried it up, laid it before Felph in his upper offices, and described how she’d found the body.
He stared at it in dismay, shaken, unwilling to believe his eyes, hardly hearing a word. Arachne, his best counselor, murdered. Her face was covered in blood and bruises.
Her silver hair mussed. Her dark eyes looked up blankly, like those of a stupid cow.
All that wisdom, all that beauty, all that insight lost. There was nothing for it but to clone her, start again. Yet. Felph wondered. Even if I clone her, will she be as wise? She’d accumulated so much knowledge in her short life; Felph despaired of ever recreating a creature quite as lovely, quite as prescient.
Felph’s heart hammered, and for a long while he simply stared at the corpse in shock. She’d been killed in the corridors, near Gallen’s ship. Beaten to death.
Who could have done it? Gallen? The bear? And why? Surely Zeus would not have done it, Felph told himself, even as a cold dread filled his breast.
Felph did not have long to wonder. Two hours after he’d first discovered the dronon presence and scant minutes after Athena located Arachne’s corpse, his perimeter security droids suddenly wailed a priority-one intruder alert.
The exterior security cameras showed a dozen craft approach from the southeast. Vanquishers, with black carapaces gleaming in the dull sunlight, skimmed through the grainfield on airbikes.
They halted at the front gate of the palace. Felph, flanked by his two remaining daughters, drove a house transport down to the main gate-a structure of rose quartz that stood some forty meters in the air, supported by twin pillars of red sandstone.