Aces High by George R. R. Martin
We’re approaching the Swarm Mother’s detector range.
Thank you. He turned to the others. “You’d better get ready. It’s almost time.”
Fortunato took out the singularity shifter from the backpack in which Tachyon had hidden it in the spare bedroom of his apartment. In the bottom of the pack was a .45 automatic in a shoulder rig.
“What’s this?” Fortunato said. He looked at Tachyon.
“You may need it,” the doctor said. “It’s going to take more out of you than you know, to power this jump.”
Fortunato touched the butt of the gun, looked at Tachyon. He shrugged. “What the hell,” he said, and strapped it on. He hefted the singularity shifter, and he and Brennan and Mai formed a circle. All helped hold the shifter. Brennan glanced at Mai. She looked back steadily. Out of the corner of his eye he saw in a viewscreen a brilliant flash of light wink out from the Swarm Mother. Baby rocked as the organically generated particle beam struck her, but her defensive screens held. Brennan felt a soft whisper in his brain.
Remember. You must not allow Mai or Fortunato to be captured by the Swarm Mother.
He looked up at Tachyon, who stared at him steadily for a moment, then turned back to his viewscreen.
“Go!” Tachyon shouted.
Fortunato’s eyes closed, his brow furrowed in concentration. Spectral ram’s horns glimmered from the sides of his head. Brennan felt a sudden wrenching, a tearing as if every cell of his body were being hurled apart. He couldn’t breathe with lungs that were no more, he couldn’t relax muscles that were torn into their constituent molecules and hurled across hundreds of miles of empty vacuum. He stifled a scream and his consciousness slammed up against a wall of nausea. The trip was worse than his jaunt to the clinic, for it seemed to last forever, though Tachyon had said a journey by singularity shifter lasted no time at all.
Then, suddenly, he was whole again. He and Mai and Fortunato were in a corridor that was dimly lit by large blue and green phosphorescent cells in the translucent ceiling and walls. Ropy tendrils ran below their feet, presumably conduits for whatever was used as blood and nutrients in the thing. The air was hot and wetly humid and smelled like a greenhouse gone bad. Its oxygen content was enough to make Brennan giddy until he adjusted his breathing. He felt light on his feet, though there was a definite gravitational pull. The Swarm Mother, he realized, must be spinning, producing artificial gravity that was necessary for directed organic growth.
“Are you all right?” he asked his companions.
Mai nodded, but Fortunato was breathing harshly. His face was an ashen mask.
“The … space faggot was right…” he panted. “That was a bitch.” His hands were shaking as he fumbled the shifter back into the backpack.
“Relax—” Brennan began, and fell silent.
Somewhere ahead in the twisting, rolling passageway was a vast sucking sound.
“Which way do we have to go?” Brennan asked quietly.
Fortunato concentrated mightily. “I can sense some kind of mind up ahead.” He pointed in the direction of the sucking sound. “If you could call it a mind…”
“Great,” Brennan muttered. He unslung his bow.
“Listen,” Fortunato grabbed Mai’s arm. “You could help me out.…”
“No time for that,” Brennan said. “Besides, Mai will need all her own energy to get through this thing. And so will I.”
Fortunato began to say something, but the sucking sound, which was getting louder and louder, was suddenly right upon them when a grotesque green and yellow mass of protoplasm rolled down a bend in the tubular corridor toward them. It had a score of suckers placed randomly over a globular body that nearly filled the passageway.
“Christ!” Fortunato swore. “What is that thing?”
It was plastered to the side of the corridor, scouring the wall and floor with myriad suckerlike mouths that were ringed by hundreds of foot-long cilia.
“I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out,” Brennan said. “Let’s get going.”
He selected an arrow and laid it loosely on the string of his bow, and started to edge past the thing. Mai and Fortunato followed warily. The thing continued to scour away. The cilia of the mouths facing them quivered eagerly as they passed, but the creature made no move toward them.
Brennan sighed in relief.
The blue phosphorescent twilight tinged their surroundings with a sense of soft-focus unreality as they followed the passageway deeper into the Swarm Mother. The unmoving air was so thick with the scents of living things that it reminded Brennan of the jungles of Vietnam. He kept glancing around, twitching with nervousness, feeling as if he were in the crosshairs of a sniper’s rifle. He couldn’t shake the ominous, oppressive sensation of being watched.
They followed the undulating passageway for half an hour in tense silence, always expecting, but never actually facing, a deadly attack from the Swarm Mother’s killing machines. They stopped when the corridor branched into a Y-shaped fork. Both tines of the Y seemed to be leading in the direction they needed to go.
“Which way?” Brennan asked.
Fortunato rubbed his swollen forehead tiredly.
“I can hear a thousand little twitterings. Not real minds, at least not sentient minds, but their noise is driving me crazy. The big one is still up ahead, somewhere.”
Brennan glanced at Mai. She looked at him placidly, as if willing to let him make all the decisions. Brennan tossed a coin in his mind and it came up heads.
“This way,” he said, taking the right fork.
They hadn’t gone a hundred yards before Brennan realized that something was different in this passageway. The air smelled sweet, almost cloying. It was difficult to breathe, yet at the same time almost intoxicating. The odor grew stronger as they advanced.
“I’m not sure I like this,” Brennan said.
“Do we have a choice?” Mai asked.
Brennan looked at her and shrugged. They went on, turned a sharp bend in the passageway, and stopped, staring at the scene before them.
The passageway widened to forty feet across. On both sides of it, hanging near the ceiling, were scores of grotesque swarmlings with shriveled limbs and huge, swollen abdomens. They were nursing from what looked like swollen nipples jutting from the walls of the passageway.
In turn, Swarm creatures of every size and description crowded around each of the hanging swarmlings, jostling for a place at one of the hollow tubes dangling from their swollen abdomens. The Swarm creatures ranged in size from tiny, insectlike entities to tentacular monstrosities that must have weighed several tons. There were hundreds of them.
“It looks like they’re feeding,” Fortunato whispered.
Brennan nodded. “We can’t go through there. We’ll have to go back and try the other branch.”
They started back down the passageway, and suddenly stopped when they heard a quiet buzzing, as if from a multitude of small wings, drift down toward them from the way they had come.
“Shit,” Fortunato said in disbelief. “We’re caught in the middle of a damn shift change.”
“The first Swarm creature we ran into ignored us,” Brennan said. “Maybe these will, too.”
They hugged the wall of the passageway—it was warm, Brennan found, and pliable to the touch—and were as quiet and unobtrusive as they could be. They waited.
A swarm of the insectoid creatures buzzed down the corridor. They were four to six inches long with segmented bodies and large, membranous wings. The first few passed them by and went straight to the feeding chamber, and Brennan thought they were safe. But then one stopped and landed on Mai. Another joined it, then another and another. She looked down at them calmly. One landed on Brennan’s shoulder. He stared at it. Its mouth parts consisted of multiple mandibular arrangements. One set of mandibles began tearing at the fabric of Brennan’s shirt while another stuffed fragments of cloth into its little mouth.
Brennan brushed the thing aside distastefully
“Let’s try to move away from them,” he said quietly, but that did no good. The bugs followed and landed on the three in increasing numbers.
“Run for it,” Brennan called, and they took off down the corridor.
Some of the swarm continued on to the feeding chamber, but more followed them down the passageway in an angrily buzzing cloud. Brennan batted at them as he ran, knocking some out of the air. He slapped at the ones crawling on him, but there were many to take the place of those he knocked down or crushed. They landed on his face and arms and he could feel their thousand little feet crawl all over him. They seemed to be most interested in his clothes, and, more importantly, his bow and arrows. It was as if they were scavengers programmed to dispose of nonliving matter. But that didn’t make them harmless. Brennan felt their sharp mandibles tear into his flesh nearly as often as not. The buzzing of their wings and the clacking sounds of their mandibles were loud in Brennan’s ears. They had to get away from them.
They reached the point where the passageway divided into the Y, looking desperately for something, anything, that would enable them to shake the little scavengers. Fortunato ran down the other branch of the passageway and Brennan and Mai followed. The floor was slick with moisture. Its surface was uneven. The moisture caught in shallow pools that set off a fine spray of liquid as they slogged through them. The liquid was warm and clear, though murky. They splashed down the corridor and the swarm of insectoids seemed to pull back. Fortunato flopped down into a shallow pool that had gathered in one of the deeper hollows, and rolled around and around, dislodging and crushing the insectoids that were crawling all over him. Brennan and Mai joined him. Brennan kept his lips shut tightly, but the murky liquid drenched him from head to toe. It looked, and smelled, like tepid water with fine particles suspended in it. Brennan was not particularly eager to ingest any of it.
Brennan glanced at his companions as they crouched in the shallow pool. Their clothes looked like they had been attacked by a legion of moths, and they had numerous cuts and gouges, but no one seemed badly injured. The swarm of persistent insectoids hovered over their heads, buzzing, it seemed to Brennan, somewhat angrily.
“How do we get rid of them?” he asked, irritated himself.
“I may have enough left to send those little mothers somewhere,” Fortunato ground out.
“I don’t know—” Brennan began, and never got a chance to finish.
The surface below their feet fell away as a sphincter opened. All the liquid in the passageway gushed downward and they went with it. Brennan had time to take a deep breath and a tight grip on his bow. He reached out and grabbed Mai by an ankle as she was sucked down into darkness and he swirled down after her, cursing as he lost half the arrows in his quiver.
There was more liquid in the passageway than he had realized. They were caught in a rushing vortex with no air to breathe and no light to see by. Brennan held tight to his Mai’s ankle, remembering Tachyon’s silent warning.
They splashed down into a large chamber, totally submerged in a pool of liquid the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Brennan and Mai bobbed to the surface and treaded water, glancing about. Fortunately, this chamber was lit by the same blue phosphorescence as the passageway above. Fortunato swam over to join them, fighting against a current that was drawing them to the other end of the pool.
“What the hell is this?” Fortunato asked.
Brennan found that it was hard to shrug while treading water. “I don’t know. Maybe a reservoir? All living things need water to survive.”
“At least those bugs are gone,” Fortunato said. He struck out for the side of the chamber, and Brennan and Mai followed.
They scrabbled up the slope, going slowly and cautiously because the surface was wet and slippery. They finally flung themselves down, panting, for a moment’s rest. Brennan patched up the worst bug-bites with bandages from the small first-aid kit he carried on his belt.
“Which way now?”
Fortunato took a moment to orient himself, and then pointed. “There.”
They went on through the belly of the beast. It was a nightmarish trek through a strange realm of organic monstrosities. The passageway they followed opened up into vast halls where menlike creatures mewling in half-formed idiocy hung by umbilical cords from pulsating ceilings, led through galleries where sacks of undifferentiated biomass quivered like loathsome jellies while awaiting sculpting by the will of the Swarm Mother, passed by chambers where monsters of a hundred alien forms were being manufactured for what purpose the Swarm Mother alone knew. Some of these last were developed enough to be aware of the interlopers, but they were all still attached to the body of the Mother by protoplasmic umbilical cords. They snapped and snarled and hissed as Brennan and the others passed by, and he was forced to put arrows through the brains of a few of the more persistent creatures.
Not all had the inhuman forms of swarmlings. Some were manlike in shape and appearance, with human faces. Recognizable human faces. There was Ronald Reagan with slicked-back hair and a twinkle in his eye. There was Maggie Thatcher, looking stern and unyielding. And there was Gorbachev’s head, strawberry-colored birthmark and all, set upon a mass of quivering protoplasm that was as soft and puffy as a human body sculpted from bread dough.
“Sweet Jesus,” Fortunato said. “It looks like we got here just in time.”
“I hope so,” Brennan murmured.
The passageway began to narrow and they had to stoop, and finally get down on hands and knees and crawl. Brennan looked back at Fortunato and the ace nodded them on.
“It’s ahead. I can feel it pulsing: feed and grow, feed and grow.”
The flesh of the tunnel wall was rubbery and warm. Brennan disliked touching it, but he pushed himself forward. The tunnel narrowed until it was so cramped that Brennan realized he couldn’t bring his bow to bear. They were helpless, and traveling into the most dangerous area in the Swarm Mother, her nerve center. He shoved on through a crawlway of living flesh for a hundred yards or more, Mai and Fortunato following him, until at last he popped out into an open space. Fortunato followed and they both helped Mai down.
They looked around. It was a small chamber. There was hardly room in it for the three of them and the large, tri-lobed, gray-pink organ suspended in the middle of the chamber by a network of fibrous tendrils that penetrated into the floor, ceiling, and walls.
“This is it,” Fortunato muttered in an exhausted voice. “The nerve center of the Swarm Mother. Its brain or core or whatever you want to call it.”
He and Brennan turned to Mai. She stepped forward and Brennan took her arm.
“Kill it,” he urged. “Kill it and let’s get out of here.”
She looked at him calmly. He could see his reflection in her large, dark eyes. “You know I’ve sworn to never harm another sentient being,” she said quietly.
“Are you crazy?” Fortunato cried. “What did we come here for?”
Brennan released her arm and she walked toward the organ suspended in the net of nerve fibers. Fortunato looked at Brennan. “Is the bitch crazy?”
Brennan shook his head, unable to speak, knowing that he was losing another. No matter which way this turned out, he was losing another.
Mai slipped around the tendrils and placed her palms against the flesh of the Swarm Mother. Her blood began to flow down the organ of the alien creature.
“What’s she doing?” Fortunato asked, caught between fear and anger and wonder.
“Merging.”
The narrow tunnel that led to the Swarm Mother’s sanctum began to dilate. Brennan turned to face the opening.
“What’s happening?”
Brennan nocked an arrow to his bowstring. “The Swarm Mother’s resisting,” he said, and shut his surroundings, shut Fortunato, shut Mai even, fr
The fanged and taloned killing-machines of the Swarm Mother poured through the opening. Brennan fired. His hands moved without conscious direction, drawing, pulling, loosing. Bodies piled up by the mouth of the tunnel and were cleared away by the creatures trying to push their way inside and by the blasts of the explosive arrows. Time ceased to flow. Nothing mattered but perfect coordination between mind and body and target, born from the union of flesh and spirit.
It seemed like forever, but the resources of the Swarm Mother were not inexhaustible. The creatures stopped coming when Brennan had three arrows left. He stared down the corridor for over a minute before he realized that no more targets were in sight and he lowered his bow.
His back ached and his arms burned like they were on fire. He looked at Fortunato. The ace stared at him, shook his head wordlessly. Brennan’s consciousness returned from the pool where his Zen training had sunk it.
A sudden movement caught his eye and he turned. His hand dropped to the quiver at his belt, but stopped before it drew an arrow. There were three forms, man-sized, man-shaped, at the mouth of the tunnel. A sense of dislocation swept through Brennan like a cold wind and he lowered his bow. He recognized them.
“Gulgowski? Mendoza? Minh?”
He went forward as if in a dream as they stepped over and around the blasted bodies of the swarmlings, coming to meet him. Brennan was numb, caught between joy and disbelief.
“I knew you would come,” Minh, Mai’s father, said. “I knew you would rescue us from Kien.”
Brennan nodded. A feeling of vast weariness swept over him. He felt as if his brain were isolated from the rest of his body, as if somehow it had been wrapped in layers of cotton batting. He should have known all along that Kien was behind the Swarm. He should have known.