Blade of p’Na by L. Neil Smith
Another explosion collapsed a second stretch of wall, and now the creatures poured through, apparently oblivious to the comrades beside them who were being turned into horrible fried meat not only by the defenders’ weapons, but by the second wall-demolishing explosion, as well. The eeriest thing about them was their utter silence—they had nothing, no lungs, windpipes, vocal chords, or mouths to make noise with.
Although most of our attackers were Grays, I was surprised to see there was also some number of humanoids—mercenaries, most likely Homo sapiens—wearing the gray livery of their masters, apparently intent on killing each and every one of us. They had been drugged or something, their complexions were almost blue, their faces blank and expressionless like those of corpses. If someone looked up “zombie assassins” in the implant directory, they’d find a picture of these guys.
Eichra Oren swung his terrifying blade down on an approaching Gray, the edge, a single molecule, cleaving its head in two, shearing through the body, and exiting at the crotch. Both halves flopped helplessly onto the flagstones at the man’s feet, quivering where they lay. As he turned, the boss’s next stroke went through another enemy alien sideways at the waist, and two more quivering halves joined the first.
In the center of the pool, a fantastic sight: Misterthoggosh stood halfway out of the water, supported by several of his tentacles, while he wielded three spiral-handled force-pistols, shooting away in every direction. His weapons, which, like those of the invaders, produced pure, recoilless one-way kinetic energy, worked exceptionally well against the Grays, who looked like they were being hit by an invisible hovertruck.
Beside him, Semlohcolresh apparently didn’t feel the need for a weapon at the moment, although I’d seen him with a handsome particle beamer. With a hideous screaming snarl I hadn’t been aware the Elders were capable of making, he was lashing about, a ten-limbed berserker, seizing Grays or any other enemy who made it to the pool and hurling them back away from it. Their bodies splashed against anything solid they struck and burst like bags of rotted vegetables. Some of them even hit other Grays, producing some of the ugliest messes I had ever seen.
Meanwhile, Eichra Oren was discovering that his p’Nan martial artistry—consisting mostly of assaulting centers of the body where healing needles would ordinarily be inserted—wasn’t working on the Grays much better than his sword. His little pistol, adjusted to disperse its energy broadly, worked better, and he wielded it with a will.
I had a sudden, ominous feeling about the Grays the boss had cut in half with his sword. Grasping the edge of a drinking bowl with my teeth, I hopped down and poured hundred proof alcohol all over the writhing remains. That didn’t seem to discourage them from twitching, but they blanched and sizzled gratifyingly, exactly like properly salted garden slugs. I only hoped that it would also keep them from regenerating.
Although his martial art, which more closely resembled dancing than fighting, didn’t appear to work on the Grays—their systems were too decentralized—it did with a vengeance on the humanoids, who were beginning to pile up in a ring of bodies around the debt assessor.
Not for the first time, I felt shamed and useless without hands to fight with, limited only to snarling at organisms who didn’t know what it meant, and snapping at their hired assassins, who did. I confess to taking off a careless finger or two. I was very careful to spit them out. Odds were long, but even more than choking on the human fingers, like in the urban legend, I didn’t want anything regenerating inside me.
Hopping back up on the table, I got noticed. I watched helplessly as one of the Grays aimed a weapon at me, from too far away to defend myself, and fully expected to die in that moment. Instead, the thing exploded before my eyes. I looked over my shoulder and there stood the very attractively ferocious Lornis, her weapon—an outsized infrared laser I believe it was—still held before her face, its big red lens glittering.
“Thanks, gorgeous!” I told her, envying my unappreciative boss all over again. The pretty girl grinned back at me, pivoted gracefully, and shot something else that exploded. Lasers superheat the water that our bodies are mostly composed of, in just an instant. They don’t burn through you, they make you blow yourself up, and Grays are even more susceptible to that than anybody else. Who says the Age of Steam is over?
Scutigera had an interesting way of handling his assailants. Of his fifteen pairs of legs, two pairs had been modified by evolution to capture prey. With a rigid body thirty feet long, when he put his foot down—all twenty-six of them—the big fellow was there to stay. If an enemy was more than a few yards away, he dispatched it with a huge, heavy ion-spraying pistol held in one of his manipulatory appendages. Closer in, he wielded a great, curved knife for them to deal with. If they were face to face, he simply bit his opponent’s head off and spat it out, leaving many a Gray to wander aimlessly, bumping into lawn furniture.
The beautiful Eneri Relda also looked more like she was dancing than fighting—she had taught him, to begin with, but from here, it almost looked hereditary—whirling about, leaping from toe to toe, Fire would spout from one of her hands from time to time, never in predictable intervals or directions. The enemy retreated as she advanced.
Suddenly, I saw a man—some kind of a man, anyway; if he had eyes in his head, they were set too deeply to be visible—behind her, aiming one of the Grays’ weapons at her. I didn’t think, I simply jumped, and by the time the two of us hit the flagstones, his weapon spun and skittered across the flagging, and my upper and lower fangs were buried in the man’s throat. He screamed, struggling, pulling my teeth through his flesh, tearing at the aortas. In a moment, he lay quiet.
I had never tasted human blood before, or killed a sapient. But looked at the right way, the man had committed suicide. The damned fool had been about to kill somebody I loved. Shrugging it off, I worked my way back and took my place, shoulder to shoulder, with the boss, his mother, and with Lornis, we four forming as formidable a wall as we could between the innumerable Grays and the House of Misterthoggosh.
There were plenty to replace the man I’d killed, scattered through the oncoming horde, and for each one of them, a hundred Grays or more, advancing in a single-minded and implacable wave of bloodshed and death.
CHAPTER THIRTY
A Dream of Romance
THE FATEFUL GATHERING AT MISTERTHOGGOSH’S VILLA broke up not long after his conversation with G*l*str*d*. Some guests returned to their homes. Others accepted his offer of safety and hospitality. And some sought various Places of Rest and Healing. I believe everybody had assumed the underwater half of the great nautiloid’s domicile had been destroyed, but the Grays had simply gone around it, intent, or so the thinking was, on killing as many of his investors and consultants as possible.
Their mistake.
We stayed the one night, my boss and I, not so much for any safety the old snail could afford us—Eichra Oren and I are by no means the victim type. Our house holds many surprises for the uninvited, all of them unpleasant and some of them thoroughly lethal. Eichra Oren simply wanted to stay “in the loop”, as the saying goes in some universes, and the best way to accomplish that, it seemed, was to sit at the Elder’s table and sleep under his roof, at least for this particular moment.
I agreed with my esteemed companion, and it had almost nothing to do with the lobster bisque that was featured on the house menu that evening.
Almost.
Nothing.
I have dreams about that stuff.
There had been a lot of palaver about the mentality—or the lack thereof—of the Grays. Some of Misterthoggosh’s retainers, when the attack had commenced, had found and seized the underwater vehicle that the invaders had arrived in. Any other species I could think of would have left a handful of guards behind, or enough crew to take the craft out somewhere safe, returning only when they had been ordered to. I think sea scorpionoids are born knowing about elementary tactics like that.
However, I was disinclined to agree with c
“Yes, it’s true,” the gigantic centipede had confessed. Call it a “rump session”. As a combined force of dinosauroid employees and Leru Obilnaj, a non-sapient insectoid servant species, began cleaning up the mess, a few of Misterthoggosh’s “inner circle” were sitting around the pool where the battle had been fought, comparing notes and making plans.
Military plans, from the sound of it, on a version of this planet that had enjoyed unbroken peace for several hundreds of millions of years. If the nautiloid Elders whose ancestors had achieved that peace felt anything about its being broken, they were not forthcoming about it.
I was furious enough for them.
The Proprietor himself and his friend and fellow sapient mollusc Semlohcolresh, had retired to the palatial comforts and delights of the briny deep, just offshore, but they were still here, with us, inside our heads. “To be truthful, Sam,” said Scutigera, “I am a sociologist—and one of Misterthoggosh’s business partners. I use my transport service in Lanternlight to study the various people that I meet.”
The nautiloids were conferring deeply (if you’ll pardon the pun) with my boss in his role as moral arbiter of the proposed undertaking, with his mother, Eneri Relda the wise and beautiful, and with a small handful of other notable or notorious insiders. Alfarz Adubudu, sweet Lornis’ somewhat shady father, was one of hundreds of investors in Misterthoggosh’s widespread enterprises, but his advice was sought, as well. He was visiting with the rest of the gentlemen (and gentlefem) adventurers on his way home, from a sub-orbital aerocraft presently streaking somewhere over the Greater Ocean at many times the speed of sound.
I’d been feeling a little left out until I noticed that the big centipede didn’t seem to be participating in the confab, either, but stood pensively (at least it looked like he was standing pensively) taking up more space than any other sapient being I was acquainted with.
“Kind of sneaky,” I observed in a mock-critical tone, referring to his method of surreptitiously studying people. The truth was, the idea of a sneaky thirty-foot arthropod appealed greatly to my sense of the absurd.
He replied, “Harmlessly so, I should hope, Sam. I do publish all of my findings openly, under my own name, in the Journal of Sapient Studies.”
I laughed. “Avidly read by billions every month, I’m sure.”
“It’s quarterly, Sam,” the enormous creature said gently.
“Okay, quarterly, then. Billions and billions of enthusiastic readers. So what can you tell me about these Grays, O Great and Mighty Sociologist?”
“Well, first, I’m not quite sure that whatever they share amounts to a society, as we would recognize it.” Scutigera inhaled and exhaled through his many spiracles. “G*l*str*d* informs me that his security people have managed to round up a few prisoners after all, surviving individuals who were left without transportation when the forces of Misterthoggosh seized their…. I’m uncertain that the term ‘submarine’ is appropriate for a craft open to the water because its users are amphibians.”
“Hey, it travels under water, so it’s a submarine. But call it a bus,” I suggested. “Although it’s supposedly outfitted with life support and a large watertight capsule outfitted for their humanoid mercenaries.”
Privately, I wondered about these entities, pretty sure that they had to be from Somewhere Else, not this continuum. Not Eichra Oren’s, either. There are lots of different kinds of people in the universes, all of them, in lots of different kinds of worlds. But who—what sapient mammal—would willingly sign up with a bunch of worm-spawn against an open, free, peaceful, progressive, and prosperous society like the Elders had built—and then shared? There hadn’t been a war on this version of Earth for over half a billion years. Five hundred million years. Five million centuries. There’s no easy way to take it in.
I said as much to Scutigera.
“Kindly note,” the centipede replied, “that the Elders are worm-descendants, too, in their own particular evolutionary way. And so are we, ultimately, you and I. Yet we side with the Elders, arthropod and mammal alike. I truly believe that Eneri Relda was mistaken about the Grays, Sam. I don’t know that for certain and therefore refrained from contradicting her. But what was that phrase Semlohcolresh used? ‘Hive mind’? I think that these so-called humanoid ‘mercenaries’ may offer us some kind of a clue. You know I examined one after I had killed it.”
“Sort of a field autopsy?” I suggested, wishing I could waggle an eyebrow. (I can, actually, but since eyebrow and forehead are the same color…)
“You may call it that. I took him apart, especially the head. I don’t think they’re from this reality or any that we know of. They wear an implant on their cortex of a design and style I’ve never seen—call it “organo-metallic”. We’ll know a bit more after Jakdav Hoj, Semlohcolresh’s technician, gets back to his lab in Lanternlight and completes his own examination of the thing. I predict that what he’ll find is that its purpose is to make the humans of one mind with the Grays.”
“Of one mind.” Put that way, it sounded horrifying.
“Techno-zombies,” I rolled the phrase around in my mind, kind of liking it. Scutigera was the only individual I knew of who was crazy enough to perform a dissection in the middle of a battle raging all around him—and the only individual large enough to get away with it.
Scutigera shuddered. There’s no predicting what will get to people sometimes. I know a guy who’s sickened by the sight of guacamole. “My point, Sam,” he said as he began to recover, “is that there’s good reason to believe that these Grays themselves are no more individually independent-minded than their humanoid slaves, or whatever they happen to be. In a sense, here, it’s almost as if we’re dealing with a single organism.”
We suddenly had the attention of Misterthoggosh. It felt like being caught in the beam of a great searchlight. “You say a single organism?”
“Indeed,” Scutigera replied. “The only one that ever talked to any of us spoke of its species in the first person singular, didn’t it, Sam?”
“You’re absolutely right, Scutigera. It would clear up a number of mysteries.”
“We may even discover eventually,” he added, “that, within their home hive, reproduction is carried out by a single ‘queen’, as it is with bees and ants and termites. They hardly appear equipped for it, otherwise.”
Now there was a sad thought to ponder. Somebody once claimed that all group behavior, ultimately, is about eating, while all individual behavior, ultimately, is about sex. It hurt my poor brain, trying to imagine a culture, a civilization, a species with half its motivation missing.
Brrrr. I couldn’t live like that.
From there, most of the talk began to run downhill, as far as I was concerned, centering on matters maritime and martial. I know there are people who love that kind of stuff—maybe I’d feel different if I had thumbs—but I’m much more interested in food and sex, not necessarily in that order. We live in a world, I thought, without police, without an Army, Air Force, or Navy. The only weapons I knew about were personal, and hand-carried. I supposed software existed for the fabrication of larger engines of destruction, but after half a billion years of progress, give or take an eon, what could you play it on?
I was, as it turned out, somewhat naive.
About halfway through the colloquium, a portly sea scorpionoid who introduced himself as P*r*z*lb*rt* joined the conference via implant. He was an academic from the more southern of th
The Grays, it seemed, neither inhaled in any conventional sense, nor exhaled. Every square inch of their bodies (they were composed, almost exclusively of skin) was selectively permeable to oxygen. They got rid of carbon dioxide the same way, simply by emitting it from their hides. My guess turned out correct: they did lie down in their food to absorb it. More details as my stomach becomes controllable again.
There is an evolutionary virtue to this kind of simplicity. It was among the things that made the invaders hard to stop and even harder to kill. But there were disadvantages, too. It meant that the Grays left a signature trail behind them—just noticeable in the air, unmistakable in the water—of carbon dioxide, hormones, and waste products, chemicals that explained why the scavenger birds wouldn’t touch them. They were literally covered at all times with a thin film of excrement. I shuddered, remembering that I had actually bitten them.
Misterthoggosh and his cohorts discussed this disgusting toughness at length, exchanging suggestions about dealing with it. The images were seared into my memory of poor Ray trying to defend himself with as formidable—but ultimately useless—a weapon as his automatic speargun.
“If you prick us, do we not bleed?”
Not necessarily.
An ordinary shotgun might work in a pinch, especially with a dense load of fine birdshot. Flamethrowers were suddenly a heartwarming idea. But in the end, directed energy weapons seemed a best approach: lasers at various frequencies, something that shot microwaves, and I wondered how that plasma gun of Eichra Oren’s would perform under water.