“I dreamt I died and went to Hell,” the telepath said slowly. “Then I woke up and found I was already there.” He looked at the stiff, jerky body of Tris Lankur.
<You sure he’s still on our side?> Grysta asked a bit nervously.
The fact was, he wasn’t sure any more. He wasn’t sure of anything except that they were in the middle of a miserable world of gloom and constant, heavy rain, and he didn’t know why he was there or how the hell to get out.
Listening to those omnipresent shrieks and moans, though, and still with vivid memories of his dreams, he definitely decided that he didn’t want to die right now, no matter how miserable he was.
“Let’s close on them,” he said at last. “I want them to know we’re there.”
It took them less than an hour along the obsidian-encrusted black rock trail before they were very close indeed. McCray climbed almost to the edge of the trail and looked out at the great falls. Still, when Tris and Molly both made to keep walking, he stopped them. “They’re there. Waiting for us, most likely,” he warned them. “There’s no cover for us down there on the edge of the falls, either.”
The Durquist agreed. “If there is some overhang or ruins right against the side here, that’s where I’d be. Waiting for us to step out and be shot right over those falls.”
“This unit, McCray, and Durquist have two directional grenades each. Enemy does not or it would have used them in first battle,” Lankur noted.
“But Modra’s with them!” the Durquist reminded him. “We’d get her, too!”
“No logical way to recover Modra,” the cymol responded. “Probabilities of doing so under this situation very small. Modra now just makes the Mizlaplan invaders the strongest group. Logical to eliminate them all. Advantage then returns to us.”
“But that’s Modra down there! Modra!” the Durquist exclaimed, appalled. Even Jimmy McCray, the newcomer, had problems with this kind of logic.
“Getting the bastards who screwed us is one thing,” he said evenly, trying to hold his temper, “but I draw the line at the murder of one of our own.”
“Without that action, a stalemate results and the Mycohl go on unencumbered by default,” the cymol pointed out. “We cannot proceed without being ambushed by the Mizlaplanians. Mizlaplanians cannot proceed because we have a clear field of fire from this point. A stalemate is unacceptable so long as a third enemy group is involved and ahead of us. We have the means to resolve the stalemate. Not using those means violates all logic.”
“It means nothing to you that she’s one of our own, kidnapped against her will?” Jimmy pressed.
“The Exchange has approximately thirty trillion citizens. Of those, close to two point five trillion are Terrans. What is one more or less to the maintenance of order and harmony?”
“I assume the same logic applies to us,” the Durquist noted.
“Of course.”
“This explains a lot about the quality of life of the bulk of people in the Exchange,” Jimmy McCray noted dryly, in the low, barely heard whisper he generally used only to talk to Grysta. “Grysta was right—you’re not on our side any more. Somehow, I don’t think you ever really were.”
“Waiting is pointless. They are sheltered, we are exposed,” the cymol commented.
“Hold, cymol—before you act!” the Durquist called icily, edging up to the man who’d once been his friend and captain.
“Yes?”
“What is the basic philosophical difference between you and your masters and the Quintara?”
“The question has no relevancy.”
“It does to me. Very much so.”
“Very well. The Guardians believe that the whole is far greater than the parts that compose it and provides the greatest good for the greatest number of people. The Quintara believe that the whole exists to serve themselves.”
“Then, in the smaller sense, the team, which is us, has interests that outweigh the interests of a part of it, namely Modra. Somehow, this ‘part’ sees little practical difference to himself in that attitude. I cannot allow what you propose to happen.”
“You have no vote. I act by the authority of the Guardians themselves as an officer of the Exchange. You elected to come with me; I did not order it.”
“I am not at all sure there was much of a choice,” the Durquist noted, “although, if there were, I would still have come because the team came. All of the team. Me, McCray, even Molly, and, yes, Modra. And I must wonder when you propose such a horrible violation of our codes if in fact there isn’t still some little bit of Tris Lankur in there, perhaps the bitter, hating part, rationalized by the mechanical part, that seeks not what is right, or just, but revenge. She killed you, turned you into this, and now you would take her life in exchange!”
The vacant-eyed, jerky body did not respond, but instead walked just to the edge, where the path went steeply down to the bedrock below. One of the Durquist’s eyes swiveled to Jimmy McCray, who stared back at it and just nodded silently.
The cymol took instrument readings, totally ignoring the other behind him. “Range forty point two meters to the right, inside the cliff in some kind of cave or dwelling,” Lankur reported to no one in particular. He reached into his pouch and removed a small black object, which hummed to life and then emitted a high-pitched, steady, whistling tone.
The Durquist stood, a bizarre caricature of a biped, and walked up right behind the cymol. Without hesitation, the “right” tentacle swung back, then loosed itself forward, striking the cymol almost directly on his ass with such force that the man was literally propelled into the air and came down a good four meters on the bedrock below.
“You saw the rest,” Jimmy told her quietly.
Modra was shaken by the flood of memories, as shaken as she’d been that night when they’d waited in the hospital, Tris with a solid bullet from one of his antiques in his brain, waiting to find out about him.
<The Durquist asked how the Guardians differed from the Quintara,> one of the demons noted. <The response was that the question had no relevancy. We believe it is quite relevant. The victor in a battle writes the history and describes his enemy to those who came after. No matter what you think of uf on our own, we believe we do differ from the Guardians, and we offer not subjective history but objective evidenced
“All it says to me,” Krisha said, “is that both your races are slime. It is the rapist offering himself up as a good example compared to the murderer.”
<The differences are a matter of degree, we admit,> a demon responded. <However, you must realize that what originally brought the four Founder Races together in uneasy alliance was how easily we recognized each other. The Mycohl, as you call them, exist as a parasitic commune that destroys their host’s ability to think, erases their memories—kills them, in fact, while leaving the host alive and healthy for them. They can only reproduce by killing. The ones called Guardians are machine-like, without any of the emotions of the rest. They manage with a cold, efficient logic, and if whole worlds must starve because they throw off the balance, then so be it. They enjoy turmoil, misery, and a measure of chaos, remote-control risk-taking and the like because it is the only sort of emotion they can have and they crave it as an addict craves a drug. But only collective emotion is effective; they feed on it, while carefully managing things so that the parts their domain requires to survive are kept reasonably prosperous. Thus, of their thirty trillion, more or less, a mere five percent have what technology could provide everyone. They are the essentials.>
<Another ten percent live in relative peace and comfort,> a second demon continued. <Primitive by some standards, with life spans shorter than they should be, but they live comfortable, dull, gray lives. They supply the essentials and maintain an educated pool if needed. Another five percent maintain or expand the system. That’s six trillion, a very large population. Both of you, Exchange people, come from that gray middle and have moved into expansion and maintenance. That leaves twenty-four trillion, and growing, living no better in many cases than their primitive ancestors, in squalor and ignorance, prejudice and superstition, suspicion and hate, but knowing that the spaceships go to and from better places. Off these do the Guardians feed, like psychic vampires, while those of you from the middle and top occasionally soothe your consciences with missions and charity, which only serves to raise their hatred and envy of you, while you all really practice only one religion, materialism. The bulk of you just turn your heads and think, ‘There, but for grace and good fortune, go I, and, if pressed, say that it’s a price to be paid for a dynamic system.>
“You do nothing but prove our point, demon!” Manya almost shouted at them. “We of the Mizlaplan stand alone against such evil!”
The demons laughed cruelly. <Your masters are the worst of the lot!> one jeered. <Your Holy Angels are the oldest and most cynical of the Founders. They tap the other plane so freely and place all of it in their hypnotic powers, a talent they were born with just as the Gnolls are gifted with the powers of psychic invisibility. It enabled them, although slow and ungainly, to be protected from harm, and to have the very beasts of their native world do their bidding. So easy has it become for them that they no longer even have useful limbs, but they don’t need them. They have an entire class of people of all races under their control who call themselves priests and priestesses and are made their lifelong, devoted slaves by their hypnotic powers. By ensuring that all with talents are also their slaves, they can use them not only to provide all that is necessary for their comfort and existence but also use their chief slaves to bring their slavery to every single creature in their domain, and enforce it ruthlessly through an inquisition that uses tele-paths, hypnos, empaths, and conditioning to ferret out and deal with any and all malcontents, any who dare question. And by stifling dissent and creating a uniform culture of people who must be happy and obedient—or else!—they stifle all creativity and social development and all opportunities for anyone to grow or experience any freedom, their very ability to compete with the other two empires, which are at least dynamic, almost totally dependent on their ability to create brilliant spies. You are nothing but common domesticated animals to them, yet you must serve and you must love them. How sickening!>
“Liars! False prophets! Source of all blasphemies and all lies! You will never get out of there! No Mizlaplanian will ever be a party to it!”
Manya was beside herself, but Krisha, too, felt near equal rage. Gun Roh Chin, impassive as usual, tried his best to calm them down.
Kalia laughed at them. “Well, old witch bitches! Being
such good little toady slaves! No wonder you don’t want to get laid! You’re programmed like a goddamn computer!”
Manya screamed in fury and eluded Chin’s grasp. She was remarkably quick for such a chunky little creature, and she plowed right through the others in her single-minded quest to get her hands around Kalia’s throat.
Krisha squirmed, trying to get out of the captain’s grasp herself, but he held her and screamed right in her face. “You must stop it! Stop it and her! Now! Don’t you see you’re just playing their game? Providing them with some amusement? Think!”
McCray and the others watched as Manya seemed suddenly to flicker, then vanish before their eyes. Kalia, however, expected it, waited just a moment, then leaped to one side with the agility of a dancer.
“C’mon, bitch!” she taunted the Gnoll. “That trick don’t work twice! You ain’t got no gun now, bitch! And I can read your mind!”
Krisha got hold of herself, but the color was draining fast from her face. “It’s too late, Captain,” she said, almost out of breath. “Manya is like a wild beast in her head right now, and that girl is a trained killer.”
THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST
“WE’VE GOT TO STOP THEM!” KRISHA SHOUTED, but Gun Roh Chin stayed her.
“Manya was built for a far heavier gravity than we’re used to,” he reminded her, “and this is an even lower gravity zone. There are ho weapons. The Mycohl woman will fight her as she’d fight any other human. Just stay out of the way.”
Modra looked over at him, then down at Jimmy, who shrugged. “Not our fight,” he commented, not seeing what he could do in any event.
<Shall I stop them?> Tobrush asked Joseph.
The Mycohl leader shook his head. “It was inevitable anyway. Let it end here.” The odd thing was, even though it was one of his own people involved, he found himself curiously not caring which of them won. Somehow, he thought, if those two manage to kill each other it’ll improve the level of the company in this place immeasurably.
It was a bizarre battle, really. Manya had essentially disappeared, but would occasionally wink in here and there, baiting Kalia, who would lunge for her. Talents weren’t directional; the only advantage telepathy was giving the Mycohlian woman was Manya’s point of view of her, and Kalia was too enraged to make use of it before it was too late. Besides, the only points of reference were the doorway and others near it and that damned monstrous goat-god statue. Most of the views gave only a vague idea of where Manya was moving, and Kalia could but counter and attempt to keep facing the Gnoll until Manya did something. That had placed Kalia entirely on the defensive, and Manya was picking her shots.