Alien Shores (A Fenris Novel, Book 2) Read online

  “You’re not primitive at all,” Cyrus said. “How is that possible?”

  “We’ll get to that. First, I need to know how many psionics Earth possesses.”

  “At last count, including Jasper, Venice, and me, fewer than one hundred and fifty.”

  The seeker shook her head. “The Kresh could send a vast fleet against the solar system.”

  “That’s what I’ve been thinking,” Cyrus said. “But one thing about all this troubles me. How can the Anointed One defeat the Kresh?”

  “Alas, the prophecy does not say.”

  “What good is the prophecy if it doesn’t tell me anything useful?” Cyrus asked.

  “The prophecy gives us hope,” the seeker said. “I refuse to believe it is useless.”

  Cyrus almost told her that it didn’t matter what anyone believed, but what was real. What was the point of saying that, though? He needed the seeker as his ally, not as his enemy. Getting smart-mouthed with her wasn’t going to help any.

  “I must damn myself for the betterment of humanity,” the seeker said quietly. “I must tell you everything I can.”

  “Tell me what?”

  The seeker licked her lips, and she wouldn’t meet Cyrus’s eyes. In a deathly quiet voice, she said, “I can tell you about the transfer, the method we’ve devised to keep our knowledge alive throughout the long years of our subjection.”

  18

  Mentalist Niens picked up a cloth and blotted his forehead. He couldn’t believe his luck, and his swift elevation in rank.

  That had gone against protocol on two counts: he had witnessed a Kresh’s murder by a man, and he had not attempted to protect or help Chengal Ras. Normally, on general principle, the Kresh would destroy such a person. Bo Taw had interrogated Niens through psionic probing. He disliked and feared that, but it didn’t matter. It never did with the Kresh. He’d wondered why Zama Dee bothered, and had expected death.

  Instead, he lived, and he gained rank. That sent his curiosity spinning like a rodent on a wheel. Ever since youth, he had an insatiable desire to know why. In his secret thoughts, he believed it made him like a Kresh. Perhaps the intense self-training to keep that assumption hidden from the thought police—the Bo Taw—had set him on his present path. He realized his curiosity inevitably led him into modes of illegal thought. That in turn had long ago put him on the road of enjoying life while he could. He had these few precious moments of life and planned to wring from them every ounce of pleasure that he could. He’d better enjoy them before he was worm food. Then his damned curiosity would lift its simian head and he’d tinker with a thing, probing, wondering, and bringing himself nearer the edge of destruction.

  Several incidents in quick succession now threatened his existence, because he couldn’t erase them from his thoughts. He didn’t know how the Bo Taw hadn’t detected them.

  First, Klane had killed Chengal Ras, the giver of pain. After the agonizer, Niens hated the 109th. He also dreaded the Kresh. The human had slaughtered Chengal Ras, and Niens secretly approved. He tried not to, but he couldn’t help it. Klane had killed a Kresh and he had shown Niens mercy.

  Why had Klane done that? Why had the man let him live? It was inconceivable. The more Niens thought about it, the more he wanted to know the answer, had to know the answer.

  Niens knew he should be dead. Yet he lived and he had gained rewards. Zama Dee wanted something from the amazing Kresh killer. Was that why he lived? Did Zama Dee believe he had a novel perspective on Klane? Niens didn’t know the reason, but he would find out.

  One thing was clear: the new rank had brought about commensurate rewards, and it had brought greater responsibility.

  “Test the calibration, Niens,” the head mentalist said in a harsh voice.

  Niens swallowed uneasily. He had a task to perform and he’d better concentrate on the here and now. He adjusted the setting a tap at a time. It was delicate work. They planned to go deep into Klane’s ego and begin to adjust his view of reality.

  On Niens’s screen, a red dot blossomed into a larger green circle. The dot shifted, heading up toward the circle’s northeast quadrant. Carefully, he brought the red dot back to the center and enlarged it, attempting to fill the green with the red.

  On the table, Klane began to twitch.

  “You’re going too quickly,” the head mentalist said.

  Niens paused, with one of his fingers hovering over the tap pad.

  Five mentalists ranged around various pieces of equipment. In their center lay Klane, strapped down on the table. Assorted leads and pads had been attached to his naked flesh. More ominous, a cutter had opened the top of Klane’s skull. The sliced-off bone lay in a blue solution to the side. Precise glass splinters stuck into the gray matter of his exposed brain. They worked directly, with tiny dots of light on top of the splinters indicating the connections with the machines.

  The chamber was larger than the one they had used for the seeker. A glass dome protected the air from germs. Looking down through the glass were two masters, two Revered Ones, one of whom was Zama Dee the 73rd.

  “Slowly,” the head mentalist said.

  Niens swallowed audibly, and tapped his pad. He enjoyed his new privileges, having used a pay girl last night for several hours. Because of his new rank, he had finally rid himself of his harridan of a wife. She’d packed her few belongings and left for one of the stations in orbit around Pulsar. Good riddance to her, Niens thought to himself. With his rank, he would be able to afford pay girls every night of the week. The things the girl had been able to do to him sexually . . . simply marvelous.

  Niens almost grinned at the memory. The head mentalist might see that, however, and it would show poor form here under the Revered Ones.

  “Hold, Niens,” the head mentalist said. “Proctor, make your adjustments.”

  Niens exhaled. A lean vulture of a mentalist now worked a station, with the head mentalist and Zama Dee watching.

  I need to see the pay girl again. I need some release. Maybe I can be allowed two at once. That would be something special.

  “Niens!” the head mentalist shouted. “Do you hear me?”

  “I hear and obey,” Niens said, feeling panic, but gratified at his calm voice.

  “Then make the adjustment,” the head mentalist said.

  Niens tapped the pad, with his gaze on the screen.

  “There,” the head mentalist said.

  Niens locked the sequence.

  “Proctor,” the head mentalist said. “Begin the tertiary maneuver.”

  Niens watched the other, absorbed with the mechanics of the operation. No one had ever attempted this directly before, although theoretically, it should work. The Revered Ones wanted full control of Klane. Why did they want that instead of simply destroying him?

  Niens dared to glance upward. Both Revered Ones gazed down into the chamber. The masters watched with Kresh avidness.

  I love all of you, Niens told himself, before his true feelings flared into thought. I want every Kresh on Jassac to bathe in acid and bubble into extinction.

  A beep sounded—a loud, alarming sound.

  No! A Bo Taw has discovered me. I love the Kresh. I love the Kresh.

  Then Niens realized the alarm didn’t have to do with his thoughts. On the central table, Klane’s body thrashed and it began to convulse.

  “Proctor!” the head mentalist shouted. “Dampen the rods. Hurry, before we lose him.”

  Niens focused on his equipment. If Klane died, or if his mind blew, they would all face horrible punishment. The masters watched. The mentalist team could not afford any mistakes today.

  “Proctor!” the head mentalist shouted.

  A glass splinter slid out of Klane’s exposed brain matter. The tops of the rest of the splinters blinked with bright lights.

  “Dampen, dampen!” the head menta
list screamed, his face red with panic.

  Niens wasn’t sure what possessed him. In a flash of certainty, he saw what to do. With a sure stride he left his station, used his shoulder to shove Proctor aside, and began manipulating furiously.

  The others watched him in frozen wonder. The masters gazed downward.

  In seconds, the thrashing ceased. Klane lay supine on the table as he breathed evenly.

  One of the other mentalists seemed to awaken as if from a drugged sleep. He stared at his screen. Then the man looked up. “I’ve lost his brain rhythm,” the man said in a high-pitched voice.

  “What?” the head mentalist said.

  “I cannot find his consciousness,” the other mentalist said. “I think the subject’s consciousness may have escaped us.”

  Every mentalist in the chamber stared at Niens.

  Zama Dee pressed a switch, and an intercom crackled to life. “Arrest Mentalist Niens and take him into an isolation chamber. Then replace the subject’s skull and put him under full sedation.”

  Niens wanted to shriek. He had just saved the situation. Couldn’t the others see that he had saved the subject? Apparently they could not, for doors slid open and three Vomags entered the room, heading straight for him.

  He knew this day would come. At least I enjoyed the pay girl last night. That was nice.

  As a Vomag grabbed an arm, Niens swallowed in a dry throat. He wanted to live, and he dreaded Kresh torture. The day of reckoning had finally come.

  19

  The transfer with the seeker changed Klane. He now experienced thoughts and ideas of bewildering complexity. It had taken him time to come to grips with the idea that the demons were Kresh aliens. The true history of humanity and the place the Tash-Toi held in it had been humiliating to accept.

  He had sorted and cataloged millions of bits of new and incredibly old data. Then stern-faced men had wheeled him into a mentalist operating chamber. They had cut away some of his skull. With the transfer, with the hidden knowledge of the singing gods, he had new levels of awareness. He had used his psi-powers to see, even though he had been drugged into seeming unconsciousness. It still didn’t make sense to him how he did it.

  The transfer memories or the singing god . . . alien—ah. That made sense. They were not singing gods. They were aliens, or an alien machine. He wasn’t sure about that yet. In any case, with his new awareness, a part of Klane recognized the danger the mentalist and their glass slivers represented. The Kresh were trying to reprogram his brain.

  It would take weeks for them to accomplish it. He understood the complexity of the operation. He also knew it would take one of the arrogant Kresh—a higher-ranked individual—to believe such a procedure would work. More likely it would sear his mind and leave him a blithering imbecile.

  Klane had decided on harsh countertactics. During the first phase of the operation he had brought about his near death, used one of the mentalists for several seconds, and had forced that one to give his consciousness a rocket boost to a safer clime.

  It was like a Far-Calling Spell, but even more so and with more than just his thoughts leaving. His consciousness had fled his body. The most tenuous of threads would allow him to return someday. For now, he sped from Jassac, fled past several planets at the speed of thought, and slid away from occupied spacecraft traveling through the void.

  He had a vague understanding of the psi-mechanics of this, but didn’t worry about it unduly. As his consciousness flew past the planets, heading inward toward the Fenris sun, he sensed various intellects. Some had high psionic strength that produced a screeching sensation in him. Those congregated on the third planet from the sun.

  The smoldering, radioactive surface had once been pristine, full of life. Underneath the seething soil, the Chirr waited. He sensed alien intelligences many degrees removed from Kresh intellect and much different from human minds. One of those intelligences reached out for him.

  Klane fled from it, as the alien psionic intelligence dwarfed his own.

  What are you? it asked. Tell me. I have never sensed one like you before.

  The thought pulsed into Klane’s consciousness. But he slid away from it, and he moved faster toward the second Fenris planet.

  A ring of Kresh-fashioned satellites orbited the second planet. Sitting in each armored station, heavy lasers aimed planetward. Klane also sensed Bo Taw psi-adepts and machines of deep complexity. He sensed the human adepts and their amplifiers as his consciousness whipped past a satellite. The Bo Taw manned the core of the station, and they kept Chirr psionic probes from reaching past them into space or coming from the third planet and going down. In fact, the questing alien mind that had questioned Klane failed to penetrate the Kresh-instituted psi-shield.

  In those seconds, Klane realized the Kresh blocked the two Chirr-held planets from communicating with each other. He realized it, and he blazed downward toward an intensely bright point of thought.

  Klane’s free-form consciousness didn’t view reality from a visual perspective, nor was it limited by the speed of light, meaning it didn’t rely on luminar mechanics in any way.

  Thus, the sun didn’t seem to be the brightest object. Those possessing psionic abilities radiated the greatest glare—except for the one mind down there on Fenris II. That mind was ordinary enough—it lacked any extrasensory ability at all. Nevertheless, the mind beckoned Klane’s consciousness for one critical reason: the mind was similar in structure and thought pattern to Klane’s own.

  In a brief span of time, Klane’s consciousness leapt from Jassac to Fenris II. It invaded a Vomag soldier’s mind, one named Timor Malik of Cohort Invincible. The mind had drawn him like a magnet. There must be something here he was supposed to see. Was this clairvoyant knowledge? He wasn’t sure.

  The soldier resisted. It was an automatic response. As Klane attempted to merge with the man, he lost the interplanetary-spanning ability. Klane’s consciousness became anchored in . . . in . . . Timor Malik.

  In those first wild seconds, bewildering memories and ideas smashed against Klane’s consciousness. He saw Timor Malik’s life in a blast of data. Without the experience of the previous transfer, Klane’s consciousness might have wilted under the torrent of information.

  Timor’s resistance threatened to overwhelm Klane’s unattached consciousness. Klane became aware of a real threat of merging with the man without maintaining his own identity.

  I must make my own foothold and take over completely later—first things first.

  Klane recalibrated masses of new information. He’d done so once already. His consciousness cataloged and sorted at blinding speed. He watched the soldier’s thoughts while remaining outside the man. Klane consumed things in broad swipes: birth, childhood, soldier training, cadet school, and tunnel tactics. He observed Malik’s first spark of rebellion—it had happened in the tunnel collapse of 44-C-33, resulting in twelve days of black entrapment. Later, freed due to a lucky break, Malik had begun to secretly oppose the Kresh. Soon, a religious officer—a member of the formal, alien-instituted religion promoting Kresh love—had discovered Malik’s baleful thoughts. Klane followed Malik’s subsequent reeducation and his entry into a suicide squad.

  Malik’s memories were fresh and bitter in the extreme. He was the squad leader of twenty selected suicide soldiers. The Kresh wanted a Chirr Nest Intelligence, but not just any one. They wanted a big jungle intelligence, one of the old ones protected by planetary-level defenses.

  Klane’s consciousness took a metaphorical breath. The concepts would have bewildered his senses without the transfer memories from the seeker. He had integrated those memories barely long enough to both accept and understand what he learned from Malik’s mind.

  Timor Malik’s cohort was part of the jungle raid, an equatorial jungle raid.

  The extent of what they meant flooded into Klane as he examined the bigger picture. The Kres
h had fought a fifty-six-year campaign in the northern polar region. It had taken one hundred and seventy-five million soldier deaths to secure it. Presently, a southern polar conquest of similar scope took place. Timor Malik had fought and rebelled there. The equatorial raid was tiny in comparison, a mere five hundred thousand Vomags.

  First, space lasers had scoured the dense, targeted jungle growth. Afterward, bombers had raced down into the atmosphere and sprayed a one-hundred-kilometer circumference with herbicides. Another wave dropped inferno-bombs, and fires raged for days, devouring the dense jungle and slaughtering every living thing on the surface.

  Later, Vomag soldiers in powered armor landed and set up kill zones. Chirr warriors boiled out of the ground and attacked, and gore ran green and black for weeks. Space lasers, bombers, tanks, and powered armor: the Kresh threw everything against the Chirr, whose numbers seemed never to end.

  Eventually, the insects stopped attacking. The soldiers on the ground had no idea if it meant a lack of Chirr numbers or a new strategy on their part.

  This was a raid against an equatorial nest. Phase two was the underground assault, where the real fun began. The Kresh knew—and so did the genetic soldiers—that there weren’t enough humans in the Fenris System to battle their way down to a deep nest using regular warfare. Thus, this was a snatch and grab, a commando operation on a vast scale: five hundred thousand soldiers. Instead of securing a level before advancing to the next one, the Vomags battled down like a drill, narrow and straight. If they couldn’t reach the Nest Intelligence in nine days, they weren’t going to do it at all. If they failed, it meant everyone would die down here in the Chirr tunnels.

  If Timor Malik’s body died, would Klane’s consciousness die with it? That seemed most likely. It was a problem, a grave one. Realizing that, Klane tried to depart the body and failed. He concentrated, willing himself away. That didn’t work, either. After an hour of attempts, Klane realized he didn’t have enough psionic strength of mind to leave. That sobered him, and focused his thoughts. He was stuck here, or his consciousness was, until he could figure out something different. That meant he had to help keep the soldier alive.