David Farland - Lords of the Seventh Swarm

His Parcher indicators put him at four thousand in creative impulse-levels one would expect to find in a great composer. But Felph had also raised Zeus’s testosterone levels unnaturally high, and had boosted the number of nerve endings in his genitals, accompanied by a hypothalamus design that craved stimulation. Zeus could not help but crave sex, enjoy it more than others.

Manipulation was Zeus’s art. He could play a woman’s emotions the way a great violinist played the violin.

Of course the genetic manipulations went far beyond this-Felph left virtually nothing to chance with Zeus. But the most arcane changes had to do with Zeus’s nervous system. There were some distinctly odd modifications, including seven genes on the twelfth chromosome that totaled some fifty-three thousand pairs of amino acids in total length.

This change in particular baffled her. It suggested Zeus’s nervous system had been hijacked to fulfill some secondary purpose, yet the information in Maggie’s mantle was insufficient to name that purpose. Could these modifications be nonhuman in origin? she wondered.

“Affirmative,” her mantle whispered.

“Can you check with Felph’s AI and find out what these modifications are for?” she asked her mantle.

A moment later, the mantle whispered, “The information is classified. Felph’s AI cannot release that information. However, by cross-referencing these genes with information found in Felph’s library, the genes seem to be a modification of those found in an extinct earth life-form, the electrophorus electricus -a breed of carp which emits a powerful electric shock.”

“Zeus is a chimera?” Maggie wondered. A creature part human, part animal. A dangerous one.

“Yes,” her mantle whispered.

A loud hissing erupted from the far side of the revivification chamber. A gray polka dot on the wall popped free. For half a second, Maggie wondered if she’d inadvertently tripped a switch that would animate a clone, but realized she had done nothing. A tube slid out, displaying the sleeping form of a man in his twenties, with deep brown hair and a hawkish nose. It took her a moment to recognize Felph, but she could see it in the contours of his face. At each leg, sinuous tubes were inserted into Felph’s ankles.

One pumped blood from some hidden recess in the cryochamber into Felph’s body. The other tube drew away a clear liquid, the artificial blood used in cryosleep.

The lights on the clone’s Guide blazed a pure white as the artificial intelligence downloaded Felph’s memories into the younger body. Maggie’s heart began thumping. Felph has died, she realized, and now he is being revived. But what of Gallen?

Gallen had gone into danger; but he couldn’t get hurt, could he? He was the one who slew the Lords of the Swarm. He was the Lord Protector who had brought down the Inhuman on Tremonthin. Yet in her mind, she recalled the sight of Veriasse, his face half-burned away, flailing about wildly as the dronon Vanquishers sliced him to ribbons. Even Lord Protectors die.

Gallen believed so much in his own invulnerability that Maggie wanted to believe it, too.

And this was just the kind of place where Gallen would die, blindly charging into some situation hotter than he was prepared to handle.

Felph had been killed out in the tangle, fighting who knows what. He’d been with Gallen, and Gallen hadn’t been able to protect him.

Maggie’s heart pounded. But if Gallen were dead, it did not matter much. In a few weeks, his clone could be raised, its memories restored. But something important could be lost. Orick and Tallea weren’t cloned.

Don’t worry, don’t worry , she told herself. Maybe nothing bad happened. Maybe Felph slipped and fell. It could have been as easy as that. But Felph had been a spry codger, Maggie knew. She doubted it would have happened so easily.

To learn what had happened, all she needed to do was ask the clone. Maggie held her breath as the download continued.

Gallen wasn’t the type to let his charges die. He’d never lost someone entrusted to his care. So he must have fallen into some heavy combat, and hadn’t been able to save Felph. That was all Maggie could think. It could take hours for the clone to revive fully. Maggie sent Gallen a message, calling him with her mantle, hoping for the best.

Cooharah and Aaw flapped their wings, struggling desperately in the thin air to climb a ridge of angry red mountains, the evening sun just touching the peaks, painting them shades of crimson and rose.

“Oasis to the east,” Aaw whistled. Cooharah looked down at a cliff beneath him. An ancient diagram painted dark green showed the way,

“Can we trust it?” Cooharah asked, weary of chasing promises.

“What choice do we have?” Aaw asked, chuckling low tones of despair.

In three days, he and Aaw had eaten little food. A few insects, a rodent. In these wastes, nothing could be found. The barrenness of the land surprised even Cooharah. All along this route, their ancestors had left ancient glyphs painted on the rocks, signs for their children to follow. The signs read, “Fly east forty kilometers for food,” or “Oasis past mountain to west.”

But the land had changed over centuries. The oases where Cooharah’s ancestors watered so long ago had long since dried. The promises of food were all empty.

Cooharah had begun to lead Aaw north in hopes of finding a nesting site, an oasis where they might raise their chick. Now Cooharah feared they would die.

It was not just the lack of food. True, they’d eaten little in three days, but if they were safe in an aerie, where they could rest, a few days of hunger would not have been so bad. But this ceaseless flying, the almost frantic zigzagging over the desert, had worn them, was affecting their senses.

After winging so far over the desert, Cooharah felt dizzy. The hot wind ruffling his feathers seemed to suck the breath from him, and his body felt disjointed. It was as if his wings flew of their own accord, without conscious thought.

They veered east, circling a mountain, and hope filled Cooharah. Before them a ragged pink mountain soared, fluted in strange and magnificent shapes.

Cooharah had never seen aeries like this: his people had no names for minarets and citadels, crenellations and vast gardens. His people had never imagined fluted columns, or strangely arched windows that made such odd entryways. Yet the sight before them was magnificent: waters cascading over palace walls in splendid silver threads.

“Oomas, oomas!” Cooharah whistled, using the Qualeewooh word for humans. Neither Cooharah nor Aaw had ever seen the aliens-odd, stubby creatures, with hair like rodents. It was said that they built machines to fly between worlds, and that they were far wiser than even the wisest of ancestors.

Yet they wore no spirit masks, and therefore had no souls.

It was widely known that oomas stole the spirit masks of ancestors, and some of the stubby creatures even killed living Qualeewoohs, tearing off the precious masks. Cooharah could not condone such madness, even though he understood it. If the humans did not have spirits, what extremes might they go to gain one? Killing a Qualeewooh, robbing it of its spirit mask, could not give a spirit to the humans, but despite all their learning, humans did not know this.

“Shall we go? Shall we drink?” Aaw whistled.

Water. The oomas had water flowing from their aerie. At the least, Cooharah and his mate would drink. In this desert, water might keep them alive for another day or two.

“We drink,” Cooharah replied. “Watch for food.”

As they dipped over the ridge, Cooharah let himself glide down the hillsides into the shadows of the coming night, buoyed by the brisk updrafts from the valleys. The fields below were green in the evening. Often, the plants had strange, colorful growths.