Stephen Leigh - Changeling

Derec grimaced.

“If you order me to do so,” Mandelbrot continued, “I will trust your better judgment and follow your orders.”

Derec shook his head. “Uh-uh. And you’ll say ‘I told you so’ afterward.”

“No.” The flat delivery almost sounded hurt.

“Okay,” Derec said, grinning. “I think you’re right. Let’s land elsewhere. How much of a hike were you planning on giving us?”

“I have estimated that fifty kilometers is the minimum.”

“Fine. A few days’ stroll through the forest-”

At that moment, the craft shook like a mad thing. As the hull shuddered, Derec felt Mandelbrot’s firm grip on his arm, guiding him to his seat and forcing him down. The crash webbing slid over him as the craft tumbled; Mandelbrot staggered back to his seat and fought the controls.

“What happened?” Derec shouted.

“I do not know. Our orbit is decaying rapidly…” The robot had no time to say more as the ship’s view of the world below spun and whirled. Mandelbrot’s robotic reflexes were far faster than Derec’s, but the power to their main engines was simply gone.

Using the attitude jets, Mandelbrot managed to reduce the wild tumbling momentarily, but then the first tendrils of the atmosphere touched them and the hull struts moaned in agony. The ship began to do gymnastics again, and this time-snared in the planet’s gravity well-they were flung violently with it.

Derec’s head slammed up against his seat despite the webbing, making him shout in pain. Mandelbrot had cut all the automatics, giving him full control of the ship, but it was of little help. In the viewscreen, they saw the hull turning cherry red; the heat was suffocating in the cabin, the ventilation system gone.

White cloudtops seemed to race toward them, then they plunged into the columns of gray murk. Storm winds tossed them; rain sheeted across the screen.

“Mandelbrot!” Derec’s scream shivered with the vibrations of the ship.

There was no answer.

They plunged out of the bottom of the storm, the murky landscape below wheeling like a mad carousel. The ground, a fist waiting to crumple them like paper, rushed at them.

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Then, like the gut-wrenching end of a roller-coaster’s freefall, Derec was shoved down in his seat as the craft pulled up in a quick loop.

For a moment, Derec thought Mandelbrot had saved them.

It was still too late.

The trailing bulk of the engines caught the lip of a rocky outcropping. The granite blade of the hill ripped into the supports. Metal and stone screeched; Derec heard the concussion as the engine exploded. Snared, the ship itself was hammered to the ground. The inferno of the engine was sheared completely off and went spiraling away.

At least I won ’ t burn to death.

As a last thought, it seemed a strange comfort.

SilverSide brought the pack to a ragged halt at a ridge looking down into the shallow bowl of a valley perhaps a kilometer across at its widest point. She sat in the shadows of the last few trees; LifeCrier and KeenEye came forward and sat on their haunches to either side of the new leader. SmallFace was high in the sky; LargeFace had yet to rise. The stars-the VoidEyes, as LifeCrier called them-stared down at the city and marveled.

SilverSide felt some of that awe herself. The Hill of Stars, set like a glistening diamond in the center of the valley and rising well above the level of the surrounding hills, was a fantastic pattern of glowing lights. The slender pyramidal structure mocked the glory of the night sky.

Nor was the Hill of Stars all. Other buildings spread out around it in geometric splendor, a procession of hard, crystalline shapes filling the valley and spilling out its open end, all linked by ribbons of walkways.

And everywhere, everywhere. there were WalkingStones: all different sizes, all different builds, all different colors. They bustled along the walkways, gazed from the windows of the buildings, slid busily between the flanks of the city. There were thousands of them.

They moved in an eerie, almost mystical silence-at least to the kin. But SilverSide could hear the deafening roar of the city’s voices inside her head. An eternal chatter of orders and instructions came from the central computer; reports were constantly being funneled back to that source. And she understood the words, for they spoke as the Hunter spoke, in that language SilverSide guessed must be that of the Void where the gods lived. It was more proof that the OldMother was being opposed.

“They began with just the Hill of Stars,” KeenEye whispered to SilverSide. She panted at the remembrance, and her long, furless tail lashed from side to side. “They’ve worked like the krajal since then.”

SilverSide had seen the industrious insects called the krajal toiling ceaselessly through the undergrowth of the forest, building their mud colonies on the sides of trees. KeenEye pointed a long finger at the periphery of the city, her lips drawn back from canines in a snarl.

“See how they tear down the trees and destroy the land?” she rasped. “All this valley was forest before the WalkingStones came. They destroy everything to put up their stone caves. And the light-it’s as if the sun were resting down there for the night. The WalkingStones don’t care about kin or any of the living creatures. They don’t care that our prey animals have fled. They don’t care that their stone caves stretch out and out and out. Long before they reach PackHome, we will have left. We will have starved, or we will have been killed.”

“Do these other WalkingStones hurt the kin like the one we killed?” SilverSide asked. “There must be different species of WalkingStones down there.”

“We don’t know,” KeenEye answered. “The others have never bothered us. They stay within the stones. Only the Hunters ever come outside.”

“That also makes them like the krajal,” LifeCrier added. “Only the blue krajali get food, only the yellow-speckled krajali build the tree-homes; only the red krajali defend the homes against the LongTongues. They each have a separate task to do, and they each are shaped a little differently. Maybe it’s the same with these WalkingStones.”

SilverSide’s optics focused more closely on the hive of activity. What LifeCrier had said sounded like an accurate enough metaphor. The view of the city bore that out. Certainly the WalkingStones seemed specialized in appearance. And though the WalkingStones were obviously constructed things, their hard, unyielding bodies were like the chitinous shells of insects.

Maybe the enemy of the OldMother had fashioned the WalkingStones after insects. They had the same outward silence, and their chattering inside her head to the unseen Central seemed like the clickings of insects. Like the insect, they labored with seemingly untiring energy; like the krajal they built their own colony home rather than take refuge in what nature afforded. And this Central, perhaps that was the queen, directing all activities of the hive.

The intricacy and sophistication of the city echoed in SilverSide. It awoke memories of her initial urges: find sentient life. Find humans. She’d made the decision on what was human, but the intelligence behind the WalkingStones…

…but that was the province of the gods, or so LifeCrier’s tales had indicated. A god had sent the WalkingStones as a god had sent SilverSide herself. It felt right to admire the genius that had created the WalkingStones, a resonance of the Third Law commands that had shaped her first hours. But admiration didn’t mean that the WalkingStones weren’t enemies. SilverSide had made her choice; the OldMother had sent her to the kin.