Timothy Zahn - Deadman Switch

I bit tightly down on the back of my lip. In my peripheral vision, now, I could see the four laskas stalking their way forward through the light undergrowth. And the thunderhead had noticed; I could sense the heightened awareness, though how much of that was now focused on the animals and how much still on us I couldn't tell. I risked a glance at the laskas, saw no sign that they were in any kind of distress.

So the thunderhead hadn't yet fired. Was he waiting for the predators to get closer? I thought back to the Butte City, trying to recall every nuance of the sense I'd felt when the thunderheads there had lashed out at Kutzko's needler. "No lasers yet," Lord Kelsey-Ramos murmured into my thoughts. "Maybe he knows we're recording and is hoping he won't have to demonstrate his weaponry for us."

A thought that hadn't occurred to me... but if that was what the thunderhead was banking on, I could already see that it was a futile hope. The laskas had the sight or scent of him now, and were moving steadily forward.

Steadily, but still slowly... and suddenly I realized that that really didn't make sense. "Something's not right here," I murmured toward my phone. "The laskas ought to be rushing the thunderhead by now—there's not nearly enough cover here for them to sneak up through."

"You're sure the thunderhead has spotted them?" Lord Kelsey-Ramos asked.

"I'm almost certain he has," I told him. "But all I get from him is a sense of—oh, watchful waiting, I'd have to say."

Lord Kelsey-Ramos grunted. "All right. Keep watching."

The laskas continued their cautious pace, moving forward until they'd nosed their way right to the edge of the vegetation that surrounded the thunderhead. There they paused, heads ducking and weaving as if checking visually or aurally for danger. I waited for them to charge... and with the same patience they'd already demonstrated, they eased their way forward through a gap between two bush-like plants—

And without warning the bushes suddenly exploded with a buzzing cloud of insects.

Reflexively, I ducked lower behind my outcropping, suddenly remembering the complaints of the men who'd gone out to dig up that first thunderhead drone. "Watch out—they sting," I snapped into my phone.

"Understood," Lord Kelsey-Ramos said, glacially calm... but there was an odd mixture of distaste and quiet horror in his voice. "I see now what the organic lasers are for—they don't shoot at predators directly, but use them to stir up their insect neighbors. Stay down and keep watching."

I gritted my teeth and complied. For a dozen heartbeats nothing seemed to happen; and then, with a flurry of leaves and branches audible even over the loud drone of the insects, the four laskas shot out of the bushes, heading downslope at a dead run. For a second it looked like the insects were going to pursue; but they were apparently content with merely driving the intruders away. For a minute longer they swarmed around the thunderhead before gradually disappearing again into the thick vegetation surrounding him.

Slowly, Lord Kelsey-Ramos straightened back to his feet. "All right," he said, his voice tight. "Gilead?—what's the thunderhead doing?"

"He's watching us," I told him, forcing my own voice to stay calm. It wasn't over yet, I reminded myself, a hollow sensation in the pit of my stomach. We still had to make it back to the car... and on the way we would have to pass within view of the rest of the thunderheads on the surrounding hills. "I can't tell—wait a minute," I interrupted myself. A subtle change in the thunderhead's sense— "He's gone," I reported. "He's left his body."

"Uh-huh," Lord Kelsey-Ramos grunted. "Not unexpected, if I understand what's going on. I think it's time for a dignified yet brisk retreat."

"Stay there, sir," Kutzko put in, his voice the tone of command I'd heard him use so often before. "I'll come up and get you in the car."

Lord Kelsey-Ramos hesitated, then nodded. "All right. I don't think we're in any real danger... but then again, we don't know how desperate they are to keep this a secret, either."

"To keep what a secret?" I demanded. It was abundantly clear that Lord Kelsey-Ramos had seen something significant in the scene we'd just witnessed; equally clear was that whatever it was, I'd missed it completely. A dash of humility to add to the tension and danger already knotting up my insides. "I don't understand."

Lord Kelsey-Ramos sighed, the sound just audible over the phone. "No, I don't suppose you do," he said, a strange sadness beneath his own tension. "The problem with you religious types is that your view of reality has some built-in limitations. There are things in this universe that only someone with a deceitful, manipulative mind can properly comprehend."

I was still searching for a reply to that when Kutzko brought the car to a bouncing halt, stopping between his employer and the still-vacant thunderhead. Lord Kelsey-Ramos ran for the vehicle; clenching my teeth, I got my feet under me and did the same.

No attack had come by the time Kutzko started us down the hill again. I tried to watch the scattering of other thunderheads over my shoulder as we came within sight of them, but we were too far away and jolting too wildly for me to read anything of consequence. All I could get was the sense that they, too, were watching. "What now?" I asked.

Lord Kelsey-Ramos took a deep breath, the tension flowing out of him to leave a tired anger in its place. "We head back," he said wearily. "Head back, and tell Admiral Yoshida and the rest of the commission just how the thunderheads have been using us all these years."

I felt my stomach muscles tighten. "I still don't understand."

He turned grim eyes on me. "Don't you see? That—" he jerked his head sharply back at the hillside behind us—"was a demonstration of the thunderheads' natural defense mechanism. A mechanism they simply adapted for their system as a whole."

And, finally—finally—it was clear. "The Cloud," I breathed. "It's nothing but a gigantic version of that plant barrier."

Lord Kelsey-Ramos nodded bitterly. "And we're the stinging insects that live there. The insects they've lured in to defend them."

Temperatures the previous night had dipped toward freezing, a sure sign that winter would be arriving in this part of Spall. Even now, four hours after sunrise, the air was still respectably chilly—a fact that clearly weighed upon the minds of the engineers working hard to prepare the new housing area that was being added onto the compound. I watched them as I walked, finding it a little hard to remember the encampment as it had been at the beginning. From a single Pravilo ship and a handful of soft-wall structures, its occupants grudgingly investigating the babblings of a pair of pravdrugged Watchers, it had now become a veritable city of offices, labs, and prebuilt individual houses.

And somewhere in all that influx of money and personnel, I could sense that something had gotten lost. The pure, almost childlike excitement of scientific discovery was all but gone now; in its place was the equally strong but far darker motivation of being part of an important, life/death problem.

Dr. Eisenstadt, though he wouldn't admit it aloud, could feel that loss. Many of the others didn't. For some, bigger and more important and better funded was always the definition of progress.

The house I was looking for was just inside the original security fence, about as far from the main work areas as it was possible to get at the moment. Like all the other houses in the cramped and inadequate space, there wasn't a great deal of land surrounding it; but as I neared the front door I could tell from the faint whiffs of familiar vegetation that there was enough room between house and fence for at least a small garden. The muted sound of metal implements on dirt accompanied the smells, and I changed direction to circle around that way.