Ozzie could just see the insolence about to find its way through the boy’s mouth. “Be big, man,” he told the boy. “Nobody’s perfect.”
“Sure,” Orion grunted with a textbook teenage shrug. “Thanks for letting me know about my parents, anyway.”
“Easy.” Clouddancer turned to Tochee. His eyes sparkled with ultraviolet light. The big alien answered in kind.
“I have to go,” Clouddancer said. “There’s a long wind coming. I need to stretch my wings.”
“Have fun, dude,” Ozzie said.
The Silfen walked back to the forest.
Ozzie looked at Tochee, who had aligned its eye on the forest where Clouddancer had gone. “You okay?”
“It had the same shape as you. But it was very different.”
“Yeah. I’m just beginning to realize that myself.”
“So now what do we do?” Orion asked.
“Get back to the shelter, gather some food, and darn my socks.”
“Why?”
“Because tomorrow we’re out of here.”
***
Morton was scouting on the lower ridges that made up the eastern edge of the Regents, high above the Trine’ba. It was drizzling again, icy droplets making the moldering boltgrass treacherous underfoot even for his armor suit with its terrain-adaptive boot soles. His sneekbot swarm scuttled around him in a wide perimeter line, searching for any traces of the Primes. They’d seen increased activity in this area recently, more overflights, and several troop patrols. Not even the Bose motile was sure why. There was nothing here. Nothing could be built on the sharp ridges and long talus falls. No crops would grow on the poor, saturated soil.
“Can’t find a bloody thing,” he said. “If they’ve planted any sensors around here they’re too advanced for us to find.”
“I don’t believe that for a minute,” Rob answered. “Their electronics are still back in the stone age. I’m just about finished myself. I’ll meet you back at the rendezvous point.”
“Gotcha.” Morton’s virtual vision map showed him Rob’s icon positioned on the high ground above the fused-glass crater where Randtown used to be. Not far, in fact, from the clapboard house where they’d found the Bose motile.
The small green glow that indicated the Cat’s position was coming from the back of the valley along the side of Blackwater Crag. MorningLightMountain was still using it as its main transport route back into the wider valleys. Motiles were preparing a lot of ground for cultivation, plowing up the sodden human fields and acres of virgin boltgrass on the foothills. There weren’t many Prime-life plants that grew in such a climate, so the Bose motile claimed. The fields that had been sown earlier in the invasion had produced the most feeble-looking shoots. A big percentage had drowned in the waterlogged furrows. A plague of Elan native tal-fungi had spread over the remaining shoots, furry milk-white blooms erupting along the limp leaves.
The Cat was supposed to be cataloguing the tractor-vehicles that MorningLightMountain was using to spray the newly prepared land with fungicide. Over the last few weeks, a vast pharmacy of venomous chemicals had been spread across the land by an army of Prime agricultural machinery. Simon Rand had analyzed the samples they’d collected, and announced that the fungicide would be of limited use against tal-fungi. The pesticides, also, would have little effect on Elan’s insects.
“I can see foundations going in at the end of the Highmarsh,” the Cat announced. “From the look of the equipment they’ve got piled up waiting, I’d say some kind of chemical plant. Makes sense; they’re importing a hell of a lot of chemicals. Cheaper to produce them on-site.”
Cat’s Claws had watched through sensors and sneekbots as the big tanks full of toxic agricultural chemicals arrived through the gateway that MorningLightMountain had established in its new settlement a mere two kilometers along the shoreline from the radioactive hollow where their nuke had detonated. The construction had begun while they were still celebrating their success. Fusion drive ships had descended out of the sky once again, bringing a huge number of soldier motiles and their flyers. MorningLightMountain simply repeated its initial landing operation, establishing an armed camp, then putting up a force field. Inside that a wormhole gateway was constructed, industrial machinery was assembled, big power generators brought through. Roads were bulldozed between the new hub and the route around Blackwater Crag. Inside a week, its operation was the same size as before, with the one difference: its garrison of soldier motiles was four times greater. Congregation pens were built out into the waters of the Trine’ba, and a replacement refinery once more began pumping out the thick black liquid that was saturated with base cells. At which point, the Prime resumed its agricultural operations.
That was what MorningLightMountain did, the Bose motile explained. That was all it did: expand.
“How far?” Morton had asked.
“Infinite,” the Bose motile said. “Think of it as a sentient virus. It has a continuity which goes back to its evolutionary origins, possibly even before. All the Primes ever did was grow and compete against each other. Now this one has achieved total dominance, eradicating the rest of its kind, though in truth there was never much difference between them. You ask why it does this, it wouldn’t even understand the question. It is growth.”
After the beautiful success of wiping out Randtown, the truth had brought them down hard. Ever since, they’d performed low-level acts of sabotage, kept the survivors alive, and kept quiet about the Bose motile in their reports to the navy. Mellanie’s messages kept promising she was trying to get them off, but so far she hadn’t managed to give them a time frame. Rob was getting very antsy about that.
“Is there a force field around the foundations?” Morton asked the Cat.
“No. But there are a lot of soldier motiles stationed down there. I count sixteen flyers patrolling above it. Wait…that’s strange.”
“What’s happening?” Morton asked.
“The flyers. They’re stationary. They’re just hovering.”
“I’ve got that, too,” Rob said. “The bastards came to a full stop. Why would they do that?”
Morton looked along the shore of the Trine’ba toward the new Prime settlement. The cloud base was scudding low over the water as it always did these days. Sheet lightning flickered through the bulbous underbelly over toward the invisible southern shore, with the odd rumble of accompanying thunder echoing around the surrounding mountains. The lake itself was dying. Fusion fire from the ships and the base cell pollution had finally killed off the delicate unique ecology. Dead fish floated on the surface, their rotting bodies sticking together to form large mats of putrefying gray flesh. Underneath them, the lifeless coral was slowly decaying, producing a dank scum that washed up on the shore to form fizzing dunes of thick umber bubbles.
Flyers were constantly in the air above the desolate lake, circling around the shore in search of any hostile activity, and keeping the land around the force field under constant observation. MorningLightMountain usually had at least sixteen on patrol at any one time. This morning, there were twenty. Now, Morton couldn’t see one of them moving. Their force fields were on, their engine exhausts rotated to the vertical position.
“Motiles are stationary as well,” Rob said. There was a worried edge to his voice. “Shit, that’s spooky. They’re just standing there. Even the soldiers.”
Morton’s virtual hand touched a communications icon. “Simon, what’s the Bose motile doing?”
“Dudley is fine. Nothing wrong.”
Morton manipulated his communications icons to give him a direct link to the Bose motile. “Something is happening out here. All the motiles have frozen.”
“I don’t know why. The only reason they have for doing anything is that’s what they’ve been ordered to do.”
Morton used his suit’s electromagnetic sensors to sweep the bands that MorningLightMountain employed. The alien’s signal traffic had dropped to about ten percent of normal. “Hang on, I’m going to patch you in to what it’s saying. Tell me what you can.” His virtual hands routed the sensor reception into the link. He didn’t like exposing the Bose motile to the Prime communications. None of them were sure if MorningLightMountain would be able to move the motile around as if it were just another of its puppets. There was absolutely no way they could ever confirm the story that the Bose motile was telling them, either, though Morton suspected it was true. As a precaution, they’d agreed it should be isolated from all Prime communications. This was a justifiable exception, he felt.