Metal Swarm - Kevin J. Anderson [162]
Either to spite the domates or express their grief, the survivors had gathered the corpses and piled them on bonfires, denying the breedex some DNA. Even from a distance, looking down from the Klikiss towers, Margaret could hear the captives howling. She was outside, safe, and completely miserable.
She wound up the music box and played it again. She had learned the words of ‘Greensleeves' from Anton himself, had even taught them to Orli:
Alas, my love, you do me wrong,
To cast me off discourteously.
For I have loved you well and long,
Delighting in your company.
At ground level, with a buzzing and unified movement, columns of Klikiss workers and warriors filed down out of towers, while others leapt from arched overhangs and flew out to the churned ground. Margaret's stomach clenched. So, the breedex had made its decision.
Your vows you've broken, like my heart,
Oh, why did you so enrapture me?
Now I remain in a world apart
But my heart remains in captivity.
She let the music box wind down. How she missed Anton. How she longed for Louis to be here. She and her husband had done such a fine job of reconstructing the Klikiss Torch, using that alien weapon for what they had thought would be the good of the Hansa. A massively incorrect assumption.
The four remaining domates lurched out of the Klikiss city. One of the striped creatures limped, and Margaret saw that two of its segmented limbs had been severed in the recent battle. The domates stalked ahead, their carapaces and spines polished. The workers had buffed and dressed the tiger-striped creatures for this grand procession.
Flanked by warriors, the domates advanced purposefully toward the stockade wall. Inside the compound, standing on the highest rooftops of the town's buildings, the captives saw them coming and let out a wild uproar. They hurled plascrete blocks, metal reinforcement beams, even heavy furniture, injuring a few loitering Klikiss scouts. The domates did not pause. They had their eyes on the immense genetic feast spread out before them.
As a species, the Klikiss hated only each other and the black robots. Initially, humans had simply been an obstacle, a distraction… but now they were raw material. Shuddering, Margaret tried to retreat to a better place in her mind.
As a xeno-archaeologist, she was accustomed to solitude. She and Louis had spent extended periods digging through haunted cities on empty planets, searching for scraps of long-forgotten history. She had particularly loved their first solo expedition to the pyramids of Mars. They had devoted years garnering the funding, living on a shoestring, calling in favours, taking out loans against everything they owned. She and Louis had set up a hab unit in a red canyon, scrounging every scrap of condensed air and water they could boil out of the Martian rocks and sand.
The set of mysterious pyramids had first been detected on satellite mapping overflights of Mars, then imaged in greater detail from ground-based rovers. The pyramids were perfect tetrahedral structures towering more than two hundred metres above the canyon rim. Each angle was perfect. The sides must once have been polished mirror-smooth,‘t,hough signs of weathering were evident.
The original images had caused an amazing stir on Earth. Humanity had barely ventured beyond their own solar system, had not yet encountered any other trace of an alien civilization. Thus, the mystery of the Martian pyramids captivated everyone. Before any rigorous scientific research could be done at the site, however, an Ildiran warliner had come to Earth and stolen all the thunder, introducing the human race to the vast alien Empire. From that point on, few people had been interested in a dead, old artefact of questionable origin.
Margaret longed for the innocence of those exciting days…
Now the four domates rose up in front of the thick stockade walls. People on the other side shouted insults, screamed, or wailed. Worker insects applied a greyish paste