Scattered Suns - Kevin J. Anderson [112]
“I don’t suppose you want to walk home?” she asked Purcell.
He still looked shaken and gray, as if the events were only now catching up to him. “We’d never make it. Our suits can only protect us for a few hours out there.”
While they waited, immobile atop the second ridge, Cesca used magnifying viewers to make out what the robots were doing. Over the radio channels, Purcell monitored the brisk exchanges at the base for a while, but then had to shut down to conserve their battery power.
Cesca felt a block of ice form in her stomach as she watched more and more robots emerge: a full-fledged black army. Awakened now, the ominous machines stepped out of the tunnels and lined up in endless ranks.
More than a hundred of the robots began to stride across the ice, and dozens more kept coming, a conquering military force that moved with implacable precision.
They marched in a straight line toward the Roamer base.
Chapter 52—ANTON COLICOS
They were cold. They were in the dark. They were alone. Though Anton was also frightened, he was the only one who kept the dwindling group of Ildiran survivors moving. He had to show them strength.
He was just a scholar, quiet and bookish, never cast in the role of hero or leader; no doubt some future storyteller would make him out to be dashing and handsome, muscular and fearless. He had compared enough myths and legends to kernels of historical truth and knew the liberties storytellers took. He realized that their current plight—a hopeless journey across a dark world with mysterious saboteurs after them—was the sort of tale that might find its way into a future expansion of the Saga of Seven Suns.
Anton did not point out the irony, not even to Vao’sh. After all, he’d come here merely to study the epic, not to become part of it. He had envisioned sitting in safe, cozy rooms reading the adventures of other people, real or imagined. He had never seen himself as a protagonist in a story. The scientist had become a key part of the experiment...
If only his parents could be here to see him. Margaret and Louis Colicos had disappeared from an archaeological dig years ago. Despite repeated queries, Anton had learned nothing about what had happened to them, until, finally, he received news that his father’s body had been found in the empty ruins of Rheindic Co, murdered along with the team’s green priest. And his mother had vanished without a trace.
If Anton and these survivors did not make it to the safety of Maratha Secda, then they too would “vanish.” He swallowed hard, wondering if his mother’s final days had been equally terrifying. How would anyone ever know?
Then he remembered the most important lesson of the storyteller’s art: No tale, regardless of its merit, is ever told unless someone survives to relate the experience. He would get out of this. And he would save as many of these Ildirans as he could.
The bloody deaths of Syl’k and Mhas’k had left the remaining members of the party hopeless, listless. They plodded through the darkness, stumbling on rocks. Designate Avi’h continued to chatter about his fears that the Shana Rei would come out of the darkness.
Vao’sh said with a faintly impatient tone, “The Shana Rei are not here on Maratha. There are no monsters in the darkness.”
But even as the rememberer spoke, they could not help but recall the voracious armored anemones that had torn apart the two agricultural kithmen. As steam plumes gushed into the air, feeding an eerie mist along the ground, the survivors gave a wide berth to other patches of the waving carnivorous plants.
Vao’sh muttered to Anton, “We do not need the Shana Rei to destroy us. Our own fears will do it.”
Without enough people to form a splinter, their Ildiran minds would feel increasingly loose and adrift. Catatonic fear would set in, and Anton would have to drag them along. He had to hold them together.
Designate Avi’h pointed. “What is that?”
Beside him, his assistant held up the portable blazer, shining out a wide cone of light.