Scattered Suns - Kevin J. Anderson [244]
Anton awoke to an insistent buzzing. The comm panel blinked, and he sat up in alarm. Outside, bright lights swooped closer—Solar Navy scouts patrolling the outer perimeter of the Horizon Cluster!
Anton fumbled with the system. “Yes, we’re here! Please. We need help!”
The Solar Navy acknowledged, and rescue ships approached. Anton’s heart swelled. It was over at last. They had made it.
He turned to Vao’sh beside him and saw that the rememberer stared helplessly at nothing, completely catatonic.
Chapter 125—DD
Szeol was another empty planet that had been a hiveworld of the Klikiss race. Unlike most such planets, though, Szeol’s environment was not conducive to human colonization. DD knew that if Hansa explorers had found this world by random excursions through the transportal network, this was simply too nightmarish a place for them to stay.
The acrid air was suffused with a midnight hue that clung in the shadows, even in the wan daylight. Despite the sere and broken rocks, gauzy foul-smelling mists crept across the ground, settling in pockets and cracks. Lichens covered the exposed boulders like splattered bloodstains. Winged jellyfish creatures cruised in packs on the updrafts, hunting for prey; they watched the black robots, Soldier compies, and DD, but did not attempt to attack.
Ancient Klikiss towers and cave cities had been built here, assembled with iron-hard fused polymers and silica so that the structures endured for millennia. The emptiness had lasted even longer than that.
DD inspected the creepy landscape where many of the robots had gathered to organize their extermination war. Sirix, who misunderstood DD’s uneasiness, rose up on telescoping fingerlegs to loom over the Friendly compy. “Our creator race is no longer here. They have been obliterated, thanks to our efforts. You have nothing to fear from them.”
DD regarded the black machine. “I do not fear the extinct Klikiss, Sirix. I fear what you will do to the human race—and to me.”
“We intend only to help you.”
DD didn’t argue with the Klikiss robot, nor did he believe him.
Boneless creatures with wet, black skin squirmed into shadows so swiftly that DD’s high-resolution optical sensors could not decipher details of their appearance. Moving shadows crossed the purplish sky, and loud hooting sounds echoed through the canyons, resounding from cliff walls.
Sirix drank in everything he saw. His buzzing mechanical voice sounded almost proud when he said, “This world belongs to the Klikiss robots now.”
The five captured EDF Manta cruisers and the huge Juggernaut had landed in the desolation. Ranks of Soldier compies continued to march out of the last human battleship according to transmitted orders.
DD followed as Sirix trudged up a path into the clustered towers of the empty Klikiss metropolis. The hollow structures contained two of the stone windows that the ancient race had used as transportals. A third trapezoidal gateway stood out in the open surrounded by whistling winds, poised on the very brink of a deep canyon. It looked as if someone might walk directly through the transportal and fall over the edge of the sheer cliff.
While DD watched, an image inside the cliff-edge transportal shimmered, and a pair of Klikiss robots marched through as if they had merely stepped onto a veranda. Inside the ruined city, the other two main transportals activated regularly, disgorging more and more Klikiss robots to join in the war preparations. Inside the hive dwellings, hundreds of insectile machines moved about, building, repairing, digging deep tunnels.
DD asked, “Did you choose this planet as your rendezvous? Is this where all the Klikiss robots are gathering?”
They walked into the yawning towers, which looked like cavity-filled stalagmites. “This world is one gathering place. One of hundreds.”
Sirix stopped in front of the city’s second transportal window, through which robot after robot arrived. The images in the stone trapezoid flickered, alternating the transmission nexus from other departure points. Though the