• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

"All right. Second best."

"Who's still alive?" Nick thought for a second or two. "Chalk, maybe.

She's pretty good. Especially with the heavy stuff. Or she would be if she could, y'know, walk..."

"She won't have to. Let's go."

Nick stayed against the wall, shrugging hopelessly. "Why bother? It's not like we can get anywhere, right? With the ship gone, there's nowhere to go."

"There is. And we will go there."

"Where?"

"I'm not going to tell you."

"You're not?"

"I have had enough," Mace said, "of being told I'm insane."

Nick rose warily, eyeing Mace as though the Jedi Master might be a worrt in disguise. "What are you talking about? You just mid there's no way we can evacuate."

"We're not going to evacuate. We're going to attack"

Nick gaped. "Attack?' he echoed numbly.

"Not just attack. We are going to beat them," said the Jedi Master, "like a rented gong."

SEEKER

The air in the weapons bunker was thick with the ozone tang of a surgical field and the rank pheromonal stink of human fear. The few heavy weapons that the guerrillas had cached were piled haphazardly outside the door to make room for the endless flood of stretchers carried by grim-faced Korunnai, bearing the sick and the wounded. Mostly sick.

Mostly children.

Mostly silent and round-eyed.

The bearers would stumble whenever another DOKAW shook the mountain, and sometimes dump those they carried; many of the invalids bled from fresh scrapes. Nick threaded his way around them to look for Chalk; the Korun girl had not left Besh's side since they both awakened from thanatizine suspension.

Mace had stopped outside the doorway. His defocused stare gathered the inventory of the weapons there, and plugged them into his calculations: new data that made his image of the coming battle shift and flow and remold itself like a stream of hardening lava. A tripod-mounted EWHB-10

with an auxiliary fusion-generator pack. Two shoulder-fired torpedo launchers, with four preloaded launch tubes apiece. A rack of twenty-five proton grenades, still in its factory-sealed case.

That was all he'd need.

The rest of the weapons were not relevant.

Nick came out the doorway, moving hesitantly, as though in pain. "They're not in there."

"No?"

Nick shook his head toward one of the stretcher-bearers. "They told me-there's not enough room for all the... So Kar-" He swallowed, forcing distress off his face and out of his voice. "All we're putting in here is people who'll live."

Mace nodded. "Where are the others?"

"We call it the dead room. Follow me."

The dead room was a huge cavern hung with night. The only light was soft yellow spill from a scatter of handheld glow rods. Unlike the other inhabited chambers, the floor of this one had not been leveled with vibro-bladed adzes, but had instead been cut into tiered ledges that followed the natural contour of the rock.

The ledges were packed with the dying.

No surgical field here: the air was thick with fecal stench, and the sickly sweet odor of rotten meat, and the indescribable smell of spores released by fungi feeding on human flesh.

Nick halted a few paces in from the entrance and closed his eyes. A moment later, he sighed and pointed up toward a far corner. "Over there.

See that light? Something's happening; I think Kar's with them."

"Good. We need him, and we're running out of time."

They had to tread carefully to climb the levels of ledges without stepping on people in the gloom.

Besh lay stretched out, motionless, barely breathing, on a ledge near the ragged curve of the cavern ceiling. Vaster knelt beside him, eyes closed, one hand above Besh's heart. The medpac tissue-binder that had closed the wounds left by Terrel's knife had lost its glossy transparency, blackening and curling like dead skin, and the wounds had erupted into cruciferous bulbs of fungus that floresced faintly, iridescent green and purple pulsing in the shadows cast by Chalk's glow rod.

Chalk sat cross-legged on Besh's other side, her own chest bulky with spraybandage;