The Eternal Enemy Read online

  Markos had trouble putting together a coherent sequence of events after that. The crystals had bits of information that made no sense, information that had been recorded well after the initial landing and setup of the aliens had taken place. There were threads of scenes, of slaughter and mayhem, that were recorded well into the aliens’ takeover of the planets. Some of these showed smaller aliens, possibly children, without markings at all.

  The third wave that left the ship, those who reorganized the structure of their defense, had brightly colored markings. These aliens never seemed to bear weapons, either, and took care of reconnaissance and food gathering.

  It was hard to get a feel for the time it took from the initial landing to the second assault, outside the camp area. The scenes were so fragmented and were so short that Markos couldn’t develop a strong sense of continuity.

  He knew he’d presented more than enough information to the children for now, and they probably needed time to discuss what they’d learned among themselves before going any farther.

  He knew there was more to do, though, before these children could enter into combat. But at least he’d started them on the right path, and the trip to Alpha Indi would give them enough time to follow the path as far as he could lead.

  By asking the Old One about the planets that had been assaulted by the aliens, Markos started gathering information that he hoped would indicate what area of space they came from.

  Most of their assaults had taken place on planets orbiting K-type stars, though two that he knew of had taken place on planets orbiting G-type stars. All of which only made him more anxious to see this whole thing concluded. Despite his split allegiance, he had been born on a planet that orbited a G-type star. But the aliens did seem to like K-types better than anything else.

  That led Markos to believe they came from a K-type star themselves. He studied the startank and tried to see a pattern in the expanding alien wave of ships and captured planets.

  The Old One cared little for talking to Markos, even about where the aliens had come from. He stayed uninvolved and detached. Markos feared this might be a result of the Habers’ nonacceptance of him, but then realized that even if that were true, something else was bothering the Old One, keeping him silent and distant. While Markos worked on figuring out where the alien threat was coming from, he also worked on getting the Old One to open up about what was bothering him.

  As Markos stood before the startank looking for some pattern, some single star from which the expansion took place, he talked to the Old One.

  “I know it’s here someplace. They’ve got to be coming from somewhere in this sector,” he said, gesturing to take in several hundred stars.

  The Old One said nothing.

  “Tell me what it is that’s bothering you. Please. After what’s happened to me, after what you and your race have done to me, I feel I’m owed an explanation.”

  The Haber flashed red. He then flashed a series of colors that meant nothing to Markos. He’d never seen them generated in a Haber before, but they managed to create a sad feeling, a failure; the feeling of a sentient, caring creature who knows no hope.

  Markos asked why he felt that way, flashing yellow tinged with blue.

  “I, I have failed. I, I have let down myself and my ancestors by extending my, my life longer than it was meant to be. Your appearance on Gandji made it necessary for me, me to live longer. When we, we get back to the homeworld, to Aurianta, my, my brothers will reject me, me, and I, I will become an outcast. I, I will meditate down in energy until I, I die at last. I, I long to become part of the home-world’s cycle. Even the cycle of Gandji would have been preferable to this life.”

  Markos nodded. He understood, and he realized there was nothing he could do. The Old One was practically in mourning for himself, and it seemed to be the Haber way.

  He expressed his sympathy and tried to take the Old One’s mind off his self-pity by getting him involved in locating the source of the alien expansion.

  They studied the angles and vectors, tracing them back as best they could without refined instruments, and located a star where five vectors intersected. The star was a K-type star, over thirty parsecs from Alpha Indi. The expansion appeared to be spreading out like a sound wave. From the front of the startank, the K-type star was a little above the relative position of Alpha Indi, but almost the same exact distance from the center of the tank to the front edge.

  It was Pi Hydra.

  By the time the ship left tau-space and began its deceleration, Markos had named the children and had named the enemy. The children were becoming more verbal as they understood more and more of what they were involved in. He established a chain of command, with Alpha as their leader.

  Alpha seemed to have the best grasp of what was expected of them. There were still some weak spots in Alpha’s understanding, but there was nothing Markos could do about that. The only way around those spots would have required Alpha to know something about at least three thousand years of Terran history. Markos gave Alpha what little insight he could.

  What they knew about their enemy was relatively clear-cut. There would be no negotiating. The crystals had shown quite clearly that the Hydrans were concerned about only one thing—taking over their target planet as quickly and efficiently as possible, with no regard for sentient life.

  They knew that at least five planets had suffered the Hydrans’ assault—these were probably owned by the Hydrans now. He was willing to ignore them for the time being and concentrate on whatever new invasions had taken place. He had no idea how many planets had been invaded, nor how long these assaults had been going on. For all he knew, they might be decelerating into a solar system held by the Hydrans.

  But whatever happened, he was glad he was there and not on Gandji, negotiating with the Terrans. From what he could surmise, the differences between the Hydrans and the Terrans were slight: The Terrans knew how to smile and lie before taking what they wanted; the Hydrans seemed a little more direct. Markos preferred the Hydrans’ approach.

  Markos wondered what kind of reception they would get when they landed on Aurianta. How many homeworld Habers could still speak? As a onetime xenobiologist, he knew that the Habers had once communicated through sound-speech and that after their culture had advanced to conscious genetic engineering, they had mutated toward light-speech for aesthetic reasons. Most Habers he’d seen on Gandji had had the latent capability to talk, though none really liked using it. And whenever Markos communicated strictly through his eyes, he felt he missed about fifty percent of the informational content while getting about seventy-five percent of the emotional content of the message.

  He was sure there wouldn’t be any cheering crowds waiting there for them. Even if they had somehow been informed of the ship’s arrival time, he couldn’t see these creatures piling out of houses (or whatever they lived in) to crowd the streets in excitement. They weren’t returning home after having won a war—they were imported talent, a cross between saviors and mercenaries. Cheers? Not very likely.

  Now all he had to worry about was whether Aurianta was populated by Habers or by Hydrans.

  If it were Hydran, he had a very good idea as to the kind of reception they would receive.

  9

  Without a viewscreen Markos had no idea what Aurianta looked like. He sat beside the Old One, squirming in his seat, anxious to get outside and see the planet. If he had been aboard the Paladin, he would have already known what awaited them. It would have been easy to see through the logarithmic magnification of the viewscreens. But the Wedge, as Markos had named it, had no screens that produced coherent visual pictures. As they landed, the thin, transparent screens before them had lit up supplying landing information to the Haber, but swirling colors through a grid made little sense to Markos.

  He was burning to leave the ship, to see where the Old One had brought him and the children. Most of his fears over finding the planet overrun by Hydrans were put to rest; the Old One would know by
now if Hydrans were out there.

  “Well, Old One, it looks like we’ve made it,” Markos said, smiling inside, bubbling with excitement, eagerness, and anticipation.

  The Old One showed a weak, watery, noncommital red.

  “You’re not glad to be back, then?” Markos asked.

  “I, I no longer belong.”

  “What? That’s not true, and you know it,” Markos said. “I’m the one who doesn’t belong—not you. I don’t even have the slightest idea what it’s like out there, or what they’ll think of me, or how they’ll treat me. I’m not even sure they know themselves.

  “You’re the Haber—not me. You’re returning home with the solution you were sent out to find. Doesn’t that mean anything? Don’t you think your brothers will be grateful?”

  “Yes,” the Haber said. But the red he generated through his eyes was weak, as though he weren’t really convinced himself. “They, they will be grateful, but that does not change the important things. I, I am still taboo.”

  “Not to me, you’re not. Listen to me, Old One. We may not have another opportunity to talk like this for a long time. If you want to spend the rest of your life in mourning, meditating down to zero energy and death, then you go right ahead. But if you do, you’ll be failing yourself and your people. You and your brothers have taught me a lot about change. But let me teach you something: Your way of life is to accept and deal with change as best you can, right?”

  The Old One showed a solid red. “It is time for us, us to go. We, we can leave the ship now.”

  “Wait a minute. Whatever’s out there can wait.”

  The Old One showed red again.

  “If you were on Aurianta and you ate something in your final cycle, then I could understand. But we’re at war, and war forces us to change our attitudes. War makes us take a harder look at what we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going.

  “Take a hard look at yourself. You’re the closest thing to a friend I have. I need your help. You can’t just open the bay door and disappear. I can’t fight this war by myself. You change so many things just by touching them. Look at how different I am, and the adjustments I’ve had to make. But now you have to change.

  “Changing rock and stone—the wind does that, and the water does too. But it can’t change the inside of a stone. Inside yourself, Old One—that’s where the change has to be.

  “Stay with me and help me. Don’t mourn something you just couldn’t stop. If you hadn’t broken your taboo, we would still be on Gandji, most likely dead, and your brothers would lose this war. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” the Old One said. “I, I understand.”

  “Even if it means eating again?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let’s have no more of this. I need your continued help too much to have you sulking.”

  The Haber flashed red. His eyes stayed red, then the color slowly faded.

  “Let’s see what it’s like out there,” Markos said. “I’ve never been here before, and it’s been a long time for you.”

  “Yes, it has.”

  They stood in the large bay, positioned by the huge door, tensed, ready to react instantly. If the Hydrans were on the other side of the door, they would have to act quickly to keep their lives.

  “You all remember what to do, right?” Markos asked.

  The ten children flashed a brilliant crimson.

  “All right then, Old One. Start opening the door.”

  The Old One touched the bulkhead and the door started to swing upward and outward. As soon as it had traveled a few centimeters, the smallest child, Markatens, dropped to the deck and described what he could see through the widening crack. No smoke, no signs of destruction Markos had warned him to look for.

  Markos felt trapped in his own body as it reacted to the changing demands. At least when he’d been Terran, years of experience had helped him know what physical feelings he’d have to deal with—adrenaline, hormones, fatigue. But this new body had no in-betweens. Without the immediate threat of battle, it reacted with incredible speed, shutting down his heightened awareness and relaxing muscles that a moment ago were tightly knotted.

  He bent down to see Aurianta.

  At first glance he thought his body was still playing tricks on him, that the tension of possible battle had created a chemical in his system that changed his perceptions. He felt as though he’d been given a large dose of a hallucinogen. When he glanced up at the Old One and the children, Markos’s fears doubled. No one seemed affected by the scene as he’d been.

  His mind reeled as he stared, dumbfounded, nearing fright and shock. The ship had landed a few kilometers away from what looked like a city. The tallest building was only three stories high, though needlelike spires pierced the sky ten stories up. Somehow he felt the city was there only as an afterthought, something to add a little sanity to the landscape.

  Balloonlike plants floated through the air, drifting on gentle breezes, some high in the prismatic sky while others drifted lazily a meter or two off the ground. Tendrillike roots dangled from the inflated transparent sacs, moved in slow motion, circling, twisting, constantly seeking a place to alight below.

  The sky proved impossible to look at for more than a second or two at a time. The sun was either rising or setting, resting on the horizon like a large, diffuse blob of constantly changing colors. The rest of the sky mirrored this effect, though the colors were far less intense and their boundaries less clearly defined. It was like staring up into a huge, deep opal that covered the whole sky, shimmering and changing with each passing moment.

  Wherever his eyes rested, they were treated to more of the same, and he flashed again on the idea that he might be hallucinating.

  “This place …” he started to say, then stopped when he realized he couldn’t put the feeling into words.

  The ground of Aurianta was reddish-brown where no vegetation grew, almost a maroon, with little shards of dark brown, bright orange, and yellow. Grass grew in abundance, in some areas in tall patches that reached two to three meters, while elsewhere it grew to only a few centimeters. Each clump of grass seemed to have different colored blades, though the taller groups showed many distinctly different shades of green. There were pastel flowers in bloom, each petal a different color, each stem a different shade of green.

  There were oddly shaped trees, shaped as if they had been tended by some insane bonsai sculptor. Their long, flat leaves made the memory of autumn in Vermont seem like a black-and-white movie.

  He needed to turn away from the overwhelming landscape. “What I don’t understand is why anyone would want to leave,” he said.

  Habers were coming to meet them; they were less than a kilometer away. Markos got the impression that they were just out for a leisurely stroll.

  The sun was setting; the diffuse patch of brighter, prismatic color was sinking down, swallowed by a row of distant, faint hills. All the Habers seemed to notice this instantly. The Old One immediately climbed down from the bay door and faced the sun, holding his arms outstretched to either side like a flow-bridge.

  All the other Habers had stopped walking and had turned to face the sun. They linked hands and formed lines of at least fifty Habers; the lines stretched row after row back to the city.

  Alpha and his brothers climbed down to see what was going on. Markos joined the others on the ground.

  A strange noise started building, first like a steady haunting wind; it built quickly to a steady hum like a thousand hydroelectric generators. It came from the Habers.

  The Old One’s eyes radiated a deep emerald green that touched a sympathetic chord inside Markos. The green was more brilliant than their greeting color. The Old One was making the same sounds, eerily echoing his brothers’ calls.

  Markos rushed to the Old One’s side and grabbed one of his hands. “Come on!” he shouted.

  Alpha rushed over and grasped the Old One’s free hand and the other children linked up from Alpha. The small
group watched Alpha Indi sink below the horizon.

  The feelings started immediately. The physical and emotional pleasure was stronger than being a flow-bridge. His whole body vibrated, built up and up, making him lose control. His only conscious thought was to feel grateful.

  He started humming too. It helped soothe the raw energy, mellow out the physical feelings. The ecstatic pleasure pulsed within him in rapid bursts of tingling sensation.

  Then the sun set, and the sky started to darken into soft twilight. The noise stopped, they all broke contact, and the feeling was gone. The Habers resumed walking.

  Markos knew his pleasure had been a shared pleasure. He’d experienced a sense of oneness, of belonging.

  “We,” the Old One said, “we are home.”

  The Habers’ eyes glistened and sparkled in the soft twilight. As the Old One explained about Markos and the children, the Habers’ eyes lit, probing the Old One’s color-intensified messages, making him stop for clarification and detail. As long as Markos looked at their eyes, they all looked like Habers.

  They were short, tall, thin, and fat, with pear-shaped torsos, barrel torsos, convex and concave—every variation of the basic bipedal anatomy seemed to be represented. Some of their shoulders were lower than Markos figured they should be, and some of their legs seemed only marginally functional. They looked like a great quilt of patches, dolls sewn together by insane tailors with synesthesia.

  By the time the explanation was over, the Habers from the city were lined up waiting for something. “What do they want?” Markos asked verbally, afraid he already knew the answer.

  The Old One turned and with violet hues in his eyes, colors that passed for a smile, said, “They, they want you to act as a flow-bridge.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.” Flashed with red.

  Markos shook his head. “Not yet. We’ve got to get into the city first, get settled in there, get accustomed to this change. I have to set up some kind of command post. I’ve got to start training and teaching. We don’t have time for this now.”