Christopher Rowley - The Military Form

THE VANG

THE MILITARY FORM

CHRISTOPHER ROWLEY

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CONTENTS

BOOK ONE: THE SEED

BOOK TWO: AUTUMN

BOOK THREE: STORM ASSAULT

BOOK FOUR: THIS IS THE WAY

BOOK ONE

THE SEED

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CHAPTER ONE

THE DESOLATION WAS AS ENDLESS AS THE UNIVERSE itself. The tiny rescue pod, little

more than a protective skin and respiration module, wallowed helplessly in the distant fringes of the

asteroid belt of an insignificant orange sun.

As far as the Military Form could predict, the pod would continue to orbit there for as long as the solar

system might last, which would be a long time, no matter which school of belief one might belong to

concerning the structure and long-term future of the universe.

Unfortunately, the Military Form was built to survive. It could not contemplate suicide and it could live,

if floating in the tiny pod could be called living, for just as long as the universe existed.

This brought on feelings close to despair when the Military Form contemplated certain cosmological

possibilities. If the universe consisted solely of "remnant mass," left over from all-consuming gravitational

contractions shortly after the big bang, then it was an "open" universe, and thus endless. The stars would

eventually go out, the galaxies darken, and in the barren void it would float on, too far from anything else

to effect a micron's worth of difference to the flow.

Twice, during the half-billion years that the pod had orbited there, it had passed within five million

kilometers of another small body. With no motive power except muscles, and no spacesuit, the Military

Form had not dared to strike out for either. It could survive in vacuum for a considerable time, but not if

it had to adopt a form capable of work.

What made the situation irretrievably bitter was that the system boasted a life world, a bright fat disk

that showed blue oceans in the telescope. A world that undoubtedly had host!

Host! it was enough to make even the Military Form quake with the wanting. But the water world was

safe, and the Military Form could do no more than watch its bright disk and hunger for it.

Naturally, the Higher Form that the Military Form guarded within the pod, had gone into life suspension

a long, long time ago, even before the pod had fallen into this solar system.

For this the Military Form was extremely thankful. Having the Higher Form awake with it, cooped up

in the tiny pod, would have been miserable. Through many campaigns and innumerable victories, the

Military Form had developed a powerful aversion to the complaining of higher forms.

In solitude therefore, the Military Form continued to obey its genetic compulsions, searching the

surrounding space for close passing asteroids. Every so often it regenerated the optical surfaces of its

telescopic limb to refresh the input. Other than that, it did little but breathe once a minute or so.

Its duty was to cling to life, no matter how bitter that might be. For all it knew, it was the very last of its

race, the only survivor of the Gods of Axone-Neurone.

In the Saskatch colony district, located in the temperate sector of the northern hemisphere, it was late

spring. Fine weather had brought a break in the clouds; the sun shone over the Elizabeth River Valley.

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Way out in the backwoods of the Black Ruk Planetary Park the sound of a heavy motor cut the cool,

humid air. In a ravine a little south of Mount Servus, a walker was groaning and shaking atop its long

legs, stuck halfway up a sixty-degree slope.

In the cab, a forty-year-old drug smuggler named Carney Waxx cursed and screamed, banged his

palms on the driving wheel and begged the walker to climb, at least to the safety of the thick stands of

kinkpine that cloaked the ridge top.

On the computer's main screen the "predicted" radar trace continued to grow.

"C'mon baby, do it for Carney now. C'mon baby, do it or the law is gonna be on top of us and we are

gonna be bare-ass naked and it's all over."

The machine growled. Pad-treads dug, dirt splattered.

"Come on!" howled Carney. "That damned chopper's almost on the horizon! If it spots us they'll

impound you, baby! They'll strip your files and stick you in the mines."

The walker responded as if lashed. The 12-cylinder, 800-horsepower hydroburner coughed warm

steam. The treads gripped, and the walker lurched upward, breaking down a pair of saplings to slide

beneath the bigger trees.

Carney let out a little whoop of relief. He retracted the legs and sat tight with the engine off.

The distant Drug Enforcement Police chopper slid up the sky from the east. Slowly it drifted across the

mountain's flank.

It passed across his route to the next fuel cache. He thought he saw it hesitate, slow down. He scarcely

dared to breathe.

Slowly, ever so slowly, it moved away into the uplands of the plateau.

Carney cursed it all the way, but softly because you just never knew these days. The damn things

carried such super-sensitive microphones they could pick up a fart at a thousand meters.

When it was finally beyond the mountain he let out a subdued cry of victory and rubbed his eyes.

This trip had been a nightmare! But the forty universal ounces of Tropic Acid 45 he had hidden aboard

the walker would make up for all his trouble, if he could just make it the rest of the way.

Trouble was, even after three thousand five hundred kilometers of jungle, he had the worst three

hundred and fifty klicks to go. The fringes around the colony were real dangerous these days.

First he had to get to the next fuel cache, a couple of kilometers away, hidden in a ravine on the flank

of Mount Servus. The walker was running on empty; there was no telling if he could get there before it

jammed to a halt. It was partly driven by software, and running out of gas while powered up screwed the

motion interface something terrible. The fuel, stabilized hydrogen in a powdery conglomerate with a

catalyte, burned clean of course, leaving no trace pollution for the DEP.

Carney ran a shaking hand through his hair, silver-blond stuff that got thinner all the time. He tried not

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to look at it in the mirror, tried not to think too much about the effect his life-style was having on his

Extended Life Medical in general. He looked old for someone his age. His nerves were shot, it was plain.

It was time he found another line of work.

But how the hell else was he going to make enough to get through the whole winter on TA45. That was

the most important thing of all. "To sit in the House of Gold, in the blue radiance, to hear the sweet voice

of the magical lands..

That was why he'd quit his promising career down at the timber inspectorate. He didn't intend to spend

his life sitting in a house of glass in downtown Beliveau City.

And since the DEP had completely shut down the aerial traffic, the walker jocks were the sole source

of supply. And the whole human hegemony was howling for more TA45. What fool in his right mind

wouldn't want "the heavens," all the time.

So prices had gone through any imaginable roof. One ounce of TA45 was worth seven figures of

credit. The smuggling at the colony's spaceport had ballooned mightily.

If you wanted to ride the heavens on a more or less continuous basis, you needed a fortune. Or you

could ride a walker across the continent and cut a deal with the dangerous people who lived wild in the

tropical rain forest. Whole tribes of strange nomads roamed down there in the endless rain, tapping the

megafungi trees. The tribes were always short of ammunition and medicine, and they gathered all the

dankwood sap they could.

From the black sap of the dankwoods colossal puff-balls came Tropic Acid 45, the most pleasurable

human hallucinogen ever discovered. In the universe of drugs that had been developed by humanity over

the millennia, TA45 was a new supernova, attracting interest and money from all sides.

Organized human societies, however, could not tolerate TA45 abuse. The apathy, the insanity,

eventually the crazed violence of the long-term abuser were political anathema. Police action against

TA45 was mandated everywhere. Enforcement was the problem. Demand too great, the cash flow too

enormous.

Still, the political pressure from offworld was so heavy that the Saskatchers simply had to keep a lid on

things, thus the drive to get good video of walkers being run down and shot up by DEP helicopters.

What with the DEP, the unpredictable nomads that tapped the trees, and random menace from things

like giant land crabs or bulmunk, it was getting downright nerve-racking walking TA45 back from the

tropics.

Carney wondered how long he could keep doing it. It had been four years now, and seven successful

trips.

While he wasn't in the big leagues with Cap'n Strider yet, he was well over the average mark. The odds

were getting longer.

But if he made it all the way this time, he would deliver thirty-five universal ounces to the Fixer

Brothers, who'd bankrolled the trip, and get to keep five ounces for himself. He could sell one and retire

for three years of near-continuous bliss.

A couple of minutes after the chopper had gone, Carney extended the legs and lifted the cab up above

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the top of the dark little kinkpines.

The sky to the east was thickening. A cloud system was brewing up on the distant mountains. The

promised storm from the Thompson glacier showing up at last? A storm would keep the choppers out of

the air for a while.

He started the walker forward again, the computer guiding its steps through the forest, over boulders,

down the steep slopes into the canyon below.

Not far from Carney, on the flank of Mount Servus, Rieben Arntage groaned softly when the faint

sputter of the hydro burner shattered the peace of the long afternoon.

He swung around anxiously. Little Bruda Dara looked at him with horrified eyes. "A motor?" she

whispered.

He nodded.

"Oh, damn them, what are they doing out here?"

"TA45, what else? It must be a smuggler, working his way through the Black Ruks after crossing the

Thompson Plateau."

"By the sound of it he's coming right this way." Little Dara was on the verge of tears.

"And it took us so long to set up, everything's ready, they're going to breed, and now..."

The advancing hydrocarb burner revved and snorted, much louder now. It was climbing a defile

somewhere.

With a loud bang and a curse in Wan Xo Chinese, two men jumped out of the photography hide.

"They're gone! They heard that engine, and the male dropped his crest. The female took fright, and

they both flew away."

Sebastian Liesse, tall, pale, and lanky blonde, smote his fist into his palm. Yen Cho, stocky,

Sino-Caucasian, simply shrugged expressively. Bruda burst into sobs.

"The best shots ever of the gray nightfeeder, and all ruined. We're a hundred kilometers from the

nearest road. There's nothing up here, absolutely nothing, and we can't even get the quiet to take some

bloody photos of the bloody gray nightfeeder."

The motor sound increased sharply. The damn thing was coming right their way, up onto the slope of

Mount Servus.

Sebastian had gone to his pack and pulled out an automatic. "Just in case," he said, tucking it into the

waistband of his camouflage pants.

CHAPTER TWO

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THE SHIP WAS AN OLD K-CLASS CRUISER. LAID OUT ALONG a mile-long spine with the

fusion drives at one end and the life-support torus at the other. In front of the rotating life-support zone an

ablation shield of neutron-latticed rock capped the spine and protected the human cargo.

On the rotating torus were stenciled the ID numbers and the ship's name, Seed of Hope.

The ship had been smuggled into the Saskatch solar system aboard a Baada-drive interstellar jumper

and assembled for an illegal prospecting mission. Three years had passed, three very profitable years for

the heterogenous crewmembers of the Seed.

Now it cruised the outer margin of a moderately rich. clump of asteroids. Beyond the last few rocks,

the outer belt thinned to virtually nothing. The Seed was about finished on its quick, plundering mission

for good-quality radioactives. The ship was due to return to the inner system for a pickup by another

Baada-drive colossus. A moment that the crew was looking forward to after the confined tedium of three

years.

They were somewhat incompatible people, the buccaneering, space trash Xermins, and the pompous,

wealthy Beshwans, but their mutual lust for money had kept them from murdering one another. The

Xermins handled matters spaceside, and the Beshwans handled the planetside and provided capital.

Still there were arguments, most frequently within the Beshwan family, which included not only Pramod

and Ritilla but their only child, a daughter, Pandamon, aged nineteen. Daughters who were only children

were very unusual among the members of Pramod and Tili's people, who followed the Refined Hindu

Canon and exalted sons above daughters to a quite extraordinary degree. Pandi Beshwan was a problem

in Pramod's eyes and was never shown much love or affection by her mother.

Somehow the indifference, even hositility from her parents had not warped her. For her age and

situation she was a quiet, somewhat bored teenager, almost placid.

When her mother, Ritilla, got angry, she always started yelling. When she yelled Pandi grew sullen. Her

defiance never failed to enrage Tili, who would say cruel things, disowning her child, damning her and all

that she stood for.

Invariably the aftermath of such a scene required Pramod to have a long, soul searching talk with his

daughter in his study. Pramod always had a study wherever he lived, a retreat from the gross world of

materiality and women.

He would begin the talk seated behind his desk, and he would try and reason with his recalcitrant

daughter.

Usually, a few minutes into the talk, Pramod would rise from his desk and begin shouting and waving

his finger. Pandamon's refusal to take him seriously simply infuriated him.

The latest argument had been about pink socks, of all things, pink socks that Pandi had left in the

"Hers" shower room. Tili was a fanatic for cleanliness, tidiness, and Hindu-ness. Pink socks violated her

idea of normalcy on every count.

Now Pandi sat on the hand-carved Bombay chair while her father stood over her, his finger wagging in

her face.

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"You know that Mother did not mean to hurt you; she was upset. She hates those clothes you wear,

you know perfectly well she does. Why you will not wear sari I do not understand. Your mother is

unhappy enough, and you make her worse. We are struggling to recover our lost happiness, to get out of

this useless system, and you are not helping."

"She hates me!" said Pandi Beshwan between gritted teeth. "It is quite difficult you know, when your

own mother hates you. I don't think she should say those things to me."

Pramod stared at her with his usual mixture of perplexity and disgust. How he hated these emotional

scenes, where women screamed and argued and then sulked and wept for hours. But he was trapped,

locked up with them in extremely cramped quarters for three years now, hunting the wealth of the

proscribed asteroid belt in the Barzap starsystem.

He struggled to bring his voice down and to control his hands, which had a tendency to flutter when he

was angry.

"Look, my dear, you must realize that it is all because of the strain of this situation. We are not used to

this sort of thing, your mother and I. She is an artist; it makes her very high-strung. You know how it is;

we are desperately trying to recoup our fortune. We must go back, back to Nocanicus system where we

belong, your mother and I."

"Saskatch is all right with me! Pandi smoothed her hands down the pant legs of her chebrans.

"Your mother can't stand to hear you talk like that, like a whiteskin buffoon. You are not like them!

You are pure Hindi, you have caste! It is a sacred honor, a duty!" Pramod waxed like an angry brown

moon, puffing himself up to his full six feet.

It never made sense, to her, of the millennia-old family traditions.

So Pramod was left on the verge of weeping with the sheer frustration of it all. All because of this

damned, difficult child.

"It is heartbreaking to raise a child like you, Pandi."

She smiled and pressed her hands to her knees. "I am quite sure you never wanted me, Daddy."

"Don't say that!"

"Why not, when it's true. You never wanted a daughter. Mummy had me because she wanted to hurt

you. She blamed you for losing all your money and having to come to Saskatch."

"Can I believe I am hearing this? How can you say these terrible things? How did I raise this daughter

who so abuses me in this unnatural way?"

"It's the truth, don't bother to deny it. I will not be sad to say good-bye to you or Mummy. You weren't

happy on Saskatch, but I was. You never had time for me, outside of your obsessions with the past. You

want to go back to the world you left, but it's not a world that means anything to me. I like living on a

planet, with real life all around me."

Pramod was nearly purple. "You are being ridiculous. There's only a few million people on Saskatch.

How can you compare the life here with the life on one of the great habitats?"

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Pandamon Beshwan tightened her full little lips and kept silent.

Pramod smote his forehead and strode gloomily around the narrow little storage room he called his

study.

"For three whole years we are shut up in this tin can, wandering the void in a Proscribed Area, facing

unimaginable dangers! And all so we can make enough so that we can get out of this hellhole system and

go home to Nocanicus. And now our daughter tells us that she doesn't want to go back, that she's

content living out a pauper's lifestyle here on this white-skinned frontier world."

Pandi shrugged.

CHAPTER THREE

DESPITE THEIR ISOLATION IN THE DEPTHS OF THE ASTEROID belt, Pramod Beshwan

insisted on maintaining the rhythms of family life, as laid down in the Refined Hindu Canon.

One of the firm rules of the Beshwan household was the retention of family meals, especially "dinner,"

the last meal of the waking watch, which was often preceded by a little ceremony of sacrifice and purity

in the tiny shrine to Shiva, established in one corner of the family living room.

On this particular occasion dinner was a curry of concentrate, served over hydroponic rice with

chapatis and hot spiced pickles on the side.

Dinner was also highly spiced with angry emotion. Tili Beshwan could barely bring herself to sit at the

same table with her daughter. But since it was Pramod's wish that she keep silent, she did. They must

make the semblance of a family; that much was essential.

Pandi however was abrasively lighthearted about things, referring happily to her future life on Saskatch,

alone. "I want to go to Saskatch U. Take a business course."

"Listen to that," said Tili, provoked at last, but speaking to Pramod as if Pandi were not really there.

"She wants to go to the bush-planet university and learn the logging business. How wonderful, and she'll

turn down the chance to go to Nocanicus University, to live on Hyperion Grandee itself."

Now she turned to face Pandi and drew a finger through the air for emphasis. "One of the great

universities in the human sphere, a university to be mentioned in the same breath as those of Earth itself!"

Tili folded a chapati around some hot pickle. "And equipped with one of the best psychoholo

departments anywhere."

"Oh, Mother, I know how proud you are of your education, and I'm sure you had a great life at

Nocanicus University, but you've got to understand that I'm not you. I want to go to Saskatch U. and

then I want to live on Saskatch. I don't care about glamorous spacehabs like Hyperion Grandee. I don't

care about the art world either."

Tili did not appear to recognize that her daughter was speaking to her.

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Angered, Pandi selected the dagger she had never used, never dared even to show her mother,

throughout the years they had warred. "And anyway, I think your kind of superholo image is overdone to

the point of being silly and ugly. Who cares about the abstractions of Thinth Space corners? The

emotional content of balloons? It's all shit, Mother, absolute stupid stilt."

Tili froze, her eyes rigid like glass marbles, unseeing in this moment of exquisite horror. Then she picked

up her plastic beaker of tea and threw it at Pandi. "You are a disgrace! Get out of my sight! Get out! Get

out!"

Pandi ducked, then looked to her father, but Pramod merely stared back at her, struck silent by

mortification.

Tili stood up and cuffed Pandi across the top of the head, the girl ducked away from further blows,

dislodging a tray of condiments that fell, scattering, to the floor. Brilliant yellow pickled cauliflower

dappled the blue perfection of Tili's favorite Nocanicus rug, a real silk Yang from Heaven abounds

habitat.

Tili screamed horribly.

At which point the communications screen in the wall module activated and Roger Xermin's beefy, pink

face suddenly filled the screen. Xermin was enormously excited. "Pramod!" He bellowed.

"Praaaaamo-o-d, we're rich, we're richer than we ever dreeeaamedd."

Tili stuffed a napkin into her mouth to stifle her screams, which continued in a low undertone gurgle.

Beshwan struggled to find words.

Xermin's blue eyes danced madly. "Pramod! Come on down here, take a look at the scope findings!

You won't believe your fucking eyes!"

Finally Pramod exploded. "Xermin, do not use that disgusting language in front of my wife and

daughter!"

Xermin blinked at him, startled into a rare silence.

"It is most inappropriate for you to be calling at this time. You know how much importance I give to the

stability of our family life."

Xermin swallowed, grinned broadly. He knew all about the quality of Beshwan family life. "Pramod,

wait till you see what we've found. Look, I'll show you."

But Pramod was beyond listening. "Later, it will have to wait." Pramod turned off the communications

station. The screen went dark.

Pandi jumped to her feet. "But, Daddy, what if it's important?"

Pramod turned back to his daughter. "It can hardly be that important, not when compared with your

dreadful manners and infuriating rudeness."

"Oh, Daddy, you're impossible. Turn the screen back on. I want to see what it is that Xermin's found."

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Christopher Rowley - The Military Form

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