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  Despite his gruff methods, the little guy had taken charge of the facility, causing it to hum at high efficiency, producing more robots and machine parts than ever before. Jacopo knew where some of the products were being shipped around the galaxy, but not all of them. He only knew for certain that business was booming. Ipsy didn’t seem to know all of the end-user details either, or he was keeping the information to himself. As a large part of this factory’s business, it produced electronic instruments and control panels—components that could be used for a variety of purposes.

  Unfortunately, the facility was making money Jacopo could not spend. The Hibbils allowed him access to heavily edited financial reports, but he couldn’t get his hands on his share of the funds themselves, and he was not allowed access to any form of transportation. The factory complex was ringed with an electronic containment field that penned him in. The furry little bastards even forced him to live in a rudimentary apartment on the grounds, a stunted, boxlike abode that had been designed for one of them, not for a Human being.

  Each day Nehr woke up in a foul mood, then spent much of his time dithering around the factory, hoping something would change, that the Hibbils who had essentially imprisoned him there more than a week ago would set him free and allow him to return to Canopa. But he saw no sign of that happening.

  He hadn’t seen any fellow Humans at all since being forced to fly across the galaxy on a strange podship, one that was unlike any other he’d ever seen. From Ipsy he’d learned it was a craft that had been bred in a laboratory, and guided by a Hibbil navigation system. The thought of an artificial podship boggled his mind, not easily done to an inventor and businessman of his stature. One of the leading merchant princes in the Alliance, Jacopo Nehr had discovered the nehrcom cross-space communication system, and had built an impressive multi-planet business empire around that connective tissue. Before falling out of favor with the princes, he had even been appointed Supreme General of the Merchant Prince Armed Forces—the primary Human military force.

  Down on the floor, Ipsy was getting increasingly aggressive, and he pushed other workbots out of his way as they pressed in around him.

  Jacopo hardly cared. Ipsy would get his way, as always. The merchant prince was more concerned about being held prisoner in his own factory complex, with no one to talk to except the robots that ran the facility. Why was he being treated this way? It seemed like a cruel joke, but he wasn’t laughing.

  To make it even more perplexing, a Hibbil had done this to him, and not just any furball, either. It had been Pimyt, the Royal Attaché to Lorenzo del Velli, former Doge of the Alliance. Pimyt was so trusted that for a time he had even been appointed regent of the entire multi-planet empire, until the princes could agree on the selection of a new doge—the prince of all princes. Nehr had suspected for some time that Pimyt was involved in war profiteering, but he’d found no evidence of it, and had been unable to determine exactly what the attaché wanted with him.

  He’d been able to come up with a pretty good guess, though, one that made sense the more he thought about it. Leverage. Holding him hostage on the Hibbil Cluster Worlds in order to force his powerful daughter, Nirella, to cooperate. She was not only married to Doge Anton del Velli; she was Supreme General of the Merchant Prince Armed Forces, having succeeded her own father in that position.

  Nehr wondered if he would ever see her again, or his wife, Lady Amila. His mood sank even more, as he realized that the Hibbils could just keep him there for the rest of his life, and maintain the leverage they wanted. But Hibbils were supposed to be allies of Humans. Why would they do this? It went beyond war profiteering. Nehr didn’t want to imagine how far beyond.

  Noticing that the altercation down on the production floor had escalated, he sighed. Robots were streaming toward Ipsy, leaving their work posts, slowing down the operation. It looked like Jacopo would have to intervene this time.

  Taking a lift down to the main floor, he found hundreds of robotic workers surrounding Ipsy, glaring at him with orange visual sensors that were much brighter than usual and shouting at him in a din of mechanical voices. Jacopo pushed forward through their midst. Noticing him, the robots grew quieter, but he heard them whispering around him, a peculiar and disturbing mechanical hum.

  “I want all of you to calm down and return to work!” Jacopo shouted, raising his arms in the air.

  The robots grew completely quiet, each one just staring at him. But in the multicolored, blinking lights around their face plates and their bright orange, ember-like visual sensors, he saw that Ipsy’s supervision methods had triggered their anger programs to a much higher level than Jacopo had ever seen. They were operating in concert, too. Like a mob or a pack.

  A wave of fear passed through him, as he saw the blinking-light patterns intensify, and the ember eyes burn even brighter. Under a strict code of honor programmed into all robots created by Humans (or stemming from those creations), robots were not supposed to harm Humans. But since his incarceration, Jacopo had grown increasingly concerned about the factory robots, since many of them were of unfamiliar designs and didn’t always behave according to known industrial parameters. Some of their personalities seemed oddly unpredictable, and he had decided that this must be because they had been manufactured by the Hibbils, under standards that were not known to Humans. The Hibbils had long manufactured their own robots, but until recently Jacopo thought he knew all of the basic designs, since he had often worked in concert with them on the development and manufacture of sentient machines. Now, something had changed.

  “We demand that you get rid of Ipsy,” one of the robots howled in a tinny voice.

  “Yes!” said another. “He goes, or we stop work!”

  “Don’t be silly,” Jacopo said. “Robots can’t go on strike. Now stop this foolishness and get back to work immediately.”

  The robots advanced on Jacopo, their face-plate lights blinking furiously, their eyes afire. He felt their hard bodies press around them, and it hurt. Then he heard Ipsy shout in his officious mechanical voice, telling them to clear away. The little mechanical man managed to reach Jacopo’s side, but now the other robots pressed hard around both of them.

  Jacopo panicked as he felt them crushing him, and he couldn’t breathe. He cried out in pain and rage as they crushed his bones. Broken and smashed, the inventor slumped in the midst of the hard metalloy bodies around him.

  When it was done, the robots packaged Jacopo’s body into an export box. And they tossed Ipsy … what was left of him … onto a scrap heap.

  Chapter Four

  There is a certain glamour and allure to very old ways, and in particular to those that are the most ancient of all. It is almost as if the Supreme Being got it right in the very beginning with the various races and star systems he spawned, but only then. Thereafter, under pressure from countless directions, things declined, and continued that way until the entire cosmic engine started to run out of steam. Scientists describe it as entropy on a huge scale, with energy systems winding down and life forms eventually returning to the soil and cosmic dust. But I have a different, less scientific, way of putting it: Sentient life forms have a way of making selfish decisions and mucking things up.

  —Master Noah Watanabe, speech to the seventh Guardian graduating class

  Horrendous. Ghastly.

  Onboard the flagship, Noah and Anton conferred. Tesh stood with them, having temporarily left the sectoid chamber. They all faced one of the viewing windows in the large passenger compartment, staring in shock at the impediment to the fleet’s forward progress.

  A short while ago, when they first entered the narrowing funnel, there had been the expected hurtling, luminous white stones that Tesh and the other pilots had been forced to negotiate. Then the rolling, oncoming stones had ceased altogether, and an unexpected obstacle had presented itself to the fleet. As a result, all the way back up the funnel the entire Liberator podship fleet came to an abrupt halt, and floated freely in the frozen vacuum, u
nable to proceed any further.

  Noah grimaced at the sight ahead of Webdancer. Like an immense cork, the way forward was blocked by immense clusters of tiny, horribly mutilated and frozen Parvii bodies, all clumped together to form a grisly barrier.

  Tears streamed down Tesh’s cheeks. “I saw bodies floating the last time I was here, but got past them.” She paused. “When we first entered the funnel this time, I wondered why there were no bodies. Now I know.”

  “We must reach the Parvii Fold,” Anton said, staring out the window. “Everything depends on us capturing the rest of the podships.”

  “It’s obvious what we have to do,” Noah said. He put a reassuring hand on Tesh’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, but we need to open fire and blast our way through.”

  Her eyes looked tortured and red.

  “But will we find anything on the other side?” Anton asked.

  “I think so,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Woldn must have created this barrier in order to protect himself, and the others who remain with him.” She scowled at the mention of the Parvii leader, the Eye of the Swarm.

  Moments later, six Liberator podships opened the gun ports on their sides and commenced fire on the horrific barricade. In the fiery onslaught of white-hot projectiles, Parvii flesh melted away, revealing a dark tunnel beyond.…

  * * * * *

  Doge Anton sent two podships ahead into the darkness to scout for further hazards or traps. One of the vessels was piloted by Eshaz. His passenger compartment thronged with Human fighters and Tulyan pilots, along with Acey Zelk and Dux Hannah., a pair of young Humans who were friends of Eshaz.

  Anton’s wife, General Nirella, had considered off-loading the pilots onto other vessels, but the Tulyans resisted, saying their telekinetic mindlink powers could be of added value against any Parviis they encountered. Even though the combined telepathic power was much weaker away from the Tulyan Starcloud, it was at least another dimension that might be useful in battle, and the Parviis had shown themselves to be susceptible to it.

  “If we get through this, we can call ourselves men,” Dux said. He and his cousin—still teenagers—sat on one of the extruded organic benches. The reptilian Tulyans towered around them on the hard seats.

  “Don’t get all terrified,” Acey said, with a smirk on his wide face. “If you go hysterical when I’m needed for a crisis, I’m going to have to let you go.”

  Dux gave him a less-than-good-natured shove. Acey always considered himself the braver of the pair, but Dux considered his cousin rather foolhardy instead. Now they were committed, with no turning back.

  “I’d rather be at the controls of one of these space blimps,” Acey said.

  Dux nodded, remembering a time that they had gone on a wild podship hunt, along with Eshaz and Tesh. An excited Acey had been allowed to pilot one of the wild pods shortly after it was captured. Afterward he said it was the highlight of his life, and he couldn’t wait to do it again. Eshaz had told him, however, that Humans were limited in their ability to pilot the sentient creatures, and were not skilled enough for battle. All logic said this was true, but Acey showed stubborn determination. He felt he could do more than Eshaz had seen, so he kept pressing.

  Now the boys and all other Human military personnel had backup life support suits aboard, and Acey hoped to use his for going outside and mounting a podship to guide it. The insistent Acey had also obtained permission to bring along a gilded harness and Tarbu thorn-vines for basic piloting, just in case there was an opportunity for him to stand atop a podship and pilot it, even if it was only on a backup basis.

  Dux hoped it wasn’t necessary for Acey to do that. Not in this distant region, filled with unknown dangers.

  As the scout ships made their way through the narrowing funnel, luminous white stones reappeared and hurtled toward them. One glanced off the companion scout craft, causing it to veer off course, before the pilot regained control. Dux watched in horror as a much larger rock tumbled toward his own podship at a high rate of speed. Eshaz, immersed into the Aopoddae flesh and, piloting the podship as if he had been born in this form, veered hard to starboard, narrowly averting destruction.

  Both scout ships made it to an adjoining gray-green passageway that was clear of stones, and then passed completely through, into the immense, pocketlike Parvii Fold. There, Dux saw thousands of the sentient spacecraft tethered in a moorage basin, and many more floated loosely in the airless vacuum, as far as the eye could see.

  From the hidden, faintly green realm, Dux sent a comline message back that no Parvii swarms were massing in battle formation, not even a defensive arrangement.

  “Just a swarm around the Palace of Woldn,” he reported. “They look lethargic, like hibernating insects.”

  “And their podship fleet?” General Nirella asked, over the connection.

  “Lots of ships are here, sir. Too many to count.”

  After hearing the report, Doge Anton ordered the Liberator task force to advance. In minutes, the fleet streamed through the rest of the funnel, and out into the pocketlike galactic fold.

  By this time, Parvii sentries were sending alarms, and the swarm was beginning to awaken.

  * * * * *

  The Palace of Woldn—constructed of interlocked members of the Parvii race—floated in the vacuum of the Parvii Fold. High-pitched sirens went off throughout the structure. Having been ill, the Eye of the Swarm was in a deep sleep when the intruders arrived. In his diminished state, he had not anticipated an attack, nor that a Parvii would lead enemies into their midst.

  Slowly struggling back to consciousness, Woldn probed telepathically, and learned from his sentinels that a fleet of Tulyan-controlled podships had arrived, behind a podship that did not have a Tulyan face on its prow. Based on this, he wondered if a Parvii could be piloting the lead craft. If so, it would be a betrayal of epic proportions. Via relay, he saw that this particular podship did look familiar, albeit larger than the last time he’d seen it. And he recalled the name of its rebellious pilot, a woman he had banished from the swarm.

  Tesh Kori. But could she have brought the enemy here, at the head of an armed fleet? He didn’t want to believe it.

  The Eye of the Swarm sent high-pitched telepathic signals to his followers, alerting them even more than the sentries already had, and sending specific instructions to the remaining swarms.…

  * * * * *

  During the doomed Parvii attack on the Tulyan Starcloud, the Tulyans had surprised Woldn with a defensive strike that sent comets, meteors, and radioactive asteroids into the swarms, scattering them into space and resulting in the death of more than eighty percent of the Parvii population. It had been the biggest disaster in Parvii history, going back millions of years.

  In the days of Parvii lore, long, long ago, there had been tens of thousands of war priests and breeding specialists—two powerful factions that had worked together to enlarge the influence and domain of the galactic race. In modern times, prior to the devastating “Tulyan Incident” that killed so many of Woldn’s people, a small number of war priests and breeding specialists had continued to practice the old ways, keeping their skills sharp in case they were ever needed. During Woldn’s rule there had never been more than a hundred members of each group, far diminished from the old days. With the Tulyan disruption of the energy fields that connected Parviis paranormally with their brethren, however, most of the modern war priests and breeding specialists had been killed, so that Woldn was left with only two female breeding specialists, Ting and Volom, and one male war priest, Ryall.

  Following the disaster, in the perceived security of the Parvii Fold, Woldn had set in motion old forces, resurrecting ancient programs that his race had once employed successfully against their enemies. In short order, the breeding specialists had established an intense breeding program from old cellular stock, and their population had begun to increase, with hundreds of thousands of young Parviis reaching adulthood in a matter of weeks. It had been a comparatively small a
mount, but a promising beginning nonetheless.

  Then something had gone terribly wrong. Shortly after reaching adulthood, the newly generated Parviis had developed a mysterious metabolic ailment that killed almost all of them, and even infected some of the general populace, including Woldn himself. Ting and Volom had been forced to set up quarantine procedures and start over. In the process, they discovered that some of the cellular material retained from ancient times was contaminated, and any Parvii created from it was genetically defective, born to suffer a slow, lingering death.

  For more than a week Woldn had been ill, feeling lethargic and hardly able to move. In the last couple of days, he had felt a little better, but he still slept most of the time, in an attempt to regain his strength. He would awaken for brief periods to do telepathic checks, then would go back to sleep. During Woldn’s recovery process, Ting and Volom worked long hours, trying to figure out the problem and get things going again with uncontaminated cellular material. It was going very slowly, and both were hindered by moderate forms of the illness themselves.

  Hidden in the genetic structure of Woldn’s race, there were others like Ting, Volom, and Ryall, waiting to come back from a long inactivity. The knowledge of breeding specialists and war priests still existed in the cellular structures of Woldn’s people, having gone into dormancy. And the Eye of the Storm had been hoping that the strongest of the ancients would reemerge.

  So it was that inside one of the wings of the palace, Parviis had been working in a laboratory to resurrect the old ways. Tapping into old cellular material and into the brains of their living people, the breeding specialists had discovered the ancient memories of a few additional war priests and breeding specialists—memories in the minds of Parviis who became known as “latents,” those persons with fertile memories that had been lying dormant in the collective unconsciousness of the entire race. It was like growing plants in the most receptive cellular material, weeding out intrusive thoughts, nurturing the old knowledge, bringing it back. But it wasn’t going rapidly enough, and now the enemy was attacking at exactly the wrong moment. If only there had been more time to prepare, if only the war priests had been able to recreate the powerful weapons of yore. But it was not meant to be.…