the link that he shared with Frost. He glanced at her to see if she felt it, too. She was scowling, but there was nothing unusual in that. Certainly she didn't seem as disturbed as he felt. He tried to grasp the vague feeling and bring it into focus, but it slipped away like water between his fingers and was gone. He still had the headache, though.
'Rebels,' the alien representative said suddenly. 'Avoid. Punishment.'
'Got it in a nutshell,' said Frost. 'Anyone tries to contact you, rebel or alien, you tell them to go to hell and then report them to the Base immediately. Understand?'
'Rebels. Avoid. Punishment. Chemicals. Interrogation. Respond.'
Silence would have shivered, had he not been boiling alive in his own sweat. There was something about the way each word seemed to emanate from different parts of the dark human shape that upset him greatly. He made himself concentrate on his job.
'Yes, we've got your chemicals,' he said curtly. 'They're being unloaded in the usual place. The regular supply ship will be along to pick up the compounds you've produced.' A question occurred to him, and he decided to ask it before he could think better of it. 'We have a use for those compounds, but what do you get out of the deal?'
There was a long pause, until Silence assumed the construct wasn't going to answer him; then it said two words and fell apart before Silence could respond. The human shape disintegrated from the top down, tumbling into hundreds of its respective parts, which hit the ground running and scuttled off in different directions. In a few moments they were indistinguishable from those who were already covering the ground, and Silence wasn't at all sorry to see the back of them. Particularly, after the two words the figure had spoken.
'Do you suppose they have any concept at all of themselves as individuals?' he said finally. 'Or only when they gather together like that?'
'No one knows for sure,' said Frost. 'They're supposed to have a single hive mind for the whole species, but no one's been able to prove anything, one way or the other. Our instruments can't detect anything, and espers just get really bad headaches when they try to listen in. The constructs are our only way of communicating with them, and they tell us as little as they can get away with.'
'What about the scientists at the Base?'
'They spend most of their time trying to get themselves transferred somewhere else, and I don't blame them one bit. This place gives me the creeps.'
Silence kept his features under control, but it was a near thing. He couldn't have been more surprised if the Investigator had admitted to secret pacifist leanings. For Frost to admit that the place made her feel uncomfortable, it must really be getting to her. And that wasn't like Frost at all. He decided to do them both a favor and change the subject.
'Did you know the chemicals we supply these insects with are addictive?'
'No,' said Frost, 'but it makes sense. If the insects are a single hive mind, they're scattered far too widely for us to be able to hurt or control them. But withholding chemicals to which they've developed a dependency should do the trick nicely. A junkie will do anything for his next fix.'
'Very efficient,' said Silence. 'But then, the Empire's always been a great believer in efficiency. And if it can work a little cruelty into the deal, too, so much the better.' He looked around him at the thousands of small scuttling forms, working blindly and obediently in the blistering heat to meet the Empire's needs. If he saw any connection between them and him, he kept it to himself.
Chroma XIII was a singular planet, in more ways than one. The original survey ship almost missed it completely, as technically it should have been impossible for any form of life to survive in a planet so far from its burned-out, dying sun. But something about Chroma XIII caught the Captain's eye, and he sent down drones to gather information. And what they sent back was enough to make even a seasoned survey officer's jaw drop. Within the giant gas ball that was Chroma XIII, there was life without form or substance. Intelligence separated from physical existence. A planet of inherent contradictions, whose very existence was theoretically impossible.
Silence kept the
There was no planetary surface, no solid area at all, and the drones dropped endlessly through shades of color and fields of light, blindingly bright, in which strange hues shifted and stirred without any purpose or meaning that could be fathomed by human eyes. There were planes of dazzling color, separate and distinct and thousands of miles long, and whirlpools the size of moons, blending slowly from one color to another, and oceans of blue mists as dark as the color you see when you close your eyes at night. And everywhere, the colors and the shapes and the shades were shot through with sudden blasts of lightning that came and went almost too fast for the human eye to follow.
'And these flashes of lightning are the aliens?' Silence said finally.
'We think so,' said Frost. 'It's hard to be sure of anything here. Certainly the lightning bolts share some of the attributes we associate with life. They react to outside influences, they consume light on some wavelengths and release it in others, and they appear to communicate with each other, though our translation computers have had nervous breakdowns trying to make sense of it. They reproduce constantly, and they also disappear suddenly, for no discernible reason.'
'All right,' said Silence, determined not to be completely thrown. 'How do we communicate with them?'
'We don't,' said Frost. 'We're not even sure they know we're here, which might just be for the best. Why give them ideas?'
Silence looked at her and raised an eyebrow. 'And the Empire's content to just leave them be?'
'Pretty much. They don't have anything we want, let alone need.'
'So what the hell are we doing here?' said Silence.
'Keeping an eye on them. We have no way of knowing what they're capable of. They're life without form, which could also be life without limits, as we understand them. Who knows what they might do if they became aware of us? If they decided to leave this planet and journey to some populated world, we could be in deep trouble. Those flashes of lightning contain billions of volts, theoretically, and we're pretty sure there are other forces at work down there, too. The bottom line is, we don't have anything that could stop them if they decided they were mad at us. What use is a weapon against something that has no physical existence?'
'Great,' said Silence. 'Just wonderful. Something else to worry about. So we can't talk to them, let alone threaten them, and we're not even sure they know we're here.'
'Got it in one,' said Frost. 'All we can do is drop a hundred or so security drones to keep an eye on things, and then get the hell out of here.'
' 'Join the Imperial Navy and see the universe,' ' said Silence heavily. 'Meet strange and interesting new forms of life, and run away from them. Navigator, get us the hell out of here. My head hurts.'
* * *
The last planet they visited was Epsilon IX, and that meant hard suits. The gravity was five times standard, the air was a mixture of extremely noxious gases, any one of which would have been fatal on its own, and the air density was uncannily like the pressure of water you find at the bottom of a deep ocean trench. On top of all that, the entire world was a mass of goo; thick, slimy mud that covered the planet's surface from pole to pole. In some places it was only a couple of feet deep, and that was called land. Either way, it was messy as hell. There were hills that rose up suddenly overnight and then spent the rest of the day collapsing and sliding away.
There were huge artificial constructs here and there that might have been buildings or machines—or both or neither. The native intelligent species created them when they felt like it, though they declined to explain out of what or what their purpose might be. The muck itself contained a handful of extremely rare and useful trace elements, and these were refined from the goo by specially designed automated mining machinery from the Empire. People couldn't live on Epsilon IX, even inside a fully Screened Base; human-built structures inevitably sank, and had to be constantly retrieved, which cost money.
The mining equipment worked only because the natives looked after it. No one knew much about the native species. They appeared to be the only living things on Epsilon IX, which raised some interesting and rather unpleasant questions about what they ate. They had a mysterious link to their mucky environment that allowed
