Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

unprotected side felt.
    Bram struggled to sit up. He inched himself up against the wall at his back. The movement brought a wave of headache and nausea. After a moment the headache subsided to a steady throb. He inhaled and tasted smoke in his mouth.
    He was in the same chamber, the one with the deepset lenticel and the workstations, but now it was full of people. There was activity all around him. People with soot-smudged faces kept running in and out, exchanging scraps of hurried conversation and brief flurries of gestures. They bore axes and sledgehammers. A few carried smoldering bundles that must have been torches. Somebody was passing out firebottles. A thick, wet smoke billowed in through the arched openings that led to the inner suites and the chamber beyond. Nobody paid the slightest attention to Bram.
    Through his headache, he located Penser. Penser was at the center of all the movement, the only one in the room who was weaponless. He stood with his hands behind his back, head lowered to listen to the reports of the runners, occasionally lifting his head and raising an arm to call someone over to him.
    Voth’s corpse was still there, too. Bram forced his eyes to find it. It lay near the pool, the outflung tentacles still reaching. Nobody had bothered to move it.
    Bram felt numb, unable to summon his feelings. Voth’s body seemed curiously flat. The settling and draining of tissues had given the symmetrical decapod form two sides in death—something it had never had in life. The mirror eyes were nothing more than dull pits around the waist.
    Bram’s head buzzed and throbbed. None of this seemed real. After a moment he realized that he had forgotten to draw a breath for too long; when he did so, it was like a knife along his bruised ribs.
    Pite came over, an axe slung across his back, one side of his mono scorched.
    “Waking up, Brammo?” he said. “You better hope we need you. Penser’s mad, really mad. You shouldn’t have gone after him that way. You’re lucky my little galvanizer happened to be on a low setting. If it had been set for Nar, you’d have been fried.”
    “How long has that been going on?” Bram croaked, pointing his chin at all the frantic movement in and out.
    “About an hour. You weren’t out long. We’ve broken through one compartment wall and burnt out a whole section along one gallery. The yellowlegs’ve barricaded themselves farther back, but we’ll smash through and roast the lot of them. We caught two of them trying to slip away. Got ‘em both with firebottles. Know what happens to a yellowlegs when it burns? It sort of pops.”
    He threw back his head and laughed.
    Bram felt ill. “I wish I’d killed him.”
    “See, Brammo.” Pite grinned. “You’re just like us.”
    Bram was opening his mouth to reply when there was a sound like a great whoof. It came from the direction of the inner chambers, where the fires had been burning.
    At the same time, Bram saw the drifting haze of smoke in the room suddenly give a jerk in the direction of the exits, as if somebody had given a sharp tug to an invisible sheet that it was painted on. Then the ribbons of smoke began drifting lazily toward the inner suites.
    An eerie silence descended. Everybody had stopped moving at once. The crackle of flames that had been heard in the distance had abruptly stopped. Then there were cries of alarm and another great whump.
    Pite, Penser, and everyone else were staring toward the exits. Bram was the only one who saw the shadowy blurs on the membrane of the lenticel blotting out the pearly ghosts of stars.
    The blurs were moving purposefully. Bram could not give a shape to them yet. This side of the tree presently faced night, and the interior biolights had flared up to compensate.
    Bram looked away from the lenticel. He didn’t want anyone to notice him staring.
    Penser was barking orders, trying to organize his troops. “Trog, take some men and find out what’s going on! Pite, never mind the incendiaries for the moment! Get your people together and have them prepared to move quickly! Hust, how is the large aggregate coming? We may have to blow another opening!”
    A man stumbled into the chamber, his forehead bleeding from a large gash. “No air there! The next chamber’s all vacuum! It put the fire out! No sign of the yellowlegs! They must have gone farther inside!”
    “Did we lose anybody?” Penser asked.
    The man was weaving and confused, trying to stay on his feet. “Jupe