Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

getting advice by radio.
    And they must have been in contact with their barricaded brethren, too. The diversion that had put out the fires and let space into the inner chambers had been too well timed to be a coincidence.
    “Kill them!” Penser screamed. “Kill them all.”
    Bram strained at his ropes. There were only twenty Nar against more than a hundred armed and desperate humans in this chamber, but they moved with a bold confidence that seemed to unnerve Penser’s minions.
    The flanking Nar threw scoops of powder at the human crowd. People began coughing and scratching. The other Nar advanced with nets and cords.
    Pite was the first to recover from his paralysis. He ran forward, coughing and wheezing, wiping the tears out of his eyes with the back of his hand, and tried to reach the nearest Nar with a spear thrust.
    But at least twenty tentacles from a half dozen decapods acted in concert to grasp the shaft of the spear, pluck the little electrical device from Pite’s other hand, curl around his ankles and wrists, lift him bodily off the floor, net him, and tie him into a neat bundle.
    It was all done in about five seconds.
    The four or five attackers immediately following Pite received the same treatment. The Nar dispatched them with unhurried ease, acting in unison, as if they were a single creature with two hundred limbs, each of which always knew where the other limbs were and what they were doing. They didn’t split up to take on multiple opponents, and no Nar had to fight alone. It was a case of a limb that had taken a moment to disarm an enemy now being free to hold two ankles together while another Nar tied a knot; of a limb that a second earlier had thrown a net immediately being available to deflect a pike aimed at a brother Nar. Seen that way, limb against useful limb, it was the humans who were outnumbered.
    A bare minute later, with eight or nine humans already trussed up and laid aside, Bram understood why.
    One of the Penserites, gasping and blinking from the powder the Nar had sprinkled, managed to light the wick of a firebottle and hurl it. It whizzed past a Nar and shattered on the wall behind him, drenching the decapod with flame. Twenty silver-clad tentacles instantly shucked the burning Nar out of his space suit and tossed the garment in a flaming arc into the pool. The Nar who was left standing there in his yellow skin wore a portable touch sleeve, the kind that outdoor crews used to communicate with each other by radio.
    The sleeves were both sender and receiver, output and feedback. Wearing them, despite the complaint of some aesthetes of coldness and lack of nuance, the twenty Nar of the work crew were effectively linked into a single extended organism that thought, felt, and acted as one. And, if one theory about cross-connections in the Nar nervous system was correct, they were seeing with one another’s eyes as well.
    The bare Nar immediately took a new place in the pattern of decapod chessmen where he would be shielded from thrown objects. The aggregate organism learned quickly. Subsequent flung bottles of alcohol or corrosives were snatched out of the air and set gently down or, if they were flaming, doused in the pool.
    One of the missile throwers was Eena. Bram, lying helpless, saw her light the wick of the composite bomb she had been molding and, despite the handicap of her half-grown flipper, chuck it high over the toiling mass of decapods and humans.
    Bram, every nerve taut, waited for the explosion that would kill or maim everyone in the room, Nar and human alike, but a dozen silver sleeves rose out of the turmoil, caught the object, snuffed the fuse, and passed it along over everyone’s head to be deposited carefully in a safe spot.
    The phalanx of Nar had chewed halfway through the human ranks by now. Scores of trussed people lay in rows, ankles and wrists lashed together to turn them into convenient basketlike objects to be carried away. Penser’s rear guard was turning into a panic-stricken rabble that fragmented and tried to escape through the inner chambers.
    Penser himself was backing away from the advancing Nar, arms raised as if to ward off a nightmare. The Nar weren’t paying any special attention to him. It was doubtful that they knew who he was. At the rate they were working, it would be another few minutes before they got around to him.
    “No,” Penser said, as if he were speaking to children. “The universe belongs to humankind. Can’t you see