The Queen of the Legion by Jack Williamson

Author:Jack Williamson [Williamson, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Timescape / Pocket Books
Published: 1983-01-03T04:00:00+00:00

22

Larron’s clones squatted around their smoldering fire. He came striding out of the thickets to join them, a bronze-beared patriarch, massive and commanding. Others followed, nude and shivering, limping under loads of long brown fronds.

When Diamondwall ran his window down for a better view, Jil caught the bitter pungence of burning leatherweed. The scent brought her girlhood back. Hawkshead Pass, and the sulphur-reek of the meteor storms, and the rank weeds her mother had tried to fight in her grandfather’s yard.

Her mother?

Cruel questions rose to haunt her. What had the plotters done to her mother? Had the parasite in Shon Macharn planted a shadowflasher egg in her? To ensure her loyalty to the “movement”? And turn her, finally, into that mindless shadow thing aboard the Purple Empress?

Jil shivered. The notion seemed too hideous to be true, yet she couldn’t shake it off. It explained too many things, and it turned her old resentments into aching pity and a haunting shame. If she had ever guessed—

Rem Brendish?

She recalled him as she had glimpsed him back on Alpha III, suspended in his null-G gear with her mother on the slidewalk, hovering over her like some monstrous insect. If her mother had been possessed, what was he? Another tortured tool, forced to compose his Antiac ballad as one more weapon in the secret war on the Legion?

She wondered. His sparrow body had not been ravished. Yet his deeds seemed hardly human. She found no answers. The parasites were far too horrible to think about, yet too near to be escaped. She pulled herself straighter in the seat, inhaling the leatherweed smoke. To her, it had always been exhilarating.

She looked at Larron, leaning to stir the fire with a long leatherweed bloom stalk. Standing back, he waved it like a wand. She heard the boom of his voice again, saw a nude and blood-streaked clone tossing her load of fronds into swirling smoke. Yellow flame flared again.

Even now, with his small world destroyed, he was still magnificent. She felt a throb of admiration, another twinge of regret for the way he had been humbled by the mode of the goring bull. . . .

Lord Archy bounded off Diamondwall’s pudgy knees.

“Information, Miss Three,” his bell voice rolled. “We detect the S.S. Hedonian. Descending to land.”

The bright-walled starship came down on the exploding cushion of its jets, too near Larron and his huddled clones. The hot white cloud roared over them. Suddenly silent, it spread and cooled and slowly rose. Looking where the fire had been, she found it blown away.

The clones were gone. It took her a moment to discover them, lying sprawled against the fringe of leatherweed where that reckless blast had flung them. Only Larron remained erect, facing the tall starcraft, still gripping his blackened bloom stalk.

The lock clanged open. The gangway rattled out. Jil’s flesh crawled when she saw the shadowflasher flowing out. A shapeless cloud of total darkness, it swelled as it emerged, lifting, drifting toward Larron.

He strode to meet it, boldly swinging his brittle club.

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