Free Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2013 by Penny Publications

down in good order at a steady trot, in neat rectangular formations. At the base of the ramp they spread out, utterly ignoring me,following their orders. Two groups of them then went down into firing positions and pulse-rifle fire cut through the poisonous air toward the approaching exo-forms. Two of them immediately went down, plowing into the ground like crashing gravcars. Two more swept to one side, but then a missile from a shoulder launcher hit between them and sent them tumbling. The thetics moved on at a run, heading for the coordinates in my mind.
    The Client was very very disappointed in me and I now expected punishing pain which, I felt sure, I could resist for long enough. I followed the thetics out, my mental defenses as tight and as ready as they could be. But there was no attack, and in those parts of my mind where the Client had its grip, all contact slid into something completely alien—beyond my understanding.
    "It's a good plan," Harriet opined, "but for the Client's defenses and its absolute hold on you."
    "What do you mean?" I asked, now breaking into a fast loping run.
    "I mean," said my troodon companion, easily keeping pace with me. "You ordered the thetics to go in after the Client and attack it, and then you disconnected yourself from them so you could issue no further orders, so the Client could not force you to order them to desist."
    "And?"
    "You hoped that if they didn't kill it they would at least keep it distracted enough for you to get close and use the weapon you designed specifically to kill it."
    "You seem to know rather a lot," I suggested.
    A battle now raged ahead of us, at the foot of the mountains. We reached the fighting just as it was terminating, exoforms like giant horseshoe crabs turned over and smoking like wrecked tanks, thetics reverting in the grip of long white worms, others pouring out of suits torn apart by ice-pick mandibles. But still there were many left, all funneling into the wide cave mouth ahead. I followed them in.
    At last,
said the Client, perfectly understandable.
    The cave sloped down, ever darker, then being lit by a hellish glow. The chamber seemed to have no limits; it seemed as if I had walked through some Narnian doorway out onto the surface of a hotter brighter world. Ahead of me I saw thetics keeling over, one after another, and I couldn't see what was killing them. I kept walking; found I could not stop walking. I stepped over and past hard shell suits and observed dissolving faces behind chainglass visors. Harriet was still beside me and I glanced across at her.
    Kill me now,
I thought, but couldn't say.
    "It's killing them with the farcaster," she said, dipping her head to indicate what lay ahead.
    The Client was wound around its crystal tree, large wasp-like segments conjoined in a great snake hundreds of feet long. At its head was the primary form which I could see was an adult some days away from death, and yet to be cast away like those husks scattered on the ground all around to allow the next creature-segment to take over. At its tail its terminal segment was giving birth to another, which would remain attached and in its turn give birth. The whole cycle—the time it took for the terminal form to reach the head—was just solstan months long. Meanwhile, all those segments fed, chewing down an odd rubbery nectar exuded by the crystal tree, which in turn extracted the materials to make it from the ground below, and from the husks the exoforms fed to its nanomachine roots. But there was something else about that tree too. It fed the Client, supported the Client, and was the totality of its technology and, near its head, a crystal flower had bloomed: the farcaster.
    Soon I was circumventing the husks of former head segments. Reaching the base of the tree I saw the last of the thetics collapsing around me, and I went down on myknees. I don't know whether that was my own impulse or an instruction from the creature rearing high above me. I managed to