The young Waypoint pilot approached the Key with mixed eagerness and trepidation. When she applied both her hands to the sphere’s surface, nothing happened. Several seconds passed, with the lieutenant slowly moving her hands over the Key’s surface, and still nothing happened.
She opened her eyes and said, “I can’t sense anything. It’s almost as if…well, the Keys we use for the Waypoints are never off the way we turn off a human device. But this one seems off to me.”
“What about the others?” Vex asked. “Begin trying them one at a time.”
The young officer complied, while Vex watched impatiently, her arms folded over her chest. All around her, the potential power of the Waymakers seemed ready for grasping. Yet, she was forced to work through interlocutors. Because Golsubril Vex did not have the gift, as Colonel Jun had called it. She had no aptitude with Keys, and never would. Which was immensely frustrating. Especially while they were on the brink of discovering how to unlock the pyramid’s potential.
The Waypoint pilot’s back suddenly arched, and she stared vacantly into the air over her head—mouth moving silently to form half-thought words.
The Key she touched was about two-thirds the size of a Waywork Key. As Vex had seen before, when the Key became active, its surface took on a translucent quality, revealing a sphere inside the sphere, but covered with a network of geometric patterns which lit up from within themselves. The lieutenant’s body quivered, and her hands shook.
“Tell us!” Vex demanded. “What can you see?”
“T-h-h-the Waymakers—!” she stuttered.
“Please, Vex,” Colonel Jun hissed, putting a restraining hand on Vex’s bicep, “our Waypoint pilot is clearly overwhelmed by what she’s experiencing!”
“Touch me again,” Vex said, violently shrugging the man off, “and I will ensure you painfully regret it, Colonel. The lieutenant’s state of mind is obvious. But she needs to talk, and talk now. Lieutenant, this is Kosmarch Vex. You will control yourself, and explain to me what is happening.”
“T-h-h-hey…their programming…machines…in my mind!”
At once, the lieutenant cut loose with a blood-curdling shriek that filled the hall. Almost simultaneously, all of the statues—which Vex and her group had been examining early—suddenly came to life.
“Security!” the battle sergeant shouted, and ten men instantly deployed around Vex and the colonel, their battle rifles pointed at whichever artifact was closest.
When the machines began to raise their insect-like appendages, with grasping claw-like digits extended from the tips, one of the troops flinched, and cut loose with a shot, which sent a bullet whirring off the carapace of the machine not twenty meters distant. And then the entire squad was firing, the din from their weapons drowning out the Waypoint pilot’s horrific wail. Vex ignored her men, and focused on the lieutenant, who still clutched the glowing Key with both hands.
“Control! Control!” Vex shouted, physically grabbing the young woman’s bicep in both of her hands. “You must control it! You must!”
But the Waypoint pilot didn’t seem to be aware of Golsubril Vex at all. Her mouth was stretched open, teeth bared crazily, while a wavering scream poured from her throat.
“Stop shooting, you idiots! Stop!” Colonel Jun was shouting.
Men began to be flung bodily, as the machines ignored the bullets caroming harmlessly off their metal armor, and attacked in a blur of swinging insect arms.
Chapter 38
Daffodil pulled two gees toward the Waypoint. There was another ship significantly ahead of them, but of undetermined national origin. She’d switched off her identification code computer, or the code computer had been damaged. Whichever. It didn’t matter. The other ship was going to hit the Waypoint first. If the other ship was friendly, she’d be back in Oswight space, and find herself in the care of Commodore Iakar. If she was not friendly, she’d be heading back home to tell the rest of Starstate Nautilan how things were going in the Uxmal system.
“It’s the Hallibrand,” Zuri said from her gee chair, having relocated to the ship’s command module against surgeon’s orders. As long as she kept her vomit bags handy, Admiral Mikton didn’t make too much of a mess. But trying to keep her mind on the tactical situation—versus the intense sensation of nausea which dominated her stomach—was a devilish chore.
“Are you sure?” asked Captain Garmot.
“Pretty sure,” Zuri replied.
“I think Commodore Urrl missed a destroyer,” the captain said. “That was a hairball of a fight, back at Objective Epsilon. Anything could have happened.”
“Hallibrand’s fallback orders were to return to Oswight space, if all else failed,” Zuri said.
“Then why won’t she respond with identification?” the captain asked.
Zuri didn’t have a good answer for that one.
“Assuming it is one of the destroyers,” Zuri said, “I don’t think we change our plan. Assuming the destroyer lingers near the Waypoint in Jaalit space, it’s just one more target for us to acquire when we emerge. How have your engineers been doing modifying the launches to carry nukes?”
“That’s been the easy part,” the captain replied. “We simply open the nose, remove the broadcast package that’s inside, and insert one of our nukes with its proximity computer wired to the launch’s proximity sensors. Granted, those launches aren’t the smartest machines in the Constellar fleet, but they are programmed to operate in a ship-like fashion. Once we drop out of the Waypoint, we’ll have to deploy them fast, to make ourselves look like the Nautilan fleet that came across originally. Nine ships. So, eight launches, and us. That gives us eight potential targets to identify—the second we’re over—then the launches go. If the codes we scraped off the memory of that Nautilan box still work, the security flotilla won’t be aware that there is a problem. Unless the codes are individually identifiable for individual Nautilan ships.”
“Our codes do that,” Zuri said. “Every Constellar vessel in the registry is in the memory of every Constellar warship, large or small.”
“So, if you’re the watch commander on the other side of that Waypoint, Admiral, and you suddenly see nine versions of the same ship popping up on your tactical display, what do you do?”
“It’s what I am hoping they don’t do that counts,” Zuri said, then turned her head to the side and wretched into one of the vomit bags. An intravenous feed unit had been belted to her stomach, pushing medication directly into the areas which had been most sensitive to the radiation. The lining of her intestines, and the cells of her stomach wall, were deciding minute by minute whether to disintegrate totally, or rally for one more go at healing. If Zuri somehow made it back home alive, she was quite sure she wouldn’t be eating solid food for several months.
“They shouldn’t,” Zuri said, wiping her mouth with a napkin, “open fire on a friendly signature. The fact that there are duplicates won’t initially indicate hostiles, just as multiples of the same signature on our side would not immediately indicate hostiles. We’d order the ships to keep a safe distance, and invoke two-step authentication using the backup audio-video process. That takes minutes. During which we can have those launches deployed, and moving toward their targets. Which shouldn’t immediately set off any bells, because the launches are physically too big and bulky to be missiles. A lot depends on how much distance their security flotilla keeps between themselves and the Waypoint. Too much distance, and the launches will never make it in time, before somebody gets wise and takes the launches out with point-defense or antimissiles.”
“Stupidly bad odds,” Captain Garmot said. “Last time you took on odds that poor, it cost you all of the Task Group.”
Zuri thought about it—as her insides continued to debate dying.
“Okay, what if we modify the plan?” she said.
“This late in the game?”
“Sure. It’ll be a while until we get to the Waypoint anyway. So, we don’t deploy launches immediately. We
keep them. One ship, one signature. It’s a signature their security flotilla will recognize. We tell them we’ve had battle damage, and are heading for drydock in the inner system. Tell them to remain vigilant at the Waypoint. Bypass the flotilla altogether. At that range, and with a code their systems recognize, it shouldn’t be too hard to slip by them. They won’t be able to tell what class Daffodil is until or unless they’re on top of us. But we won’t give them enough time to do that.”
“Running immediately would look suspicious,” Garmot said.
“Maybe we tell them we have a VIP aboard who’s hurt, and needs treatment at a groundside facility? Hell, I can produce the barfing sounds to make it convincing.”
Zuri wretched again into her vomit bag, sealed the zipper, and let herself be miserable. The gee chair had been fitted with an extra layer of padding, but that didn’t change the fact that Zuri was suffering worse than she could ever remember having suffered. Every part of her felt awful. The surgeon speculated that even if Zuri survived, she’d cut untold years off her life on account of the induced malignancies which were going to be in her future. The human body just wasn’t built to withstand that much radiation exposure in such a short span of time. Not without dreadful consequences.
Part of her didn’t care. Making it or not making it was not the point anymore. Zuri had sacrificed everything for the sake of an idea. An idea she still thought was worth trying.
Or was it simply that Admiral Mikton wanted to make Nautilan hurt?
Chaplain Ortteo and his focus on the Word had gotten Zuri to thinking. If worthiness really was the deciding factor in this supposedly larger-than-life drama in which they were all participating, which objective was better? Attacking a Nautilan system for the desired strategic delay it would cause, or attacking a Nautilan system because Zuri wanted to make sure the Nauties felt her? At long last. Right between their eyes.
She knew the answer. But Ortteo wasn’t here to lecture her anymore. He’d died with Catapult, and was finding out firsthand whether the Prophecies were true or not.
Admiral Mikton wanted to believe that it could be a bit of both, and God—or whoever was paying attention—would be satisfied with a mixed motive. Versus no motive at all.
Chapter 39
Elvin Axabrast was frantic, not to mention furious. Not once in all the time he’d served Family Oswight had he ever failed to keep the Oswight children safe. Oh, there’d been a bump here and a bruise there. The usual kids’ stuff. But when it came to standing between real danger and those two boys and their sister, Elvin had stood like a cement wall.
Until last night.
He winced every time he took a step, feeling the sprain in his ankle. It wasn’t broken. But Elvin’s tendons and ligaments weren’t as elastic as they used to be. He would be feeling it for weeks. Assuming they managed to make it that far.
“Keep after it, lads,” he urged the men and women around him. Captain Fazal’s platoon of DSOD TGO troops had been gainfully employed looking for Lady Oswight since the sun had come up. It had been a hell of a night before that, with all of them huddled in whatever makeshift shelter they could find. Most of them came out of it drenched, hungry, and tired to death. But that didn’t stop Elvin from rousting everyone the moment light crept its way over the horizon. And it wouldn’t stop him until Lady Oswight had been found. Or he was dead first. Whichever.
Since none of their wireless was working, they had to tackle the project compartment by compartment. A chore which might have been interesting, if Elvin had been spared the time to do it in the name of archeology. The insides of the ark weren’t all that different from the insides of any other large spacecraft. Staterooms, lavatories, refectories, they tended to have the same general configuration as those in the modern era, except many of them—the ones which could be easily accessed, at least—had become choked with sand, or filled with water, or clogged by a mixture of the two. There were even hydroponics facilities, like those found across the Waywork. One such bay held the desiccated, lifeless remains of livestock. Pigs, from the mummified look of them. Another had been used for rice farming, but had all of its topsoil washed out, so that the nested moisture tubes ordinarily covered by dirt were exposed.
Not once did any of the searchers find a human body. Not the remains of an original ark inhabitant, and—thankfully—not the corpse of someone who’d come down with them in the drop module.
If Lady Oswight were still in the ark, and Elvin felt she had to be, they would discover her sooner or later. Even if it took him uttering all the oaths and curses in the Constellar dictionary, and Dissenter folklore, to do it.
The sky suddenly made a noise. Everyone stopped the search, and looked up. Elvin shielded his eyes with a palm at his brow, while the sleek, predatory shape of an aerospace plane flew overhead. The craft looked nothing like any of the drop modules which had been hastily mated to Antagean’s starliners. And unlike the drop modules, the aerospace plane could return to orbit again. Which meant Starstate Nautilan had a way to get back to space, where Elvin and his cohorts did not. They watched as the aerospace plane descended to the northwest corner of the pyramid, using its vertical takeoff and landing thrusters to set down on a flat piece of ground not far from the pyramid itself. Elvin’s binoculars whined as he dialed the magnification up as far as it would go. He couldn’t make out individual people, but he could see vapor blowing off the aerospace plane’s ducted engine nacelles, where the fusion-driven turbofans converted atmosphere to thrust. Later, in the boost-to-orbit phase, the nacelles would close off, and the aerospace plane would climb into low planetary orbit using direct fusion-rocket power.
If the ship had not belonged to Nautilan, Elvin might have admired it.
As it was, he muttered curses aplenty on the plane, then put his binoculars away, and went to find Captain Fazal.
The TGO officer looked dead on his feet.
“What d’yah think, lad?” Elvin asked, his own voice sounding hollow and exhausted in his ears.
“We knew they were coming. Now we know they’re here. And they certainly know we are here, if they saw the drop module on the beach. Which I doubt they would have missed during that flyover. Our one piece of luck is that they’re more interested in the pyramid than us. So, we can keep looking for Lady Oswight. Though I can’t say what our plan should be once we find her. If the Nauties are taking control of the pyramid, we’ve got nothing left to gain on this world.”
“Gunfight them,” Elvin urged. “A plane that size c’ldna take more than a score o’ men. Maybe a few more? We’ve got the troops and the weapons.”
“We have to assume they will return to orbit, and bring down more people,” Fazal said, crouched down on his haunches, and drinking heavily from one of his canteens. That had been the single benefit of the storm. Plenty of fresh water to top off their bottles.
“Then we bloody hit the plane before she’s back in the air,” Elvin said.
“You really were a colour sergeant of the old school, weren’t you?” Fazal said, smiling slightly.
“Damned right,” Elvin said.
“But then we’re well and truly stuck here, Mister Axabrast. Antagean’s starliners have no way of bringing us back up off the surface, even if they could get through the destroyers in orbit. We need that plane, as much as they need it too.”
Elvin ran a hand over his face and beard, feeling the fresh dots of stubble that poked out of his cheeks. As a man who prided himself on his groomed appearance, he realized he was going to wind up looking mighty shaggy after a few days. Shaggier than Garsina Oswight had ever seen him, that was for sure.
“Sir!” one of the TGO troops shouted.
Elvin and the captain shot to their feet, making their way over to where several TGO people were clustered around what appeared to be a large funnel.
“Is this where you last saw her?” Captain Fazal asked.
“’Twas damned bloody dark and I couldn’t see a damned bloody thing except her lantern,” Elvin
growled, staring down into the hole at the funnel’s bottom. Unlike the rest of the ark which they’d been searching through so far, this particular portion appeared to have been recently modified. Little streams of water were still runneling out of different places in the ark, and into the funnel basin. Almost as if the funnel had been specifically built here, to take advantage of a natural depression in the ark’s hollowed-down internal landscape.
“Big enough for a man,” Captain Fazal said, pointing down at the hole, which was a good ten meters below them. The sides of the funnel were not steep, but their smoothness made it apparent that nobody who fell down it could hope to climb back up. Especially during a storm.
“Aye,” Elvin said, getting a prickly feeling on the back of his neck. “And it could be a bottomless pit to nowhere.”
For a moment, the majordomo imagined Garsina Oswight trapped in the dark, down at the bottom of wherever that hole ultimately led to. Maybe half shivering to death? Maybe drowned already?
The old man shuddered, and shook such thoughts out of his head.
“It’s worth a try,” he said. “But only if we don’t lose more men, Cap’n.”
One of the troops knelt by the opening, and began shouting into it, “Heeeeeeeeelllllooooooooo! Caaaaaan annnnyonnnne heeear meeeee?”
Her voice echoed down the funnel, but there was no response.
They all looked to Captain Fazal for guidance.
“We’ve got assault rope. We could lower somebody down.”
“And how much will it take to get to the bottom?” Elvin asked.
“Who knows?” the captain said. “But do you have any better ideas? We’ve been searching all through this wreck for hours. Even frantic like she was, I don’t think Lady Oswight could have gotten much farther on foot than this. You said Antagean went with her, and now both the lieutenant commander and Lady Oswight are proving extremely difficult to find. If they had holed up in a compartment somewhere, I think they’d have heard us calling for them, or knocking on hatchways. And now that Starstate Nautilan is here, our time is running out. Sooner or later, they’re going to put enough troops on the ground to send a security force our way.”
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