At least he understood the situation. There were always Hunters around of one kind or another, mostly scavenging, feeding off the weak, dead, and dying, trying to figure out how to get a better meal. Being trapped there had obviously brought some in, maybe trapped as well by the new river the demons had made. Then, when the demons went to their groves and began doing whatever it was they did, anyone hiding in there was flushed out. It was always said that to spend even one night in those groves was to go forever mad. Maybe it was true.
“Well, we’re not going anywhere tonight,” he told them. “Both of you come away from the river. I will stand guard as well as I can, but I think we are probably safe for the night here on this side of the river. Get some sleep.”
“And then what?” she asked him in that same flat tone.
“I don’t know, but it will be easier to find out in the daylight,” was all he could think to answer.
They slept on grass in the brush, exhausted, unable to stay awake. Littlefeet intended to stay awake himself, but he, too, had had a very long day, and in any case he was no match right now for any Hunters that might come along. In spite of his wishes, he nodded off himself.
In his mind, in his dreams, he saw it all again, this time not through demon eyes but through someone else’s, someone human. It was horrible, nightmarish, brutal and hopeless. He saw many of his friends get taken down, some of the women grabbed and eaten alive, two Hunters munching on a screeching baby before several women and two warriors fell on them and hacked them to bits with knives and sharp cooking rocks.
With a start he realized that he was seeing it all replayed through Spotty’s eyes, inside her nightmares. He knew this not because he saw anything to indicate it, but because he saw her finally isolated, pushed into the water, struggling and coming up grabbing on to Rockhand’s body, and then, panicked and thrashing, sensing rather than hearing someone on the other shore, someone drilling into her frightened brain, “Kick! Kick and hold on!”
Somehow he and Spotty had been connected, at least as strongly as he’d been in his dreams to the passing demons. Her being one of the survivors was not as much the marvelous coincidence it first seemed, although it still might be the work of God’s hand. She had heard him while others had not, heard him in her mind, and this had given her the will and strength to make it to him.
It was well past sunup when he awoke and found the two girls still lying there near him. He nervously stared at each, but saw that both breathed; their chests went up and down, and there was some movement now and again. He relaxed.
He thought about scavenging for some food, but decided to wait. He didn’t want to wake them, not now, but he had the feeling that, whatever they did from now on, they should do together; that it was better to be a little hungry than to split up.
The hot sun and the crescendo of insects stirred up by it began to make things uncomfortable, though, and very soon Spotty stirred and then opened her eyes. She looked around, then sat up, frowning.
“Good morning,” he said softly. “Or, rather, more like midday.”
She stared at him in seeming confusion, then managed, “I—I... Do you know me?”
“Of course I do,” he responded, a little confused himself. “Don’t you remember? I’m Littlefeet.”
“Little—No, I, um, I don’t know what I mean. I mean, I can’t seem to remember anything.”
He realized that she wasn’t playing with him. “You really don’t remember who you are?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. It’s like I just, well, woke up. I know your words, I understand you and can speak, but I don’t know anything else. It is a little scary.” He’d never seen anything like this, but the old tall tales and legends had had stories about this sort of thing. He’d never believed them, but apparently it was possible to lose your memory. Not a little, but mostly. In the stories, people always lost their memories after having something awful done to them, so maybe that was true, too. Even if he’d thought it could really happen to somebody, though, he would never have bet on Spotty. Not tough, caring Spotty.
Froggy sighed, turned over a bit, then opened her eyes. She was short and chubby with big breasts, in dramatic contrast with the taller, thinner Spotty. “Oh, my!” she sighed. “I had such awful dreams!”
“They weren’t dreams,” he told her softly. “Um—do you remember who you are?”
“Um, yeah, sure. You’re Feet and I’m Froggy and this is Spotty. What are you doing here, anyway? And where’s everybody else?”
“Then you don’t remember,” he replied. Just more than Spotty does.
It turned out that she didn’t, not really. She remembered a lot, but the previous night’s horrors had been totally blotted out, not erased but relegated to confused if frightening nightmares. She found it hard to believe that anything was missing, but was even more astonished to find Spotty completely blank.
“You two went through a lot last night,” he told them. “I think it’ll come back to you, at least some of it, after a while. Some of it, I think, you’d both be better off not getting back.”
“So what do we do now?” Froggy asked him. He’d never taken a lot of notice of her before, but for all the shock and horror of the previous night she seemed in better shape than Spotty.
“Let’s all find something to eat,” he suggested. “It’s not hard over here. Then we’ll work our way up north and see what’s left of the camp. Spotty, you’ll just have to stick with us and trust us until your memory comes back. Okay?”
“I guess,” she replied. “I don’t have anything else I can do, and from what you say, it’s real scary out there.”
He found some melons that made a good breakfast, and then they worked their way back to the river. Mercifully, he saw no bodies around, either floating or against the banks. The current had been swift enough to carry them at least out of sight downriver.
An hour or two’s walk north brought them directly across from the Family camp. It was all trampled and clear to be seen from their vantage point, which meant it was no more good as a camp anyway. There were some bodies visible over there, but it was impossible at this distance to tell who they were, or even if they were friend or foe. Probably a mixture of both. Hordes of insects were already going to work on the remains.
Far off he could hear the sound of one of the demon machines, but he couldn’t see it. No others were in evidence.
Littlefeet sighed. “Well, I don’t think everybody got killed, ’cause if they had there’d be a lot more bodies over there. Still and all, they’ve scattered all over to be safe and preserve the Family, and I don’t hear any wailing babies or anything like that, so they’re some distance off. The scouts’ll try and round ’em up, but where that’ll be it’s hard to say. Won’t be here, and I don’t think they’ll try this camp again, not this close.”
Spotty didn’t really follow some of this, but Froggy was upset. “You mean we’re cut off?”
He nodded. “Seems like. It’s the three of us on this side and all the other survivors on that side. Well, at least that tells me what we gotta do.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Well, if we came up north to the demon flowers and couldn’t find a crossing, then they’ll come back to the river and head south, figuring maybe that somewhere down there might be enough built-up mud and crud to manage a swamp crossing. That’s my guess as to how they’ll think. So we move south. If we find ’em, maybe we can help get ’em across.”
“What if we can’t find ’em?” Froggy asked him.
He sighed. “Then I guess we’re on our own.”
FOURTEEN
Priam’s Lens
There were spacesuits for everyone aboard, although even Colonel N’Gana’s suit did not have the capabilities of Harker’s experimental model. N’Gana knew it, as did the silent but always attentive Mogutu, but the only thing the colonel could say was, “Look, Mister Harker—no matter what else, let us get one thing straight. I am in charge. I am the comma
nding officer of this expedition. Although you are a military officer, you are not in a formal military unit and you were not planned for on this one, so Sergeant Mogutu also outranks you. Understand?”
“It’s your party, Colonel,” Harker responded. “Right now I’m just along for the ride.”
The corvette could not risk actually landing on Hector; the thrusting maneuvers would have invited attention from the planet below. Instead, it braked and matched motion with the moon, then glided with minimal energy expenditure to where they wanted to go.
Hector was not large, but it was still almost six hundred kilometers in length, big enough to make an impression, albeit a small one, on the surface of the planet. In fact it usually looked like a small star-sized or planet-sized beacon, blinking in odd patterns because of its wobbly rotation and irregular shape.
Matched now with specific features on the surface, the interior of the corvette depressurized and everyone checked out in their suits. One by one they went out the hatch and, using primarily compressed air, floated to the surface below. The compressed air system was good enough for this purpose, and did not contribute to any energy signatures that could be picked up below. As soon as the last one was down, the corvette slowly moved off and out of sight, keeping its profile behind the tiny moon for the same reason.
The surface was about what Harker had expected. Dark igneous rock for the most part, pockmarked with tiny impact craters. The surface, for all that, seemed almost fluid, the rock bending and twisting, creating a rough and wholly irregular landscape.
Low-level automatic signals kept them pretty well tethered to the leader as if by a long strand of flexible rope. There was very little gravity to keep them on the surface, but the suits were able to compensate. They all learned pretty early, though, to keep their eyes on the ones in front of them and on the surface itself. While you couldn’t feel any movement, the sky when turned away from Helena was in a slow but noticeable motion that could be very disconcerting. N’Gana, Mogutu, and Harker, all old space-hands, had little trouble with it, but it was causing problems for some of the others.
“Put your suits on automatic,” N’Gana suggested. “They won’t let you fall. It won’t be much longer now.”
They walked to some low knobs that formed a very shallow valley and then into the valley. At the far end there was a darkened area that seemed different, although it took even Harker a few moments to figure out why.
No impact or other features at all were apparent. It was smooth as glass.
“Admiral, detach and come forward please,” the colonel instructed, sounding calm and professional. “I believe it is your turn to open our way.”
Krill was fairly unsteady and clearly uncomfortable here, but she was game, Harker gave her that. She took little steps, making her way to the front and then bracing herself against the smooth, streamlined V-shaped end of the valley.
This was where the absorption and analysis of the transmission from the surface was so valuable. With her computer-like mind and augmented mental abilities, Krill was able to instantly analyze the system in use here and then interface with the security system on the other side. It could have been done with a robotic system using the same information, but Krill was an acknowledged genius at this sort of thing and much more apt to see any nasty little traps that might have been laid.
She suddenly stopped and took a step back; they could hear the frown in her voice. “That’s odd. It should have cleared.”
She looked around, then up, and added, “Ah. Wait.”
The great disk of Helena was above them, but not for long, as the combination of Hector’s rapid rotation and irregular shape took it in a slow slide out of sight. At almost the instant it faded from view, there was a slight sparkling on the heretofore black obsidianlike rock. Krill turned, nodded to herself, and walked through. “Quickly,” she said. “As soon as any part of Helena is in a direct line, it will instantly power down.”
They all hurried. Once inside, they found themselves in a surprisingly large chamber that had been scooped out of the natural rock by some kind of heat ray. It was like being in an ancient cavern where not even water had touched, but the walls and ceiling were coated with a chemical substance that glowed. It wasn’t as good as full-blown lighting, but it would have allowed anyone there to see around even if they weren’t wearing a special suit, and it gave all of them, appropriately suited up, more than enough light to amplify and use.
“We’re safe in here, even with suit power,” Krill told them. “This is fairly deep and well insulated from outside scans: It’s as close to a perfect natural jammer as I’ve seen. They must have been working here when Helena fell, and possibly after.”
Katarina Socolov looked around nervously at the cold, empty, glowing chamber. “But where did they go?”
“There’s nothing here to sustain a workforce for almost a century,” the colonel pointed out. “I suspect that much of the work was done by machines, probably coupled to a large database, AI unit, and neural net. I’m not getting much in the way of readings on it now, though.”
Krill checked her instrumentation and tried to use her special interfacing abilities. “It’s in complete shutdown,” she told them at last. “I doubt if it has the power to actually operate the device here, or, if it does, just powering up would be enough to bring Titan ships in force to see what was going on.”
Harker looked around. “Okay, so where is this thing? And what the hell is it?”
Krill looked around, then pointed. “Over there. Through that tunnel.”
They walked quickly over and through, Krill leading the way, only to emerge in a much smaller chamber almost too cramped to fit them in their suits.
It was certainly a control room of some sort. A series of screens were mounted in front of a central console, the screens creating a 180-degree forward view and rising up almost to the ceiling. The console itself was not nearly as elaborate. There were no gauges, small screens, dials, switches, or anything of the sort. There was a single command chair, but it was oddly shaped and hardly designed for normal human sitting. It was, in fact, quite large and bulky.
“The command chair is designed to interface with a specially designed suit,” Krill noted, examining it thoroughly. “I’d say the whole thing was designed to connect a human in a suit designed for control purposes with the computer net integrated into the room. The screens appear to be for the observers’ benefit. This is most certainly it, though. The control center for Project Ulysses.”
“All right,” Harker responded. “So what the hell it?”
“A control center, Mister Harker,” Juanita Krill replied. “A control center and aiming mechanism and a lot more for controlling a force nobody yet understands. Synchronize your suits for an incoming visual and I will transmit to you just what this is all about. I believe it is time that you know what the rest of us know, and perhaps I can also, at this point, fill in a few holes for the others.”
The synchronization took barely a moment, and then they all received an image of a vast starfield. Nothing in it looked familiar, although it appeared to cover a fair segment of space. What was telling was a bright and indistinct area shaped much like a giant eye that had to be an artifact of transmission; it couldn’t possibly be present in real life. It showed some stars and other structures, some clear, some a bit smudged as if obscured by gases, but what was important was that it did not match the surrounding starfield. It was like an eerie, eye-shaped window that looked right through the universe to another, different scene beyond. Even more strange, the eye would occasionally “blink”; it didn’t actually open and close, but the scene it revealed would shift radically, then, a bit later, shift back. It was pretty unnerving.
“That is Priam’s Lens,” Krill told them. “It is only a few parsecs from here, and it is what is known as a microlens. We’ve seen these since we could look into space with adequate equipment, but most tend to be of galactic or even supergalactic size. Walls and giant lenses
and bubbling voids. This one is quite small. Smaller than an average gas giant, in fact. It is, of course, not real. It’s a distortion caused by something else that is there. Something so powerful and so mysterious that to call it an artifact of a singularity would be like calling an amputation a hangnail. We may never actually know what it is, because it isn’t at the Lens but instead causes it from some other place connected to this sector by this hole in space-time. We have seen many natural wormholes before, although they usually close rather quickly after they open. Judging from its gravitational effects, this one has been around a very long time and shows no signs of shutting down. In fact, controlling or at least capping it was the primary problem to be solved.”
“They capped a natural wormhole?” Harker was astonished.
“Well, yes and no. We could not cap the Lens—it does not help to cap what you cannot even know is there—but the mere existence of the Lens causes other, rather small and limited, wormholes to form all about it. Those were the ones that they sought to cap, and, in one or two cases, they apparently did. Its properties, as I said, are unique in our experience. There were many theories about what was on the other end of the Lens that might be causing the effects, but nothing could survive getting there or being in its presence. For computational purposes, it was termed Olympus, but what it is will remain a mystery until we encounter it or one like it. There are several theories on what it might be, but each is so unique in itself that it stretches credibility.”
“Such as?” van der Voort pressed.
“Whatever it is, it masks itself, and the energy it puts out is enormous. We’ve never found a way to properly measure it. It spawns artifacts and shoots them out and around in all directions, which is also a characteristic of a black hole, only it no longer appears to be swallowing anything. The area of space-time around it is so unstable that these natural wormholes have formed. Somehow they are as stable as the ones we create, but hardly passive.”
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