Priam's Lens

by Chalker, Jack L

  Now they made their way down into a drainage ditch half-filled with debris, going along toward a small open pipelike tunnel ahead.

  The emotional roller coaster caused by the Titan signals had subsided almost to a memory. Though they were extremely tired and bloodied on the elbows and knees from the night’s crawls, they saw the end of the quest ahead.

  It was dark and silent in there, but they weren’t afraid, not after what they had had to walk and crawl through just to get there.

  Some air circulated, probably from other old half-exposed vents and exhausts, but it was suddenly quite cool.

  “Let’s rest here and consider how we proceed from this point,” the colonel suggested, sinking to the damp rubble that served as a floor inside the tunnel. The others did the same.

  “I’d say that we have to find some way to get some light in here or we’re going to have to go totally blind,” Harker noted. “Hamille, can you see much in here?”

  “Better than you,” the Quadulan responded. “Not good enough.”

  “It’s odd, but even in this muck in the darkness I feel better than I have since we landed and lost our stuff,” Kat Socolov commented. “It’s like—well, like there was some kind of constant background noise that’s suddenly been cut off. Don’t you all feel it?”

  “I think I know what you mean,” a weary Harker responded. “For some reason, we’re no longer connected to the grid. They’ve been broadcasting constantly to us, to all of us, and now we can’t receive the signals. Odd that it wouldn’t penetrate this far. We can still see the opening.”

  “I can’t hear them,” Littlefeet said, amazed. “For the first time since I climbed the mountain, I can’t hear them. And we are almost on top of them!”

  “It couldn’t be so simple, or there would be organized underground societies on the Occupied Worlds,” Harker noted.

  “It’s not,” N’Gana told him. “I suspect that this place, like several of the high-industry areas dealing in very dangerous radiation and other forms of energy manipulation, required shielding. What shielded and protected the population of Ephesus does the same now for us. The odds are that it began with the topmost floors of the buildings above that no longer exist. Dissolved, they’ve lined this conduit. Now the buildup of debris channels the water away, so we’ve got this protected area. Ironic, isn’t it?”

  “Well, it’ll serve as an explanation until something better comes along,” Harker agreed. “But it’s pretty damned temporary. With no food, no uncontaminated water except this little bit in Spotty’s gourd, and no light, we can’t stay here long. One way or the other, we have to move.”

  “Light is our first, last, and only priority right now,” Socolov agreed. “With it we can deal with the rest. Without it, we don’t have a chance. Damn! I wonder what the Dutchman’s man did for light? He couldn’t possibly have been in any better shape than we are!”

  “Actually,” said an eerie voice just beyond in the blackness, “I turned on the lights when his presence awakened me. Shall I do the same for you?”

  TWENTY

  The Caves at

  the Gates of Oz

  All tiredness vanished. Every one of the group felt their hearts jump almost out of their chests. In an instant they were on their feet and eyeing the distant oval, which was now showing some sunlight filtering in.

  Littlefeet was in a combat stance, and N’Gana and Harker had reflexively pulled the gun barrel truncheons they still carried.

  “Who are you?” the colonel called. “Where are you? Show yourself!”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, as I’m not really much of anywhere at all,” the voice, a rather mild, almost bland man’s baritone, responded. “However, I do believe I should turn on illumination. I apologize that it is only emergency lighting, but I dare not risk anything more powerful.”

  The tube did not illuminate, but at the far end a pale yellow glow turned on, showing an entry into a larger area beyond.

  “What do you think?” Kat asked nervously.

  “A trick!” N’Gana hissed. “I don’t know what this is, but it’s not possible!”

  “We have a choice?” Gene Harker put in, considering their position. “Come on! If we’ve got light, let’s use it.”

  “Ghosts! I will not go down to where the ghosts live!” Littlefeet said firmly. “Anything living I will take on, even the demons themselves, but you can not fight a ghost!”

  “That’s no ghost, Littlefeet!” Kat tried to calm him.

  “I’m afraid that’s about what I am,” the voice responded. “But I will not harm you. I will not harm any of you. I cannot. I was built by your kind to serve and protect, and that is what I continue to do.”

  Both N’Gana and Harker started to breathe again. “You’re a computer?” the colonel asked.

  “I am a mentat. I was supervisor of this installation until the Fall. Please—come down, all of you. You cannot know how happy I am to see you. I began to fear that my message had not gotten out with Jastrow.”

  “It’s okay,” Harker told Littlefeet and Spotty, who still seemed more frightened of the voice than of what they’d just come through. “It’s a friend. We know who it is now and it is on our side. Please—you trusted us this far, trust us now.”

  They made their way carefully down toward the yellow glow, and finally reached a point where the great tube had a section broken out of one side. Looking through the break, the first underground level of the old complex showed in eerie indirect light.

  It was huge. It was also, astonishingly, pretty much intact. Robot arms and huge control cabs were all over, and sheets of various fabricated parts of some great machines were stacked up here and there.

  Just below was a catwalk, intact except for one section immediately below that had been more or less dissolved. The remaining section was only a couple of meters away, though, and easy enough to reach.

  “The breach in the pipe was quite recent—about five years ago,” the mentat told them. “When the water rushes down the pipe, a little more goes, but it’s not that serious. Only a small amount reaches here now.”

  One by one, they lowered themselves down onto the catwalk, each helping the next. Harker decided to be last, to ensure that Littlefeet and Spotty would go in as well. He not only didn’t want them to run, he particularly didn’t want them to go back up and outside and fall into the data stream of the Titans. Not now. Not after all this.

  The two natives managed, although they were transfixed by the vast scene in front of them. Neither had ever even been inside a building before, and certainly neither had seen the ancient places when they were still whole.

  “How are you getting power?” N’Gana asked the century-old machine. “Surely nothing is still running.”

  “No, the Titans absorb all our power like a sponge. It is only in the security areas with the low-level trickle charges—just a few amps, really—that any of the original stored power is still used or even exists. It is too low-level for their mechanisms to pick up. In truth, I was as surprised as anyone to get even this power. It is Titan power.”

  “Titan power!”

  “When their installation was fully constructed and turned on, the grounded base intersected one of my old power plates. So long as I do not vary the flow and simply use what seeps in, I have been able to maintain this level and my own existence. Of course, I am mostly shut down unless someone is here, and you are only the second in almost ninety years.”

  “Nobody was left trapped here when they took over?” Harker asked.

  “Yes, some were, but as I lost all power for a period of almost two years except trickle from batteries, this place was uninhabitable. No power, no food, and even the water turned off—well, they had to evacuate, those who could. I went dormant due to lack of power then and did not revive until Jastrow showed up a few years ago. Since then I have remained awake, in a standby setting. Unfortunately, I have been unable to do very much, since I cannot draw more power than seeps thro
ugh and I dare not use it for any mechanical purposes lest they detect it and eliminate this place and me. They are capable of doing so, but do not bother unless there is some threat. I have detected several security stations and some places that were almost certainly old refuges for survivors that appear to have been subjected to sufficient energy to turn them and everything inside into molten rock. It is a delicate balancing act. I have, however, managed to recharge virtually all the security and backup power supplies over the period.”

  “Where to from here?” N’Gana asked.

  “Down the catwalk, then use the ladders to go down to the floor. From that point, I will direct you to where the problem lay for Jastrow. I see that you have brought a Quadulan per my recommendations.”

  “That was your message? I thought it was that poor fellow’s,” Kat commented as they made their way along the very cold metallic catwalk.

  “Oh, Jastrow sent it. It was the only way. He was quite a brave man. He had the morals of a thief and the qualities of a devil, but I provided him with the only thing he could do that he found satisfying—revenge. He wasn’t afraid to die, I can tell you that, if in so doing he felt he could get the Titans. I was quite afraid that he wouldn’t make it to one of the only three remaining monitoring stations with sufficient reserve power to send a message. He couldn’t send it from here, obviously. The moment he did, there would have been a rather rapid and interested investigation and that would have given up the game.”

  They reached the old factory floor now, covered in fine dust. Harker noted that there were other prints there, those of a single barefoot individual coming and going. Although they were almost certainly those of the unfortunate Jastrow and years old, they looked as if they had been made yesterday.

  “Follow the footprints,” the mentat instructed. “You will come to it.”

  They walked across the ghostly floor, the huge machinery all around making it an eerie place. Every voice, every cough, was magnified and echoed back and forth in the place. Only the mentat’s voice was devoid of any acoustical naturalness; it seemed to come from a closed and baffled chamber.

  “What are these things in here?” Kat asked the computer. “What was it that was made here?”

  “Caps and plates for genholes,” the mentat responded. “The device works by capturing the stringlike pulses from the temporal discontinuity in the lens. It cannot, however, be truly capped or controlled. The only way to handle it is to capture a string and put it through a genhole and out somewhere else. Right now the junction caps direct it into an area of space where it can do no real harm. It is the junction that is the key to the operation. In relays, you can redirect it so that it emerges out of any genhole you determine. After that you have no control. You can, however, see the possibilities. If you can switch genholes at various junctions, then you can direct it to specific targets. There are countless genholes out there now, each a potential exit point. After that, though, it is wild. That is why they could not test it against anything planetary. Nobody knows what will happen. Nobody knows what the strings are, or if they are strings or energy spikes or temporal discontinuities or something else. Once you have an object generating these energy spikes by virtue of a temporal loop in which it is always trying to fall out of our universe, well, you can see we are in uncharted waters. That was why The Confederacy abandoned the idea even though it had no alternatives. Early tests were inconclusive. The trick was getting a burst short enough to keep from tearing apart everything.”

  “I don’t see why it wouldn’t destroy the genhole and the gates as well,” Kat commented.

  “It doesn’t. It is drawn to a charged plate as if it was magnetized and goes through the center,” the mentat explained. “In a sense, the twisted space-time inside a genhole appears to be a natural, or compatible, environment for it.”

  “So what is in the security modules below?” Harker asked. “What is it that they need up there?”

  “The control codes for the fourteen thousand six hundred and thirty-seven junctions established in this sector before Helena’s fall,” the mentat told them. “With these codes, anyone in the control center can route the string or pulse or whatever it is to any exit point under junction control. I made them all, you know, right here, and I am certain that they will work as designed. You can see why the codes and locations were kept separate, though. It is quite possible that the use of it on, say, Helena, would destroy the planet. Anything is possible. Nobody was sure what happened to the asteroids and small moons used in the early Confederacy tests, but it scared them. There was a sense that this was a weapon that would not only destroy the enemy but would also destroy what you wished to protect. The debate raged even as the Titans closed in. It was agreed that there would be a master code that no one person or family would have. Karas had part of it, Melcouri a second, and the supervising engineer, Doctor Sotoropolis, had the third. All three parts were needed before the station would even accept the coded commands. When the time came, sooner than they thought it would, Mel-couri and Karas had no qualms about giving the code, but Sotoropolis balked. His wife pleaded with him to withhold his consent since all that they had in the world, their families, their lives, were here. He vacillated long enough that it was almost too late. He was trying to set up a close-in gate that would intersect Titan ships instead of hitting them after they were down, but when they came, it was too swift. He wasn’t ready, and he died for it.” N’Gana stopped suddenly, causing an almost comic backup of the others. “Then what in hell’s the use of getting these target codes? We don’t have all three parts of the master code, right? Or is that down there, too?”

  For the first time, Harker realized just exactly what had led to all this, and even what had led the Dutchman to the family survivors offworld rather than attempting it with his own crew.

  “Sotoropolis gave the code to his wife,” he guessed. “The old diva’s had it all along. All these years she’s been living with the guilt that she stopped her husband from using the weapon. It cost him his life, her adopted world most of its life, and, even now, we have no other way to deal with the Titans.”

  “Then why didn’t she just come to your people—the Navy—with the codes?” Kat asked him. “Why all this time, all this misery?”

  “Her code was meaningless without the master target code modules,” he pointed out, “and they were down here and believed to be lost. She had the missing part of the master code, but no way to aim the damned weapon. The Dutchman knew where the necessary modules were and probably could have followed up his man’s failure and gotten them, but he wouldn’t have had the master code. Because they argued and agonized as the enemy came, the enemy won. Now they need each other to do what they couldn’t so long ago.”

  “Why weren’t the damned targets just programmed in on Hector?” N’Gana grumbled. “Damned amateurs!”

  “Probably fear that the Navy would close in and stop them,” Harker guessed. “Or take it over and maybe not use it where Karas and Melcouri were interested in using it. You’re right—it was a tragedy of errors and misjudgments and mistakes, and there’s enough blame to go around. That’s all over and done. It’s past. Enough people have agonized and suffered too long for those mistakes. No use in rehashing it. The important thing is that we may be able to give it a try at last. As the mentat said about Jastrow, if you can’t survive, at least get even.”

  Kat wasn’t so sure. “Um, Gene—if they use it here, then it might well shatter the whole damned planet. Might I point out that we are on said planet?”

  He nodded. “And we’re gonna be on it for quite a while. You know that as well as I do. I want to live, but I’d rather die and take them with me than live as one of their experimental subjects.”

  “But—”

  “Let us not refight the arguments of ninety years!” N’Gana snapped at her. “If we can do it, it will be used. Never mind even thinking of revenge. We have nothing else we can do.”

  “At least now you can feel for what t
hey were going through when push came to shove back then,” Harker noted. “Imagine having to do it with everybody and everything you hold dear in the balance.”

  She sighed. “Well, maybe they won’t even use it on us anyway. We’re kind of a backwater now in the fight.”

  “They have to,” Harker pointed out. “If they don’t use it and knock out the Titans here on Helena, then the Titans are going to be quickly turning Hector into a molten mass. Krill and company are in a worse position than we are. It’s possible we can escape and live—if you call it living. They can’t even take a practice shot. The moment they get the codes they have to shoot and shoot straight at us. We’d better damned well think about that angle. Never mind what happens if it doesn’t work. What if it does?”

  • • •

  Although much of the ancient factory seemed intact, the far end was a real mess. Here some of the structure had collapsed.

  “It happened when they began to expand the base,” the mentat told them. “The bedrock shifted, then cracked, and there was a general collapse like a small earthquake.”

  Not only was there a great deal of rubble, but just beyond was the bank of freight elevators that carried material from one level to another. The giant cages were at the bottom where they’d fallen, and because these were magnetic levitation systems, there were no cables—just deep, dark shafts.

  “Jastrow actually managed to get down to the bottom level,” the mentat told them. “However, the car itself has been crushed at the bottom, blocking access to the tunnels beyond. I have no sensors in the area, so I could not see or predict what was down there. I know he worked down there, using metal rods and other scavenged items to try and enlarge the hole, to get in there, but after two days he was only bloodied and scratched. He said it was impossible. That only a Pooka had a chance of getting through that.”

  “I do not like that term,” Hamille croaked. “I am Quadulan.”