A Mighty Fortress

by David Weber

  No, I would never have believed it without Merlin,she admitted. I would’ve wanted to, I think, but I wouldn’t have. Despite how much I love Cayleb, I don’t think even he could have convinced me of it. But I’ve got Merlin. We’ve got him. And given that, how could I not believe?

  “I wish you were here, Cayleb,” she said now, wistfully, and heard a soft chuckle in her ear.

  “I wish I were, too,” her husband said from their bedroom in Cherayth . . . well over six thousand miles away. “And not just because Edwyrd and I are going to find it a bit difficult to explain where you are if someone happens to notice you’re away.”

  The water- clear earpiece tucked into her right ear relayed his voice from the “security com” she wore on a golden chain around her neck.

  “Fortunately,” a second, deeper voice observed, “you’re one of the most talented . . . fabricators I’ve ever encountered, Cayleb.”

  “Any diplomat learns to lie with the best of them, Merlin,” the emperor replied.

  “Why do I suspect that you learned to ‘lie with the best of them’ trying to explain away little things like broken windows, stolen apples, and all those other childhood infractions of which you were undoubtedly guilty?” Merlin Athrawes inquired from the skimmer’s forward cockpit.

  “Because you know him?” Sharleyan suggested innocently.

  “Probably,” Merlin said dryly, and Sharleyan chuckled.

  Well, maybe the “commmunicator”is magic, she thought. But if it is, at least it’s magic I’ve started getting used to. I wonder if I’ll ever get to the point of taking it for granted the way Merlin does, though?

  Sometimes, she suspected she would; other times, she was positive it would never happen. It was simply too marvelous, too impossible, for that. Yet there were also those moments when her own lack of familiarity with Merlin’s miraculous toys actually became an advantage.

  The com she wore around her neck was a case in point. It was considerably smaller than the one Merlin had originally given her, and her lips twitched in another, less crooked smile as she considered why that was. It hadn’t occurred to her, at first, that coms could be smaller than the one he’d initially shown her, but as she’d encountered more examples of the often incredibly tiny bits and pieces of “technology” Merlin had shared with her and Cayleb, a possibility had crossed her mind.

  From the beginning, she’d decided that figuring out ways to conceal things like the communicators had to be one of their highest priorities. Small as the original, handheld units Merlin had given them might be, they were still obviously—and dangerously—alien- looking. They didn’t belong to Safehold’s homegrown (and allowable) technology, and anyone who saw one of them would realize that. It might not be very likely anyone ever would see one of them, but unlikely wasn’t the same thing as impossible, and as Merlin himself had pointed out, if the Group of Four ever discovered their enemies truly were dabbling in the proscribed knowledge of Shan- wei, the consequences could be disastrous.

  Especially if they could prove it.

  So she’d asked Merlin if there were smaller, even easier to hide “coms” tucked away in “Nimue’s Cave.” There hadn’t been, but as Merlin considered her question, he’d realized there was no inherent reason he couldn’t make one smaller. Most of the existing units’ size was more a consequence of having to provide something large enough for a human hand to manipulate comfortably than of any unavoidable technological constraints. The same basic capabilities could be provided by something far smaller, if those manipulation requirements were removed. In fact, they had been, prior to the Federation’s destruction, in the form of the surgically implanted communicators the Terran military had issued to its personnel. Of course, he didn’t have any of those, and surgically installing something which would cause the eyebrows of any healer who discovered it to become permanently affixed to his hairline would probably have been a bad idea, anyway. But if he had Owl redesign a com to respond only to spoken commands—for “voice activation,” as he described it—even an external com could be made little larger than the end joint of Sharleyan’s slender thumb.

  Which was precisely what he’d done, using the “fabrication unit” in the cave where Pei Shan- wei and Commodore Pei had hidden Nimue’s PICA (and all the other tools they’d provided for Merlin’s use) to manufacture the new devices. Just as he’d used the same fabrication unit to hide Sharleyan’s com in the golden pectoral scepter she wore about her neck. Cayleb wore a matching scepter—they were exact duplicates, down to the maker’s stamp and the tiniest scratch, of the pectorals she’d commissioned as a welcome-home gift for his return from Corisande—and they’d have to be literally smashed apart to reveal the forbidden technology concealed at their hearts.

  While he was at it, he’d produced yet another marvel in the form of the “contact lenses” Sharleyan wore at this very moment. At first, the thought of actually sticking something into her own eye—even something as clear and tiny as a “contact lens”— had been more than she was prepared to undertake. Cayleb had been more adventurous, however, and his delight had been so great Sharleyan had gathered her courage and taken the same plunge.

  She was glad she had, since the tiny lenses not only corrected the slight but irritating farsightedness which had been growing worse over the last couple of years, but also permitted her new, tiny com to project its imagery directly onto the lenses. She could view remote imagery, transmitted to her over the com, without the betraying “hologram” the original, larger com had produced. In fact, she and Cayleb could now view images garnered by Merlin’s SNARCs—those “Self- Navigating Autonomous Reconnaissance and Communication” platforms she still understood only poorly—which was actually letting them assist Merlin and the artificial intelligence called Owl in the endless struggle to cope with all the intelligence material Merlin’s network of SNARCs made available.

  Merlin had followed up the same idea and provided the same ability to everyone else who’d been added to what Cayleb had dubbed “the inner circle”— the list of people who knew the entire truth and had been cleared to use the coms. There weren’t many of them, unfortunately, but the list was growing slowly. In some ways, that only made it more frustrating, of course. The ability to stay in close, instant communication with people literally thousands of miles away—not to mention communicating with Owl, or the ability to view Merlin’s “visions” for themselves—was an advantage whose importance would have been literally impossible to overstate. At the same time, it was something which had to be used with extraordinary care. They couldn’t afford to have too many of the wrong people start wondering just exactly how it was that they managed to coordinate so perfectly over such vast distances, for example. And, in some ways, the ability to talk to some of their closest allies only made their inability to do the same thing with all of them even more incredibly frustrating.

  Still—

  Stop that, Sharley!she told herself severely. You’re letting your mind wander on purpose, and you know it.

  Which, she admitted, probably wasn’t too surprising, under the circumstances.

  She looked ahead and saw the vast curve of Safehold stretching out before them. It was beginning to grow lighter, she realized, and felt a fresh stir of awed delight as she realized they really were catching up to the day which had already left Chisholm so far behind.

  “How much longer to your cave, Merlin?” she asked, and heard his quiet, amused chuckle over the com. Apparently she hadn’t managed to pitch her voice quite as casually as she’d intended.

  “About twenty- five minutes, Your Majesty,” he replied. “Just over another seventy- five hundred miles or so.”

  .II.

  Nimue’s Cave,

  The Mountains of Light,

  The Temple Lands

  Sharleyan knew she was gaping like a child witnessing a stage conjuror’s illusions for the first time, but she couldn’t help it. For that matter, she hadn’t particularly cared, either, as she’d watched
in breathless, unalloyed delight while Merlin brought the recon skimmer down into the thicker air and bright daylight of the Mountains of Light.

  “Thicker air,” indeed!She snorted at her own thought. You’re still high enough you’d pass out almost instantly—not to mention freezing to death almost as quickly—if you weren’t locked up inside Merlin’s skimmer, you silly twit!

  The mountain peaks reaching up toward them were crowned with thick, eternal blankets of snow. It was already high winter in these latitudes, but those mountains would have been snow- covered what ever the time of year, she thought, and adjusted the visual display, shivering inside as she gazed at their bleak, icy summits and the glaciers oozing ever so slowly down their flanks, and watched ice crystals blow on the thin winds, glittering in the bright sunlight.

  It was the first time she’d ever been to the continent of East Haven. In fact, it was the first time she’d ever been to the mainland at all. She’d always intended to make the pilgrimage to Zion and the Temple, just as the Writ enjoined all of God’s children to make it, but there’d always been too many charges on her time, too many decisions to make. Too many political crises for the first true reigning queen in Chisholm’s history to deal with.

  And thelast thing I need is to be making any “pilgrimages” to the Temple now, isn’t it? she thought bitterly. Somehow, I don’t think I’d enjoy the Inquisition’s greetings. On the other hand, Vicar Zhaspahr, the day is coming when a lot of Charisians are going to be heading for Zion, whether the Inquisition wants to see us there or not.

  “You’re sure no one’s going to see us, Merlin?” she asked, glancing at the secondary display that showed Merlin’s face.

  “I’m sure, Your Majesty,” Merlin replied, smiling reassuringly back at her out of the same display. “Nobody really lives here, even in the summer, and the SNARCs have the entire area under observation. Trust me, there’s no one down there. And even if there were, I’ve got the skimmer in full stealth mode. We’d be invisible, as far as they were concerned.”

  “I don’t mean to dither,” she said half- apologetically.

  “Your Majesty—Sharleyan—you’re doing one hell of a lot better than I imagine I’d be doing if our positions were reversed,” he assured her.

  “I doubt that, somehow,” she said dryly. “It’s probably just that I’ve learned to pretend better than you realize. I think it comes with being a queen. Mahrak always told me it was vital to convince people you were calm and in charge, no matter how scared you really were.”

  “Father always told me the same thing,” Cayleb agreed in her ear, and she heard a sharper edge of envy in his voice. She knew he was watching the imagery relayed from the skimmer, but she also knew that wasn’t the same thing as actually being there.

  And I’m probably the only person who wishes he were here more thanhe does!

  She suppressed a nervous chuckle at the thought.

  “Either way, it won’t be much longer,” Merlin assured her. “Watch.”

  “Watch wh—?” Sharleyan began, then froze, her eyes wide, as Merlin flew straight into a sheer vertical face of stone.

  They weren’t actually moving all that quickly, a corner of her brain realized. Certainly not compared to the velocity of their flight here, at any rate! But they were going quite fast enough for her heart to leap up into her throat. She felt herself tensing uselessly for impact, then exhaled explosively as a portal literally snapped open in front of them.

  “Merlin!”

  “Sorry.”

  There was genuine apology in the deep voice . . . but there was also an undeniable edge of amusement, and Sharleyan made a mental note to find out whether or not it was possible to throttle a PICA. And, for that matter, to throttle her insufferable lout of a husband, she thought as she listened to him laughing over the com.

  “I suppose you think that was astonishingly funny, don’t you, Cayleb?” she inquired in a dangerously affable tone as the skimmer swept down the center of a huge, perfectly circular, brightly lit tunnel.

  “Ah, no. No, not actually,” the emperor said instantly, once again demonstrating his acumen as a tactician.

  “Good,” she told him. “As for you, Merlin Athrawes—!”

  “I know you’re going to make me pay for it,” he told her. “But . . . it was worth it.”

  Cayleb laughed again, and this time, Sharleyan discovered she had no choice but to join him. Her pulse was decelerating towards normal once more, and she shook her head as the tunnel stretched on and on ahead of them. They were moving slowly enough now for her to see that the stone walls around them were smooth and polished, almost like mirrors, reflecting the impossibly bright glow of the endless line of overhead lights running down the center of its curved roof. There was room enough for at least half a dozen craft the skimmer’s size to have passed through it abreast, and she found herself feeling very small—almost tiny—as they drifted onward through it.

  “How far down does this go?” she asked.

  “Well, the cave is underneath Mount Olympus,” Merlin told her. “At the moment, we’re still about two miles from the mountain itself, coming in from the north. And when we get there, we’ll be just over twelve thousand meters—that’s about seven and a half miles—down.”

  “Seven and a half miles?” Sharleyan repeated very carefully, and Merlin chuckled. There wasn’t a good deal of genuine humor in the sound, she noticed, and wondered why.

  “Well, that’s seven and a half miles below the summit, not below sea level,” he pointed out before a reason for the pain shadowing his chuckle had occurred to her. “Still, I suppose it’s deep enough to be going on with.” She sensed his shrug. “Commodore Pei and Shan- wei wanted to make certain no one would stumble across me before I woke up.”

  Sharleyan started to respond, then stopped herself as she suddenly grasped the reason for the pain in his voice. It was hard for her to remember, sometimes, that people who had been dead for the better part of a millennium, as far as she was concerned, had died only a handful of years ago, as far as the man who had once been Nimue Alban was concerned.

  “Anyway,” Merlin went on after a moment, his tone deliberately brighter, “after they tucked me away, they filled the entire complex with an inert atmosphere. Which means there wasn’t really anything down here that a flesh-and-blood human being could have breathed. But Owl’s got the environmental plant up and running, so there’s going to be plenty of air when we get there.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” Sharleyan said dryly, wondering exactly what an “inert atmosphere” was.

  “We strive to please, Your Majesty,” Merlin assured her. “And speaking of getting there . . .”

  Even as he spoke, the recon skimmer slid out of the tunnel into a far vaster chamber, and Sharleyan inhaled sharply as still more overhead lights came on, illuminating a stupendous cavern shaped like a flattened hemi sphere. Its walls curved up and inward, smooth as the tunnel had been, to join an equally smooth, flat roof a good two hundred feet overhead. Yet tall as it was, it was much, much wider, and as the skimmer drifted out into it, she realized its vast, pavement- flat floor was crowded with dozens of devices and machines which looked at least as marvelous as the recon skimmer itself. The skimmer slid gracefully onward for another few moments, then floated smoothly into a landing beside a duplicate skimmer, nestled in the lee of another, far larger aircraft of some sort. They touched down under the sweep of an enormous wing that dwarfed their own vehicle, and as Sharleyan stared up at the chamber’s roof, she realized the cavern was at least a thousand yards across.

  “My God,” she heard herself murmur.

  “What is that thing, Merlin?” Cayleb asked over the com, and she heard the wonder in his voice, as well.

  “Which ‘thing’?” Merlin asked.

  “The one you just landed next to!”

  “Oh.” Merlin shrugged. “That’s what we call an ‘assault shuttle,’ ” he said. “Think of it as one of the landing craft we took t
o Corisande, but designed to move troops from orbit down to a planetary surface.”

  “How many troops?” Cayleb’s voice was suddenly more intent, more calculating, and Merlin’s and Sharleyan’s images looked at one another with matching smiles as the emperor’s military instincts engaged.

  “Only a couple of hundred,” Merlin replied in a deliberately casual tone.

  “Only a couple of hundred, is it?” Cayleb repeated dryly.

  “More or less,” Merlin agreed, and Sharleyan straightened as the skimmer’s twin canopies opened.

  Cool air, fresh- smelling but with just a whisper of a stone- edged tang, flowed about her, and Merlin climbed out onto the self- extending boarding ladder and held out a hand to her.

  She took the hand and let him guide her down the ladder, though she was scarcely so old and feeble—or pregnant—that she needed the assistance. On the other hand, she realized, maybe she did need a little help. She was so busy gawking at all of the wonders around her that she didn’t realize she’d reached the bottom of the ladder until her questing toes jarred against solid ground instead of finding the next rung, and she stumbled, on the brink of falling, until that hand lifted her effortlessly back upright.

  She gave herself a shake, then smiled at Merlin.

  “I’m impressed,” she said.

  “Oh, you haven’t seen anything yet,” he assured her.

  “—and this is the medical unit,” Merlin told Sharleyan the better part of an hour later.

  They didn’t have an unlimited amount of time, but he’d deliberately taken long enough to let her settle down a bit. Her ability to cope with the wonders coming at her had both impressed and surprised him, although it probably shouldn’t have. He’d already known she was one of the smartest, toughest- minded people he’d ever met. Still, all of this had to be more than a minor shock to the system, however well prepared she’d thought she was, and they had long enough to let her regain her mental balance before she faced the examination for which she’d come the next best thing to halfway around the planet.