I was no more than a third of the way up and had found nothing useful. I thought briefly about turning around but I was not in the mood to turn around. I had killed four mutated apes and watched one of my friends die. I was angry. I was more than angry, I was enraged. I wanted to kill some more. I dimly realized that this was not a smart way to feel but I just didn’t feel like being smart.
I turned back to the path and resumed my trek up the mountain.
Chapter 19
The next platform was a charnel house. The bodies of men in black enemy uniforms lay entwined with the bodies of five more apes. The place was loud with the buzzing of flies and hornets. Some of the bodies had begun to swell in the heat. A miasma of decay seemed to hang over the platform and it stank. The center of the platform was clear, however, and all the bodies belonged to the People’s Army, so somebody had taken the time to clean the place up, at least to remove their own dead or injured.
It was not immediately apparent who or what had killed them but a few moments after I stepped off the trail, a section of camouflaged rock slid to the side and three combat robots emerged. Their black, bulbous heads immediately focused on me. “Oh, shit,” I murmured and turned to run. A black, filigreed gate slid from the rock behind me and blocked the stairway. On the other side of the platform, another gate slid out in front of the upper stairway. I was trapped with three combat robots and twenty dead bodies.
I had fought a combat robot before and I knew how they worked. They were designed to overwhelm their opposition but they were not weapons of mass destruction. There were cheaper ways to cause mass destruction. The original idea behind their manufacture had been to conduct surgical strikes against enemy cities and installations and to demoralize enemy soldiers. They were faster and stronger than any human and were almost invulnerable to hand held weapons but they did have a few weak spots, particularly the sensor array around their abdomens and the main gyroscope in their otherwise useless heads.
I didn’t wait for them. I charged.
The three robots separated as they emerged from the mountain. Two flashed to the sides, flanking me and one stood still, waiting for me to get within striking distance. Before I reached it, I dove to the ground, spun and cracked off two shots from the rifle. The robots blurred, moving impossibly fast but they were too late to escape completely. One charge impacted against a robot’s abdomen. It blinded the thing, at least temporarily, and it began to spin in place, heavy metal arms forming a whirling protective barrier around its body. The other robot moved so fast that I could barely see it. The explosive shell hit it on the right side, just above the leg. It fell but was barely damaged.
By this time, the third robot had reached me. I dropped the gun and grabbed at its arms, sending all the electricity I could muster into its body. It was useless. The thing barely paused, then, before I could move, it reached out its huge metal hands, grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me. My head rattled. My vision grew dim. I heaved my legs up and kneed the thing in the groin, a useless maneuver but maybe it would distract it for a moment and I had nothing left. I was going to die. I just wanted to inflict as much damage as I could before it killed me.
Dimly, I could feel a trickle of blood leaking down the side of my face. The blood dripped onto the metal bands holding me in place. The robot froze. It held me that way for almost a minute, while I gasped for air and tried to recover my senses.
I could sense radio waves zipping back and forth between the three robots. The first one stopped its rotation. The second rose to its feet and stood still. The one holding me put me down and released its grip. I stood there, facing it, breathing deeply. It turned and walked back to the man shaped hole in the mountain and entered.
I looked at the two that were left. One of them raised a hand and waved it toward the entrance, a strangely human like gesture. I looked at the other. It stood unmoving. I took a step toward it and tried to walk around. It raised its arm, blocking my way, but otherwise made no movement.
I sighed. Apparently, I was not being given a choice, though this didn’t bother me as much as it might have since it looked like I wasn’t fated to be dead, at least not at the moment.
“Alright,” I said. “Why not?”
I walked into the entrance and found myself in a small metal room with an airlock door on the other end. The door was open. Light flooded into the room in which I was standing. I walked through into a much larger room. The walls and the floor of this room were polished rock. Soft luminescent lights glowed from the ceiling. The room was empty of furniture.
A man stood near the far door. His arms hung at his sides and he carried no weapons. Dressed in combat fatigues and a green, military style jacket, with deep blue eyes and sandy hair, he was about my height and appeared no older than thirty. He drew a deep breath when he saw my face and he broke into a radiant smile.
“Lord Oliveros,” he said. “Welcome home.”
“Huh?” I said.
“Lord Damian Oliveros was Governor-General of Illyria at the time of the Hirrill invasion. This was his headquarters and principal residence.”
I knew of Damian Oliveros, of course. Every school child did. His exploits were legendary. Governor General and Viceroy, Damian Oliveros had kept Illyria stable and relatively united after the Usurper, Thomas Montgomery invaded the home worlds, overthrew the crown and the Empire dissolved into ruin and civil war.
It didn’t last, of course. Once Oliveros was gone, Illyria had fractured into the nation states that persist to this day. Our own civil wars and dark ages and slow ascent back to technological civilization followed, but it all would have been much worse without Damian Oliveros.
Sagittarius Command. That was the name of the ancient base. Three thousand years ago, Sagittarius Command had burrowed deep inside Mount Sindara and spread out for many kilometers down and beyond the mountain slopes. It was a city, but all traces of the city outside of the mountain were gone, eaten away by the heat and the jungle and millennia of time and multiple invasions, ground into ashes and dust. Deep underground, if an archaeologist were to dig into the jungle, he would find concrete and pottery and statues and the charred ruins of ancient buildings, now long gone. Only here, inside the mountain, was anything left.
“You, it seems, are Damian Oliveros’ direct descendant. The robots are programmed to recognize certain genetic markers. Yours is one of them.” He smiled ruefully. “An assumption was made that the bearers of such genetic markers would be on our side. Perhaps this assumption was naïve.”
His name was Edward Lane, the Preceptor of Sagittarius Command. We sat together in a strangely mundane looking office, with a wooden desk, a couch along one wall, a couple of battered but comfortable chairs. A monitor screen, made to look like a window, displayed a scene at the base of the mountain. Winston Smith, or somebody working with him, had called in reinforcements. An army was massing there, preparing to attack.
“Our screens fell a few hours ago, not that the screens were much of an impediment. They kept out laser fire and missiles but they don’t want to destroy this facility. They’re trying to capture it.”
I nodded. We had walked in under the screens; so had the enemy troops and their mutated apes.
“They’ve already taken the lower levels,” Lane said with a resigned shrug. “We evacuated them years ago and all the useful tech was stripped, so we haven’t lost much, yet. Still, they’re wearing us down. Unless things change, we’re going to be overwhelmed.
“Our ancestors had quantum teleportation. Their starships were twice as fast as current, Second Empire designs. They had machines that could read minds and transmute matter. You wanted a new house, a new chair, a larger bed? No problem, just think about it, it will arrive in the mail tomorrow. Funny, though, how much less one really desires when you can have anything at all.” Lane smiled. “This was in the last days of the Empire. At first, everybody wanted a palace of their own. After a few years, most of them grew bored with showing off their stuff. After
all, it was no different than anybody else’s stuff. When anything material is within your grasp, just by making a wish…well, knowing you can have it is usually enough. When the pressure to make a living was removed, most people discovered that what they wanted most was to hang out with their friends.” His face grew thoughtful. “And have a lot of sex,” he said.
“Well, that doesn’t surprise me,” I said.
He shrugged. “None of this is relevant now. Unless things change, we’re going to lose.”
Lane’s ancestors had been here for over two thousand years, watching, waiting, guiding when they could, recruiting from the outside to keep the blood lines fresh. “You can’t marry your sister for two thousand years and expect good results. There weren’t enough of us. In the early days, when the Empire had abandoned this planet and society everywhere was collapsing, we had hundreds of agents in the outside world, influencing events, guiding and cajoling, working for positive change. We were like the ancient Christian monasteries during the middle ages on Earth. We preserved the intellectual heritage of mankind. It was our charge, you see. Serve the Empire, serve mankind; but it’s been centuries since there were enough of us to do more than maintain the status quo. During the dark ages, when technology on this planet had almost vanished, there didn’t seem to be much point. Sagittarius Command was almost abandoned more than once, but there were always at least a few that tried to keep the lights on, to fulfill our mission.”
“I don’t understand why you couldn’t do more,” I said. “You were an island of stability in a world that was falling apart.”
Lane frowned at me. “It’s one base on one small island. It was decided very early on that our presence here had to stay secret. We were invaded more than once, you see, and the outside city was destroyed. After the first few centuries, a really determined army could have occupied us at almost any time.”
I shrugged. “So, you do have these things?” I asked. “Quantum teleportation, an improved star drive, the ability to transmute matter?”
He gave me a sad smile. “No,” he said, “we don’t. It’s possible that the plans still exist, but it’s been centuries since we could access the relevant databases.” He shook his head. “The Second Empire has technology beyond any on Illyria, though it is nowhere near as advanced as that of the First Empire. If they capture this facility, they may be able to access that data.” He raised an eyebrow. “Or they may not. We don’t know.”
“Then you have a choice to make,” I said.
“And what choice would that be?”
“You can choose who you give it to, or you can choose to destroy it. Perhaps you don’t know it but Winston Smith has overplayed his hand. Most of the civilized world wants him dead. Say the word and I can have an armada from Meridien and our allied nations here within hours.”
He shook his head. “You’re not going to do that.”
I frowned. “Why not? We can save you.”
“Because despite whatever protestations the representatives of the Second Empire may have made, Winston Smith is not acting alone. He’s an intelligence agent, and he has the full and total backing of his government. Oh, they wanted to maintain some semblance of plausible deniability but for stakes like these?” He shook his head. “If Meridien tries to get involved, they will find themselves at war with the Second Empire. Meridien cannot win such a war. No nation, no group of nations on this planet can.”
I stared at him. “The Empire consul said that his government was not involved. He was telling the truth.”
“You know this for a fact?”
“Yes,” I said. “I can tell.”
“Can you?” Lane shrugged. “Then his government was keeping him in the dark.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Oh, indeed. We still have our sources, you see. Even on the Eastern continent.” He shrugged. “Not many, but our information is reliable.”
I looked at the screen, at the army massing down below, preparing their final assault on Mount Sindara. Edward Lane looked at me looking at the enemy and then he said, “There is one possibility, one thing that might help.”
My eyes snapped to his face. “Tell me more,” I said.
Chapter 20
“Lord Oliveros was a crafty one. The politics of the First Empire were Byzantine, everybody plotting against everybody else, vying for power and position. He was a distant cousin of the Imperator, distant enough so that he had no realistic claim to the throne but close enough to be regarded with suspicion. It’s unclear how he managed to get posted to Illyria. Maybe the Imperator’s courtiers wanted him far away. Maybe this was his aim all along, because once he arrived, as viceroy, his word was absolute law.
Lane smiled. “This should do it. Ready?”
I was having serious second thoughts but I wasn’t going to back out, not now. “Yeah,” I said.
“Excellent.” Lane puttered with the keyboard, frowning, and then the helmet descended on my head. I could feel multiple pinpoints of sharp pain, followed by numbing cold as the helmet injected local anesthetic beneath my skin. Thin delicate wires began to bore into my skull. I knew this and the thought of what was happening made me mildly nauseous, though by now, I felt no physical discomfort.
“You do know what you’re doing, don’t you?” I asked.
“Pretty much.”
“Oh, great,” I said.
“Relax. The instructions are clear.”
“It’s been what? Six hundred years?”
“A little longer than that—seven hundred fifty, actually, but the machines monitor themselves and undergo a full service every ten years. Don’t worry; it will work.”
What was it the little AI had said, back in Wittburg? Over time, errors creep into the best of programs, a stray cosmic ray, the smallest electrical charge can change the orientation of binary data. I didn’t have as much confidence in this scheme, or in the sanctity of his equipment, as Edward Lane. Frankly, the whole idea was insane.
But it was the best idea we had.
Except to run, I thought. Running was an option. I was trained in hiding and good at surveillance and Lane had implied that escape tunnels under the mountain did exist. Yes…running from the fight that could no longer be avoided was most certainly an option, but not one that I wanted to take. And, of course, neither did Edward Lane.
“Lord Oliveros kept his secrets to himself. He didn’t have a lot of friends and only a few trusted advisors. We know he had resources that only he could access. His second wife and youngest daughter were assassinated. He barely survived. It made him bitter and suspicious.”
“No shit,” I muttered.
“Hmm.”
The helmet covered my eyes but my ears still functioned. I could hear Lane’s fingers clattering over his keyboard.
We had sat in his cramped little office only an hour before while he explained it to me. “There were many Lords Oliveros before him but he was the best of them all, the most successful, at least. He knew how to play the game. Shortly before his death at the age of four hundred and twelve, he made a copy of his memories and personality. Only his direct descendants can access them. This has been done four times before you. A direct descendant of Lord Damian Oliveros can plug into the database and learn all of his secrets. Maybe there’s something there that can save us.”
“What happened to the other four?” I asked.
He looked away, frowning. “The second died during the memory transfer. The machine killed him. Apparently, he was not a direct descendent, after all. One of Lord Oliveros’ daughters-in-law was rumored to have had affairs. The rumors were apparently true. The other three came through the process in good health.”
“What happened to them then?”
“They all became successful. They all grew rich. None of them ever talked about what they learned.”
“So, there might be nothing in these memories that can help our situation.”
Edward Lane pursed his lips and frowned. “That is true.”
/> Maybe. Maybe not. I shook my head and hoped I wouldn’t regret this. “I’ll do it,” I said.
Lane nodded. “I thought you would.”
So here I was, body strapped down to a metal chair, head enclosed in a padded metal helmet. I could feel…something. Small flashes of light appeared in front of my eyes. Distant, burbling sounds filled my ears, the sound of running water, the sound of a bird chirping…and suddenly, I was sitting in a room across from a man who looked much like me. He had a few strands of gray in his hair, sharp eyes and a suspicious mouth. He peered at my face and gave me a thin smile. “Your name?” he said.
“Douglas Oliver.”
He clucked his tongue. “I am Lord Damian Oliveros. Apparently, I am your ancestor. Tell me your situation.”
I did, and Lord Oliveros nodded. He reached out and touched my forehead with the tip of one finger. “Sleep,” he said, and the world went dark.
In my dreams, I held the body of my daughter. Her face looked peaceful amid the wreckage of our vehicle. I looked down upon my wife. She did not look peaceful at all. Her face held a snarl, defying her killers. Revenge, I silently vowed. You will both be avenged.
It took thirty years and the loss of a son but I made good on that vow. Was it worth it? Possibly not, but at stake was more than the honor of Clan Oliveros. It was necessary for my survival and the survival of all that I had worked for to demonstrate, publicly and clearly, that violence against my family and my person would avail my enemies nothing, would instead cost them everything.
Those who wished me harm lived their lives in fear, and that was good. It was better to be feared than to be loved, because love can never be counted on and fear lasts forever.
I lived a long life, full of violence and regret but there was triumph mixed in as well. I made the world a better place. I preserved a little bit of civilization among the ruins and the ashes. All of my children, the ones who survived, fought for the Empire. Most of them never came back, but a few did, and I cherished them, as fathers have always cherished their children. I gave them everything that I could and we were strong together. We ruled this world with compassion and strength.
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