Here is what you seek. Here is what you need. Take it. It is yours. Use it well and wisely.
I saw another young man come before me, seeking aid. He had my face. I gave it to him. A young woman, afraid but resolute, who put on the helmet and received the knowledge that she required to defeat her enemies. Another, who sought what he had no right to, who died, and another, and now, one more.
Do not fear. It is here, and here, and here.
The Imperator stood before me while I knelt at his feet. The Imperator was wise, as always, but he was dying. We both knew this. The stars shone through the window of his ship, blazing in the endless night. “Go, Damian, before I kill you.” He smiled at me. “I don’t want to, but if you stay I shall probably have to. You represent too great a threat. You are too smart for my own good, and for the good of my children.”
“As you command, Majesty, so shall I obey.”
He smiled, a soft, knowing smile. “Of course you shall. Your loyalty has never been in question. It is the people around you who cannot be trusted.”
And so I left him and I left the world of my birth and came here and prospered, as he and I both knew that I would, and you have followed after me, seeking wisdom.
Here and here and here. He/I showed me. He/I nodded, and understood.
“Do you see? Do you understand?”
“I do. I do understand.”
“Good,” he said, and I agreed.
Chapter 21
I groaned.
Edward Lane’s face loomed over me, looking worried. “I’m alright,” I said, and I was, sort of…I just wasn’t sure who I was. The memories of Lord Damian Oliveros filled me, overlaying my own. I drew a deep breath. This was going to take a little while.
Edward Lane nodded. “Don’t try to push it. It will be confusing until you incorporate the new memories.” His face grew pensive. “You are now the revenant of Lord Damian Oliveros. Supposedly, in the days of the Empire, only the best and brightest were allowed to receive such memories. It was a great honor to be one of the chosen.”
I shook my head, still feeling dizzy. “What happened to this Utopia that you described to me? Where anyone could have everything that he wanted?”
He gave me a smile that said I should have known better. “Any material thing that he wanted. The machines could never give a man respect or status or authority or power. Somebody has to give the orders. Somebody has to be in charge. These are things that men will always fight for.”
Just then, a small, quick vibration came through the walls, then another. “They’re breaking into the next level,” Lane said. “We’re losing.”
“How many of you are there?” Strange that I had never asked him this, but then a lot had happened in a short period of time.
“Three hundred,” he said.
Naturally. I almost laughed. “You have combat robots,” I said. “How many?”
“Twenty-seven,” Lane said, and I winced. Twenty-seven combat robots were worth at least five times their number in a fight, but even that was not going to be enough.
“We need to buy time,” I said.
“Have you learned anything useful? Anything at all? Can you save us?”
I cocked my head to the side, considering this question. “Yes,” I said, “and maybe.”
“Better than nothing,” he said.
Oh, yes, it was better than nothing. It was much, much better than nothing…but was it enough? “And how many men do they have?” I asked.
He hesitated. “Hard to tell. They’ve been taking out our sensors. Maybe two thousand.”
“Where are their reinforcements coming from?” Not that it really mattered; I was just curious. It might matter in the future, I thought, if we survived this.
“We don’t know. A steady stream of airships has been arriving. Finlandia is letting them through.”
“Let’s go,” I said. “We have a lot of work to do.”
Sagittarius Command, or what was left of it, consisted of seventeen levels inside Mount Sindara. The bottom two levels, the largest, had served mostly as storage and training facilities in the days of the Empire. They had been relatively easy to break into and occupy. Winston Smith and his forces had then burrowed through the rock and the inner steel lining of the next three levels. These had been living quarters, for the most part. The enemy now occupied more than fifty percent of the entire volume of Sagittarius Command. The computers, the power sources, the shield generators, the research facilities were all higher up in the mountain—for the moment, beyond their reach.
“Take me to Command Facility One A,” I said.
Lane looked momentarily embarrassed. “Where is that?” he asked.
I looked at him, amazed. “You don’t know?”
He shrugged.
No, I thought. Of course, he did not know. “I’ll show you,” I said.
Two minutes later, at the end of a seemingly blank corridor, I placed my palm upon a hidden sensor and a door slid seamlessly open. Lane’s eyes grew huge. “Come,” I said.
We entered a small room and three lights in the ceiling glowed. “Lord Oliveros,” a soft voice said. “Where to?”
“The Eyrie,” I said.
We moved upward with a smooth whoosh. Edward Lane shook his head. “We never knew this was here,” he said.
“Sagittarius Command has many secrets,” I said. “There’s a whole separate installation that Damian Oliveros and his successors kept to themselves. Why don’t you know this?”
Lane shook his head. “Six hundred years ago, there was an accident. We’re not even certain what happened. The preceptor at that time was newly invested. His predecessor had recently retired and the new preceptor had not yet picked a successor. It was customary for the retiring preceptor and his replacement to go on a tour of our facilities throughout the continent. It helped to foster a smooth transfer of power and responsibility. There was a freak storm, perhaps also an explosion. It may have been sabotage. We just don’t know. Their airship fell from the sky and all on board were killed.” He shrugged. “Only the preceptor, and a revenant of Damien Oliveros, if one existed, possessed the codes and could access the databases. We have lost so much, over the years.”
“You needed a descendent of Damien Oliveros. This place won’t work without one. There must be others out there. Why didn’t you look?”
He frowned at me. “The population of the city of Rome at the height of the Roman Empire was over a million, the greatest metropolis of its time. At the depths of the dark ages, only a few hundred years later, the population of Rome had fallen to barely ten thousand, ignorant and starving, scrabbling through the ruins of their ancestors. So it was with Sagittarius Command. As I’ve told you, this base was almost abandoned more than once. Our resources were…limited.
“Have you ever heard of the Genesis Corporation?” Lane asked.
“No,” I said.
“It serves some of the same functions as your Guilds. It’s a research and investment firm, and it gives financial support to new technologies. We own it. It was founded over a century ago, at the height of the industrial revolution. At that time, we still had some remnants of technology, the shield generators for instance, and fusion power, that nobody else on this world possessed. Genesis was, and remains our primary resource. Genesis has been searching for descendants of Damian Oliveros for all of its existence. It’s yet to find one.”
Lane shook his head. “Damien Oliveros is a distant legend. Today, his name is barely remembered but for hundreds of years, Damien Oliveros was considered the greatest hero in this world’s history. Every orphan took the name of Oliveros, or Oliver, or Olivetti or some such variation. Dozens of families that could claim a plausible connection changed their names. There were hundreds. We investigated as many of them as we could. Your grandfather came from Cornwall?”
I nodded.
“The Olivers of Cornwall have no relation whatsoever to Damien Oliveros. We know this for a fact.”
I
frowned. “My mother, then?”
“Apparently. What was your mother’s name?” Lane asked.
“Sarah Morrigan.”
Lane smiled sadly. “Who would have thought? And yet here you are, the answer to our prayers, when it’s too late to do us any good.”
Three hundred men, and twenty-seven combat robots…I sighed to myself. The numbers didn’t really matter. The plan I was considering did not depend upon mere numbers. The elevator ground to a halt. The door opened upon another blank corridor, the floor covered with a thin layer of dust. The end of the corridor opened into a small, almost blank room at the exact center of the highest level of the base, a level that appeared on no maps and was thought to be solid rock.
A small, low table circled the room. Inside the circle sat a command chair, equipped with a retractable helmet and a holoscreen. I sat in the command chair. “Sit down,” I said.
Lane took a seat at the circular table, slightly behind me so that he could see the screen over my shoulder. I slid the helmet down over my head and opened my eyes. A multitude of pictures shot past on the inside of the helmet. Stop, I thought. Display, and the machine did as I ordered.
Lane sucked in his breath. Winston Smith stood on the lowest level of the installation, Derek Landry at his side. His troops were lined up at parade rest, standing on the concrete floor, rifles at their sides, hands behind their backs. Their discipline was less than I would have expected from trained troops. Some of them shifted in place. Some rolled their eyes. A few slouched and a few others looked bored. Neither Smith nor Landry seemed to mind. And why should they? They had more than enough resources to do the job.
“Winston,” I said, my voice rolling like thunder in the confined space.
A stir went through the crowd. Most of them cringed. All of them raised their heads and peered wildly around. A holograph flickered against one wall and I almost laughed. It was the long dead form of Damian Oliveros, looking imperiously out over the crowd. Winston Smith cleared his throat. “Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m your worst nightmare, Winston,” I said, and I almost cackled. “I’m going to kill you, Winston. I’m going to kill all of you!”
The lights in the room flickered. The hologram vanished and the crowd shifted, looking for one long moment as if they might bolt. “Silence!” Smith roared. The men started at his voice. A few stepped forward but then they shook themselves, blinked a few times, took a deep breath and slowly settled into place.
“This is just talk,” Winston said, “and talk is cheap. We outnumber them ten to one. We’ve already taken half of this installation and we’re going to take the rest. You’re soldiers. Act like it.”
Most of them weren’t actually soldiers, I reflected. Putting a rifle in a man’s hands and a uniform on his body does not automatically turn him into a soldier. They were more of a mob, but a dangerous mob, nonetheless, and they did indeed outnumber us by almost ten to one.
“Alright,” I said to Edward Lane. “Here is what we’re going to do.”
What we were going to do was fight for every inch. We knew the territory. They didn’t. If my plan worked, it would be enough to salvage at least something from this fiasco. A big if.
Winston Smith evidently saw no advantage in waiting. On the contrary, the longer he waited, the greater the chance we had of demoralizing his troops. His men crawled up the mountainside, occupying all the stairs and levels, and began to bore in, but it wasn’t going to be easy for him. The leaders of Sagittarius Command had had many years to prepare.
At Edward Lane’s order, explosive charges set into the mountain went off in sequence, from the bottom up. The mountain shook. The stairs crumbled into dust and the bodies of over one hundred soldiers evaporated into bloody mist. The stone platforms, filled with enemy troops, released from their moorings and fell into the jungle and the sea. Two hundred more of Winston Smith’s men fell with them.
But that was all we had, on the outside, at least. Amid the rubble and the dust and the loose, unstable rock, five hundred more enemy troops climbed up and began to set charges of their own.
The mountain shook again.
I sat in the Eyrie with Lane, monitoring it all. At over fifty different points, enemy troops brought in miniature earth diggers and set more small charges. They had ground penetrating sensors. They knew where to seek the easiest access to the inside of the base.
Our troops waited for them. A puff of dust falling into a room: an office perhaps, a lab, even a bedroom. A hole appears, then widens and then soon after, an enemy soldier wriggles his way inside. He falls, his body riddled by bullets or cut nearly in half by hand held lasers…and so it goes, one after the other, soldier after soldier after dead and dying soldier.
For a little while, it looked like it might be enough.
The combat robots did the most damage, as we had hoped and expected, but the mutated apes were almost their match. Momentarily, the attacking soldiers fell back and let the apes take the lead and soon, at the price of over fifty dead apes, the robots were dismembered and then dismantled.
I wondered what would induce a soldier to be first into this chaos. The first one into a hail of death is going to die. No chance, no choice; but others soon follow, and the defenders are slowly, and then not so slowly, pushed back and are soon outnumbered and then the fighting rages through the halls and then, inexorably, the tide has turned. The defenders become the hunted, charging blindly down empty corridors, seeking a place to stand and attack and take back the territory that they regard as their own. Except that soon, all too soon, there is no place left to stand.
There is nothing left.
Chapter 22
Five hours had passed. Grimly, almost silently, Edward Lane and I watched the systematic destruction of Sagittarius Command, a bulwark against history that had stood for over three thousand years; and we watched with grim satisfaction as enemy troops poured into the mountain.
Winston Smith set himself up in a command center and through the thousands of small sensors set into every wall and facet of the base, we watched him watching and giving orders as his soldiers began the final mopping up. Finally, Lane turned to me. “It’s over,” he said. “It’s time.”
I nodded and threw a small switch on the command panel; the order to evacuate would be transmitted to all our remaining troops. Lane and I rose to our feet and I pressed a series of buttons set into the rocky wall. A man-sized panel slid aside. A light went on. We entered and walked down a series of stairs, turning and twisting deep beneath the surface of the mountain. It was a long walk. Half an hour later, the stairs ended in a concrete platform. At the end of the platform, beyond a metal railing and beneath a jagged, rocky ceiling, lay a seemingly endless expanse of cold, dark water that led through a series of man made caverns out into the sea.
Fifteen men waited for us on the platform, all who were left.
The night before, I had explained the situation to all three hundred inhabitants of Sagittarius Command. I told them what the memories of Lord Damian Oliveros had revealed to me. I explained the plan that Edward Lane and I had devised and I asked for volunteers. I asked for fifty to remain. I knew none of them, of course, but they all knew me, or at least, they knew what the ghost of Damian Oliveros meant to them and to their hopes for the future. Almost all of the three hundred had volunteered and Edward Lane selected the ones he wanted. All the rest of the men and women of Sagittarius Command left shortly after.
And of the fifty who had stayed to fight, only these fifteen remained.
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you all.”
They were bloody, aching and tired. Most bore injuries, but they were unbowed. One of them, a large, bearded man with unruly black hair and sharp blue eyes, looked for a moment like he was about to say something, then he gave a tired grimace and merely shrugged.
Damian Oliveros had been a brilliant man. I doubt that he foresaw this exact scenario, but close enough. I walked over to the sheer rock wall and pulled
open a panel. Behind the panel sat a metal box, and inside the box were five colored plastic buttons. I pushed them in the proper sequence and a holographic display lit up all around me. Suddenly, I was sitting behind a desk in an office, except that it was not my face that appeared in the holo. It was the face of Damian Oliveros, with a framed painting of Mount Sindara on the wall behind me and a vase full of cut flowers standing on the desk by my side. Sagittarius Command was riddled with such installations, all unobtrusive, all hidden, most in plain sight. Damian Oliveros and his successors had wanted to be able to function in their appointed role as Governor-General from anywhere in the base and at any time.
“Attention,” I said, and my voice echoed out along the platform that we stood on and out into all the rooms and hallways and into every corner of Sagittarius Command, and on every screen in the facility, the face of Damian Oliveros smiled down upon them. “This is Lord Damian Oliveros speaking. My message to you is simple. Observe.” I held up a small handheld and compressed the top. Somewhere, high above our heads, the mountain shuddered. Even here, thousands of meters below, we could feel the vibration. A gout of flame spewed out into the sky and rocks and boulders rained down upon the jungle and the sea.
I gave them a moment to digest what had just happened and then I spoke again. “What you have just observed was merely a demonstration, so that all of you will clearly understand me and believe what I am about to say. There are almost two thousand enemy troops inside Sagittarius Command at this moment, a rag tag band of thieves and murderers pretending to be an army, and it is this band of thieves and murderers that I am now addressing. The forces that have attempted to resist your invasion have been defeated and are now nearly destroyed. You sought to capture this base and in this, you have succeeded, but now this base has captured you. As I have just demonstrated, the Sagittarius Command has been mined with explosives.
The City of Ashes Page 14