by Johan Kalsi
“I think this: the Ambassador lied to you about the Canon Archive sending an avatar, and that the Ambassador told you to abandon the search for the secret door. I think you are following orders, and possibly believe the lie to be true, but are nonetheless perpetuating a falsehood for the Ambassadors political purposes.”
“How fascinating,” said Gretz. “Do you have evidence that leads you to believe this?”
“Only this – there is no way that the Canon Archive has immediately sent an avatar here without warning or preparation.”
“There must be some way that they have.”
“How so?”
“Because here comes the avatar, right now.”
The bronze-brown machine walked over the dunes. Fawkes was by its side.
Enjo stood up and shook the avatar’s hand.
Fawkes said, “This is Professor Sterling.”
“Enjo Awoi.”
“I thought you were coming by to chat, Enjo,” said Fawkes.
“I am. I said I’d do it after Evensong.”
“Evensong would have been done hours ago.”
Enjo looked at the time quizzically.
Gretz said, “My people do not sing tonight. They are having council.”
Enjo and Fawkes looked at each other with the same confused expression.
“That’s serious, Gretz.”
“Yes. It is. Do you think that I can tell them that you are re-focusing the project?”
Enjo was taken off-guard, but Fawkes spoke up. “Yes, I think that is exactly what you should tell your council. We’ve been thinking about it and, yes, it is a very sound approach.”
Sterling had explained that the Onhi had become concerned with the project, and that the Canon Archive would be in negotiations with them for the time being. The dig would be suspended entirely and immediately if they didn’t voluntarily concentrate their efforts on the carvings, and abandon the search for the secret passage.
Enjo brought Sterling to his quarters, and set up a sleeping/charging station. After much explanation and reminder of the hazards of virtual avatar transfer, Enjo finally convinced Sterling to follow the recommended schedule. His eyes powered down, and the massive hulk reclined on the floor with a sigh.
Fawkes and Enjo retreated to Enjo’s bedroom.
“You realize they can pull the plug on this project?” said Fawkes.
“Yes, but do you think they’d really do that? They’ve had no problems all this time. Now suddenly they are going to kill it? For what?”
“They also have never canceled Evensong. You know as well as I do that this thing has entangling alliances all the way through. It's remarkable we’ve made it this far on the project without a bureaucrat gumming up the works entirely.”
“Yes, I can see it. It just surprises me.”
“Let’s go along with it for now. Maybe we can revisit the search for the next chamber in a few months. Rocking the relationship right now is a bad idea. We are so close to getting funding for the museum and everything else that entails.”
“I agree,” said Enjo. “Let’s keep them happy. Perhaps in a few days, Professor Sterling will have adjusted enough to the transfer to be more forthcoming with us.”
Enjo entered the excavation site very early that morning. Courtesy barriers had already cordoned off the old excavation room. No one would be going back there on official digs until further notice. He stepped over the simple barrier to take one last look at the site to which he’d given five OufStans of his life.
He walked along the line where he and Gretz had been working the day before and knelt in the dust to get a close last look at the markings in the dim light. Gretz left a unique pattern in his brush dustings: brisk straight lines finishing with a subtle curly-q at the end. An archaeologists dusting was like a fingerprint. He looked closely at the brushing, and he realized the dust was piled in a faint, even row, instead of whisked away to the center of the floor for removal.
Enjo blew on the line of dust. It exposed a small channel in the floor that had a short undulation in the center.
Why had Gretz covered this up?
The undulation was familiar. A similar one had been at the first interior door that had been discovered, decades before. Enjo placed his fingers in them and jumped when a secret door swung open.
Enjo fumbled for his light. He shone it into the vast room beyond it. The room contained a dozen doorways going in all directions, including a door into the floor and a stairway leading up. There were unfaded paintings on the wall, and carvings depicting the Onhi People, standing tall and glorious and savage. In smaller relief surrounding the Onhi warriors and gods were pale little human beings, being forked, like grass, into the open mouths of the Onhi.
Piled in stacks and contorted in all variety of agonizing poses were the twisted, broken skeletons of hundreds of human bones.
“It wasn’t a contaminated xenohospital, of course.” Sterling’s tinny voice came from behind Enjo and startled him. Sterling stood in the open doorway and beckoned Enjo. “It was a trap, designed by the primitive Onhi, a defense against the human incursion. A highly effective one, at that. The Ambassador knew you were getting close more than a year ago, so he called me in. It is a very delicate situation. Gretz was enlisted to slow the search for this chamber down. He was very good at it. Just good enough, though. I only arrived here weeks ago. Had my transfer been delayed for any reason, you might have stumbled onto this place too soon. I would not have been able to explain it to you and put it into the proper context.”
“So, the Canon Archive knows about this? Won’t their publication of this discovery end up betraying them now anyhow? I can’t imagine that the Ambassador trusts us with this embarrassment.”
“I’m not from the Canon Archive. I am not an avatar. My name is Sterling Ervo. I imagine you have heard my name. I was once a famous doctor, centuries ago.” Sterling’s left eye winked off and on. “This little embarrassment is what I might call a large-scale algorithmic failure – just a bit of corrupt data that must be deleted and overwritten so that the entire system is not corroded beyond recovery.”
“A coverup? No. That flies in the face of everything the Canon Archive stands for! So, they set a trap a long time ago. This is not the disaster they think it is.”
“No, it is not a trap. It is more than that. Far more. And revealing it would be a far worse disaster than you can possibly imagine.”
“Then there is no way can we cover this up!”
“I suggest you think about your museum. Revealing this will destroy any possibility of funding.”
“My museum is worthless if it doesn’t reveal the truth of the past.”
“The truth is that the Ambassador is willing to work with your crew on the translation of the markings. According to them, it is a virtual encyclopedia of ancient wisdom. Your museum will overflow with truths. Just not all of them. And there will be no museum at all if you allow our present understanding of history to be corrupted by this old, forgotten error. Not if you allow the entire project to be pulled. Come. We must close this up before the Onhi catch wind of this. Everything hangs in the balance, and if you really care about the truth, you’ll know what to do.”
Enjo stepped back into the familiar chamber. He put his fingers in the floor to shut the door. He filled the dust back in as best as he could and he returned to the courtesy barrier with Sterling.
Fawkes met them there. “Hey! You’re here early.”
“Yes,” said Enjo. “We were just discussing the site. Maybe the Onhi would appreciate it if we did more than just cordon off this section for now. What would you think about fencing it securely, for the time being?”
“Sounds like a great idea. We’ll get right on that, Enjo!”
BOOK FIVE: Century 400
Chapter 15: Soldier of Fortuna
Whist: A paradise mining planet of peace and harmony peace and harmony peace and harmony peace and harmony peace and harmony peace and harmony peace and harmony pe
ace and harmony peace and harmony yttrium peace and harm…
—Infogalactic Entry: Grand Category: Peace and Harmony
Universal 445
He bounced the sizable and fresh human skull back and forth between his hands like a ball. It had heft, and Dayna Lea took a dangerous few seconds to care about its former owner. It was blackened by fire, with its jaw fused shut by what appeared to be melted tendons, but had clearly been the container for a larger-than average brain.
The dead man had been a warrior-king, a rare and precious resource in these tunnels of death.
Dayna hoped the man had left children behind, grieving, cunning and full of wrath.
Now, the skull served a less noble purpose: bait, for a trap.
It needed just a bit more weight.
The lockdown door to Magnetic North was completely offline, of course, and inches thick. It was secured in the ancient way. The steel bar had been slid manually into a deep recess, and it was likewise barred across the interior hinges. Closed and locked from within, the door may as well have just been yet another section of wall, from the outside, save for the rubber seals at its gap-points to prevent poison gas from filtering in.
Soon enough, it would be breached. Dayna's squad had acted the decoy, drawing off a deadly roving mixed patrol of three of the latest slaughterbot models. This freed up the advance squad to bypass the thinned ranks at the enemy missile base at junction YX-843. That squad could then take the components necessary to complete the guidance system necessary for Project Crossbow to launch the first and possibly only rocket of humankind into space.
Dayna hand-drilled through a dry thigh bone. He blew bone dust through the hole and then gathered a length of old analog tape and ran it – just in case – over a magnet to erase any pernicious remnants. He then threaded the tape through the hole, then through the tube of a metal pipe, and repeated this until the pipe and the leg bone were reasonably bound to one another.
He cobbled together a variety of materials both inorganic and once-living quickly. There was no easy craft to it. Once he had a ghastly, headless scarecrow assembled, lying prostrate on the floor, he crucified the thing on a rolling crossbar, and attached to the shoulders an old hydraulic shock spring from a long-dead zip lift. Using a hand winch typically used to birth breach calves in the slaughter mines, he compacted the spring until it nearly exploded in revenge. He secured the springs with one hook on the front of the scarecrow, and one on its back.
He stood the scarecrow up; careful to step on the wheel brake so it didn't roll away.
The scuttling noise of metal fingernails scratching at the gaps in the door came so soon.
Dayna held his breath. His frenetic gestures gave way immediately to measured, silent moves. He gingerly lifted the skull up and loaded it on the spring. With more time, he would have fused it to prevent gravity from pulling the thing prematurely from its perch, but he was cutting every corner now.
All too quickly, he scooped three white glass balls from their spongy beds. Two of them clinked in his hands.
He cursed.
No explosion. The things may not have been hair-triggered, but it was no excuse to get sloppy. He’d survived by Jag’s ghost, and nothing more.
Counting his breaths, he slipped one of the balls in the open top of the skull to give it a bit more weight, and then he gently thumbed adhesive into the sockets of the scarecrow's head.
The scritching was loud now, and Dayna knew that at least a handful of microbots had worked their way into the gaps of the door, scuttling the lock-bars and lubricating them at the same time. Even the simplest machines would betray a man at the behest of the Overlords. Locks, bars, levers and barricades were not just pregnable: they could, given time, be turned against the defender.
Dayna had once watched a child's hand slip, like magic, into the open gears of a vengeful dummy lock. It had eaten the entire arm to the shoulder before the screaming began, and the little girl should have died before she hit the floor. The only enemy involved had been the stealthy micros, waiting at the ready in the gears.
No one spoke of rescue any more. The early evacuations of the elites from the countries of Dome and Halvorstead had been the only ones. The rest of the planet had been long-since given up - by the Universe - for dead.
Dayna would have nothing of it. He had brought enough scrapped robots, machines, tools, locks and motive circuits back to life to know better. He had created traps, decoys, dummies, magnets, mines, distracters and every other sort of counterattack and counterintelligence known throughout Whist's knowledge core. So frequently had he done it that he now believed - with every atom of his soul -- in the Resurrection.
Now, he was no Ol' King Jaggya, of course. He might be able to guess what a machine thought like. He might be able to detect patterns in an artificial intelligence. But he was no master engineer. He was no Galactopede. His heart didn't beat to the rhythm of corrupted algorithms. Why would it? He was human. His animating spirit was ethereal, not electrical.
Still, he sure as suns knew how to make these machines miserable. His new scarecrow was just the latest innovation.
“Not my last, neither,” he said to the haunted golem's face. He had learned over time to talk encouragingly to himself, because it was a special occasion if anyone else might. His own exit had been bricked up. Only a small opening remained. Fortunately, he'd been especially starved for food for a week, so if he got finished soon enough, he'd slip through and mortar in the last of the wall behind him. Hopefully, the rest of his crew hadn't panicked and blocked off the alternate ductwork in addition to their original route. If they had? Ah well. Death was on its way at some speed or another.
The skull looked back at him, white blind in one of the eye bombs. It had rolled.
“You winking at me? What you know that I don't? Ah. I see. You happy to get one last go at 'em. Well. Hm. You're welcome.” Dayna gently rolled the eye down as close to center as he dared. “And thank you. That octopod they got is expensive. You take her out and they are gonna cry a long time about that. It’ll give our rocket boys plenty of time to get those parts through to safety.”
The INTEG-Octopod had been the first of a new wave of machine. While the first machines to go rogue had been standard galactic models with excessively bad algorithms, they quickly, and unexpectedly adapted on Whist. Soon, they learned to develop new models of their own design, and now, eight years into the nightmare, they had hybridized hardware with living tissue. The Octopod was the most successful, and fearsome, of this experiment.
Built on a standard wheel-walk base, it had a heavy electromagnetic chest designed to draw shrapnel and steel away from its “face“: a faintly glowing set of tentacles capable of delivering a fully biological electrogenic shock. It looked like a nest of translucent eels. Dayna had seen one from a distance about a year ago, and fled. Back then, that was the only way to see one and survive.
It didn't make much sense why the machines had bothered to bioengineer such a hybrid. A typical RATROC could wreak nearly as much human damage as the Octopod, at a fraction of the resources. Dayna figured it had something to do with the dastard machines discovering the utility of cruelty and fear.
In any case, “Soldier Skull” and he were going to take one down today.
“One down at a time, buddy. Let's do this.”
He locked the last of the stabilizing straps down on his creation and gave it one last foot to head mistgassing with a little jerry-rigged dispenser made from a hollow Gogago husk.
“Good. He said. No micros in you. You'll do.”
The scratching at the door came early.
He dare not peer into the large central lock without a scope. He grabbed an old glass mine sample jar from a teetering shelf and held its mouth to the opening. He pressed his eye to the bottom of the jar and shone a light into the lock. Even through the blurry glass, he could see tiny streaks of motion.
He could have destroyed the current wave of microbots with a simple lock-sho
ck. In fact, he had a polarized one that would temporarily reverse the microbot attack on the gears. He could turn them against their masters. He’d done it before.
It was a delaying tactic that didn’t suit the circumstances, so he saved that trick for another day. He had only recently charged the lock-shock, and energy was at a premium, anyhow.
Instead, he affixed a dormant plate against the lock opening. Once the micros finished with the gear pins, they would move to the sliding bar. He wanted them to pass through the plate first. It would magnetize most of the little machines.
Time to go.
He very lightly patted the golem on the shoulder and carefully rolled it into place at the center of the cracked floor. He took down the pair of tactical lights attached at opposite walls and hitched them to his shoulders, to use as personal lights. He shut one down to save the battery, leaving the room fairly dim. He checked his pack quickly and tossed it through the hole in the block wall behind him. For good measure, he took two more bricks, reasonably unbroken, from his side of the escape hole, and tossed them through. It was overkill – he had left more than a dozen fill bricks on the other side in the darkness.
The scratching at the door intensified. He put both hands inside the hole to get a grip good enough to pull himself through.
From the hole in the wall, not the door behind him, emerging from the dark, a face appeared.
It was not human.
“Hello,” it said.
Dayna drew his sidearm, an old-fashioned mechanical Movexan-style N-Class shooter and fired once into the hole. It used jacketed cartridges and he had kept it clean of micros for years by carefully trapping its moving parts. It wouldn’t blow through brick, though, so when the face vanished, he didn’t fire again.
The scratching behind him had converted to a tell-tale buzz. The lock was letting go.
At the opening of the brick wall, the high whine of mortar meeting a diamond-bladed saw erupted. A line cut through and the very end of a rotary saw burst through from the other side.