Trapped On Talonque: (A Sectors SF romance)

by Veronica Scott

  She tugged at his hand. “Come inside the hut and let me help you with your knee. I don’t have any power left in the gilintrae, but at least I can provide moral support.”

  “When Thom gets here with our supplies, there’ll be some painkillers in the medkit,” Nate said. “Which will also help.”

  “Can you climb?” she asked, brow furrowed. “How badly did he injure you?”

  “Let’s find out. But we can’t stay here—it’s too exposed. I’m confident I can manage the trail, not too much farther, right?”

  Staring at the mountain, Bithia nodded. “I can’t believe how close I am after all this time.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The wind howled between the crags and crevasses as the afternoon progressed.

  “Snow coming soon,” Thom said, pausing in the middle of the trail and checking the gray skies to the west.

  “We’re nearly there,” Bithia promised, glancing at the sergeant, who’d been trudging directly behind her on the narrow trail. “My father and I never took more than an hour as you measure your time to hike to the facility from the meditation place. Of course, we didn’t make the trek in winter.”

  “Or with a bad knee,” Nate said, leaning on the stick he’d fashioned into a cane. “I think I see our destination about a hundred yards ahead.” He pointed up the mountain flank. “Looks like a flyer tunnel door to me. I’m sure glad we didn’t have to climb all the way to the crater itself.” He studied her face for a moment, trying to evaluate how tired she might be. “Should we take a break for a moment and rest? There’s time. It isn’t going to start snowing right now.”

  She laughed. “Get me this close to the place I’ve longed to be for countless centuries and then ask me if I want to rest? I can’t believe you even suggested such a thing.” She pushed past him on the trail and forged ahead.

  “She’ll wear herself out,” Nate said to Thom as he climbed after her.

  “No harm in a bit of overexertion as long as we can shelter inside this base for the night,” Thom said reasonably. “Only a problem if we was planning to climb down the mountain today. How’s the knee?”

  “Doing all right. Nothing’s broken. I managed to roll with the force. Come on, she’s getting too far ahead of us, and she’s not thinking about climbing safety today.”

  Nate finally caught up to Bithia when she stopped on a small ledge jutting out about two yards below the familiar massive flyer tunnel hatch. True to her promise, a small, one-person-sized door was set into the mountain below and to the right of the flyer entrance. The far side of the ledge, which in her time had provided easy access by foot, had crumbled away over the eons. This condition made progress tricky, requiring them to swing over to the smaller entry. Clambering inside once the door opened would be yet another challenge. Nate eyed the distances and the condition of the ledge and figured he and Thom could manage it and get her safely across too.

  “Does this door respond to manual controls or only the gilintrae?” he asked, working the pack he’d been carrying off his shoulders and preparing himself for the next brief, but dangerous, stage of their journey.

  A vivid set of symbols flashed into his head, taking him by surprise.

  “It’s faster than explaining out loud,” she said, sinking onto a handy rock, apparently willing at last to rest.

  “All right, no problem. I got out of the habit of receiving data directly. I can’t see any other choice here but for one of us to crawl over and key in the symbols. I’ll go, since we already know your skill set doesn’t include actual mountain climbing, my lady.”

  “And I can’t read the symbols,” Thom said.

  “Right, which leaves you to anchor me,” he said to Thom, then pointed a finger at Bithia. “Stay well back in case the ledge crumbles any further under my weight.”

  “Can your knee take the pressure?” Thom asked as he got into position.

  Nate shrugged. “It’ll have to.”

  Once he’d linked by a safety rope to the sergeant, Nate climbed sideways across the mountain, going along a promising crevice in the rocks below the door and then managing to locate enough handholds and footholds to bring himself up the cliff to a point where he could steady himself beside the personnel entrance. Clinging with his right hand, toes of his boots dug firmly into the cracks in the cliff face, Nate activated the symbols left-handed.

  For once on Talonque, an alien device responded promptly. The door unsealed with an audible hiss of escaping air and swung open with surprising force. Nate leaned over to peer inside.

  “No lights,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the wind. “All clear in the passageway. No blockages as far as I can see. Time to get the lady on the safety line and transfer her over here.”

  The maneuver was delicate work, and as she’d told him several times, Bithia lacked even basic mountain-climbing skills. Sheer desire to reach her goal drove her to make the transition from the ledge to where Nate waited, hand extended to catch her when she’d gotten close enough. Once she was safely inside, Nate and Thom managed to get themselves and their gear transported across the small gap and into the unlit access tunnel.

  Nate and Thom keyed the hand lamps they’d brought along from the Murphy, drew their Mark 27s, and the three proceeded cautiously through the echoing talmere-lined tunnel into the mountain.

  “Odd that the lights aren’t working for us,” Bithia remarked at least twice as she proceeded.

  “Probably not a good sign,” Nate said. “Remember what we agreed about not having expectations.”

  Another door loomed at the opposite end of the tunnel. Bithia keyed the symbols with a happy exclamation, and this portal opened as easily as the outer one had. The trio stepped into the huge expanse of a flyer hangar, larger than the one at Nochen. Flashing his hand lamp from side to side, Nate saw one sizable vehicle parked crookedly at the far end of the space.

  “They left a flyer,” Bithia said excitedly as the beams of the lamps played over the shiny skin of the object.

  “Probably for some compelling reason.” Thom, as usual, refused to be too optimistic. “In for repairs maybe.”

  “Why aren’t the lights coming on the way they did at the Nochen facility? I’m more concerned about illumination at the moment,” Nate said. “This place is the same age as the Nochen facility, give or take a few months, right?”

  Bithia nodded, barely visible in the beam of the lamp.

  “We’d better check the pleikn chamber first,” Nate said. “If the expedition shut the power source down, then we aren’t going to be able to do much here beyond spending a night or two. I’d like to know now. Save the issue of the flyer’s viability for later. If we can’t depend on this place for a long-term home, then we’ll want to expend our own resources differently.”

  “I agree.” Taking his hand lamp, she led them unhesitatingly out of the flyer bay into another unlit corridor. The distance wasn’t far to walk, but in the eerie gloom, breathing the stagnant air, it felt like forever to Nate before Bithia opened the next door, admitting them to a pleikn observation chamber. It was similar to the room at Nochen in design, but constructed on a bigger scale.

  No blue power globe rotated on the other side of the crystal talmere shield.

  Bithia stared in disbelief, flashing her lamp in all the corners. “Completely deactivated? I can’t believe this. We had three pleikn to run this place, with three spares. Why would someone take away all six? And yet leave the one in Nochen?”

  Nate wondered if her people left the one in Nochen because whoever was in charge knew it was unbalanced and would self-destruct, given enough time. It didn’t square too well with what Bithia had said of her people, but then neither did their abandonment of her or the two corpses in the warehouse.

  Thom’s considerations appeared to be in a more practical vein. “Spares, ma’am? Where would extras have been kept? Did you have any kind of auxiliary power source?”

  “Auxiliary?”

  “For
emergencies, for backup,” he elaborated.

  “There’s a system to provide power for the setup team, from their first day of landing and establishment until the pleikn were brought in and placed into service, but then the initial system was no longer needed.”

  “Thom’s asking if the original system is still available.” Nate tried to bridge the momentary communication gap between his companions. “Or did your setup contractors take it with them when they completed their part of the job?”

  “I imagine it must be here. Such things are not portable.” Dubious, Bithia apparently clung to the idea of having full, glorious power supplied by the pleikn. “The spare pleikn would have been here.” She flashed her hand lamp at the far corner, double-checking again that no containers of any type, much less power-generator shields, had escaped her first search.

  “Show us the auxiliary?” Nate asked. He was patient with her, knowing this trip to the main base was more stressful for her than anything else since escaping from Nochen.

  She exited the useless pleikn chamber, slamming the door angrily after Nate and Thom exited. She headed to the flyer bay. Crossing the broad expanse with rapid strides, almost reckless in the gloom, she stopped at a large panel of jeweled switches and symbols, inert and colorless. “This is the original system, or backup as you call it. Shall I try the activation sequence?”

  “Nothing to lose—go ahead.”

  She handed Nate the lamp. “Point the light on the wall panel for me, please.” She began the activation process. Gradually, as she played her graceful fingers across the gems, switches and symbols, the board came to colorful life. An encouraging hum emanated from the display.

  Suddenly, there was a fat sparking snap, and many of the lights came on in the flyer bay. Not with the full brilliance Nate preferred, but at least bright enough to see without the hand lamps, which Nate and Thom snapped off.

  “This is progress,” Thom said.

  “If you say so.” Bithia clearly wasn’t impressed. “I’ve no idea how long the power will last. We mustn’t try to activate too many things, because the system was never designed to run the entire base.”

  “All right, you tell us, since this is your place, where to next?” Nate kept his tone amiable. He had no great expectations for this excursion, but he was interested in seeing whatever she wanted to show them.

  “There are the storerooms. A spare pleikn might have been left there—”

  Nate shook his head. “I doubt it. Any other priority choices? Your personal quarters maybe?”

  Bithia gave him a reproachful look. “Remembering how my quarters at Nochen were handled, sealed with no attempt at preservation, I’m not eager to investigate the corridor here.”

  “Ma’am, the place we ought to be going is wherever you think your father might have left you a message,” Thom said with a gentleness that was unusual for him. “Ain’t that what you want to see, bottom line?”

  She hung her head for a moment, toying with her gilintrae, rolling it around her wrist, then nodded. “Yes, you’re right. I admit it.”

  “But?” Nate prompted. “You’re afraid there may not be a message. Want us to go first, check his quarters or wherever we need to go, see what the conditions are?”

  Bithia stood straighter. “No, but thank you. As you said about your trip to the warehouse, even if there was a message, you might not recognize it for what it is. I need to stop being foolish. If he left me a message, or anything at all, it’ll be in the central control room where he had his workspace, where he loved to sit and direct all activities, talk to the researchers and the students about new finds and discoveries. That place was the hub of his existence on an expedition. The others—the ones who’d served with him in the field before—used to joke he could go for days at a time without leaving his chair in the central room, except for brief moments. He had to be in the middle of the activity, eating and sleeping there oftentimes. New discoveries were his passion.”

  “Lead the way.” Nate stepped aside to let her pass. I know this is hard for you.

  I appreciate your understanding. She sent him a warm flood of affection. I’m scared of what we may find.

  Not moving as rapidly, she took them to the corridor outside the flyer bay and went to the left. A few yards down the hall, Bithia easily activated a door that opened onto a dark stairwell extending up as far as the beams of the lamps reached.

  “More climbing.” Thom stretched to unkink his back and grimaced.

  “My aching knee,” Nate said. “Getting a workout.”

  “Not all the way to the top.” Bithia was already close to the first landing. “If the base power was on, we’d have a different way to go, antigravity assisted, but as things stand, stairs are the only option.”

  Trailing Bithia, Nate and Thom ascended three levels of darkened stairs, the backup lighting providing only sparse illumination in certain areas.

  “Kinda warm in here, ain’t it, for a place with no power?” Thom asked as he climbed the third set of stairs. He took off his big, fur-lined jacket and stuffed it sloppily into his pack.

  “My father assigned one of the student teams to engineer a heating system using the volcano’s magma chambers. The students were also to stabilize it, so the Sleeping Goddess couldn’t erupt again. My father worried about the villages. So he had the team redirect the magma to another peak farther on into the range. There were no people at risk there, because the area is totally uninhabited. At least in my time.” She chuckled. “Probably still is. The farther you go across the mountains, the more desolate the terrain becomes. I’ll never understand how Sarbordon’s people made it across.”

  “Probably something worse drove them,” Nate said. “That’s usually the case in a mass migration.”

  “My father was quite pleased with the results of the students’ work.”

  Nate found it interesting how casually she discussed this achievement the Sectors technologists and engineers couldn’t have duplicated. Drawing heat from the volcano’s energy, perhaps, but not stabilizing the whole volcanic system to ensure eruptions would occur only where you wanted them to. Obviously, there was a lot to learn from this vanished civilization. “Would a report of relevant data be somewhere in the files here?”

  “Of course. I told you my father’s most precious possession on any expedition was the data he gathered. I hoped to find some extra data chips sized for my gilintrae while we were here, so I could try to preserve more of the expedition’s records. Of course, I planned to recharge it too with the pleikn that unfortunately isn’t here anymore.” She laughed somewhat bitterly and stopped on the landing, although the stairs continued to wind as far as the eye could see in the gloom.

  “The stairs take you to the crater,” she said, pointing upward. “We used to go there sometimes to enjoy the crater lake, especially after the students heated it.”

  “The whole lake?”

  “Yes. Something to do with geothermal exchanges. Not my area of expertise, sorry.” She laughed. “Light over here, please. We need to open this door to access the central areas of the base.”

  Thom leaned over, pondering the gloom they’d climbed from. He stared upward next. “Gives me an uneasy feeling, all this darkness and empty, abandoned space.”

  Nate raised his eyebrows. “Getting sensitive in your old age?”

  Thom didn’t appear bothered by the good-natured teasing. “Don’t seem right, such a big base, all deserted.”

  Nate had to admit he instinctively became more relaxed when he left the stairwell and heard the access door close snugly behind them. Bithia chose the left corridor again and headed off, her pace slowing as the corridor curved.

  “After this curve the hall opens into the central area,” she said, whispering as she paused.

  Nate took her hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze. They strolled on, hand in hand, Thom following at their heels, until the area came into view.

  There were two men standing in the middle of the alien contro
l center.

  Bithia gasped. Nate shoved her behind him with one hand, blaster in his other. Thom flattened against the opposite wall, his blaster at the ready.

  With Thom guarding his six, Nate inched forward to peer around the curve. The two men stood in the exact same spot, staring at the corridor. Both men have their eyes shut.

  “Holograms,” Nate said. “I think we’ve found your message.”

  Her eyes widened, and she whispered something under her breath Nate couldn’t catch. The next second, she darted past him, raced the last few yards to the edge of the nerve center and hopped down the three stairs into the well of the central area. She stopped a yard or so in front of the two holograms.

  “My father,” she murmured, voice choking on a sob as she stared at the person on the left. “I don’t believe it. It truly is him.” She reached out with one hand, then let it fall to her side before her touch could break the illusion that the real man stood waiting for her.

  Nate followed more slowly, Thom at his back. Now he studied the representation of Fr’taray, who was taller than Bithia and had the same basic facial features, only he was the masculine version, heavier and older. The family relationship was glaringly obvious. His bearded face was peaceful, calm. His hair was the same dark blue and purple as hers, brushing the gemmed collar of his dark blue one-piece garment. He appeared poised to walk away but looked like he wanted to tell them something first, as if he’d waited to impart vital information that only he could reveal. Nate hoped for Bithia’s sake that the subliminal impression was true.

  “Who’s the other guy?”

  Bithia shook her head, reluctantly taking her gaze from her father’s face to focus on the companion hologram. “I never met him. He wasn’t on our expedition—oh!” She glanced at her wrist, where the heavy gold identification bracelet set with red and purple gemstones rode loosely. “See? It’s his. He’s M’negel.” She held her arm close to the arm of the hologram, and Nate realized the bracelets were identical.