Into the tower they rushed and closed the door behind.
“Are you certain they will be able to rescue us?” asked Trendel.
“We are the Black Foxes,” said Ky, as if that explained all.
“Well, it’s been entirely too long since we saw your friend the ghost. Perhaps even now they are shackled in chains somewhere, or even worse, dead.”
Ky said nothing.
“Hm, I wonder,” pondered Trendel, “how do you kill a ghost?”
“Oh shut up!” snapped Ky.
In the utterstill, Kane and Arik rushed the two warders sitting at the table in the outer chamber. Taken by surprise, they leapt up yelling, but silence annihilated their shouts as well as their shrieks of death.
Mist emerged from the door and reformed as Lyssa.
“Sst!” hissed Trendel. “Light comes. Perhaps it is your ghost.”
The Shadowmaster stood.
A key rattled in the door.
“Damn! A guard.” The syldari slumped back against a stone pillar.
But then the door opened. “Kane!” shrieked Ky, and sprang forward as the big man stepped into the cell. But Kane cried out, “Yaaahh!” and pressed his hands to his temples, dropping a ring of keys to the stone floor in his agony. Rith rushed in, Arik behind, searching for foe. And they both cried out and clutched their heads, and Rith sank to her knees in excruciating pain.
“It’s the cell!” cried Ky, hauled up short by her length of chain. “It’s null, dampened!”
Kane managed to look through tears at the Shadowmaster. “Throw me the keys,” called the syldari, holding out her hands.
Groaning, Kane stooped down and took up the ring and cast it at her, the keys landing short and jingling as they skittered across the stone floor.
Swiftly she snatched them up and tried several, at last finding a key which unlocked her shackles. “This one,” she said, handing the ring to Trendel.
As the seer opened his manacles, Ky rushed to Kane. “Out of here, now!” she barked, shoving at him. “You too, Arik.” She went to Rith. “Trendel, help me.”
Together, Trendel and Ky lifted Rith to her feet, and they followed Kane and Arik as they lurched from the cell.
The moment they stepped into the hallway, blessed relief washed over them all, eradicating the pain, including the dull ache in Ky’s head and the pounding distress in Trendel’s.
Kane picked up Ky and whirled her ’round. “I thought you dead, little mouse, but I’ve never been so glad to be wrong.”
Arik barked, “Now is not the time to celebrate. Instead we must win free of this fortress before we are detected.”
As Lyssa stood watch at the far end of the corridor, Rith handed Ky her black long-knife. Gratefully, Ky took possession of the blade, then growled, “The bastards took my scabbard.”
Kane stooped down and pulled a silver-bladed short-sword from his boot and held it out to Trendel. “Here, can you use this?”
“Yes,” said Trendel, accepting the weapon, “though a good axe and shield are more to my liking.”
At that moment they heard the blat of a bugle sounding above.
“Dretch!” spat Rith. “We are discovered.”
“Come on,” growled Arik, and down the corridor he ran, the others on his heels, ephemeral Lyssa racing ahead. Quickly they reached the ground level, where the two skull-crushed tower warders lay stone dead. Outside a bugle blared and there sounded the shouts of one of Horax’s man-beasts.
At the door Lyssa signaled,
She dissipated into mist form and flowed through the wood.
Ky looked about. “Where is Arton? And Pon Barius? Did he live?”
Kane put a hand on her shoulder. “Dead, mouse. They are both dead. Horax’s doing.”
Ky’s face drained of blood. “Arton? Dead?” She sagged against Kane, stricken, tears welling.
In that moment Lyssa returned and resumed her erstwhile corporeal form.
Arik thought a moment. “We need a diversion.”
signaled Lyssa, and before any could protest and still in her bodily form she turned and vanished through the doorway, and suddenly the blats of many horns and shouts filled the bailey. Cautiously, Arik turned the latch and opened the door a crack to see . . .
. . . bright shining Lyssa fleeing across the court and toward the northern gates, guards atop the walls racing after, arrows flying, and other warders in the compound, cudgels raised, yelling and cursing and running to intercept this luminous intruder.
“Their weapons won’t hurt her,” sissed Rith, looking over Arik’s shoulder. “Unless they’re enchanted or silver.”
Arik turned and looked at her, an unspoken question in his eyes. “I swear,” said Rith.
Arik glanced at the others. “Let’s go,” he barked.
Ky gathered herself together, then called, “Wait!” and frowned a moment and muttered a word. Shadows gathered about them. “Now,” she said.
Out the door Arik darted and around the tower toward the stairwell, Trendel and Rith and Ky and Kane dashing after. And covered in darkness they were all but invisible in the fortress gloom.
But as they neared the spiral stair, out from the step-housing came boiling five of Horax’s man-beasts, running to join the chase of the glowing intruder. But into shadow they ran, and Arik took the first through the throat as Trendel stabbed his borrowed silver blade through the second one’s heart. The third cried, “Waugh!” and then fell to Arik’s sword. The fourth and fifth turned to flee, but one of Rith’s daggers flew into the nearest one’s back and he staggered a few steps and fell. Yet the fifth one leaped shrieking into the step-housing and fled up the stairwell.
“Damn!” shouted Arik, and leapt after, Trendel on his heels.
Rith paused long enough to retrieve her dagger, then sped after, Ky and Kane behind. Up the well they spiraled, coming at last to the parapet. To the right, the man-beast ran along the banquette, shouting in alarm, yet his calls were unheard in the general uproar below.
“Dretch!” cursed Arik, breaking off pursuit. “We may be undone.”
“Perhaps not,” said Ky. “Perhaps they’ll think it was shadow they fought.”
“Detected or not, shadow or not, let’s flee,” said Rith, unhooking her grapnel from her belt and snapping the tines into place.
Kane and Arik joined her and the trio set hooks in the castellated angles of stone. Then they cast the ropes over the wall. “Ky, Rith, Trendel, go now,” barked Arik. “Kane and I will follow.”
Those three quickly glanced at one another and nodded, then rappelled down to the ground, Ky taking the shadow with her.
And at the distant end of the parapet, the man-beast shouted and blew his horn, for in the bright light of Orbis above he saw the two revealed men.
As soon as the others reached the ground, over the wall went Arik and Kane, swiftly rappelling down.
Abandoning the hooks and lines, toward the woods they all fleetly ran. Quickly they reached the trees and disappeared among them. From the bastion walls behind there sounded shouts of discovery, the alarm mingled with the clamor of man-beasts yawling in pursuit of a ghost.
As the Foxes came to the horses and mules, “Trendel, take this steed and mount up,” sissed Arik.
As Trendel hastily adjusted the length of the stirrups then swung into the saddle of Pon Barius’s former mount, he asked, “Which way?”
“West,” cried Ky, “circle ’round to the west and out from this cursed swamp.”
“Why west?” asked Arik, mounting up. “What lies to the west?”
“The Kalagar Wood,” answered Ky.
“But that forest is haunted,” protested Trendel. “Why would anyone wish to go there, much less thee and me?”
“That’s where we’ll find the Kalaga
r Gate, the portal to the demonplane,” said Ky, swinging up onto her horse. “And the demonplane is where we’ll find Horax the Bastard and the red gem.”
Arik glanced back through the trees, where atop the fortress wall he could see a force of man-beasts gathering, one of them gesturing toward the woods. “Come on,” Arik barked, “let’s get out of here while we can.” He spurred his horse, and the others followed after, bending low over the necks of their steeds and galloping among the trees.
As they fled deeper into the woods while horns behind blatted in alarm, Trendel the seer muttered unto himself, “Indeed we might find Horax the Bastard on the demonplane, but that’s also where we’ll find the DemonQueen and her ravening, chaotic hordes—drakka and skelga and demonsteeds and broogs and . . .” but still he raced on with the others, running for the trackless swamp to throw off the gathering pursuit.
42
Klaxon
(Coburn Facility)
Doctor Stein pointed at Mark Perry. “As ignorant as this lawyer is, he put his finger on it when he said that those mental patterns were ersatz duplicates.”
Toni Adkins looked briefly at Mark and then back at Stein. “Oh?”
“Yes. The AI has somehow found a way to deactivate the higher functions of a brain and mimic their patterns within its own processors.”
“What makes you so certain?” asked Greyson.
Stein peered down his nose at the portly philosopher. “It’s obvious, John. Only the autonomous processes of the alpha team members are active; the rest are shut down. But listen”—Stein turned to Toni—”if I modify a hemisynch helmet to shock their brains back into full activity, then I, we, will have revived them from their comatose state.”
Greyson objected: “Nonsense, Henry. You assume that the human mind is nothing but the parallel workings of clusters of neurons. But I believe a mentality is more, much more, than that—independent altogether—and that Avery has somehow captured these spirits of the alpha team, captured their very souls. We proved that when you tried to extract Alice Maxon from the rig and she nearly died when you broke the psychic link.”
“You irrational ass, the AI is likely synchronizing the autonomous functions, and sync is lost when disconnect occurs.” Stein turned away from Greyson and appealed to Toni: “Are you going to let this superstitious fool and his jabber of so-called psychic links stand in the way of reviving those people? My hemishock will free them from Avery’s control.”
Greyson started to protest, but Toni held up a hand to stop him. “Look, Henry, John, I don’t know the truth of the metaphysics involved, and neither I think do either of you. As Timothy said, and I repeat: desperate times often call for desperate actions, and this sounds to me like an ultimate gamble.” Now she held up a hand to stop Stein’s protest and fixed him with a stare. “Henry, Drew told Timothy it would take months to modify a hemisynch helmet, and so there simply is not time. But even if there were, and even if you did find a means to administer your so-called hemishock, even then we would use it only if it became absolutely necessary, only as a last resort.”
Stein shook his head and pointed at the gimbaled rigs. “But don’t you think—”
At that moment the overhead lights flickered on then faded.
Toni glanced at the doomsday clock—five minutes, thirty-one seconds to go—then keyed her comband. “Al, what’s going on?”
Al Hawkins’ reply came tinnily through. “We got one or more short circuits in the building. We’re flipping the goddamned breakers off now to find them, then we’ll try again.”
“You mean Kat’s turbogen is up and running?”
“Up and running and connected, but something’s blowing the mains. Now lemme do my job.”
Toni keyed her comband off. She looked at the others, her heart in her throat. And then a klaxon began sounding on the clock and the display began to flash. Doomsday—the catastrophic collapse of the batteries—was just five minutes away.
Her hardhat light casting a beam ahead, Kat ran for the distribution center. As she ran, she keyed her talkie. “Carleen, is the Astro all right?”
“Just a mo, chief” came Carleen’s reply.
“Cut it free until I find out what’s happening.” Kat heard the whine of the turbine as Carleen opened the door of the truck.
Quickly Kat reached the breaker panels. Powertechs were milling about. At the breakers themselves, Al Hawkins stood with a meter while a man and a woman swiftly threw individual breakers off. Somewhere a klaxon was sounding.
Kat moved up next to Michael Phelan. “What the hell happened?” she snapped.
“The mains blew,” he answered. “We’ve got a low resistance short to ground. Al is trying to locate it now.”
“And the klaxon?”
“Coming from the battery room. There’s less than five minutes reserve remaining.”
“And then . . . ?”
“Total collapse.”
Anxiously they watched as Al monitored the ohmmeter as the techs threw breakers. And time fled irretrievably into the past as the reserve batteries drained.
Kat’s talkie beeped.
“Yeah.”
“It’s Carleen. The Astro is fine.”
“Thanks, Carleen. Leave her mains open till I say go.”
“Right, chief.”
Kat keyed the talkie off.
She watched a moment more, then her eyes flew wide. “Wait just a damn minute,” she called, shouldering her way forward to come to Al’s side. “Look, Al, if it were some individual circuit, that breaker would be the one to blow and not the mains.”
Al looked at her. “Crap! That’s right.”
Kat’s blue-grey eyes became gemstone hard. “Now think, Al: what could blow both mains at once?”
“Nothing. Not a goddamned thing.”
“Bullshit! The both blew, didn’t they?” Kat flipped her unlit cigarillo into the shadows.
Al took a deep breath and expelled it. “All right. There’s the main busses to the substation, but we cut them loose. There’s the busses to the Allen-Breech, also cut loose. There’s the power leads to your Astro. But wait a minute, those are all on the input side of the mains. What we gotta find is a short on the output side . . . which means either some of these feeds to the individual breakers are shorted to ground, or something is wrong with the . . .” He looked at the large subpanel housing the mains. “Susan, Bill, let’s pull this fucker off the wall.”
As the powertechs grabbed up wide-bladed drivers and began to snap open Dzeus fasteners, Kat jammed another unlit black synthbac cigarillo into the corner of her mouth and looked at her watch. Two minutes twelve seconds remained.
And the klaxon shouted disaster.
In the relative quiet of the control center, Toni Adkins paced back and forth, unable to stand still. She had switched off the klaxon before it had driven them all mad, but the display still flashed out its silent warning. Off to one side, Stein and Greyson argued over whether the mental patterns in the AI were real or merely Avery-generated duplicates. Mark Perry sat at one of the dead consoles, his head in his hands. Alya Ramanni sat at a live console and punched buttons on the compad. And in the shadows the alpha team lay comatose as the witch’s cradles twitched and hummed in the dark.
Toni glanced at the flashing clock. One minute forty seconds till doomsday.
Popping the subpanel loose, Al Hawkins wrested it free of the primary housing. A black cable snaked out after. “What the hell is this?” As the klaxon continued shouting its warning of imminent disaster, Al turned the panel sideways. “Damn. Welded. Lightning welded! Cross-connected to the breakers.” He wrenched the subpanel farther out. It stopped, the cable snagged on something.
“Yank it again,” called Susan above the klaxon’s cry, “I think I saw it move over here.”
Al jerked.
“Yeah, this is it.” Susan ran her hands along the heavy-duty wire. It was bolted to a girder. “It’s the goddamned panel ground!”
Al bra
ced the panel edgewise against the wall, his hands at top and bottom. “Get an axe,” he cried.
Michael Phelan passed one to Kat. “Chop it free, Kat,” ordered Al, turning his head aside.
Kat knelt and eyed the weld then swung. Sparks flew as steel met steel, the blade shearing along the subpanel and then across plastic and through the lightning-welded copper-to-copper bind and on into the concrete wall. Chips and dust and mortar flew. The cable flopped free.
“Pull it, Susan!” shouted Al. “Kat, when it’s behind the panel, push it down and away.”
As Susan and Kat maneuvered the panel ground cable back through the subpanel opening, Al snapped, “Reengage all the breakers, now!”
Bill and another powertech stood shoulder to shoulder and frantically flipped disengaged breakers back on, and still the klaxon clamored.
“Ready,” called Kat, stepping aside.
Al slammed the subpanel back in place and held it while a powertech clicked the Dzeus fasteners shut. Then he looked at Kat. “Ready?”
“Just a mo.” Kat keyed her talkie. “Carleen?”
“She is at the Astro, princesa” came Luiz’s voice.
“Tell her we’re ready. Tell her to reengage.”
“Si.” The whine of the turbo sounded as the cab door opened. A moment later it chopped off as the cab door was closed again. “It’s done, princesa.”
Kat nodded to Al and crossed her fingers. “Go ahead.”
Al took a deep breath then slammed the mains to.
In the control center, the overhead lights came on and stayed on.
Toni looked up in disbelief, then tears filled her eyes. Blinking, she peered at doomsday clock, but the numbers were all blurry. “What does it say?” she asked Mark Perry, pointing at the display.
“Thirteen seconds and stopped,” he replied.
Down in the power distribution center men and women yelled and pounded one another on the back. Standing at the panel, Al Hawkins looked at Kat Lawrence. “Gimme one of them cheroots,” he said.
Shadowtrap: A Black Foxes Adventure Page 36