Dr. Haral paused. Bain waited, wanting to ask what that had to do with the planet's name. He glanced at Lin. She wore a slight smile and nodded to him and pressed one finger to her lips, signaling him to silence.
“Her two remaining children died together, their faces covered with tears. Norbra was left entirely alone in her palace. No servant would stay with her, afraid they would be required to die for her pride. Norbra left her palace to find her servants and found the country was in the middle of a drought. When the people of the country begged her to repent and appease the Guardian Spirits, she laughed at them. Why should she appease them, when they had taken her children from her? The people took her prisoner and dragged her to the top of the highest cliff and prepared to throw her over the edge. At the last moment, she cried out in fear for her own life and a single tear escaped her eye. The Guardian Spirits turned her into a pillar of stone, forever hanging over the edge of the cliff. From the rock, a stream of water gushed up and watered the land. The drought ended, and for two thousand years—a century for each dead child—that water kept the land from drought. At the end of the two thousand years, the rock cracked and fell to the base of the canyon."
“Did they find Norbra's bones inside the rock?” Rhiann asked.
“Rhiann, that's disgusting!” Herin groaned.
“No, they didn't,” Captain Lorian said.
“But what does Norbra have to do with the planet's name?” Bain dared to ask.
“The planet killed all the children born there,” Lin said. “I know this part of the story. When people tried to settle on the planet, no child survived its first year of life. Everything was poisonous—the plants, the animals, the water, even the soil."
“Until Khybors, our ancestors, came there to hide from prejudice,” Dr. Haral said. “The khrystal in their bodies helped them adapt to adverse conditions, and from all the stories, Norbra had the most adverse conditions recorded."
“That's really depressing,” Bain said.
“I can see why you'd want to go back,” Lin said, nodding. “It's a monument to triumph against all the odds."
“Among other things.” Captain Lorian turned halfway around in her seat and looked toward the front of the shuttle, to the narrow door leading into the cockpit. “All clear?” she called.
The pilot and co-pilot, a brother and sister team, Ehren and Eilen, called out something in a language Bain couldn't understand. He wondered which language the Leapers actually used, if the ancestor of Commonwealth Standard wasn't their mother tongue. Lorian smiled at the answer and turned back around to face the rest of the passengers.
“Relatively calm air currents until about a half kilometer above ground level,” she reported. “No sign of electronic activity or any ground movement."
“That's good, isn't it?” Bain asked.
“We'll need to be in flight for a good long time before we can establish coordinates and know where the fortress really is. Or if it even survived all these centuries. The less movement there is on the ground to obscure the features, the better for our hunt."
She didn't need to add, and Bain didn't need to hear, the possibility that the longer they were in the air, the better the chances the pirates at either pole might notice their presence and come to investigate.
They ran into a stroke of luck less than half an hour after penetrating the atmosphere. A thick, jagged black line broke the streaked sands of the surface. It was a chasm, stretching north and south from horizon's edge to horizon's edge.
“In the last days of the conflict, the world broke to its very foundations,” Herin whispered. She tore her gaze away from the view out the side portal window and looked around at the others. “I remember that part of the journals the best. The man recording the fighting sounded like a poet. I felt sorry for him that he was forced to be a warrior instead of an artist."
“What he wrote was very accurate,” her father said, nodding. “We're close to the fortress, if this is the same chasm mentioned in the journals."
Everyone pressed against every available window, searching. The fortress had been built inside a butte towering up to the sky, hollowed out inside, and reaching down to the foundations of the desert where it stood like a solitary sentinel.
“There!” Rhiann shrieked. She bounced up and down a few times in her seat and pointed, stubbing her fingers against the thick pane. “Look, Mumma! That has to be it!"
The years had brought cascades of rubble down from the sides of the butte, yet it still stood tall, squat pillars of rusty brown and ebony rock thrusting up from the scarlet and black sands. The top was nearly flat, even with the erosion that had dug grooves across it like claws dragged through wax. The shuttle landed smoothly. Bain held onto the armrests of his seat, holding his breath until he felt the engines shriek and then settle down to waiting idle. There was not a thump or bump to indicate they had landed.
“They're really good,” he said under his breath to Rhiann. She nodded and grinned proudly, as if she had trained the piloting team herself.
“Give the sensors time to analyze the air content and soil and wind speed,” Captain Lorian said.
She stood and walked to the hatch at the front of the shuttle. She pulled her breather mask and helmet into place, but left her gloves shoved into her belt while she read the screen placed conveniently next to the hatch controls.
“According to the records, we should be close to the stairs down.” Herin pulled a tiny reading screen from her pocket and tapped the buttons. After a few moments, she nodded. “If we're in the exact center of the rock table, we can walk due north and we should find the opening. It's shielded with a pyramid of rock slabs and their version of therma-crete."
“The stairs could be filled with dust or broken by any quakes in the area,” Bain pointed out.
“Could be. There are outside terraces with doors to get in, but they required high security passes and during the attacks, most of them were sealed, the terraces themselves deliberately destroyed to hinder access.” She tapped a few more keys and put the reading screen back into her pocket. Herin met his gaze and smiled. “I don't care what shape we find everything in, just the fact that we made to Norbra is...” She shrugged and let out a breathless little laugh.
“I know what you mean."
“We'll get in,” Rhiann declared. She scooted out of her seat and joined her mother at the door.
Captain Lorian continued watching the information scrolling sideways across the screen in foreign letters and numbers, but she put an arm around her younger daughter and squeezed her shoulder.
Then, a few moments later, she announced, “All clear. We need to wear our breather masks against the dust, but the air is safe. Seismic readings say everything is stable. We can expect them to remain stable for the next twenty hours. After that ... if we're not heading for the Estal'es'cai in ten hours, I'd worry."
At her gesture, everyone else stood and started pulling on and sealing their protective gear. Bain felt sweaty as he sealed his breather mask to the edges of his helmet and tugged his gloves up into place. It wasn't heat, he knew. Excitement, pure and simple.
Even through the breather mask, Bain smelled the hot, baked stone scent of the air when the hatch opened. He took a step backwards, not quite braced for the gust of wind that blew through the opening. Beside him, Rhiann laughed and caught hold of his arm to steady herself.
Ehren and Eilen stayed with the shuttle. Bain thought they hid their disappointment very well, other than a few longing looks as they helped the other two crewmen scramble into their protective gear. Then all eight were down on the ground and walking due north according to Herin's instructions. The shuttle hatch sealed shut with a soft hiss, barely audible against the louder sizzling hiss of sand slapping against the sides of the shuttle and slithering down to the scoured rock.
It took them nearly twenty minutes of searching to find the protective rock pyramid over the stairs leading down to the interior of the butte. Time had eroded the rock and
tilted one of the faces loose. Bain, Dr. Haral and Lin worked together, stepping down into the depression of the first step, and worked together to tilt the slab up out of the way. The searchlights attached to their belts revealed piles of sand and rubble on the wide, deep steps all the way down into the dark well—but they were visibly passable.
Rhiann grabbed hold of her father's hand as they started down the stairwell. Bain flinched when he felt a hand grab hold of his arm. A glance showed him Herin, her eyes wide and her mouth set in a wide, trembling grin. When their eyes met, she blushed, even through her shaded faceplate and the shadows of the stairwell. Bain grinned back at her and gripped her arm in return. They matched their steps and followed directly behind Lin and Captain Lorian.
One crewman took point at the front of the group, and the other brought up the rear. Bain noted small, hand-held rods attached to the crewmen's belts, and a series of what could have been power packs on the back of their belts. Leapers might say they concentrated on defense, and flight as the best defense, but they were ready for trouble. Bain hoped those weapons would never be used—and glad they were there, anyway.
The stairs curved slightly to the right after the first thirty steps. Once the curve started, the heaps of sand grew shallow and then vanished altogether where the wind couldn't blow it in any longer. Herin made verbal note of that, using her tongue to turn on and off a little recorder in her helmet. Bain was glad of the excuse not to talk.
After two complete circuits—another fifty steps—they reached a landing. The stairs continued on the other side of the landing, a thick platform carved out of the rock five meters wide and four deep. Two pairs of doors with control panels stood on either side.
“At this point, those doors should give general access. No security codes,” Captain Lorian said. She stepped up to the right-hand set of doors and reached for the control panel between them. Her gloved hand shook a little, barely visible in the beams of light and thick shadows. She pressed five buttons. The last two seemed to stick, resisting the pressure of her finger.
They waited. The silence rang in Bain's helmet. He felt a single drop of sweat slide down his forehead and he tilted his head to direct it away from his eye.
Something at the edge of the left-hand door moved as he straightened his head. Bain stared, straining his eyes to see. He thought he caught a tiny jerk of movement again.
“Maybe it's jammed,” he said.
“After all these centuries, I'd be surprised if it wasn't,” Captain Lorian said. She laughed; it sounded a little forced. “We're being rather silly, standing here and expecting these ancient mechanisms to work, aren't we?"
Bain stepped around her and leaned his shoulder into the panel, throwing his weight hard into it.
The panel moved. He felt it grate against the floor. A loud hissing of escaping gas brought smiles to the others’ faces. A red light flashed on the monitor for Bain's breather mask, indicating that it filtered out gas with dangerous elements.
Dr. Haral joined him for the second try on the door. This time, the panel opened enough to leave a hand's width of space, and darkness beyond.
The lights aimed through the opening revealed a blue-painted blank wall, the corner where the hallway met the wall between the two doors, and a stone floor. Nothing else. The door wouldn't open any further, though they all took turns pushing on the panel until Bain and the crewman both had bruised shoulders.
The other door wouldn't budge at all. They tried the other set of doors. Again, Bain and the crewman tried to open the panel with their weight.
With a gasping hiss, the door slid open. Rhiann let out a shriek and snatched at Bain's arm, throwing him off balance. He turned, catching bright sunlight in his eyes—and felt empty space under his seeking foot. Then Rhiann's yank pulled him backwards to the landing again.
The entire side of the butte had shattered, cascading hallway and rooms and the next two stories of the fortress into the canyon floor below. Piles of rubble and dust, compacted by time, filled the open rooms three levels down. Faint dust devils swirled into being and died in those shattered rooms as Bain stared downward.
* * *
Chapter Ten
Bain stood for nearly four minutes with his toes on the edge of the precipice, looking down hundreds of meters, waiting for his heartbeat to return to normal and for the sweat to stop streaming into his eyes.
“I think we should try another level down,” Lin said. She looped her arm through Bain's and gently nudged him away from the edge. His knees didn't want to bend.
“Are you okay?” Rhiann whispered, her helmet touching his.
“Yeah.” Bain swallowed hard. “Thanks. You saved my life."
Rhiann shrugged. “You're my friend. What else was I supposed to do?"
The next landing was four stories below the first. This time they were more careful as they threw their weight against the doors to make them move. Bain kept his weight balanced ready to fling backwards at the first sign of the door sliding open.
All four doors opened this time. The first three hissed loudly, venting more foul air gone dead and poisonous after being shut in for centuries. The fourth door made no noise at all, other than a soft grating sound against the dusty guide tracks.
“There's probably a broken wall somewhere, letting in fresh air,” Dr. Haral said. He held out his diagnostic wand and read the flashing lights and numbers on the tiny screen in the handle. “The air reads normal for what's outside. I'm sure somewhere along the way, erosion has eaten through the walls and let in the elements."
Other than that one difference, all four doorways opened into yellow painted hallways with stone floors and a meter-wide black line down the middle. Bain nudged one of the lines with the heel of his boot. Whatever the ribbed material was made of, it flaked under the pressure of his heel and rubbed away easily.
“Probably a traction strip, in case the stone got wet,” Dr. Haral theorized. He scraped up a few scraps of the black material and put it into the sample case hanging from his belt.
“Well, we have four dark hallways and no sign of animal penetration anywhere,” Captain Lorian said. “Eight of us ... Two to a team is too few."
“Mother, why not four to a hallway, walk for half an hour and if we don't find anything, come back and try the other two hallways. If we do find anything, we come back and wait for the other team, and all eight of us investigate it together,” Herin suggested.
“That sounds like a very workable idea.” Captain Lorian nodded. The smile she bestowed on her daughter was the same kind of proud expression Lin wore that made Bain feel tall and strong and able to do anything.
Bain, Rhiann, Herin and one crewman went down the left-hand hallway on the right-hand side of the landing. Lin, Dr. Haral, Captain Lorian and the other crewman took the right-hand hallway.
Open doorways leading into shadowed, empty rooms filled with dust met their eyes under the sweeping beams of four handlights. It could have been any abandoned building on dozens of worlds Bain had visited.
“It's so ... ordinary,” Herin grumbled, voicing the feeling that plagued them all.
“I know. Why didn't they leave anything for us to find?” Rhiann said in a softer voice than usual.
“They were running away, right?” Bain said. He stepped into the fifth empty room they had found and stirred the dust around with the toe of his boot. “I figure, if I was going away and I knew I wouldn't come back, I'd take everything because who would know what we'd need where we were going?"
“That's probably it,” the crewman said. He nodded toward the open door on the other side of the hall. “Time's almost up before we start heading back. Time for one more room."
“Babysitter,” Herin muttered, but she smiled at the crewman, who in turn gave her a friendly cuff to the back of her helmet.
The last room was empty as well. With the fading of time and darkness and the thick coating of dust on walls and floor and dripping from the ceiling, it was hard to find marking
s that might show what the room had been used for. The very uniformity of the rooms made Bain think it could have been a dormitory, or a series of offices. They had only walked maybe a fifth of the distance down the long hallway, and still hadn't found any facilities, either for cooking or sanitary or even a food dispensing area. The machines probably would have been removed like everything else, but the pipes for water and waste and the conduits for energy would have remained to give some clue to their function.
Lin's group reported the same findings when they met again on the landing. This time, Bain's group took the hallway that had fresh air in it when the door slid open.
“We won't walk on the way back, all right?” Rhiann begged. “Let's go into as many rooms as we can, and run on the way back."
“I don't...” Herin's doubtful protest of the plan faded as she looked into the first room down the hall.
Empty shelves filled both long walls. Multiple rows of holes with bits of wire protruding from them showed where some kind of equipment had filled up the short wall opposite the door.
“This is it,” Bain whispered, but loudly enough for the others to hear. “We're going to find something fantastic on this floor."
“Let's look in all the rooms and mark the ones that need more exploring,” Herin said. “If we find enough, maybe we can persuade Mother to stay for a few days and explore."
“Race you!” Rhiann called. She darted down the hall to the next doorway.
This door, though, was closed. Rhiann tapped the keypad next to the door. It slid open with another gust of rank, dead air. Coming up behind her, Bain managed to shine his light inside and found another completely empty room. The two exchanged grimaces and turned to the next door.
Herin and the crewman teamed up, taking the left side of the hall, while Bain and Rhiann worked the right side. Three more doorways were open, showing rooms with shelving left behind and more marks of equipment being taken from the walls. Some floors showed signs of having some covering ripped up and removed. Tiny holes for fasteners marred the smooth, cold stone under the layers of the dust of centuries.
Leap Ships [Sunsinger Chronicles Book 7] Page 9