by Allen Wold
"Take it easy," Droagn projected. He reached out one hand and gently placed it on Rikard's shoulder. The ends of his fingers came almost halfway down the man's chest.
"I'm supposed to play the heavy, you just make the decisions."
Rikard looked up at him and snorted. "You can be heavy if you want," he said. He watched the Kelarins. They had lost some of their fragile bravado. "I just don't have much patience with people who claim to be such tough dudes and then quail at the sight of a dark ramp." He gazed calmly at the Kelarine supervisor as he spoke.
Kath Harin lowered his clawed hand. He glanced at the gray humanoid, who was silent. The goggles the gray one wore revealed nothing, not even at what he was looking. The supervisor's tongue flickered once, then he went back to his crew, and they spoke quietly together for a few moments. Then he turned back to Rikard.
"Look," he said, "we signed on for one kind of job; this is turning out to be something different, a lot more dangerous than what we bargained for. The deal is this, we quit now or you double the rate."
Rikard snorted again, disgusted this time. He stared at the brick-red supervisor until Kath Harin could no longer meet his gaze. "All right," Rikard said, "twenty kay apiece. But no more chickenfooting, or you get nothing."
The four workers bobbed in the way that was their equivalent of a nod. "All right," Kath Harin said. "But you've got the heavy artillery. Be ready to use it if you have to."
Rikard's only response was to put his recording helmet back in place.
They went down, the two Kelarine workers in the lead with their lights, then Rikard Braeth flanked by the gray one and Kath Harin, then Droagn, and well back the other two workers with their own lamps. The textured floor of the ramp was canted from side to side, the walls were twisted, and in some places there were cracks running through the surface. But aside from that it was an easy descent.
There was no sound, except for their own footfalls or the equivalent; no smell, of mold or rot or char or even mustiness; no color, other than a multitude of shades of gray, no iridescent heat discoloration as they'd found above; no movement to the air. The descending ramp turned one full circle, then leveled off where a door was set into the outside wall. They did not pause here.
"Notice the lack of dust," the figure in gray said.
"What about it?" Rikard asked.
"It means that everything was removed from this place either immediately before or immediately after it was buried. I am impressed that the materials used in construction haven't decomposed more than they have. This must indeed be Ahmear architecture, rather than that produced by a physically similar species."
"Of course it's Ahmear," Kath Harin said. "Everybody knows that."
"I don't," Droagn projected. "This place is too big. In my time we didn't build cities, just private residences and the occasional orbiting station. We like to be roomy, of course, but— He reached up to touch the black metal circlet with its projecting spikes that sat on his head. "This place is at least a hundred times bigger than any chateau I've ever known." It was the circlet that enhanced his natural telepathic abilities and gave him an extended sensing of the place they were exploring.
"Only a hundred?" Rikard asked. If this had been a Human city it could easily have accommodated fifty thousand people.
" Maybe two hundred," Droagn said.
They went down the ramp, level after level, until it ended, thirty floors below, in a roughly circular chamber, with nine doors around the sides. All the doors were closed. The floor here was nearly level. The walls showed no compression or burning.
"Are we at the bottom?" Rikard asked Droagn.
The Ahmear's dome eyes seemed to gaze through the walls. He turned his head, the light glinted off the points of the spikes on the circlet he wore. "Nowhere near," he said at last. "We'll have to find another ramp."
"So which way do we go?" Rikard asked.
"Lots of options," Droagn said. He tapped the black crown on his head with a finger. With it he could feel the difference between rock and air for quite a distance. He pointed to the fourth door on the left from the ramp. "I'd guess that's our best bet."
Rikard adjusted the recording helmet, scanned the chamber one last time, then waited as the Kelarine workmen, taking their cue, went to the indicated door and started opening it. It was not fused shut, so a few moments' work with prybars did the trick. Beyond was a broad corridor. The party resumed their previous formation and entered.
"The ceilings are right, though," Droagn said to Rikard. They were four meters above the floor. "A comfortable height for an Ahmear." His own head rose to three meters above his serpentine lower body. "For a private dwelling, that is."
There were widely spaced doors along the corridor, but Rikard did not pause. The rooms beyond the doors were spacious by Human standards, cozy in Ahmear terms, and all completely empty. Those on the left had windows, now completely darkened by volcanic scoria and pumice.
The corridor went on for three hundred meters or so and then came to a tee. Droagn gestured and they turned to the right.
"This is older than fifty thousand years," the gray one said as they proceeded down the slightly narrower branch.
"Well of course, Msr. Grayshard," Kath Harin said, "it would have to be, wouldn't it, for it to have been buried by a volcano that is well known to have gone off fifty-one thousand three hundred and twenty-one years ago."
"Indeed," Grayshard said. "That is to say, I believe this place to be more than one hundred thousand years old."
"How can you tell?" Rikard asked.
"There's something in the flavor of the dust."
"This dust's got no smell," one of the black Kelarins protested.
"That is my point," Grayshard answered.
The corridor ended in an arch, beyond which was a large chamber, its ceiling eight meters high. Their footfalls and talon clatters echoed in the open space, and the light of the lamps, broad-beam as it was, showed the far wall only dimly. There were two doors on either side of the arch. There were five doors in each of the other walls, more or less evenly spaced.
Droagn concentrated again, extending his senses through the black circlet, then directed them to the fourth door in the right-hand wall. Beyond was another, much smaller chamber, with one door in each of the other walls, and a ceiling once again only four meters from the floor.
After that it was a maze of rooms, chambers, short connecting hallways, and more rooms. They proceeded more slowly now as Droagn tried to find them the best way. It was a job for which the circlet he wore, a device called the Prime, and once thought to be the oldest pre-Federation artifact in existence, was not truly intended.
"You're going by more than just 'feel,'" Rikard said to him once.
"I'm assuming that this was indeed built by Ahmear, and applying logic. That doesn't always work, of course. What if you found yourself in ruins built by Humans even five thousand years ago, a different culture, a different people. Could you predict what each empty room might be, or where each empty corridor might lead?"
"If it were as empty as this," Rikard said, "I'm not even sure I could tell it was Human."
"Exactly," Droagn replied.
"But I'd know it wasn't built by Atreef, or Belshpaer."
At last they came to another door, massive and double, but when Droagn pushed the panels aside, all they found beyond it was the top of an elevator shaft.
Droagn turned to look back the way they had come. "I'm not sure," he projected, "but I think there's an opening between floors that way."
They went back around the corner and entered the first door on their left, toward the outside of the structure. The room was perfectly empty, with lava-sealed windows opposite them and a door to the right. They went through the door into another room like the first, but with two doors in the direction they wanted to go. Droagn directed them through the one on the left, near the outside of the building.
This opened into a relatively narrow corridor, bar
ely wide enough for two Ahmear—or four Humans—side by side, with occasional doors on the inside wall, and no windows outside. Every forty to sixty meters or so the outer wall had cracked, and congealed tongues of black bubbly lava projected partway into the corridor, sometimes only a few centimeters, less often farther.
Rikard had not consciously counted paces before, but it seemed to him that they had gone a lot farther back along this outside corridor than they had come on the inner one from the ramp. He was about to mention this to Droagn when the lamps picked out the end of the corridor just ahead.
There was a single doorway, at the end. It opened at a touch, into a chamber that was much larger than any they had yet entered, and far more distorted. The outside walls had buckled almost completely and were heavily corrugated, half melted. The floor and ceiling actually met in two places, and the rest of the floor sagged down in a shallow depression that matched the sagging ceiling.
Here and there in this room, for the first time, were low piles of ash and char. Grayshard went over to the nearest of these and knelt in a strange way that implied that his knees worked differently from a Human's. He reached out one gloved hand and poked a finger into the centimeter-high pile of dust, spread out like a thick smear across the slanting and buckled floor. "A complex of organic materials," he said. He moved his finger elsewhere. "Plastic or wood, I can't tell which." He stood, a flowing movement that still seemed clumsy, and went to another pile that differed only in being slightly more granular, and poked his finger into it. "This is much the same.
"This room," he said as he stood, "was so badly burned that there was nothing left to take away. If the inhabitants had evacuated before the disaster, they would have cleared this room too. That it was not, that the furnishings were left to burn to ash, conveys to me that the emptiness elsewhere was due to later salvage."
"If there was anything to salvage," Rikard said.
"Oh, there would have been. Or it would have been left as strews of dust, as it was here."
"I take it that's our exit," Rikard said. He pointed to a fused doorway on the far side of the room, near the inner wall.
The two Kelarins with the cutting torches went over to it and unpacked their equipment. But instead of cutting through the door itself, Droagn had them make a new opening just beside it, where the material of the wall was a bit less melted and distorted.
Beyond was another, smaller chamber, with lots of ash and char, in smears and mounds, some of which were rather substantial, but all situated more toward the inner wall. At the outer wall the ceiling nearly met the floor.
On the far side of this room there was yet another door, and this time the workmen cut through it. And there, at last, was another ramp, leading down into silent darkness. This one was broad and shallow, as if intended for ceremonial rather than strictly functional use.
They followed the ramp around seven full circles, descending seven levels as they did so, and then it ended in a large open space with the feel of a lobby or an antechamber to it. There were doors and open arches in the other five walls, and even as they came off the ramp, from each door and arch came strange creatures, huge and spherical and covered with thick fur, nearly black above and shading to tan below, shambling on six legs, each with two heavily clawed toes.
They resembled the Kelarins as a bear resembles a Human, half again as tall and far bulkier. Huge eyes projected upward from the forward top of their bodies, and their mouths, at the front, were gaping slashes nearly thirty centimeters across, filled with a grotesque array of huge fangs. Shadows bobbled wildly as the Kelarine lamp-holders recoiled in near paralytic surprise and terror. The creatures, in turn, seemed confused by the light, and milled around the outer edges of the room.
"A pod of fathak," Kath Harin choked.
The last two Kelarins began to back up the ramp as more of the fathak came in, pressing those who had first entered. The terra-cotta workman dropped his equipment, except for the lamp, and ran. The other three workmen followed in short order.
Rikard held his place, though the darkening of the chamber, lit now only by Droagn's blue-ted lamp, encouraged the fathak to surge forward. Gray shard drew his gun, while Droagn put down the case and the lamp so that he could brandish the staff and the chain-sawlike thing. Kath Harin had drawn his own gun, and seemed undecided, whether to stay and fight or follow his vanished crew.
"They do seem to be hungry," Droagn projected softly.
That was enough for Kath Harin. He turned and bolted up the now-dark ramp.
"Wait," Rikard called to him.
"You wait," Kath Harin's receding voice called back. "And keep your money!"
In the light of Droagn's lamp the thirty or so fathak moved more comfortably now, more determinedly, concentrating their attention on the three remaining adventurers. At last Rikard let his gloved right hand rest on the butt of his megatron. As he drew the weapon a pad of special mesh on the palm of his glove closed a circuit between a scar-covered implant on the palm of his hand and the contact on the butt of the gun. His perception of time slowed, by a factor of ten.
At the same time, concentric rings appeared, floating in his sight, in his uncovered right eye, and a small red spot, low and off to the side, showed where a bullet from his gun, if it were fired at that moment, would strike. The automatic ranging device, implanted in his head and arm and hand, compensated for the distance and motion of the fathak in focus at the center of the concentric rings. It showed him where to aim—no elevation at this range, no lead since the motion was directly toward him. As the red spot entered the innermost concentric circle, centered between the fathak's eyes, he squeezed the trigger.
He started to choose a new target even as the bullet left the gun, its flat arc taking it, almost visible to his speeded-up senses, unerringly to the point where he had aimed. He picked and shot five more fathak with a physical speed that almost matched his subjective perceptions, imparted by the complex circuitry that involved -not only his hand, eye, glove, and gun, but other circuitry in his brain and body as well.
As he was firing Grayshard wielded his own peculiar weapon, of a type and shape unknown in the Federation, a micropulse laser that fired multiple bolts of extremely brief duration. Each pulse was weaker than that produced by a Federation gun, but in a hundredth of a second a thousand of them pulsed out, and the fathak that was its target crumpled and charred.
At the same time Droagn wielded his chain-saw weapon, a forceblade in fact, an energy sword mat added two meters to his reach. The body of the weapon was its generator, while the blade was its wave guide. Though it weighed nearly fifteen kilograms, he wielded it like a foil. It simply cut the fathak in half.
When Rikard's gun was empty he rocked it back in his hand to break the connection and return to normal time. As he had fired, with his left hand he had extracted a full clip from the cartridge pouch at his belt, and he now reloaded in one smooth motion. He had accounted for six of the fathak, Grayshard had downed four, and Droagn five.
Now he just watched as Grayshard fired again, and in real time the laser seemed like a shotgun, or a machine gun in its effect. Hundreds of tiny holes opened up in the body of the fathak in front of him, many of them penetrated dozens of times by succeeding microbolts. The creature fell and slid forward, stopped by the carcasses in front of it. At the same time Droagn swung to the side, the forceblade crackled, his reach took the end of the weapon over the stacked corpses in front of him to slice yet another bearlike monster from side to side.
The rest of the fathak tried to stop, but those behind piled into those in front, who in turn were piling up on the bodies of those slain. Rikard and his companions held their fire. The next three seconds seemed interminable as the beasts at last came to a complete stop, then began to run away. Another moment and, except for the dead, the three adventurers were alone again.
Rikard holstered his reloaded gun and went to the foot of the ramp. There was no sign of light from above. "Kath Harin," he called. "It'
s all over, come on down." There was no answer, no sound of talons on the floor.
"They're out of my range," Droagn said. The power was off on his forceblade, and the only light in the chamber came from his lamp, still on the floor.
"We can't carry all this stuff." Rikard surveyed the equipment the Kelarins had left behind. He hoisted one of the cutting torches onto his shoulder. He pointed to a leather case with a carrying strap. "Can you take that?" he asked Grayshard.
"I'll try." It weighed only about four and a half kilograms, but it threw him badly off balance.
Droagn picked up his lamp, tucked the big case and his staff under that arm, and with the other two arms picked up a number of the heavier bundles.
"Which way do we go?" Grayshard said.
Droagn paused a moment in concentration, then turned to the archway immediately to the right of the foot of the ramp. "This takes us back inside."
They left the chamber, no longer empty, stinking with blood and burned flesh. Since Droagn had the only light, he led the way.
There were frequent ramps, though they seldom descended more than three levels at a time. The thin layer of dust on the floor became minutely thicker with each level down, until at last they left obvious prints in a coating of ash that was perhaps as much as a millimeter in depth. There were more drifts of ash in the few rooms and chambers through which they passed. As they went deeper these became thicker, coarser, subtly colored varying shades of gray and dark brown and dirty white.
Then, an hour after the fathak attack, the nature of the place changed. Here there were large expanses of open floor, the ceiling was supported by free-standing columns, and the outer wall was almost completely window, though it was dark with the compacted volcanic ash.
Smaller chambers were set in clusters which formed broad columns or short partitions, which served to divide the larger spaces into distinct areas. The whole level had the feeling of being at ground level, though there were at least two similar levels below. Droagn got his bearings, then they started in toward the middle of the structure.