by David Drake
“Yes, do,” Lissea said. She didn’t look up as she spoke. She’d taken another tool from her case and was cutting at the end of a wave guide with a tiny keening noise. “Both of you go up, will you? I don’t know how long this is going to take.”
Ned turned without speaking and climbed the stairs, two steps at a time. He heard Carron’s feet behind him. The staircase, though apparently flimsy, didn’t spring or sway under foot.
By the time he stepped over the lightball, his head was above ground again. It felt good.
Carron snicked closed the catch of his belt pack, rotating so that a spear of sunlight illuminated the task. He avoided eye contact with Ned.
The immediate forest held nothing of interest on any of the spectra Ned’s helmet could receive and analyze. He squatted to watch through the hatchway as Lissea worked. Carron moved a little farther back in the clearing so that he too could see without rubbing shoulders with Ned.
Lissea had broken her case into three separate trays which she’d laid out to her right side. She used the floor in front of her as a worktable, picking up and putting down items with precise movements. A lamp extending from one tray threw an oval of intense light across the floor. Occasionally a welding head sparkled viciously.
Ned had seen Lissea perform as the female captain of a band of hard-bitten, intensely masculine men. She’d done a good job, a remarkable job; but that was all on-the-job training. This was the first time Ned had seen Lissea doing the sort of engineering task for which she’d been formally educated.
Repeatedly, Lissea held a device against the wall, touched a switch, and went back to work. She was proceeding by trial and error, but there was no waste motion whatever. Each action was calculated to determine a particular question, yes or no, and thus take another step toward the goal.
“She must be incredibly brave, isn’t she?” Carron said quietly.
Another step toward Lissea’s goal.
Ned gave Carron a friendly but neutral smile. “You bet,” he said. “In some ways, I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody braver.”
Because she had something to lose. There were no cowards aboard the Swift, but most of the men knew they’d be doing this or some equivalent of this until the law of averages caught up with them.
“Aside from being brilliant, that is,” Carron added hastily. “I’ve been . . . consumed with the Old Race since—well, since I can remember thinking. And she dives in with a plan only minutes after she gets here!”
“A lot of times it’s having a fresh perspective,” Ned said dryly. Pancahte wasn’t the sticks, exactly, but the whole Pocket would have been a backwater even without the Twin Worlds strangling access. “But I agree: Lissea is brilliant.”
He waited a beat to add, “Besides being beautiful, of course.”
Carron grimaced as though by forcing his face into a tight rictus he could keep from blushing. He couldn’t. “Ah, yes,” he said, staring toward a tree ten meters away, “I think she’s very attractive too.”
Ned looked down at Lissea again. He couldn’t really see much of her at this angle. She’d lowered her faceshield to protect her against flying chips and actinic radiation from the welding.
What he saw when he looked at her was the image his mind painted. That was more than a trim body and precise features, though it included those aspects. He wouldn’t define Lissea Doormann as being the ideal of physical beauty . . . but beauty wasn’t solely or even primarily physical.
And yes, she was beautiful.
“I suppose that she . . .” Carron said. “Does she have a protector?”
Ned looked at the tree on which Carron’s eyes were focused. It was one of the tall cones. Tiny blue flowers grew among the shaggy needles. “She’s got twenty of us,” Ned said with unintended harshness. “Well, eighteen, now. But if you mean—”
He fixed Carron with his gaze and waited for the Pancahtan to meet his eyes before he continued. “—is she involved with anybody, no, I don’t think she is. Certainly not anybody aboard the Swift.”
Carron nodded and let out a breath that he might not have been aware he was holding. He opened his mouth to say something noncommittal.
The bunker roared.
The interior was a hazy ambience rather than clear air and pale walls. Glare quivered through the mass like lightning across cloudtops. The bioluminescent globe had faded to a shadow of itself.
Carron started to jump down the hatch. Ned grabbed him across the waist left-handed and flung him back. Lissea might be trying to run up the stairs.
“It’s all right!” she shouted as thunder coalesced around her. “I’ve gotten it to work!”
Ned dropped into the bunker in three strides, judging where the treads were by memory. He held his submachine gun like a heavy pistol so that his left hand was free to take the shock if he slipped.
His soles hit the floor. He reached out for Lissea. She was there, her shoulder warm through the tunic and her hand reaching up to clasp Ned’s.
The wall before them erupted in a massive bombardment taking place on a horizon kilometers away. White, red, and yellow light gouted, and the air shook with repeated concussions.
The image vanished rather than faded. On the opposite side of the room, blue light limned a gigantic structure composed of pentagonal facets. Either the object was hanging in space or it was so huge that the supporting surface was beyond the image focus. Bits of the ship/building hived off as bands of non-light struck and scattered and collapsed in searing bolts which flashed from corners of the pentagons.
As suddenly as the conflicting images had appeared, the circular wall cleared again. The air still had a shimmering materiality: the lightball glowed as if it stood behind a dozen insect screens.
Ned couldn’t be sure where the air stopped and the wall began. He didn’t reach out, because he wasn’t sure what his hand would touch—or whether it would touch anything.
Carron Del Vore stood with them. His eyes brushed Ned’s with a cold lack of expression. Ned took his hand away from Lissea and stepped to the side.
“I loaded a vocabulary cartridge and told the system to switch on,” Lissea said to the men. The room hissed with sound that was barely noticeable until someone tried to speak over it. “There weren’t any input devices, so it’s likely the system was voice-actuated. But it had to recognize my words as data, so I made a core load through a guide hole.”
“Ready for instructions,” a voice said from the whole circumference of the bunker at once.
“Well, I’ll be hanged,” Ned said. “You mean it’s a data bank with no security gate controlling access?”
“You loaded a vocabulary?” Carron said. “But how did that help? How did it translate the words into information it could process?”
Lissea squeezed Carron’s hand. Ned looked at his feet. He’d flipped over one of the trays when he leaped into the bunker. Now that the light was steady, Ned bent and concentrated on picking up tools he’d scattered.
“A seven-hundred-thousand-word vocabulary of Trade and Standard English,” Lissea said, “is enough self-consistent information to provide its own code—for a sufficiently powerful processor. This one was.”
Presumably the bunker didn’t care where the controller was facing, but human beings like to act as if there were a point of focus. She turned to the wall again. “There are two tanks defending a perimeter around Hammerhead Lake, fifteen kilometers north of Astragal,” she said. “How can the tanks be shut down or destroyed?”
“Define Hammerhead Lake or Astragal,” the environment said.
“I’ll handle it,” Carron said with matter-of-fact firmness. He took the control wand from Lissea’s breast pocket without bothering to ask. “Project a relief map of the ten thousand hectares of surface centered on this bunker.”
Carron was taking charge rather than begging a favor. Ned had noted the dichotomy in the young noble’s personality before.
The interior of the bunker changed. Ned felt an instant
of vertigo. A vast map curved into view some meters beyond where the wall should have been. Either the illusion of flying tricked the balance canals in his ears, or for a moment gravity had shifted and he was looking straight down at Pancahte it self.
A flat, palm-sized disk from Lissea’s toolcase hung in the air, attached to nothingness by one of the wave guides Carron had provided. She hadn’t removed the device after she dumped data into the vast bank encircling them. Ned wondered what storage method the builders had used, and how long ago they had lived.
Carron adjusted the wand’s lens into a needle of light. “This location,” he said, flicking the beam around the easily recognizable dumbbell silhouette. There was no sign of Astragal or any human construction on the projected map.
“Do the tanks you’re concerned with look like this?” the bunker asked.
The image of an object with twenty pentagonal sides appeared. The topographic map was still there. The projections neither masked nor intersected one another even though they should have been occupying the same points of space.
The tank, if it was a tank, had no weapons or other bulges to mark its flat sides. The vehicle rotated like an ill-made wheel across waste terrain, leaving cracked indentations on the surface. Broken rock spewed out whenever a corner bit. The vehicle looked like nothing Ned had ever seen in his life.
“No,” Carron said. “It’s a . . . there’s a hull and on top a—”
Another vehicle replaced the first against the same setting. The change was so complete and sudden that Ned wasn’t aware of any point of transition. This tank was identical to those whose images Carron had showed them on Buin, except that the details were precise, down to splotches of tarnish on the flanks. There was either a persistent highlight or an emitter on the gun mantle.
“Yes,” said Carron. “Like that. How can we get past them safely?”
“Describe the behavior of the tanks,” the bunker directed.
Ned was beginning to get used to the omnipresence of the voice. What he still found disquieting was the background vibration. The longer he listened to it, the more it sounded like a battle of enormous scale going on in the far distance.
“They circle the lake,” Carron said. “They shoot at anyone or thing that comes within six kilometers of it.”
“They’ve been operating for at least five hundred years,” Ned added.
Perhaps the hum was merely the operating frequency of the vastly complex computer in which they stood. Or again, Ned might be reading his own fears into random images which the system displayed as it booted. . . .
But he didn’t believe that.
“The tanks are on autopatrol,” the bunker said. The system’s designers had made no effort to humanize the voice. The words were dead and wrong without a tone of satisfaction to accompany them. “They can be disarmed by anyone they’ve been programmed to recognize as friendly.”
Ned and Lissea exchanged glances—she frowning, he with lips pursed in consideration.
“It is unlikely after five hundred years,” the bunker continued, “whether standard or local, that anyone from the contemporary population would remain alive. Did you have another type of year in mind?”
“No,” said Carron tightly.
“Then the only way the tanks can be disarmed is through the use of a standard key,” the bunker said. “This is a standard key.”
A flat, square object some sixty millimeters per side appeared in front of Lissea and the two men. It had a wristband, though Ned thought the object was too large to be comfortable when worn that way. There were no distinguishing marks on the smooth gray surface.
The third image appeared with/over the topo map and the vision of the tank maneuvering across rocky terrain. The combined views were simultaneously clearer than any one of them should have been, no matter what distance from which they were seen. The bunker’s display certainly wasn’t holographic, and Ned now wondered whether it had any presence in the physical universe whatever.
“All right,” Lissea said. “That’s how the tanks can be disarmed. Now, how can they be destroyed?”
“The tanks can be destroyed by the application of sufficient energy,” the bunker said. “The flux required is of stellar magnitude. Nothing within the information you have provided me suggests that you have knowledge of the principles necessary to apply such volumes of energy.”
Ned didn’t look at his companions. He was also only marginally aware of the map, tank, and key before him. The rumble of warfare, cataclysmic and unimaginably distant in time, filled him like flame in the nozzle of a rocket.
“I’ve seen a . . . a key like that,” Carron said. “My father has one in the collection of Old Race artifacts in the palace.”
“You’ve got one?” Lissea said. “Wonderful! When can you bring it to me?”
“The top lifts up,” Carron said, gesturing toward the display. “There’s points marked on the inner surface. When you touch them, light flashes from the back of the lid.”
The bunker changed the image as Carron spoke. The lid raised ninety degrees; the view rotated to show ten unfamiliar symbols arranged in pyramid fashion with a solid bar across the bottom. The image turned again. The raised back emitted pulses modulated in both time and hue—spectrum—across the entire surface.
“Carron,” Lissea said. “You have the key. Our lives depend on it, my life. When can you bring it to me?”
“Lissea,” the Pancahtan said, “I don’t have the key, and my father does. I can ask him to loan it to you; I’ll do that—”
“A little thing like that?” Ned interrupted harshly. “You say nobody ever looks at the artifacts and your father certainly doesn’t care. He’ll never miss it!”
“He’ll see you use it, though!” Carron said. “You can’t hide that. He’ll see and he’ll understand, and then he’ll have me killed. Probably kill me himself. You don’t know Lon!”
Ned turned his back to the Pancahtan.
“If you ask your father to let me use the key,” Lissea said, ticking off probabilities without particular emphasis, “then he’ll know its significance—guess, at any rate. After that, you won’t be able to remove the key yourself.”
Carron nodded miserably.
“I don’t think there’s any likelihood of his agreeing to your request,” Lissea continued. “Especially since he’s ordered you to keep away from me and the expedition members in general. Is that correct?”
“I don’t know,” Carron said, knotting his fingers together before him. “Yes, I suppose so. Yes.”
Lissea nodded, her eyes empty. “Yes,” she said, “that’s what I thought.”
She shrugged. Her visage and stance shifted with the movement, becoming as hard and brilliant as an oxy-hydrogen flame. “Slade,” she said, “go back to the jeep and monitor radio traffic. Don’t disturb me unless there’s an attack on the Swift.”
“Yessir,” Ned said. He turned to the steps, putting his left hand on an upper tread to guide him in the surreal half-light.
“I’m going to get additional information on these keys,” Lissea said in a brittle voice. “Perhaps we can build one from equipment aboard the Swift.”
Perhaps pigs can fly. Perhaps the lion will lie down with the lamb.
“And Slade?” Lissea called. “Close the hatch behind you, will you?”
“Yessir.”
Echoes of fire and bloodshed reverberated, in the bunker and in Ned’s mind.
The sun had set while the three of them were in the bunker. The primary had not yet risen.
Given the size of Lon Del Vore’s pet, the variety of life in the forests of Pancahte shouldn’t have surprised Ned as much as it did. He sat with his back to a tree-trunk at the edge of the clearing, as still as a sniper: watching, listening, trying not to think.
The largest creature of this night was a snuffling omnivore the size of a raccoon. Its long snout delicately skimmed the leaf mold. When scent located a target, one or both of the creature’s thumb-claws
swept sideways and down. Each stroke was as quick and startling as the snap of a spring trap.
In the air, other hunters patrolled. Small, scale-winged creatures drove ceaseless spirals and figure-eights across the clearing, sucking gulletfuls of the chitinous insect-equivalents that chose the open space in which to dance and mate.
Twice while Ned waited, a hook-beaked flyer stooped from its vantage point on the peak of a cone tree. Both times the killer smashed an insectivore to the ground, pivoted on one wing, and snatched its prey back up to its eyrie. The flight was a single complex curve, executed as smoothly as a sailor ties a familiar knot.
With magnification at ten-power and his helmet’s microprocessor sharpening the infrared images, Ned watched the killer shred its prey. The victim’s skin and wings, stripped away by tiny cuts of the beak, fell to the floor of the clearing in tatters before the creature bolted the remainder whole.
Ned watched; and, despite himself, thought.
The hatch opened partway. The bunker was silent. The system’s own illumination had shut down, and the lightball was by now only a flicker of gray.
Lissea held the hatch vertical. It shielded her from the vehicles, though Ned had a perfect view of his companions from the edge of the clearing. She bent down, kissed Carron as he stood two steps below her, and then shook free of his would-be embrace.
She flung the hatch fully open and called exultantly, “All right, Slade. We’re ready to go. Fire ’em up!”
“You’ve got interesting bird life here, Del Vore,” Ned said easily as he rose to his feet. “Do you call them birds, though?”
He rolled the switch over his visor to restore an unmagnified field of view, though he left the receptors on thermal imaging.
Carron tripped on the last step and almost dropped Lissea’s toolbox. Lissea continued to walk to the jeep. She neither paused nor looked back.
“I can take that,” Ned said, reaching for the toolbox and removing it from Carron’s grip.
“Ah, yes, we say birds,” Carron said, but Ned was already striding for the hovercraft behind Lissea. “I, ah—Lissea, I’ll be there.”