by D L Frizzell
“Jarnum really is tryin’ to start a war,” Redland said. “A big one.”
“Give Redland a gun,” I said, evoking surprise on everybody’s face, including Redland.
“Why?” Hathan-Fen asked.
“Because I think that Redland is a misguided sonofabitch who realizes that the future of all humans is at stake. Whichever way this situation goes down in the end, his fate will be the same as ours. Jarnum played Redland like a fiddle. He played all of us.”
Hathan-Fen gave us the leery eye, and then handed Redland the gun I’d taken from Charles. “You’d better behave yourselves,” she said, pointing at each of us, “or I swear to God I’ll tear you both an actual set of new assholes!”
Redland extended his hand. I didn’t want to – really didn’t want to – but I took his hand and shook it.
“Fine,” we both said.
Redland spun the cylinder on the pistol to check that it was loaded. “That bugfucker Jarnum will have a plan,” he said, getting back to the business at hand. “I’ve got no idea what, so we’d better find out what’s at the other end of this tunnel and go from there.”
I nodded and readied my pistol. We all marched toward the light together.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Still a good fifty meters from the light at the end of the tunnel, we reached the barricade and found that there were no longer soldiers guarding it.
“That’s not a good sign,” Traore said.
“They musta figured out that Jarnum got past ‘em,” Redland said.
“We’d better pick up the pace, then,” Hathan-Fen said. To Redland, she asked, “Will Jarnum create more distractions?”
“Depends on what he’s tryin’ to accomplish,” Redland answered. “He could start another fire, or kidnap somebody for all I know. Whatever it is, he’ll get people riled up, throw them off balance so they can’t guess his next move.”
Redland’s thoughts sounded reasonable for once, and I couldn’t disagree. Still, I had to wonder what Jarnum’s endgame was. There was only one tunnel leading back toward the northern hemisphere, which would be heavily guarded from this point on. There was the T’Neth train, but there wasn’t any indication he’d found it yet. There was even less chance that he could make use of it, as Engineer Seku would have to bring back the train and give him a ride. That didn’t sound likely. At any rate, he’d have to create a pretty big distraction to sneak back out after killing nine T’Neth with a single, short-lived laser pistol. I shielded my eyes from the glare at the end of the tunnel. “The cave can’t be any bigger than the one we just left, so we should find him pretty quickly.”
The waterfall was tucked into a bell-shaped antechamber on one side of the tunnel, which looked like a natural formation created by geothermal springs. A torrent of water roared from a crack at the top of the cavern and fell into a pool at the center of the floor, generating enough mist that the light from the end of the tunnel made a rainbow. The Dolinians had made a walkway around the pool and fixed benches at regular intervals, but it was understandably empty at the moment. With scarcely more than a glance at the falls, we stepped into the light at the end of the tunnel.
The first thing I saw, much to my disbelieving eyes, was the sky. Not the night sky that our geographic location should have dictated, but a bright, blue, daytime sky. It was the kind I would expect to see halfway around Arion in the northern hemisphere. Kithara shone directly overhead between billowing clouds. That was clearly impossible, since that suggested we were at the north pole. We stood there and gawked for a minute before Mayford spoke up.
“Welcome to Dolina,” he said simply.
In the distance, maybe a few kilometers away, a dozen chrome monoliths were arranged in a circle, each of them hundreds of meters tall, with great, twisting buttresses that spiraled up the ground. In the center of the monoliths stood a tower that was twice their height. A sphere formed the apex of the larger tower, its mass steadied by gossamer strands of glass running to each of the surrounding monoliths. It took a closer look to be sure, but I was certain the monoliths had windows. “Skyscrapers?” I asked Mayford.
Mayford nodded.
I scanned the city that spread out from the skyscrapers. There were hundreds of smaller buildings, each impressive in its own right. Between them, people rode back and forth on bicycles. There were larger, motorized vehicles as well, but they ran as quietly as the bicycles, and carried loads that would overtax the best sap-fueled vehicle that we could produce in the Allied Territories. The land outside the city itself was subdivided by rows of massive trees. Between the trees, in wide swaths of open space, were farms. Barns, not re-purposed spacecraft but real wooden barns, dotted the landscape between fields of grain and pastures where hundreds – maybe thousands – of cattle and other livestock grazed. White picket fences, gravel roads, and even more vehicles, covered the landscape for kilometers in every direction. At the edges of the farms, I noticed a wall, maybe twenty meters high, that defined the border between land and sky. Though the sky was blue overhead, it took on a pearlescent sheen where it met the wall.
“If this is Dolina,” I said, “Then what’s the cavern we just came from.”
“Well,” Mayford said, “that is also Dolina. It’s our welcome center for new visitors, you might say. It does have a greater purpose, however. We are expanding our horizons, quite literally, by looking for more tunnels.”
“You might need to rethink how long this search is going to take,” Hathan-Fen said dryly.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“I thought Dolina was supposed to be in a cave,” Traore said, staring into the sky.
“It is a cave,” Mayford explained as we walked toward a warehouse a short distance away. “More exactly, it is a valley that was created during the Great Cataclysm when a mountain range was pulled apart. What you see as the sky overhead is merely another projection, created on the vortex bubble which encloses the entire city. Admittedly it is much more advanced than the windows you saw in the outer tunnel. The vortex bubble’s primary purpose is to shield us, first from T’Neth sensors inside the planet’s crust, and second from the glacier that broke away from the mountain range overhead.”
“What’s a glacier?” Traore asked.
“A mountain of ice about two kilometers thick in some places,” Mayford said. “It covers the city completely, which is a nice form of camouflage.”
Traore looked a little undone by the answer. “Sorry I asked.”
“Mister Mayford,” Hathan-Fen said. “This is all fascinating, but we do have a murderer on the loose around here somewhere.”
Mayford pointed to the warehouse ahead of us, which stood near the city wall. A single railway track ran past the warehouse into the farmland but had a secondary transfer rail that linked to the warehouse’s loading dock. “There’s a call box in the station’s office,” he said. “We’ll call for a ride there. The authorities have already been alerted, so this Jarnum person you spoke of may already be in custody.”
“Custody ain’t good enough,” Redland said. “He needs to be in a coffin.”
Mayford seemed disturbed by the comment. “What exactly do you do to criminals in your part of the world, if I may ask?”
“We put them in prison,” I said. “Depending on how grievous their crimes were, they may be put to work on croplands, or forced into hard labor in the mines of the Sheers Territory. Those individuals are fitted with titanium shackles on their right forearms to identify them in case of escape.”
Mayford looked at Redland uncomfortably. “What happens if they escape?”
“I kill them and take their shackle back to the prison’s warden,” I said. “The shackles are hardened, so it’s easier to just cut off their arm. I usually kill them first.”
Mayford looked sick now. We reached the warehouse at that moment, so he looked ready to talk about something else. “I’ll see if the station master will let me in.” With that, he hurried through the front door and disappeared.
“That man’s gonna wonder about me,” Redland said, looking thoughtfully at his own shackle.
“He might,” I replied.
We stood there in silence, waiting for Mayford to return.
“That vortex reactor’s gotta be a damn big power source,” Redland said. “I’m no scientist, but I figure things like that would explode under the right conditions.”
“Yeah,” I said.
Mayford came back out of the station. “The police force is sending a flyer,” he said. “They’ll be here in a few minutes.” Before we could say anything else, he cleared his throat. “Listen, I’m going to head back to my side of the tunnel. The police can ID you visually, so you won’t need me.”
Hathan-Fen frowned at Mayford. “Visual ID? You sent them a picture of us?”
“A digital picture, yes,” Mayford said. “I’m sorry, that means their computer already knows what you look like.”
“Outstanding,” the major said.
Looking around, it didn’t seem that life in Dolina had been interrupted by the sabotage and murder in the outer cave. Norio had the same thought. “Are people aware that there is a killer running loose in the city?” he asked.
“I’m sure the public safety personnel would broadcast an alert if they thought citizens were in danger,” Mayford said.
“Do you have a lot of murders here, sir?” Hathan-Fen asked testily.
“We have crime,” Mayford said. “Any city this large would.”
“You couldn’t tell by looking,” I said.
“I’m sure the authorities take every matter seriously,” Mayford replied, his words becoming defensive.
Hathan-Fen’s eyes widened. “Is the city being calmed? Is all this just a bigger version of the picture windows at the cave entrance?”
“I don’t feel calm,” Redland said.
“Me neither,” Traore added.
“No,” Mayford said. “Calming fields only work in contained areas. The only place you would find them in Dolina is in holding cells at the police station. I’m sure they have the situation under control. I really am.”
“Look,” Hathan-Fen said, “we need to speak to the authorities right now. You have a killer on the loose here, and I don’t think anybody realizes how serious this is.”
“I’m sure they’re aware of the situation,” Mayford repeated, his face reddening. “However, you can ask the patrolman for an update when he picks you up.” He opened his mouth to say something more but decided against it. “I need to go. Good luck to you all!” He marched off toward the tunnel to escape from us.
A police flyer approached us a couple minutes later. It looked like an oversized aerovee, with an open-air passenger compartment that seated six. Instead of using T’Neth technology, lift was generated by six helical rotors, three on each side. Each of the rotors was encased within a protective rim, with grids above and below to shield the blades. We shielded our faces as the flyer kicked up rocks from the ground. There were two uniformed men in the flyer’s front seat. One of them wore a helmet and operated the vehicle. The other was an older man, grey-haired with deep wrinkles and a furrowed brow. He climbed out of the flyer and put a service cap on while sizing us up.
“Who is making calls to my dispatchers?” the man demanded, his voice thick with a Titan accent.
Hathan-Fen gestured toward Mayford, who had nearly reached the tunnel. “Mister Mayford called at my request,” she said. “I am Major Hathan-Fen of the Plainsman Militia, here in pursuit of a dangerous criminal.”
“I was not informed that Dolina is under Alliance authority,” the man growled. “Forgive me for making you wait while I was distracted with a hostage negotiation.” His tone dripped with insincerity. “I am Major Kuznetsov. Please join me so we can return to hub.” He pointed to the flyer with a thin-lipped smile.
“Thank you,” the major said. We boarded the flyer as he climbed back in his seat. As soon as we secured our lap belts, the pilot gunned the engine and we rose into the air.
“You chase criminals to my city?” Kuznetsov grilled Hathan-Fen over the sound of the rotors. “You can’t chase them somewhere else?”
“He followed us here, sir,” Hathan-Fen said, “not the other way around.”
“How long have you been after this Oliver Jarnum?” Kuznetsov asked.
“How’d you know his name?” I asked.
Kuznetsov glanced at my badge before leering at me. “He tells us his name while making demands.”
“Sure enough,” Redland said, “Jarnum’s got ‘em chasin’ their tails with another distraction.”
“Are you so good at policing?” Kuznetsov snarled. “You can’t catch criminals at home, but you know how in my city?” He pushed his jaw out in defiance. “We have him surrounded, so no chasing involved.”
“I really doubt that, mister,” Redland shot back.
“Major,” I said, “I apologize for my colleague here.” I gave Redland a stony glare. “This fugitive…Jarnum…is an insurrectionist. He wishes to start a war with the T’Neth.”
“The T’Neth do not live in Dolina,” Kuznetsov said.
“I know,” I replied, considering what I might say that would convince Kuznetsov that we should handle the matter, but could think of nothing. I sighed. “I also know that we do not live here, either. We know how Jarnum works, but this is your home. If you let us, we will do whatever we can to assist you in resolving this crisis.”
Kuznetsov chewed his lip for a moment. “What is your name, young man?”
“Alex Vonn,” I said.
“Ah.” Kuznetsov thought for another moment. “Your father was Richard Vonn, yes?”
I nodded.
“You are taller than him, but look the same,” Kuznetsov said, “Could be you are the same kind of person?”
“I try to be, sir,” I said.
“Will you let us help you, Major?” Hathan-Fen asked humbly.
Kuznetsov considered her request. “Yes.” He gave a whirling gesture to his pilot and pointed toward the tallest skyscraper.
Chapter Forty
The pilot gunned the motor. We rose a few hundred meters farther into the air in mere seconds, being pressed into our seats until the pilot eased off the throttle. Upon reaching the altitude he wanted, he dipped the nose down and accelerated. The force pressed all of us into our seats. Traore groaned uncomfortably.
The rotors ran quieter after we leveled off. I watched the pilot operate the flyer, thinking how similarly it worked compared to an aerobike. It made sense, I thought, that the controls had not evolved much over the last five hundred years.
I had some questions for Kuznetsov while we flew toward the skyscrapers, and took the opportunity to ask while we had some time. “Mister Mayford told us that the T’Neth helped build Dolina.”
“Only the front door,” Mayford said. “Well, they also modified the vortex reactor to look invisible to their unfriendly relatives below us, but that was for their own benefit also. Other than that, Dolina was built by human hands.”
“What would happen if someone turned off the reactor?” I asked.
“Oh, it can’t be turned off,” Kuznetsov replied. “Before you ask, it can’t be overloaded, either.”
“Would a power increase be noticed by the T’Neth?” Hathan-Fen asked.
“No,” Kuznetsov said irritably. “The reactor is safe. No one can enter without credentials.” He waved his right hand in the air. “Biometric is fool-proof way to make sure only right people get in. Everybody else stays out. Please, we have five hundred years’ experience. You have only five minutes.”
“Major Kuznetsov,” I said. “I understand the basic theories of magneto-rotational drives. Vortex Reactors create energy bubbles like the one you have here. But they were designed to operate in deep space, not on a planet’s surface.”
“You know of vortex drives?” Kuznetsov laughed. “Outsiders have not had one for five hundred years. I think you make this up.”
�
��It’s part of the Dead Sciences curriculum at the University,” I said. “One of my favorite subjects, actually.”
“Dead Sciences?” Kuznetsov scoffed. “In Dolina, science is alive and well!”
“How high does this thing fly?” Traore shouted nervously from his seat behind the pilot.
“It goes anywhere there’s air,” the pilot shouted back.
“Great,” Traore said, double-checking his restraint and ensuring it was extra tight.
From the higher vantage point, I got a good understanding of Dolina’s layout. The city was circular, which fit nicely in the vortex field. The city had been divided up into six equal segments, each with different purposes – industrial, housing, and so on. Agriculture took up three of the segments, though they focused on different types of crops.
We changed course as we approached the middle of the city, circling one of the smaller skyscrapers before climbing toward the taller central tower. As we passed over them on a heading toward the central skyscraper, I got a closer look at one of the suspension cables between them. It was huge, with small peripheral cables running along the tops where workers walked side by side along its length. They reminded me of Donald Biedrik, with his crew of men that maintained the Sunlo Canopy. Somehow that made Dolina more real to me. It wasn’t just a place – it was somebody’s workplace. It was somebody’s home.
The pilot revved the engine again, this time for more altitude. We continued upward until we were higher than the top of the large, central tower, and then changed course directly toward it. I leaned over the edge to get a downward look at the towers and noticed how the framework and buttresses weren’t just designed for functionality. They were also designed with an artistic flair. From our location high above, the contours of the towers and the cables together made the outline of what might have been a flower. A monumental, chrome flower.
I leaned back against my seat and noticed the pilot moving his lips, but not loudly enough to hear. “Who are you talking to, pilot?” I asked.