by Chris Bunch
They walked for almost half an hour, then stopped in front of a half dome over a smooth ramp that led underground. They went into the cover of the dome and took off their suits.
‘You appear to have taken the long way,’ Wolfe said.
‘Not at all,’ Taen replied. ‘We could have used the first burrow entrance. But then we would have had to use the civilian ways to reach this military entrance, and I do not know what shape they are in. I wonder that none of your people appears to have landed and collected the spoils of war.’
‘Some might have,’ Wolfe said. ‘But not for long, and it would’ve been in the first days after the war. The Federation has all the homeworlds under watch now.’
‘Ah. I did not know that. That is why the drone found me so swiftly when I first came to Sauros. I merely assumed my ship had been detected somewhere in space and followed. ’
‘No. They’re scared shitless of whatever’s still here. That’s why we wore the suits, so their sensors wouldn’t pick up any heat or other signs. We’ll put them on again when we come back,’ Wolfe said.
‘If we come back this route,’ the Al’ar added.
‘You could also say if we come back at all.’
‘I could. But I have confidence.’
The Al’ar opened his pack, took out what appeared to be a block of white plastic. He unfolded it until it became a thin square about eighteen inches on a side.
He touched a sensor, and the lines of a crudely drawn map appeared.
‘The machine we seek, this computer, is one of three used by our Command On High. I learned of it only because the unit I headed that hunted you was assigned directly to them, and I filed my reports here.
‘With luck, no one will have discovered it, and our task will be simple,’ Taen said. ‘I shall lead. Perhaps my presence will prevent any protective devices from activating.’
Wolfe nodded and shouldered his pack.
The two went down the ramp, disappeared from sight.
There was a neat hole in one corridor wall and, on the other side, a gaping, jagged opening.
‘I do not like this,’ Taen said. ‘Someone who did not know the code came this way and triggered the weapon.’
Wolfe knelt, touched the deck, and felt around him. The Lumina in its hidden pouch warmed to his touch. He rose.
‘Someone . . . maybe two, three people died when they set off this trap.’
‘Terrans?’
Wolfe nodded.
‘Yet there is no sign of a body. Still worse,’ Taen said.
‘Renegades don’t worry about corpses,’ Joshua agreed. ‘These people would’ve been part of some organization.’
They went up a winding, curved corridor. The Al’ar abominated straight lines in length, so their buildings turned, swept, as did their roads and tunnels.
Wolfe had to stop three times to reorient himself as they went.
They went on another half mile. Twice Taen touched a blank section of wall, then told Wolfe it was safe to proceed.
The corridor ended abruptly. Taen stood in a certain place, took two steps at the side, and the wall lifted, revealing a high, rounded chamber. But no lights came on, and Wolfe smelled the old stink of seared flesh, ozone, felt fear and agony.
There were control panels ranked around the walls, but blaster bolts had torn and ripped them.
Taen made a soft noise of pain.
Once more Wolfe felt around him.
‘Men were killed here,’ he said softly. ‘There aren’t any bodies, so this must’ve been a Federation Intelligence group, not renegade looters. Probably one of our Analysis teams. Scientists, engineers, mostly. I guess they found this, tried to operate it.’
‘And the machine killed them,’ Taen said.
‘Killing itself in the process.’
‘No,’ the Al’ar said. ‘This is but an operating station. The computer itself is safe far away, far below us. But what upsets me is that I was wrong. I told you that the computer itself would have no safeguards. I was wrong. I wonder what else I am wrong about.
‘We must seek one of the secondary stations. I know the approximate location of one.’
They stopped twice, ate rations from their packs that Wolfe hardly tasted, stopped a third time, slept briefly.
Wolfe woke with the memory of buzzing, felt the burns on his arm.
The man sprawled on his back, a look of mild surprise still visible. His build was slight, thin, and the face was that of a scientist, a thinker. His cheeks had begun to pull back into a rictus.
There was a hole where his chest had been and a pile of white dust above and below the hole where a strange decay was spreading.
‘This was a looter,’ Wolfe said. ‘Somebody managed to land without alerting the Federation or else came down before the interdiction was put on.’
‘What would he have sought?’
‘Hardware. Programming. Raw knowledge, maybe. The word was your computers were faster, more intuitive than ours. I never knew anybody who’d operated both, so I can’t say. He must’ve believed the story. He’ - Wolfe looked around at the other six bodies - ‘and his friends. They had enough brains to find this place . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Now what do we do?’
‘I do not like this at all,’ the Al’ar said.
‘I’m not exactly overjoyed. What are our options? Find another world?’
‘No. This is the only location I know for certain. We could spend the rest of our lives on other homeworlds’ undergrounds, looking,’ Taen said.
‘And maybe running into another one of these nasty little traps,’ Wolfe said. ‘All right. We’ll come up with another plan that doesn’t require heavy thinking. Drop the computer idea.’
‘We have one option. We could seek out the computer itself.’
‘Which you said is under us. How far down did the Al’ar dig? I never knew of anything other than the upper civilian levels when I lived here, you know.’
‘We dug . . . very deeply.’
‘You said we could spend two forevers looking for a simple operating station. How will it be easier looking for Big Mama?’
‘Easier in the looking because its location will be close to our Final Command Station. This is where we would have fought from, if you had landed on Sauros. Instead . . . we found another Way.’
‘All right. And I would guess that there’ll be even more traps for intruders.’
‘Not just for Terrans,’ Taen said. ‘No Al’ar was permitted to go to these places without special permission, guides, and passes.’ He paused. ‘The machine will be as perfect a deathtrap as our finest soldiers could devise.’
SEVEN
The ramps curled down into darkness, broken now and again as still-sensing lamps flared, died as they passed.
Three levels below the military tunnel system, huge doors hung open. Inside was a great hangar with lines of in-atmosphere interceptors, sagging drunkenly, their skid-shocks slowly collapsing as fluid leaked away.
‘We would have launched these when your ships entered Sauros’ atmosphere,’ Taen explained. ‘Buildings above had been constructed with demolition charges so they would fall away at the proper time.’
‘Clever,’ Wolfe said neutrally. Both spoke in Al’ar. It seemed safer.
The next level was barracks for the pilots and maintenance crews, with long rows of resting racks stretching away into darkness. The padding on the racks had begun to unravel and trailed on the decks. Wolfe noted that nothing, not man, not rat, not cat, had made trails in the thick dust. He thought he could hear the faint whisper of a still-functioning air-circulation system.
Taen moved in front of Joshua as they went on. Wolfe found his hand hovering over his gun and grinned wryly, wondering what in this long-dead labyrinth would need shooting. Booby traps are impervious to a quick draw.
Taen held up a grasping organ, crouched, and pointed to the wall. Wolfe saw nothing, felt beyond.
Death . . . the snout of a blaster muzzle behind the metalloi
d . . . trigger-sensor still alive . . .
They crawled under the sensor, got up, and went on.
The corridor they were in opened up, the walls hidden in the gloom, and another ramp went down, winding, turning. Joshua felt great space around him.
More and more of the automatic lights had failed, and so they took flashes from their packs, continued on.
Wolfe heard a whine of gears and went flat. The sound grew louder, and the ramp swiveled sideways, trying to dump them off. Joshua scrabbled toward the edge of the ramp as it turned, held it, and Taen’s grasping organs had him by the leg.
He hung, gasping, over emptiness.
The Al’ar clawed his way up Wolfe’s body, found a hold on the ramp, and they clung for long moments until the ramp settled back to level.
‘I did not sense that coming,’ Taen whispered.
‘Nor I. I heard the sound of its machinery just before it began functioning.’
‘But you sensed it before I. Perhaps you should lead. I must tell you that none of these devices was operative the times I was ordered to come this way.’
Wolfe hesitated, then obeyed. The Lumina was warm against his skin. The darkness around him was chill and smelled faintly of ozone.
The walls drew in once more, and they walked down a corridor that might have been on a spaceship.
At the end of the passage was a door. Wolfe was about to insert a finger into the opening sensor notch, then stopped. He knelt, peered into the slot, saw nothing.
He took the pack from his back, and pulled out a jimmy and a hammer. He motioned Taen out of the way, then tapped the dogs of the hinge free, caught the door as it tottered, and eased it to the deck.
Taen held up his grasping organs in a questioning gesture. Wolfe turned the door over and slid the tip of the jimmy into the sensor notch, turning his head away as he did.
A violet laser-blast flashed, burning a half-inch hole in the ceiling above them. Taen hissed, said nothing.
Their way was level once more. Taen came close, whispered, ‘Now we are on the base level. What we seek should be close.’
Once more the walls were far distant, invisible. Wolfe coughed, and sound echoed into the distance.
Taen took the lead again and went on, his head moving back and forth like a questing hound’s.
Domes, some small, some huge, rose around them. Taen stopped at one.
‘Here is the place we would have commanded the final battle from.’
Curious, Wolfe started to activate the door to the command center. Taen stopped him.
‘Our business is not in there. Why should we risk encountering another trap?’
Wolfe held up his hands, agreeing, and abandoned curiosity.
He heard the purring of engines and then light crashed up around them, blinding them. The engine-sound grew louder, and something hovered toward them from the darkness.
Wolfe knew it from the war.
It was a four-barreled auto-cannon, triggers linked to motion detectors. Wolfe rolled as the cannon churned rounds, tearing up the metal deck where he’d been. The cannon swiveled, long-disused bearings squealing, spat a stream of solid bullets, and once more he rolled, coming up in a squat.
The Lumina burned against him as he frog-jumped sideways, and the cannon swept past him.
He froze, barely breathing. The cannon’s pickups scanned the area he was in, found nothing, swept in increasingly greater arcs.
Wolfe inhaled sharply, about to dive for the gun’s base, into its dead zone, and Taen rose from the darkness, blaster in both grasping organs, and blew the sensor off the cannon-mount.
The cannon blatted a burst into nowhere, ground into silence. It floated away, aimlessly, its guns looking here, there, nowhere.
Taen beckoned, and Wolfe followed him, around the great bulk of the command center.
An arched doorway rose from the deck. Taen tried the opening sensor. The door remained locked.
Wolfe took lockpicks from his beltpouch and slipped them into the slot. He felt as he moved them, trying to think as an Al’ar.
He felt a humming through the picks, jerked his hands out as the door slid smoothly open.
Inside were the banks of a great Al’ar strategy computer.
Taen slid his hand down a multicolored strip next to a rack, and around him screens lit. A larger screen, almost a yard on a side just in front of Taen remained blue-black, inactive.
‘It lives!’
‘It would have been a not life-enhancing experience if it had not, considering our passage,’ Wolfe said.
‘That is what you call sarcasm I would guess,’ Taen said. ‘I did not know it was possible to do that in Al’ar.’
The holograph rose in front of him, the computer’s ‘keyboard.’ Dim green light formed vertical squares, and in each was a character or combination of characters in Al’ar.
‘Let us hope that it will recognize me.’
Wolfe pulled up a resting rack and made himself as comfortable as possible.
Two hours later the dark screen in front of Taen blinked into life, swirled through a color wheel, shades unseen by Wolfe since he was last on an Al’ar world.
‘Now we have a starting point,’ Taen said.
‘Start by asking about the Guardians.’
Taen’s impossibly long fingers moved, screens showed figures, then a diagonal multicolored band appeared across the main screen. Taen’s grasping organ shot out, and the screen blanked.
‘That I do not like.’
‘What occurred?’ Wolfe asked.
‘Be silent. Let me attempt the task again.’
Again his fingers moved against the ‘keyboard,’ and again the diagonal band flashed and Taen was cut out of the program.
‘The machine has defenses and takes precautions. I thought I had a high-enough permission, what you call clearance, but any attempt to inquire in the area of Guardians produces a warning. If I persisted, I suspect the whole computer would shut down on me. Do you have a suggestion?’
‘I think,’ Wolfe said, ‘we stay light-years away from that area. You realize that what just happened confirms the existence of the Guardians.’
Taen’s hood flared slightly, then subsided. ‘No, I had not yet . . . of course. Certainly it must. I wonder what has become of my intelligence? I am behaving entirely like a broodling.’
‘Don’t concern yourself,’ Wolfe said. ‘I never thought you were highly gifted in the arena of thinking.’
‘Such is obvious,’ Taen said. ‘I chose to associate with Terrans.’
Wolfe looked at the Al’ar in considerable astonishment. ‘Taen, did you just make a joke?’ he asked in Terran.
‘Perhaps I did. It was an error. How shall we pursue the matter now?’
‘I wondered if there might not be some kind of block within the computer,’ Wolfe said, ‘so I brought some backup.’ He dug in his pack and took out two microfiches, a viewer, and a notepad.
‘This will take a few minutes,’ he said, inserting the card into the viewer’s slot. ‘If we can’t get ’em high, perhaps we can nail them down low.’
‘What are these locations?’
‘These are twelve battles fought during the war. I got them from the standard Federation history of the Al’ar war. We gave these battles their own names, which I assume could have different labels in Al’ar, so what you’re looking at are just the ana/kata coordinates.’
‘Why were - are these battles special?’
‘Because these were fought in the middle of nowhere, for no discernible reason. All of them are deep inside the Al’ar sectors. Generally a Federation Fleet or Fleets would be traversing a certain area and be met with a sudden attack that ended only with the complete defeat of one or another force.’
‘What makes that extraordinary? There were many such fights.’
‘True. But these catfights appear to have been by accident, and especially ferocious, when our forces stumbled into yours. The Al’ar ships were already in plac
e, as if they were holding a specific defensive position.’
‘Perhaps,’ Taen said, ‘your security was inadequate. Perhaps our forces had advance knowledge of your Fleet movements and were able to prepare ambushes.’
‘That was what the Federation Command worried about. I was consulted on two of the battles, which is why I remembered them. They’d assembled all data on the two events, but no one could find any congruence that might suggest a mole. They wanted to know if I could provide any interpretation of what happened. I failed. The explanation settled on was the imbecilic one of “aliens do alien things in an alien way.”’
‘Do not be angry at them. My own Command On High frequently used the same simplistic thinking,’ Taen said.
Wolfe returned to Al’ar. ‘I would like you to examine these locations on a small-scale starchart and tell me what the computer tells you about them.’
‘I do not understand what you are seeking, but I shall obey. Rest yourself. This shall take some time, even with a device as sophisticated as this.’
‘I have some interesting data,’ Taen announced. ‘First, I can confirm your hypothesis that these battles were anomalous, being fought far distant from any known Al’ar bases and not part of any known offensive plan. Look at these two. Nearly in the same location, yet fought seven years apart.
‘What could have been so valuable about that sector of seemingly empty space that our forces would defend it so resolutely, as well as all the others?’
Wolfe’s eyes gleamed. ‘I can conjecture a better place to begin thinking,’ he said. ‘Take those two points and connect them. Project the line out.’
‘I have done this.’
‘Now take the other battles, and project a line from each of them to intersect with this line.’
‘Shadow Warrior,’ Taen said, and Wolfe thought he detected impossible emotion in his voice, ‘the intersection point is at the fringes of our sectors, but well within the area of Al’ar control.’