by Travis Perry
The squeaking of icy snow in the cold continues until I reach the wall itself. My hand touches its frosted surface. I look up and see large icicles hanging from a lip at the top of the wall far above me. I back away from the white daggers waiting to plunge down onto (or even into) my body.
I turn backward, facing the upward slope of the icy mons of Olympus. My Lord is nearby, breathing frost out through his mouth filter as he whispers. “What say you now, Evan? Where would you go from here?”
My own breath comes out in instant snowflakes as I answer him, “I don’t know, my Lord.”
He grunts and then raises his voice ever so slightly, “Follow the wall to my right, all of you. Not too close!” He raises his right hand as he says this.
So we march single file along the way. I am no longer in first place. I am behind my lord and Sir Isaac, third in line. But frankly happy to be third.
After walking perhaps twenty minutes, we come to a round outline in the wall. A door of some kind. Sir Isaac sends back the hand signal for silent walking, and we creep up on the portal.
It is large, taller than me standing, my outstretched arm over my head. And very round. And covered with a thin layer of ice.
Govnor Pederson pauses by the side of the door. His left hand passes across the ice. His right hand removes the dagger from the sword belt that he, like all of us, had wrapped around the large cold suit that makes him look more than twice as thick as he is in reality. As if he were as fat as Elder Tucker of the Brotherhood of the Shield. He stabs at the ice on the right side of the door. Now the light of the Rebel Phobos adds to the brightness as it rises in the west, allowing me to see there is a panel of some kind beside the door. With buttons.
Sir Isaac and the govnor close in on the panel which is about chest high, each man’s goggled and covered face approaching near it as they hunker in. I step closer. I see little between their backs and what I hear of their low voices, whispering advice to one another in low rumbles, is not much. Only occasional words stand out for me. “Button,” “cycle,” and “perimeter” among them.
On my right, Sir Michael advances toward the two leaders. As he does so, before he reaches them, my lord stretches out his right hand. And presses what I realize is a button of some kind.
A clank sound cuts through the air and most of the riders draw swords, including Sir Isaac. Not including Govnor Pederson or Sir Michael. Or me.
And popping of ice begins at the round door, small bits of ice flying off as the rest of ice splits into cracks. The door is moving open. Now I draw my sword. To my satisfaction, I note Sir Michael and the govnor draw sword at the same moment I do.
The portal appears to have pulled backward and then rolls sideways, breaking more ice and rumbling in a grinding sound like rock sliding across rock. An unlit chamber is open before us.
We, all of us riders, pause before this open dark mouth. Sir Isaac waives me forward. My bronze blade drawn, I cross the threshold into pitch black.
At the instant I step in, perfectly white light overwhelms my eyes, piercing my head it seems, so bright is the radiance. I kneel in shock and cover my eyes. I feel grateful this suit design includes room for a urine bag and that I had installed one. Or else the front of my crotch would have become instant frozen ice.
I find though, after blinking hard I can open my eyes again. There is light here, like the cold white light of Madam Susan’s lamp from the Age of Magic, illuminating from above a chamber of polished steel. But no kind of direct threat is in sight.
There is something about this setup I should recognize something deep inside me tells me. But I stand just inside the doorway, another round steel door is in front of me much like the one I passed. I struggle to recall, still fuddled by brightness, but I’m not quite recognizing what this is. Sir Isaac pushes past me, roughly. Govnor Pederson passes by more gently. The two of them walk to the inner portal and examine the control panel on its right side, which appears to me much like the panel outside the wall.
Again, my lord reaches out and presses the button, which I can now see is green. But this time the door does not open. A harsh sound something like the screech of a songbird comes from the panel in a chirp. Glowing letters appear above the panel on an ancient screen the size of my hand. It says: ENTER ACCESS PASSWORD.
The govnor looks at Sir Isaac. “Do you know the password?”
Isaac scratches his head. “My lord, what does this mean, a ‘password?’”
“There is a code we need to enter to open the door. Evan, do you know any Olympian passwords?”
“No, my lord, I’m sorry I do not. You could guess the code I suppose. If you guessed enough times, it might open for you.”
He rubs his chin. “It might. Let me try something.” He types on the panel: 1 2 3 4. Then he presses a button labeled ENTER. The screen changes. It says: INVALID PASSWORD, ATTEMPT 1 of 3.
“That was the only one I knew,” muttered Govnor Pederson.
Sir Michael now passes me. “What does that mean, my lord?”
“It means, old friend, that we have only two more chances.”
“Before what?” I ask.
“Before something bad happens,” answers the govnor. “Whether the door will lock forever or there will be an alarm of some kind, I know not.” He looks up at the shiny steel ceiling, the white lights illuminating his face in thought. “Sir Evan, could you go back and get Lady Susan?”
“Yes, my lord. But won’t the cold be difficult for her?”
“Good point. Sir Michael, please go back instead. Give her your cold suit—you are close to being her size—and remain in camp, wherever the tents have been pitched.”
Sir Michael’s face drops in clear disappointment. “I think it may be difficult for the Lady scholar to walk this distance at this altitude. She normally rides on one of the wagons.”
“Give her your horse with instructions to ride all the way to the wall. We didn’t for fear of being spotted, but I believe she can take the chance. We’ve seen no sentry.”
“Yes, my lord.” Michael frowns but bows his head in obedience before backing out of the chamber.
The wait proves to be very long. Men hunch outside to form a dogpile for warmth, switching positions from inner to outer every ten minutes or so. (I have no idea what dogs have to do with a “dogpile.” I have never seen dogs huddle like that, but then again, I have never worked a dogsled team.) The inside, where the govnor, Sir Isaac, and I are waiting, proves to be a refuge from the wind, which does much to keep us warm, as does moving back and forth. Ice begins to form on the inside of what I finally remember is an airlock.
Hours pass and I begin to worry it will be daylight before Madam Susan arrives, but then I hear the steady pace of horse hooves on ice. I realize she is here.
Several of the riders outside help her dismount the horse. As she steps into the chamber of this stainless steel airlock, she slips on the new ice. I catch her before she falls.
“Thank you, Evan” she says with a chuckle. “It is SO cold out there. I need a fire in my suit!” She waddles forward in the suit of her own design, one that hangs loose on her because while she and Sir Michael share a similar round body, his is larger and taller than hers.
Standing beside the govnor, she examines the panel. My lord Pederson updates her on what has happened thus far. “Well, as silly as it is may seem, many systems used a standard simple password for initial login and then reset the initial password later. We can hope this one has never been updated. It seems possible, given no one has responded to the outer door being open. Security systems that existed in the magic days could be very complex and dangerous. Fortunately the ones here don’t seem to be fully operational.”
“So what’s the simple password?” I asked.
“The Govnor used one of them. Here’s another.” As she said this, she typed out on the screen with her hand covered in mitten: PASSWORD123.
The screen cleared for a moment and remained clear for a half-second, as if the s
ystem were thinking over the entry. Then it illuminated the words: INVALID PASSWORD, ATTEMPT 2 of 3.
“Oh my,” said Madam Susan.
“If it’s not a simple pass code, then we have little chance of opening it at all, isn’t that true?”
“I’m afraid it is, Roger.”
“Do you know another simple password?”
“I do. Several,” she sighs “Here goes.” Her covered hand tapped out a new code: Pa55word123!@#. The screen blanks out as it did before.
The inner door rumbles. As does the outer door, but it moves first! Shutting itself, astounding all of us inside and out. After it does, the inner door opens. I realize this has to do with this being an airlock, but something seems wrong. Before I put the word to what it is, Madam Susan says, “The air isn’t pressurizing.”
Sir Isaac strides through the open doorway first. He waves at me and I follow him as silently as I can. Both of us have our swords drawn. The doorway reveals an inner courtyard. Some fifty meters in front of us is another wall, with another round portal, apparently identical to the one we just passed through.
The courtyard is unlit and stretches farther to the left and right than I can see the end of. I look back and realize the wall behind us is taller than the one in front of us. The rear wall has a scaffolding of some kind along it, above the door we passed through. This construction includes a stairway in metal going up from the ground level, right beside the doorway, up to just below the top of the wall. It’s hard to see any details, because my eyes are still adjusted to the brightness of the airlock chamber.
Sir Isaac and I shuffle forward quickly across the courtyard to the inner door. It has a panel like the outside door. Sir Isaac pushes the button I realize from before must be green, even though in the dim courtyard light it seems gray. The panel lights up with a screen that must be very ancient, demanding a PASSWORD.
“Go get Lady Susan,” the senior rider whispers the command harshly. “I’ll wait here.”
I turn back and walk the fifty meters or so outward towards the other wall. The brightness of the doorway light causes me to close one eye as I approach it.
Inside, Susan is still at the panel and Govnor Pederson waits, his face set and unreadable, his sword drawn. “There is another door,” I say. “Sir Isaac wants Lady Susan—”
“Madam Susan!” she interrupts with a smile.
“Madam Susan, to open the door password there.”
My lord looks at Susan and back at me. “Take her then, Evan. Even though the airlock is not pressurized here, it seems only one of these doors will open at a time. I’ll close this inner door, open the outer, and start to bring the riders into the courtyard in groups.”
Susan and I walk out of the airlock toward the inner door. As we pass about ten meters in, from behind me, I hear a sudden crack of thunder. My cold suit jerks sideways a bit. I look down and see there is a new hole in the material between my left arm and the chest.
“Get down!” shouts Susan. “It’s a gun!” I look upward and see a glint of moving metal from a shape standing on the inner scaffolding, near the top of the wall. A gun. A legendary weapon of the distant past. I dogpile Susan to the ground, covering her body with my own. Thunder roars and something tugs at my cold suit again.
I roll off and charge the metal staircase, the one with steps near the ground. I leap on it and begin running upward, very winded by the thin air, but still moving, thanking the Lord Jesu. As I come up, thunder cracks again and an echoing zip flies off the metal scaffolding beside me.
I climb without pause or thought for my own life. My great fear is this weapon of the magical past will slay Susan. I will not let that happen.
On the second tier of scaffolding from the top, I have ascended four times and the shape above me has descended once. I find myself at one end of a piece of suspended metal, while opposite me is the shape with a long object he points at me. The gun.
I scream, charging, “FOR JESU!” and he fires again. Something tugs at my neck, but I feel no pain. I lunge forward, bounding in great steps a man could not have taken on Earth, my lungs burning, and suddenly I’m on a shape wearing what must be their own version of a cold suit, one thinner than mine, eyes in a larger mask of ancient rubber and glassy plastic. I swing down my sword in an overhead cleave. The gunman holds his weapon up to block, one hand gripping the metal end he’d pointed and me and the other griping the wider side where he held on.
The bronze of my blade strikes steel in the cold. The bronze holds but the gunmetal shatters like falling glass. For an instant, both the gunman and I are astounded. I raise my blade to swing again, while he, arms waiving, backs up, unlooking. He hits the edge of the scaffolding and pitches backward over it. I hear a low cry of panic leave his lips as he plunges downward.
I now walk down the scaffold, by legs shaking with tremors of danger. My breathing comes very hard. But at least I get to go downhill now. Once I reach the bottom, I find a cluster of five riders standing around a dead man some twenty meters away from me at the other end of the length of the scaffolding, his neck broken in the fall. I join them.
Susan stands beside the dead body. She touches his facemask. “He’s wearing oxygen,” she comments to no one in particular. I bend over, my face between my knees. I feel like I’m going to throw up. From nowhere Sir Isaac is there. He roughly probes the holes in my suit and examines his gloved hands as he draws them back from me.
“I see no sign of blood. Do you, Susan?”
“Nothing. It seems God was with our dear boy rider.”
“Are you well, Evan?” Sir Isaac’s hand now rests on my shoulder.
“Yes, I think I just ran too hard.” I pant, “I am, after all, still the son of a flatlander.” But I begin to feel better. I sit down, cross legged, my head up. Sir Isaac’s hand still rests on my shoulder.
He squeezes it and says with a warmth I have never heard from him before, “No, boy, you are a true son of Ascraeus today.” He steps away from me after he says that.
Men filter in through the outer lock in fives. By the time all twenty are in (our total is twenty-one with me and twenty-two with Susan), I’m able to stand again. I drink water through a tube Susan provides me.
We mass by the inner airlock door. Susan applies the password again. The door opens, much like the other one, but this lock has no sign of cold or frost. The inside was warm—the inner door must open up into a heated area.
Govnor Pederson points as he speaks, “Isaac, Evan, Susan, and David, you are with me. We’ll jam into the lock and come out together on this first run. The rest cycle into this lock by fives as the door opens and closes. Got it?” Heads nod understanding.
Inside the airlock, once the password is entered and the button pushed, this time the outer door closes but the inner one does not immediately open. Air rushes into the lock. Thick, warm, moist air. Govnor Pederson and Sir Isaac begin to help one another remove their cold suits. They move quickly, using daggers to cut straps. Susan helps me with mine.
“Here,” she says. “Get yours all the way off first, then you can help me if I need it.”
“All right.” The inner door begins to open as I slough off the final bit of my suit. For a second I worry about my urine bag and what connects to it, but Susan discreetly helps me adjust without looking down.
I’m reattaching my sword belt as the door opens all the way and Sir Isaac and my lord rush through the airlock, swords drawn. I follow after, as does Sir David, still suited. Madam Susan remains near the airlock. I pray under my breath, “Lord Jesu, be with us...”
The air is so thick here—not as much as the bottom of Olympus, but much more than what we faced outside. And it is warm, some twenty degrees or so above freezing. It’s good we took off the cold suits.
We face an enormous room, filled with trees and ferns and other green plants. Columns of white stone are to our right and left. Govnor Pederson shuffles forward, mixing caution, silence, and speed. Isaac and I follow afterward. Sir Dav
id is still taking off his suit next to the airlock with Susan’s help.
We three press forward to the edge of a patch of trees. From within the branches I see a pool of water larger than any I have ever seen indoors. The water is churning of its own accord, as if volcanic. High above the pool the ceiling is composed of interlaced glass and metal of some kind. Phobos the Rebel shines down his light from the western edge of this framework.
By moonshine we see three figures in the pool, a man and two women. They are standing in water as high as their shoulders for the women, chest high for the man, laughing with one another. Unaware of our presence. No one else appears to be in the chamber. My lord touches me and signals I move to the right, Sir Isaac he sends to the left.
I hook right, ignoring stealth. My armor pounds on the stone surrounding the artificial pond of warm churning water. A woman’s voice screams out. I make the edge of the pool and hook left, headed for the far end, to cover anyone who might try to enter from the outside. I hear and perceive Sir Isaac doing the same thing on the opposite side of the pool.
I hear a splash and glance left. My lord Pederson has leapt into the pool, sword drawn, and charges through the water in his armor toward the man, ignoring all risk of sinking and drowning.
“Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me!” the man shouts out in a pitch almost high enough to seem like it came from one of the women. “I am a powerful man here! I can get you whatever you want!”
“Hands out of the water!” shouts my lord.
The man complies, hands raised over his head, as he shouts, “Please, please!” his voice now in a lower tone.
From where I am now at the far end of the pool, I hear movement, someone running towards the water through a set of poorly-lit columns in front of me. A young man appears in an elegant red robe, sandals on his feet. He backpedals as he sees me, trying to halt his forward momentum. I step forward and punch him in the jaw with my mailed left fist, my sword still in my right. He crumples to the ground, unconscious.