Crown of the Serpent

by Allen Wold

  "I think there's quite a way to go yet," Raebuck told her. "We'll pass some projections and deep bays before we get near the bottom."

  "We'll keep a watch anyway," Sukiro said.

  Which turned out to be a good idea. The lookouts reported that a balcony, projecting into the shaft, was coming up below them. All who had free hands put them out to slow their fall, and they had come nearly to a full stop when they dropped down past the last floor above the balcony, and the artificial gravity took effect. It was not very strong, but still they dropped to the balcony floor in free-fall. This took them by surprise, and though nobody was hurt it was a moment before they could sort themselves out.

  "That was one of the landmarks I was looking for," Raebuck said breathlessly. "The tapes didn't show the effects of gravity, of course. We're about halfway down, I think."

  They stepped out into the well again, deployed as they had been before, accelerated downward, and after a while came to a place where the recess was far deeper than the others they had passed, and maybe fifteen levels high. There was no way to slow themselves down here, if they had a need to, and the goons prepared to cut on emergency antigrav if it should prove necessary.

  It wasn't, and all were relieved when unbroken wall came up past them again. The goons' antigrav might not have been enough.

  "What purpose do you suppose this well served?" Nelross asked Falyn.

  "Possibly ventilation."

  "Have you seen any signs of a ventilation system anywhere so far?" Sukiro asked.

  "No," Falyn said, "no vents, no grills. But there has to be something."

  "If there is," Denny said, "it's too sophisticated for a simple tube like this to be a part of it."

  The wall continued here much as it had been above, some­times blank, sometimes with open balconies that ran around the entire shaft—as far as they could tell—but after a while the balconies become just square openings in the wall, sometimes in front of them, sometimes to either side, and in some places there were windows instead of openings, either very wide or very small and square.

  "This is all like I remember it," Raebuck said.

  At last they passed a place where vertical ribs stood out from the wall, four levels high, each only a few centimeters wide and half a meter deep.

  "That's another thing I was looking for," Raebuck said. "We should start to slow down now."

  The goons in contact with the wall used their hands and feet to brake their fall and the group began to slow. Almost at once Ming and Dyson reported reflected light from below. They slowed more and almost came to a standstill. But not quite. They continued to descend cautiously until the gravity in the floor below them took hold and they dropped the last two levels. They turned on their antigravity, and the landing was easy.

  From where they now stood they could see a large archway to their right, and another farther away to the left.

  "Which way?" Sukiro asked.

  Raebuck walked into the center of the floor. The others fol­lowed, spread out as they did so, and shone their helmet lights all around. From the middle of the bottom of the well their headlamps were bright enough to reach the entire surrounding wall, and now they could see seven exits, more or less equally spaced. Each was an arch, but each one was different—one had a semicircular top, another had a wide jamb, another was very low, another very broad.

  Raebuck pointed to one that had two shallow steps leading up to it. "That one," she said.

  "Are you sure?" Sukiro asked.

  "Yes, it's the steps. That arch should be at the head of a flight of stairs."

  "Stairs?" Denny asked, "in this place?"

  "Well, it looked like stairs in the video."

  The goons kept spread out and wary as they went toward the arch. There was no iris here, just an opening. Denny reached around inside and found a light switch. She brought the amber ceiling up full bright.

  And sure enough, the floor beyond the arch did look like broad, shallow stairs, but in fact it was just a succession of ever-lower floors, each only three meters deep and only twenty-five or so centimeters below the other. The walls slowly fanned out as the floors descended, though the ceiling remained at a constant level and did not slant downward parallel to the floor. On each side of each of the step floors was an alcove, iris, or arch, or an object that looked like a cross between an advanced electronic game and a set of closet organizers. Raebuck ignored all this and just went straight down the broadening and descending corridor toward another arch set into the wall at the far end.

  This opened into the side of a large hallway, fifty meters wide and high. As they stepped out into it the ceiling directly over them lit up, illuminating a section just fifty meters long. There were a few widely scattered artifacts of the kind they'd seen before, standing on the floor here and there, but not ar­ranged in any way that made sense.

  "Several of the tapes showed this," Raebuck said, "and this hallway should intersect with an even larger one, that way." She turned to the right.

  They followed her lead. The section of ceiling ahead of them lit up automatically as they neared, and the section behind darkened as they left.

  Every seventy to a hundred meters along the hallway was another of the Tschagan objects—now a large brick-colored thing like an oversize filing cabinet without drawers, then a smaller light blue thing with rounded corners and edges, with tori of dark navy projecting from three sides and a black half-dome smeared with olive on top. Each of the objects they passed was different from the previous one.

  There were few doors here, and only an occasional darkened archway. They passed a deep alcove, thirty meters high and wide, with a broad spiral ramp descending into darkness. Much later they passed another one, on the other side of the hallway, only its ramp was going up.

  "What are we looking for?" Sukiro asked. "Are you sure this is the way?"

  "It's been a long time since I saw those tapes," Raebuck admitted, "but I'm pretty sure this is right. This hallway should end soon."

  It was as she had predicted. The end of the hallway opened into the side of one even larger, one hundred meters square. To the left, at the edge of the lit area, was a cluster of rectangular objects. Some were similar to those they had seen before, but some of them were quite different, like psychotic soft sculp­tures. Raebuck led them in that direction.

  "The Tschagan certainly had a peculiar life-style," Fresno muttered.

  "They were insects," Petersin said.

  "Warm-blooded arthropods," Raebuck corrected him.

  "A bug is a bug."

  There were many more of the floor-standing objects here, of all three types, sometimes in clusters. They passed these by without more than a glance. Raebuck strode purposefully forward until they came to where another fifty-meter hallway teed into the larger one..

  Though Raebuck led them on past without hesitation, Rikard thought he could detect a hint of uncertainty in her movements. He watched her closely, saw that this uncertainty continued until, when the lights came on several hundred-meter sections farther on, they came to a huge object, a machine of some kind, twenty or more meters tall and half as broad, standing in the middle of the floor. It was rectilinear overall but highly com­plex, a combination of cubes and boxes, with rods of metal and crystal projecting and connecting, panels that might have glowed, and a delicate enclosing framework of ramps and plat­forms.

  Raebuck sighed with'relief. "Yes, this is just how I remember it."

  There were fewer individual objects beyond this point, most of them, whatever their type, gathered in clusters. They went past another side hall, then to another hundred-meter hallway that crossed theirs, where an object thirty meters tall and almost as wide and deep stood, right in the middle of the intersection. This one was even more complex than the first, with half-domes, diagonal beams, and plates of what looked like crystal. Like the previous machine the upper portions were reached by spidery catwalks and ramps.

  "This is right," Raebuck said. But again, as
she looked at the machine, Rikard felt sure that she was not really that certain after all. He touched her arm. She glanced at him. "It has been a long time," she said, then went on past the object.

  They passed another cluster of smaller artifacts, a smaller side hall, then came to a great intersection with another hundred-meter hallway, again with a huge, complex machine where the two corridors met.

  "This is right," Raebuck said again at the machine. "See that chrome sphere there, behind the orange cube? There's a black shaft coming out the other side." They went around to look, and it was so.

  Still she led them straight on, past clusters of small objects, another hundred-meter intersection with its giant machine, occasional smaller side hallways, and once or twice an alcove with a ramp rising or descending.

  But after another twenty minutes or so Raebuck began to look uncertain again. "There should have been another major intersection," she said.

  "Videos can be edited," Rikard said gently.

  "At least," Sukiro said, "we're getting far from the raiders, and at some point we could just go up toward the skin and find another hatch."

  "Yes," Raebuck said, "there's always that." But she did not seem to like the idea.

  "What are you really looking for?" Sukiro asked her quietly.

  Raebuck glanced from Rikard to the major. "I was hoping to find one of those places I saw on the tapes," she said, "like a museum. The Tschagan brought back lots of trophies."

  Rikard could sympathize, but Sukiro had other concerns. "We'll have to save that for another time," she said. "We're far enough away from the raiders now, let's go up."

  Then there was the sound of tearing air, and a streak of dust zipped past them, and Glaine, on the edge of the group, went crashing to the ground.

  Everybody dropped to a full defensive posture. Rikard saw another cloud of dust, but it had gone by him knocking Yansen over as it did so, before he could fully register its movement. They waited, weapons drawn, staring around in all directions. But there were no further attacks.

  "All right," Raebuck said at last, "we'll take the first way up."

  They did not backtrack but went on, past an alcove with a ramp leading down, until they came to a cross hall that was different from the others they'd passed—much smaller. Suddenly Raebuck was excited.

  "This is the way!" she said.

  A dust-streak zipped by behind them, and they all hurried into the side hall.

  3

  The smaller corridor was not very long, and quickly opened into a huge chamber, all but completely filled by a single, complex machine. There were balconies and ramps around the walls of the chamber and around the machine, and catwalks connect­ing the two.

  Raebuck looked up at it. "This isn't right," she said. "The corridor is supposed to tee into a kind of gallery, with doors all along the far side."

  "You've misremembered," Sukiro said, as she and the non-coms walked curiously around the gigantic machine.

  "It doesn't seem to be turned on," Falyn observed.

  "Or the tapes didn't show consecutive movement," Raebuck said. Ramps led up to catwalks, which led to other ramps and what looked like service stations, but what possibly could have been done at them was anybody's guess.

  "Could there be other places like the one you saw in the tapes?" Sukiro asked, "and we just found the wrong one?" They came around the far side of the machine, where a closed arch­way offered the only other exit.

  "That's the most likely," Rikard said. "If that well we came down does serve as a ventilation shaft, there could be hundreds similar to it all over this place."

  They started to go back around the machine when two dust-devils came whizzing out from behind it, arced in front of them, knocked Jasime down, then whizzed out again. The goons who were in range fired but hit only the walls.

  "Hold your fire, dammit!" Nelross yelled.

  They proceeded more cautiously, weapons drawn, back to­ward the open arch, but more dust-devils whizzed out at them, barely grazing those in the lead, but moving so fast that even the lightest touch knocked the goons off balance. The party was forced back into the chamber.

  Rikard drew his .75 in the hopes that his slowed time sense would give him a glimpse of whatever it was that was attacking, but the dust-devils were gone before he could get a grip solid enough to bring his internal mechanisms into play. By the time the concentric circles of his heads-up display came clear in his eyes, he could find no target. With his perceptions speeded up by a factor of ten to one, the dust in the air seemed to hang dead still, and the goons he could see were moving in ultraslow mo­tion.

  He heard a bass groan, relaxed the grip on his gun, and time returned to normal. The groan was Sukiro's slowed voice, ask­ing Grayshard, "... are those things, something your brain pi­rates brought with them?"

  "I know of nothing like that," Grayshard said.

  "Could they have picked up some allies on their way here?" Nelross asked.

  "How could they trust anybody they did bring?" Denny mut­tered.

  Everybody watched the archway from which the dust-devils had come, but they did not reappear. Sukiro gave quick com­mands to the noncoms, who formed up their squads to make another try for the corridor.

  But even though the goons were facing down the corridor, and could see the dust-devils as they entered at last, and fired at them as soon as they saw them, they hit nothing. The dust-devils swerved from side to side, easily dodging the blaster shots, for which there was time for only one or two. In an instant the dust-devils were among them, hitting them, pushing them back into the chamber. The goons fell back, tried to pick targets, but the dust-devils were gone as quickly as they had come.

  "Robots could move that quickly," Falyn said, "dodge that quickly." She tried to catch her breath.

  "Then someone's directing them," Sukiro said. "Their move­ment is too intelligent for them to be completely automatic. But if that were the case, the directors would have to be thinking at least as fast as the robots are moving. I don't think they're robots, I think they're alive."

  "The only possibility," Raebuck said, "is survivors. But nothing I saw on the tapes suggested that they could move like that."

  "How could anybody survive in here for ten thousand years?" Rikard asked. "I mean, if they had an ongoing culture, yes, but this has been a derelict."

  "We haven't seen a fraction of a percent of this place yet," Falyn said. "Who knows what's going on in deeper levels, or on the other side."

  "If they don't want us here," Denny said, "how come they haven't bothered the pirates?"

  "I don't know," Raebuck said. "Maybe they do. Maybe the pirates keep them out with force screens."

  "They first attacked us in the pirates' territory," Rikard commented.

  "It really doesn't matter," Sukiro said. "The question is, how do we get up to the surface?"

  "Let's go where they want us to go and look for a chance," Rikard suggested.

  It seemed like the only reasonable thing to do, so they went back around the machine to the closed arch on the other side. The iris here was not typical. The opening was too large and flat-bottomed, and there was no touch-plate in the middle, which in any event was too high to be reached. But there were plates on either side of the iris, and when Rikard touched one the door opened. Without further discussion they went through a thick wall into another chamber.

  This room was larger than the one before and the machine inside filled it from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, though it was less bulky, more spindly. Again there were ramps and bal­conies along the walls, with catwalks to platforms and balconies near the machine, some of them almost embedded within its struts, angling members, dangling plates, cables, and wires.

  There was more space to the right of the machine, and they started to go that way, the better to defend themselves, but dust-devils appeared in front of them, swooped by without actually hitting any of them, but effectively driving them back around to the left.

  "We'
re being herded," Sukiro said.

  "I can't stand this," Denny half shouted. "We can't even fight!"

  The dust-devils did not attack them as they went around the left side of the machine. In the wall on that side was a deep alcove. The interior was deeply shadowed, but there was an iris door at the back. On Denny's command, Fresno and Van Leet started to go past the alcove but stopped as soon as a swirl of dust appeared at the far end of the room.

  "We're being herded all right," Denny said. "They want us to go in here."

  "Have we any choice?" Nelross asked rhetorically.

  "Not that I can see," Sukiro said.

  They entered the alcove.

  Dyson, on point, touched the latch-plate. The iris opened to reveal a short corridor that ended in another iris at the far end. It felt claustrophobic in there, with so many people in so small a space. The far iris opened into another chamber, smaller than the first of these they had entered, but almost completely filled with its machine, bulky, solid, and catwalks between it and the wall balconies just a few steps long. They were compressed in here, without space to fan out.

  "Which way," Falyn asked, "right or left?"

  Sukiro chose right. They met no resistance. And as they came around the machine they could see that some of its lights, dials, panels, and screens, some located in places that made no sense, were lit, or twitching, or humming.

  Raebuck went toward one of the functioning panels near the floor, but a dust-devil suddenly came from behind, zipped be­tween her and the machine, forced her back to the wall, then disappeared, all in an instant. Nobody shot. It was too close in there; the back-flash of the blasters would have hurt those who fired.

  They went on in the way they were being forced to go, but whenever a goon got too close to the machine, another dust-devil would zip past, to keep him or her from it, and once even knocked Private Glaine against the wall so that he nearly hit Gray shard.

  "Please be careful," Grayshard said, "if you hit me, you will crush me. I have no armor to protect me."