by B. V. Larson
“Yeah,” I heard myself say.
What happened next was hard to credit, even to me, but I climbed down into that hole. I seriously doubted my mental capacities as I did it. I had to wonder if those psych tests they’d given me long ago back at the Mustering Hall had been right all along.
-23-
The tunnel slanted downward, then leveled off. As best I could tell we were headed toward the nearest rocky cliffs, away from the lake. That was good, as far as I was concerned. I didn’t want to risk drowning under the lake and out of range of the legion’s sensors.
The passage widened, narrowed then turned wet and dank. We splashed through regions of still, oily water.
“Where are we going?” I asked Della.
“To the Verge,” she said, as if that explained everything.
I grumbled and kept after her. “Why did you come to me?”
“I don’t trust any of your kind,” she said. “But I can’t deny that you’re fighting the slavers. I saw you die on the ramp—that was a brave thing. Few warriors have ever defeated even a single slaver.”
“You saw that? How?”
Della glanced back over her shoulder, eyeing me with a calculating glance. There wasn’t much in the way of a light source in the tunnels. The walls glimmered faintly, just enough to keep a man from ramming his nose into them. She carried a chemical light in the form of a tube around her neck which illuminated her face from below with a wan, yellow-green glow.
“We have tubes drilled through the walls of the cliffs,” she told me. “There are lenses and mirrors inside. We can see most of the valley. Guiding wires allow us to direct our scopes and focus on distant objects. We installed the system to watch our enemies years ago. If you ever find one down here, be careful, however. They’re dangerous when the ship fires light at the walls of stone. Your eyes will be burned from your head. My people are careful never to look through the tubes at the wrong times.”
I nodded thoughtfully, and she turned and trotted away. I followed.
The system of scopes and the network of tunnels I toured over the next ten minutes were an impressive engineering effort. The tunnel system represented a low-tech solution and a clever use of resources. These colonists were admirable in their own way. They were determined and obviously tough survivors. I’d always thought we’d had it rough back on Earth over the last century or so. But compared to these people, Earthers like me lived in the lap of luxury.
“Where the hell are we going, girl?” I asked after we must have jogged and slogged twenty minutes or more. “Isn’t this far enough for a private talk?”
She halted and looked back at me, cocking her head in the same way she’d done the first time I talked to her.
“A private talk?” she asked.
“Yes. I’ve been assuming you wanted to discuss our alliance, to talk about what we’re going to do next. No one can hear us down here.”
“I’m taking you to speak to the Investigator,” she said, as if this explained the situation with perfect clarity.
“The what?”
“Our leader. The principal. The one in charge of this valley.”
“Oh, okay. What does he want?”
“I don’t know, but I’m sure it will be important. You’ve decided upon your course of action, we understand that. But we’ve yet to decide ours.”
That was all she would tell me. We spent thirty more minutes in the tunnels, during which time I became hopelessly lost. We’d jogged upward and downward, taking various forks, twists and turns. I was trying to keep a mental map, but there were no landmarks to differentiate one tunnel from another.
At one point, we passed a glimmer of light from outside. A pale circular beam played along the left wall. I stopped and searched the right wall for an aperture. When I finally found it, Della came back to see what I was doing.
“I found one of your little spyglasses,” I said, peering into a conical tube about the size of a water glass.
“Careful,” she said. “You never know when they might shine their great weapon. You’ll be blinded.”
Deciding to take the chance, I put my face to the cone and swiveled it. Pulleys squeaked and grit shifted. My field of view was limited, but I could see a slightly blurred, dusty version of the valley at night.
Stars overhead played like pinpricks in a velvet blanket. To my left, the ship was visible only as a darker hulk in a pit of umber. To my right, there were lights scattered over a circular region.
“That must be our camp. So far down—I hadn’t realized we’d climbed inside the cliff walls. We must be two hundred meters up and a kilometer from the camp. We’re right between both armies now.”
“You see much for an untrained eye,” she said.
“We have devices like these, but they fly and carry cameras.”
She nodded. “The intelligent insects. We know about them.”
“Tell me, Della,” I said. “What will the aliens do next? They must know we’re going to fight them. Will they come at us, or will they keep trying to capture you in your tunnels?”
“They’ll do whatever they find to be the easiest. They only want slaves. If we make it too difficult and delay them long enough, they will eventually go away. That is our goal.”
I nodded thoughtfully. “Have you ever considered anything more drastic?”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’ll have to talk to the Investigator about that.”
She clammed up then, and I was left following in her wake. By the time we reached a large open cavern, I figured we must be getting closer to the side of the valley where the ship was than my own side.
The main cavern was a surprise. There had to be hundreds of people in it—maybe thousands. I couldn’t see them all in the faint light.
Unlike the dusty, crumbling holes I’d been traveling through, it was well-kept and airy. There were natural chimneys that exhausted the place and fresh air must be coming in from someplace else. They even had a row of fires along one wall for cooking and the like.
Along the far wall, up a series of ramps and stairways, was an area apart from the rest of the cavern. This upscale region was set upon a shelf of flat, fine marble. I could tell right off that was where the important folk spent their time. Instead of crude furniture built of sticks and canvas, there were real chairs and even tables carved from polished stone.
We passed people performing odd operations. There was something that looked like a forge—but not a primitive one. Men with goggles handled lead-shielded pots, pouring hot molten metals. My rad meters jumped on my tapper when we passed this operation, so I gave them a wide berth.
Della led the way to the base of what appeared to be manufactured steps built with tubular steel. I frowned at them as I followed her to the top.
“These steps…” I said, pausing. I looked around, noticing the even, regular shape of the cavern. The walls were ribbed, in fact, with heavy curved supports.
I looked at Della, and she eyed me quietly.
“I think I figured it out,” I said. “This cave—this isn’t a cave at all. It’s what’s left of Hydra, isn’t it?”
She stepped close to me. “Pretend you don’t know. People will not trust you with the knowledge.”
“Right,” I said, looking around. It was obvious now that I thought about it. Sure, it was dusty and decrepit. What must have been decks had been turned into open floors. “Looks like you guys cannibalized much of the ship to build stuff. You must have removed a lot of the metal and—where are the engines?”
Della pursed her lips in annoyance. I don’t think she was happy that I’d figured out their little secret.
“Hydra was a colony ship,” she said. “The vessel was built to be dismantled and used to start our colony. But, as I said, it’s best you don’t talk about it.”
“Okay, I’ll play dumb. You have to tell me one more thing, though: how did you bury it in solid rock?”
“When we found the system was occupied, we decided to hide ourse
lves here, in the wall of this valley. We used the engines to burn into the cliff and let the rock fall outside to cover the entry point.”
I nodded thoughtfully. It was quite an engineering feat. My estimation of these people and their technical skills had risen another notch. It almost made me sad to think that Earthers had been such amazing engineers before I was born. We hadn’t done much of anything on our homeworld to advance ourselves for several generations. I guess that was part of the grand design of the Empire—to prevent frontier worlds like ours from creating new technology and eventually becoming a threat to the Core Systems.
Following Della, I found I was in for a further surprise. I’d been expecting a scene of wealth, at least compared to the lower class folks who lived on the ship’s belly and outer hull. But although I did see better materials and living conditions on the upper deck, I was struck by the number of scientific instruments they had as well.
There was a region of batteries fed by clattering generators. Past that, following the black and red wires, we reached a wide variety of machines. There were computers, medical equipment and even a full machine shop. Labs, enclosed presumably to keep the dust out, lined one wall while extra equipment sat closer to the edge of the deck. There were a lot of people here, some of whom wore old-fashioned lab coats of various colors. I was impressed by these people the most. They eyed me seriously, but without the same mistrust as the simpler folk downstairs.
“What’s this place?”
“The Verge,” she said in a tone that indicated I was some kind of an idiot for asking.
“Ah,” I said, looking over the edge of the railing. “The Verge is the upper deck. What’s its purpose?”
“This place keeps us all alive,” she said with a hint of pride in her voice. “All that we know, all that we learn, comes from here. Our tools are fashioned here as well with the raw materials smelted below.”
Nanites, I thought to myself. This place was the source. They had retained some of the equipment and obviously had been very busy creating effective weaponry against the slavers.
At last, we came to a lab unlike the others. It was full of vats of colored, bubbling liquids. Most of the liquids were yellow or red—or a tainted mixture of both.
I hesitated at the entrance. I’m not sure why. I think it was the smell of the place. It was a distinctly organic odor. Not rot, or offal—more like a tannery, or a slaughterhouse.
“This must be the stranger,” said a voice. “Hello stranger. I’m the Investigator.”
I stepped into the chamber and turned toward the voice. Taking in the man and the scene around him, I have to admit I recoiled in horror.
Standing not ten feet from me, was a big man with a scalpel the size of a butcher’s blade in his hand. He had long, salt-and-pepper gray hair that hung down past his armpits in an unruly mass. That wasn’t what freaked me out, however.
What I had trouble accepting, what my eyes latched onto and couldn’t escape, was the body on a cold marble slab in front of this blade-wielding Investigator. I would recognize that dead man anywhere. I’d seen him in my dreams a thousand times. His hair was sandy blonde. His eyes—carved lidless—were as blue as the Georgia sky.
It was my own dead body on that slab, and it had been carved up into bloody pieces. I stared at it, frozen in place.
“Can it truly disturb you?” asked the Investigator, his sonorous voice both gentle and commanding at the same time. “I hadn’t thought that it would.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it again. I took a breath, but almost choked on the cloying scents that intruded into my lungs. Was I smelling my own death?
“Yes,” I said, looking away from the thing on the slab. “It disturbs me. It would disturb any thinking man.”
“Tell me, star man,” he said, setting the big blade down and walking a step closer to me.
Della, who stood at my other side, watched the Investigator approach with a mixture of respect and worry. I got the feeling that she was comfortable in his presence—but not completely.
“Tell me what year it is back home,” he said.
I met his dark eyes and knew I was taking a test. I’ve never been good at tests—ask anyone who’s ever had the displeasure of administering one in my presence.
“Uh…” I said. “It’s 2122, sir.”
“A correct answer, but you hesitated!” said the Investigator, turning away from me and walking toward a computer that was set upon a shelf on the far wall of the laboratory. “Is that because of time-dilation? What year did you set out to come here? Really, you must have moved very quickly. You can’t have gotten our signal before you left. Do you realize that you’re more than twenty years earlier than we expected?”
I blinked at him, chewing over what he was saying. The presence of my own torn-up corpse, not ten feet from my left hand, was distracting to say the least.
To help myself think, I shifted on my feet so that the body wasn’t in my field of vision—at least, not most of it. I could still see those cold bluish-white feet out of the corner of my eye.
“Sir,” I said, “I’m not quite sure I’m following you. I know you sent your message indicating you’d arrived here on Zeta Herculis about thirty years back. You’re correct if you’re saying that we only just got your message on Earth not six months ago.”
The Investigator made a strange sound. “It’s not possible. What you’re saying—not possible.”
“What’s that, sir?” I asked, truly curious.
“You’re saying that you came from Earth, but you only got our signal a few months ago. The speed of travel that suggests—it defies logic.”
“Ah,” I said. “I get it now.”
What was it that Natasha and the other techs had explained to me at one point?
“Have you heard of the Alcubierre drive, sir?” I asked him.
His dark eyes fixed upon me. He nodded slowly. “A fable. We tried to make it work. We had theories, mathematical models, but to build such a thing… Are you saying Earth has managed it? That you’ve uncovered the secret of warp drive?”
“Yes, in a way.”
“In a way,” he echoed, and his face took on a haunted look. “I’ve dissected your corpse, sir,” he said. “Surely, you must know that I know you better than you know yourself: The foodstuffs and the micro flora species in your gut. Also the protein levels, trace radio-isotopes and even the lead content of your bones. They all match up. You did come from Earth.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I’m from the old state of Georgia, actually, North America Sector.”
“You said, ‘in a way’,” the Investigator said suddenly, walking toward me and halting at arm’s reach. “What did you mean by that?”
Normally I’m a straight-talking fellow, but I found myself wanting to hide things from this man. He was clearly highly intelligent and dedicated to science. But he also seemed mildly insane. At the very least, his brain and mine didn’t work on the same frequency.
But despite my hesitation, I decided to tell him the truth. I’d already blown his mind partway. I figured I might as well blast it apart completely.
“We, meaning the people of Earth, didn’t exactly figure out how to make the warp drive work, sir. We had help. Well, more than that. The truth is we bought passage on an alien ship to get out here. We didn’t build the ship. We’ve never managed to build a warp drive, either.”
“But…” he said, trying to take it all in. “If you’ve been in contact with aliens with superior technology…what year?”
“What, sir?”
“What year did you make contact?”
“2052, sir. They came to Earth in 2052, and they had so many ships we could scarcely make out the stars between them.”
The light of madness in the man’s eyes flared brighter.
“That makes it all useless,” he said. “Everything we’ve done here—a waste of time. We’re jokes, forgotten and laughed at. My life’s work, my mother’s work before me…”
“Well now, hold on,” I said. “It’s not quite like—”
“Why didn’t you come sooner?” he asked suddenly. “Why did you leave us here to rot on this rock beneath an alien sun? Why did you allow the cephalopods to torment us for half a century? Can there be an excuse for such cruelty?”
I opened my mouth and raised my hands to answer him, but he was already answering himself. He was up and pacing now, not even looking at me.
“The answer can only be political,” he said, his haunted face searching empty years and trillions of empty kilometers as if they stretched out before him as far as his mind could see. “We were exiles, my mother always told me. Whoever hated us so much must have stayed in power: The Social Synthesis, the nation-blocs. You said something about North America Sector—not the United States.”
“You have part of the answer,” I said, getting a word in edgewise at last.
He loomed close to me. “That’s it, isn’t it, star man?” he asked. “Your masters hated us, feared us, and wanted us to stay forgotten. What other answer is there, really? I don’t even know why I’m asking you. The answers are in the facts as they’ve been laid out before me. I hadn’t wanted to believe—”
“Sir,” I said suddenly, loudly.
He looked at me with white-rimmed eyes.
“Sir, you don’t understand it all yet. Yes, the situation is a political one. But your old enemies are gone. Long gone. It’s the politics of the Galactics that matter now. In fact, that’s all that has ever really mattered throughout human history. We just didn’t know it.”
I proceeded then to explain to him what every kid on Earth learns in elementary school now—about the layers of government all the way up from Local, to District, to Sector, to Hegemony and finally to the distant uncaring halls of the Galactics themselves. I explained the deal we’d made to stay alive and the reality of living under the watchful eye of aliens who cared not one whit if we all lived or died—as long as the rules laid down millennia ago in the Core Systems were strictly followed.
The Investigator listened closely, and I think he got it. He really did. I might have explained this to anyone else on the planet, and it would have failed to penetrate, but this man was ready to listen. He’d dug inside my corpse and seen the light of truth there. We were human, we were from Earth, and we’d gotten here faster than the speed of light would allow. What was even more amazing to him was my regeneration. Our talk turned to that topic once he understood the basics of the Galactic Empire.