"And if that's the case, it's probably smack between the two." The Librarian was a dear man, but sometimes he took the longer route himself. "Which tunnel?" He indicated his best guess, and I followed it. To avoid being seen, he vanished, leaving me alone once more. I drew my sword and hugged the wall.
The guard gave it away. I had covered more than half of the distance I estimated lay between the pit and the arena, seeing no one—I had fortuitously chosen a Vulsteen sleep period; most were in their chambers—when I chanced upon a man standing before a door some way ahead. Casual loiterers being rare in these tunnels, I marked him as a sentry.
The Vulsteen would have done better to leave well enough alone; had they never posted a guard, I would have tried the door, been stopped by the lock, and moved on. But his presence was a lighted signpost.
Men without emotions make very poor sentries: They lack fear, nervousness, caution…all emotions that would have caused a normal man, upon being confronted with an unknown person in a restricted area in a forbidden city, to call for assistance. Having none of those survival factors, this sentry did not, even when the Librarian suddenly appeared in the corridor, and refused to advance when so ordered. So the guard left his post to intercept the intruder.
Eventually he returned—at which point I left him lying senseless in the control room, after letting myself in with the key he so thoughtfully provided. The Vulsteens' lack of experience in security matters was about to cost them dearly.
The room was entirely filled with machinery vital to the Vulsteen—or so the Librarian told me as I was about to place the library sphere into one of the universal access indentations on the control panel for the air ducting system. He directed me to another panel, plain but for four blinking blue lights and an access indentation, across the room. I reached for it…
Concomitant with the disadvantages of totally emotionless guards is the advantage that when they awaken, they do not let loose with outraged screams that alert the intruder who previously rendered them unconscious that such a state of affairs no longer exists. In other words, when the guard I had knocked out woke up, he smartly slapped the Library from my hand before I could place it in the interface.
Perhaps he was still groggy, in that he did not simply club me over the head and take possession of both saboteur and sabotage equipment at the same time. But even so, I barely scrambled out of his way across the slick floor before he flung his net and nearly entangled my still-numbed hand.
I had been holding the Library with my right hand, the same with which I usually held my sword, but for that moment I had transferred the sword to my left hand, and now it was with that hand that I was forced to defend myself. I moved in close to seize his net with my aching right hand and use my sword as a long knife, but he flicked the net at my eyes and blinded me for a second. I thrust regardless, and he swept my blade out of the way with his club, but at least I delayed his charge until my vision returned.
The Library had rolled into a corner beyond anyone's reach. We circled the room in silence. I could not reach the control bank, and he could not summon help lest I carry out what I had come to do.
My breath was coming short and fast; time was on his side, and the moment one of his fellows happened upon us, I was finished. He knew it, but where a normal man might have smiled at my predicament, or given some sign of his nervousness, the Vulsteen's face was an expressionless mask. No excitement pulsed through his veins; no fear made his heart pump harder. I looked at his skeletal visage and wasted limbs and all I saw was a breathing mechanical man.
And then, with the seeming rashness that had more than once saved me, I jumped back, my fingers dancing on the invisible control buttons of my sword hilt. Had I consciously thought about it, I could not have effected my weapon's metamorphosis before my foe was upon me, but my hands had a life of their own and I was holding a stout staff in place of my sharp blade before he could close with me.
I charged into him, my staff pitched straight out like a lance. He tangled it in his net, drawing it to the side and rendering me helpless—until I let go the staff, its weight dragging his net aside. He tried to bring his club to bear and I seized it in one hand before he could summon up any momentum. In a mob against lone Thorans, the Vulsteen were dangerous predators; one on one against me, he had the strength of a palsy victim. I wrenched his club from his grip as I would from an unruly child. True to his nature, he showed no emotion whatsoever right up to the moment I slammed his face into the wall.
Moving quickly, I gathered up the Library from the corner where it lay.
"Are you all right?"
"You needn't worry about me," the little sphere whispered pedantically. "I am thoroughly laced with plastimetallic alloys and I have no moving parts. Place me in the access pit directly to your left."
I did so without any fear that my actions would be interrupted a second time. As far as I could tell, nothing happened. Then the Library spoke again.
"I have isolated the subprogram that controls the emotion sequencer. I can turn it off at any time, but I would advise you to remove your friends from the pit first."
"Can you change the settings? Perhaps we can use the Vulsteen's machine against them."
"I'm sorry, no. I am basically an advanced database. In light of your situation, the main Library programmed some—additional—capabilities, but that one is beyond me. I can turn the machine on and off, but I have not the analytical superroutines necessary to change its pre-set parameters."
I hesitated, calculating how long it might take to find a rope, return to the pit, and haul my friends out—assuming that I ran into no further Vulsteen on the way. I instructed the Library to give me ten minutes' grace, then deactivate the machine. I was well on my way back to Timash and the others when I realized that I might not have a chance to return to the control room.
Without the Library I was trapped in this century, but without my friends I would be unworthy of living in any event. I take pride in the knowledge that I hesitated hardly a moment before continuing on toward the pit—notwithstanding that my heart was racing back to the control room to retrieve my only guide to my slim chance of returning home.
Whither the Vulsteen might keep a rope or a ladder I knew not, but common sense dictated that they did not carry them around, and common sense, it seemed, had survived the past million years. Taking a stout cord from its hanger out of reach of the pit, I quickly lowered it.
Harros was the first to try and his weight nearly pulled me back in and dashed all our plans.
"There's nothing here to lash the rope to," I reported hastily. "Marella is the lightest; send her up and she can help me hold on while you climb up."
"She won't go," Timash hissed back. "She's still under their influence."
"Well, she won't be for long—and neither will the breen. I fixed the machine to turn itself off in a few minutes, and then it's going to get crowded down there."
Timash's eyes got very wide. "You turned off the machine?"
"In a few minutes. I—"
Timash waited to hear no more. Backing up, he took a running start, leaped straight into the wall, and started clambering up without my help. Within seconds his paws appeared at the edge and he scrambled upright next to me.
"Let's go!"
"How did you—?"
"I've been climbing trees since I was a baby. C'mon, Harros, let's move it!"
Marella was still dead weight, so he looped the rope around her uncooperative body and we hauled her up like a sack of rice. No sooner had we dropped the rope again than Harros seized it, practically running up the wall faster than he could have slid down it.
"They're starting to get restless down there," he imparted breathlessly. "I think the machine's turned off."
Indeed, Marella seemed to recover her spunk even as we stood there. Blinking her confusion away, when apprised of our situation she voted for an immediate departure; Harros seconded her.
"I have to go back," I said. "I—left som
ething in the control room."
Marella stared at me. "What? Whatever it is, I'll buy you a new one! Let's get out of here!"
"You go on. I'll move faster alone."
"Oh, no," she said. "We stay together. You've got the only weapon." Although Harros seemed ready to protest, when Timash backed Marella he wisely kept his own counsel.
I tried to give her my baton, but she would not hear of it, nor would the others. We all realized that only in a group might we have the strength to fight off any Vulsteen we met between here and the surface. I was about to lead us back to the control room when I glanced at the pit, and watched in a mixture of awe and horror as the first breen, clawed hands and feet throwing gashes of mud in its wake, raced up the side of the pit and stood truly free for the first time in generations!
It turned, saw us, and bared its fangs…
32. Fight for Freedom
In the moment between the time the breen beheld us and its predatory instincts took hold, another breen scrambled out of the pit. It put out one hand against the other's chest and growled a few words in their own language. The first breen's lips reluctantly slid back over his teeth, even though the fiery hunger in his eyes burned unabated.
"Stay there," the second breen advised us in its coarse voice. It crossed the floor and stood with us as others climbed out of captivity, demonstrating a facility for scaling the walls that made Timash seem clumsy by comparison. It was plain that the pit itself had played no part in the slavery of these beasts; only the emotion sequencer had held them in thrall all these years. The pit must have served the Vulsteen more as a psychological separation than it had served to keep the breen in their place. We were quickly surrounded by furry bodies, some antagonistic, needing a growl from our protector to ward them off, but most seeming to ignore us, wandering the small space as though they had never seen it before—as indeed they never had.
The very last breen to come forth was Uncle Sam, and all the others, save our guard, gathered about him. He lifted his arms to take them all in. They leaned forward as though to hear him better, and I could almost smell the bloodlust on their minds. But for all his people's ferocity and righteous vengeance, he had a different answer.
"It is over. Let us return to the surface and see the Vulsteen no more."
I feared a slaughter, that one of the young bucks would leap out of the crowd and strike him down, crying for vengeance and blood, but none did. Instead he walked through the crowd and they parted for him, obediently allowing him to lead them away from this place and back into the sunshine.
Caught up in the tide of retreating beasts, I could do no more than stay my place as they streamed by; try as I might I could make no headway against them, and as a result I found myself on the fringe of the crowd, watching them go. Uncle Sam, leading the pack, had not yet noticed that we were not among them, and I am not sure that he would have stopped for us had he known.
"Go ahead," I ordered my companions. "I know where I'm going, and I can catch up before you reach the surface."
Marella started to protest again, but this time Timash sided with me.
"He's right. You're better off with the breen. We'll catch up."
Thus it was that Timash and I, scurrying in the opposite direction from the straggling breen, were the first to come upon the Vulsteen army.
Contrary to our initial impression, we had not run headlong into the entire population of Vulsteen, but in that crowded corridor it seemed as though we had. We met at an intersection, neither party knowing the other was there until we had almost run each other over. They were not armed with the usual complement of clubs and nets, but wide, straight swords—they were not out to gather prisoners this time—but apparently the Nuum's strictures against machines had affected even these subterranean hermits.
How the Vulsteen knew that their slaves had escaped we did not know, nor did we ever find out. My best guess is that we set off an alarm when we turned off the emotion sequencer; it is inconceivable that no precautions would have been taken against its failure.
Their mass proved their undoing and our salvation. Flooding the confines of the small passage, they had little room to wield their own weapons, while we simply lashed out at whatever got in our way. Timash, especially, was good at this, bulking thrice as large as most of our opponents, who, unable to fly backward from his fists as would have befitted the force employed, crashed into their still-charging comrades, causing riotous confusion.
There was no science to what we did in that hallway, only a frenzy of swinging limbs and slashing swords. The Vulsteen fought and died without sound, without visible emotion. Perhaps that is why Timash and I lived and they did not.
As suddenly as it began, it was over, and a dozen of them lay about us, some still breathing, some not. Who killed them, I do not know—in those close quarters some of them may have stabbed each other.
We reached the control room without further incident. I grabbed the Library—which came loose at my touch, although no one else could have moved it—and returned to the room where we had left the breen. We moved much more carefully on the way back, but the Vulsteen patrols appeared to have already passed. Only the dead remained at the site of our skirmish in the hall.
There were sounds coming from the chamber ahead. Screams that came from no human throat, ripping noises whose origin I did not want to imagine.
Timash and I looked at each other, plainly and unashamedly afraid to rush into what could literally turn out to be a bloody hell, yet goaded on by our obligations to our companions. Had they made it to the surface, or were they trapped in the midst of the carnage?
And then it stopped.
Warily, we crept to the entrance to the larger chamber and peeked out. A very bloody hell, indeed. Even in my days and nights in the awful trenches of France, I had witnessed nothing to rival this. Bodies and pieces lay everywhere, blood coated the floor, dripping into the pit, smearing the fur of the victors. For those standing were breen, more than a match for men who despite their superior numbers had been limited by the edicts of Thora's alien conquerors to weapons that only approximated what the breen had been given by God. The smell overtaking us made me want to retch. I saw nothing standing that was not breen, neither Vulsteen nor human.
But even as I was casting about in my mind for a route that might bypass these bestial killing machines, a small knot of breen on the far side of the room opened and I saw Marella and Harros step out, unharmed but no less horrified than I by the abattoir that confronted them. We, at least, had been spared for the most part the awful sounds that accompanied so much death. Even as this thought crossed my mind I saw Marella throw her hands over her ears and bury her face in Harros' chest.
None of the breen had noticed us as yet. Thinking it unwise to appear suddenly in their midst, I called out to Uncle Sam, whom I recognized in the throng near my friends. Heads jerked around, teeth bared, but a shout from their leader brought them to heel, and we were allowed to cross the room unmolested, although I confess that my skin crawled icily along my shoulders the entire time. We walked through the breen as through a forest of lions, each gazing hungrily at our tender flesh but held in check by an invisible power. We were careful never to brush against even a single individual, for fear that the touch would drive him over the edge and the entire room would erupt in savagery once more. From the slight sigh that escaped when we reached him, I believe that Uncle Sam had dreaded that same possibility. Indeed, he lost no time guiding us to a passage to the outer world.
Our good-byes were of necessity swift and informal, but Uncle Sam's thanks were no less genuine.
"Where will you go now?" I asked. "None of you has ever lived outside before."
His answer surprised me.
"Back to our people, of course. We have wandered these plains for thousands of years. Just because men fear us doesn't make us animals. We have many tribes, many nations." He nodded. "And we have long memories. Our people will be glad to welcome us home."
&nb
sp; "But—but…" Harros sputtered. "I mean, will they accept you? I mean, won't you be different?"
Uncle Sam lifted one lip in his imitation of a smile. "Not so much as you think." He laid a clawed hand on my shoulder. "Remember, my friend, the breen have long memories."
And with that he was gone. Not far ahead we saw daylight. It was morning, and we sat in one of the long shadows while we waited to our eyes to become reacquainted with the sunshine.
"So, Keryl," Harros spoke up. "If the breen have such long memories, do you think one of them could tell us how to get home?"
Mentally I slapped myself for forgetting that our transportation had been smashed to pieces the day we arrived. How could I know that this would soon emerge as the very least of our problems?
Marella got to her feet and looked out into the morning sky, shielding her eyes from the glare. Apparently satisfied with what she saw—or what she did not see—she returned to sit with the rest of us in the shade.
"What's so interesting out there?" Timash asked querulously. "That's the third time you've been out there."
"Just looking for something to get us on our way. We're not doing any good sitting here."
In discussing our options, we had decided not to return underground to the breen for assistance. Not only did it feel wrong after our triumphant exit, but the breen had only one thing to offer that we lacked, and the idea of marching for several days—and nights—escorted by the most ferocious killing machines ever to walk dry land left us more comfortable relying upon our own resources, scant as they might be.
I was beginning to wonder about the steadiness of our own group: Marella was still a stranger, Harros had long overstayed his anticipated visit, and Timash had shown unwonted surliness ever since we emerged from underground. I had known him in the past to exhibit the moodiness of youth, but never such raw ill temper. Given his past animosity toward Harros and the latter's lack of diplomacy, I feared they might come to blows ere we camped for the night.
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