by David Weber
Not bad, he thought. Not bad at all.
In fact, it was almost perfect. Less than half an hour from Tellesberg even at the relatively modest velocity he'd allowed himself tonight, it was at least thirty or forty of the Safeholdians' miles from the nearest human habitation, and the cave was more than large enough to serve as the skimmer's hangar. It was a little on the damp side, with quite a bit of seepage on the southern wall, despite its elevation, but that wouldn't be a factor. Once the skimmer set down and sealed its ports, Merlin could have submerged the thing in salt water and left it there without damaging it.
There were signs that something large—probably a dragon, he thought, studying the leavings, and not one of the vegetarian variety—had laired here, but that was all right, too. In fact, it was another plus. Not even a great dragon was going to be able to damage the heavily armored recon skimmer very easily, and should some wandering hunting party actually penetrate into this high, mountain valley, they were . . . unlikely to go poking about in a cave which had been claimed by one of Safehold's most fearsome land-going predators.
The rest of the gear isn't as tough as the skimmer, though, he reflected. Probably be a good idea to leave the sonic system on, anyway.
His copies of Shan-wei's original terraforming notes and progress reports contained enormous amounts of information on the planet's native ecology, and she and her teams had determined the sonic frequencies most effective at repelling the local wildlife. If he played with the power levels a little, he ought to be able to come up with a sonic field which would keep even a dragon safely away from his local equipment depot without driving it into finding another lair.
He hovered there, a meter or so—three feet—off the cavern's reasonably flat floor. The skimmer's adjustable landing legs were more than long enough to compensate for the inevitable irregularities, and he nodded to himself, pleased by the cave's suitability.
"Owl."
"Yes, Lieutenant Commander?"
"This is going to work very well," he said. "Go ahead and run the air lorry in tomorrow night. But don't unload anything until I've been able to get back here and fiddle with the skimmer's sonic fences."
"Yes, Lieutenant Commander."
"And don't forget to avoid any population centers on its flight in, either."
"Yes, Lieutenant Commander."
For just a moment, Merlin thought he'd heard something like a trace of exaggerated patience in the AI's voice. But that was ridiculous, of course.
"Do you have the take from the day's surveillance?"
That's another redundant question, he told himself. Of course Owl has the day's take!
"Yes, Lieutenant Commander," the AI said.
"Good. Anything more from Nahrmahn and Shandyr about Duke Tirian's involvement in the assassination attempt?"
"No, Lieutenant Commander."
Merlin grimaced unhappily at that. He had nowhere near as much information on the Duke of Tirian as he would have liked. He'd identified the noble as a player only relatively late in the game, and the duke was very cautious about the people with whom he met and what he discussed when he met them. He couldn't prevent Merlin from eavesdropping on almost any meeting Merlin knew about, but there didn't seem to be very many meetings of any sort. Almost as irritating, the care he exercised in what he said to his human henchmen when he did meet with one or more of them made analysis difficult.
There was no question that he was deep in bed with Nahrmahn, although Merlin had been unable to determine the exact point at which he intended to plant his own dagger in the Emerald prince's back. Unfortunately, given the duke's rank, relatives, and in-laws, accusing him of treason was going to be a . . . delicate proposition. Which was one reason Merlin hadn't brought it up with Haarahld. And equally a reason he'd hoped to acquire additional corroborating evidence before he sat down to talk to the king's most trusted councilors in the morning.
"I don't suppose the Duke gave us anything new from his end, did he?" he asked.
"No, Lieutenant Commander."
Merlin grimaced again, this time with a chuckle. According to the manufacturer's manual, a RAPIER tactical computer's AI had a vocabulary of over a hundred thousand words. So far, he estimated, Owl must have used at least sixty of them.
"All right, Owl. Go ahead and burst-transmit the take to the skimmer's onboard systems. I'll have time to skim through it before I head back to Tellesberg."
"Yes, Lieutenant Commander."
Owl was perfectly capable of maintaining the critical bugs Merlin had emplaced in various and sundry locations about Safehold. At the moment, they were concentrated in Charis, Emerald, and Corisande, but he wasn't neglecting Zion or the Kingdom of Tarot. For that matter, Queen Sharleyan had one permanently parked on the ceiling of her throne room and another in her privy council chamber.
Despite the fact that Merlin required far less "sleep" than any biological human, he couldn't possibly have found time to monitor all of those stealthy spies himself. But Owl had been carefully instructed about the names, places, and events in which Merlin was interested. The AI had also been given a list of more generalized trigger words and phrases—like "assassinate," for example, or "bribe"—and unlike Merlin, it was both designed to monitor multiple inputs simultaneously and immune to boredom.
The transmission took only a handful of seconds. Then a green light blinked, indicating completion of the transmission. Merlin nodded in satisfaction, then cocked his head.
"Anything more on your analysis of the Rakurai platforms, Owl?" he asked.
"Affirmative, Lieutenant Commander," the AI replied, then fell silent, and Merlin rolled his eyes.
"In that case, tell me what you've come up with on how to take them out."
"I have not been able to devise a plan to destroy them, Lieutenant Commander," Owl said calmly.
"What?" Merlin sat straighter in his couch, eyes narrowing. "Why not, Owl?"
"The kinetic bombardment and solar energy platforms are nested in the center of a sphere of area defense systems and passive scanners which no weapons at my disposal can hope to penetrate," the AI told him. "Analysis suggests that most of those defenses were emplaced after Commodore Pei's destruction of the original Lake Pei Enclave."
"After Langhorne was dead?"
"Yes, Lieutenant Commander." Owl's response actually surprised Merlin a bit. The AI wasn't usually very good at recognizing questions—especially what might be rhetorical ones—appropriate for it to answer unless they were specifically directed to it.
"Do you have any hypothesis for why they might have been added at that time?"
"Without better historical data, no reliable, statistically significant hypotheses can be offered," Owl said. "However, modeling of the apparent strategy of the Langhorne administration prior to that time, particularly in light of the fact that Commodore Pei was kept in complete ignorance of the bombardment system's existence before its use against the Alexandria Enclave, would suggest the Administrator's successors were concerned that there might be other 'disloyalists,' particularly among the military units the Commodore had commanded. Assuming that to be true, it would perhaps have seemed logical to bolster the platforms' defenses against additional attacks."
Merlin frowned—not in disagreement, but in thought—for several seconds, then nodded slowly.
"That does make sense, I suppose," he mused aloud. "Not that it helps our problems very much."
Owl said nothing, and Merlin chuckled harshly at its lack of response. Then he thought some more.
The kinetic bombardment platforms which had been used against Shan-wei were still there, sweeping silently in orbit around the planet. It was impossible to be certain, but Merlin was virtually positive the platforms were tasked to bombard and destroy any ground-based energy signature which might indicate that Safeholdians were straying from the dictates of The Book of Jwo-jeng's limitations on technology. The energy footprint of an electrical generating plant, for example.
The exact leve
l of emissions necessary to activate them was impossible to estimate, but The Book of Chihiro clearly warned that the same Rakurai which had smitten the evil Shan-Wei waited to punish anyone so lost to God as to attempt to follow in her footsteps. According to the Writ, the lightning associated with natural thunderstorms was God's reminder of the destruction awaiting those who sinned, a sort of inverted mirror image of the symbology of the rainbow's promise to Noah following the Deluge.
Owl had been able to get fairly good imagery of the platforms using purely passive systems, but the one SNARC which had gone active to probe for additional information had been picked off almost instantly by a laser-armed anti-missile platform. Another SNARC had attempted to penetrate the defended perimeter under maximum stealth, only to be detected and destroyed while it was still thousands of kilometers from the platforms. That had rather conclusively answered the question of whether or not the solar power-powered systems were still active. At the same time, the defensive systems had shown absolutely no interest in any stray emissions Merlin's other SNARCs, skimmer flights, or com transmissions might have let slip.
Probably would have been just a bit of a problem for their own operations if it had gone around shooting the "angels" in the ass because of their emissions, he thought mordantly. So the damned thing almost certainly is waiting to kill the first sign of emerging technology outside the Jwo-jeng parameters. Which doesn't mean it couldn't be used for something else if those damned power sources hiding in the Temple told it to. And it's got six loaded cells, each capable of covering half a continent at need, by Owl's best estimate. Not good. Not good at all.
"We can't get anything close enough to do the job, Owl?" he asked after the better part of a full minute.
"Negative, Lieutenant Commander."
"Why not?"
"Because none of the weapons stockpiled for your use have the range to engage the platforms from outside the range at which the platforms' defensive systems can destroy them, Lieutenant Commander. Nor do any of the platforms available to you have the stealth capability to get deep enough into the defended zone to change that fact."
"I see." Merlin grimaced, then shrugged. "Well, if that's the way it is, that's the way it is. We'll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it, and I'm sure that between us we'll be able to come up with a solution eventually."
Owl said nothing, and Merlin chuckled again. Tact or obtuseness? he wondered. Not that it mattered. But whichever it was, there was no point in beating his head against that particular wall right now.
He put the problem aside and leaned back in the flight couch once more as he took the skimmer high and allowed its airspeed to climb to Mach four on a southwesterly heading. The flight he had in mind would take over an hour, even at that speed, and he punched up the first of Owl's recordings.
* * *
The local night was much younger as Merlin switched off the playback from the surveillance bugs five thousand kilometers and almost an hour and a half later. As always, most of the recorded surveillance data had been boring, irritatingly cryptic, or both. But, equally as always, there were more than a few nuggets tucked away amid all the background noise.
At the moment, though, that wasn't really foremost in Merlin's thoughts, and his expression tightened as he gazed down at the terrain below him.
Armageddon Reef, the locals called it. Once, it had been called Alexandria, but that had been long ago, and its new name was grimly appropriate.
Just under a thousand miles, east to west—that was the width of Rakurai Bay, the bay at the heart of Armageddon Reef, the most accursed spot on Safehold, which had once been home to the Alexandria Enclave. The island upon which that enclave had stood was still there, but it wasn't as large as it had been, and it had been battered into a near-lunar landscape by overlapping impact craters.
Langhorne hadn't been content just to destroy Shan-wei's enclave and murder all of her friends and associates. There'd been colonists in that enclave, as well. Some in Alexandria itself; others scattered across the minor continent surrounding the vast bay. They, too, had had to be destroyed, for they might have been infected by Shan-wei's "heretical" teachings.
Besides, Merlin thought harshly, the bastard wanted to make a statement. Hell, he wanted to play with his goddamned toy, that's what he wanted. "Rakurai," my ass!
He realized his hand was tightening dangerously on the stick. Even with the governors he'd set on his PICA strength, he could damage the controls if he really tried, and he forced himself to relax.
It was . . . difficult.
From his altitude, it was easy for his enhanced vision, despite the darkness, to see how the kinetic bombardment had shredded a roughly circular zone over eighteen hundred kilometers across. Not just once, either. Nimue had had plenty of time to run the reports from the SNARCs she'd dispatched to the site of that long-ago mass murder through Owl's analyzing software. It was readily apparent from the overlapping impact patterns that Langhorne had sent three separate waves of artificial meteors hammering across the continent. And he'd given Alexandria itself even more attention than that. At least five waves of kinetic strikes had marched back and forth across the island. Even now, almost eight hundred standard years later, the tortured, broken ruin he'd left behind was brutally evident from Merlin's present height.
But he didn't kill quite everyone, did he? Merlin told himself bitterly. Oh, no! He needed someone to bear witness, didn't he?
For that was exactly what Langhorne had done. He'd spared a single settlement from destruction, so that its stunned and terrified inhabitants could testify to the rain of fiery thunderbolts—the Rakurai of God—which had punished Shan-wei and her fallen fellows for their evil. The "archangels" who'd swooped down upon that surviving village in the aftermath of the bombardment had borne them away, distributing them in family groups to other towns and villages across Safehold. Officially, they'd been spared because, unlike their fellows, they had been free of sin. As Lot and his family had been spared from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, they had been spared because they'd remained faithful to God and His revealed laws. In fact, they'd been spared solely so that they could testify to the might and fearsome power of God's fury . . . and the fate of any who rebelled against His viceroy on Safehold, the Archangel Langhorne.
There'd been no reason Merlin had to make this flight. Not really. He'd already known what had happened here, already seen the SNARCs' imagery. There wasn't really any difference between that imagery and what his own artificial eyes reported to the electronic ghost of Nimue Alban who lived behind them. Yet there was. Oh, but there was.
PICAs were programmed to do anything humans could do, and to react naturally, with appropriate changes of expression, to their operators' emotions, unless those operators specifically instructed them not to. Merlin had not so instructed himself, for those natural, automatic reactions, like the scars Nimue had been careful to incorporate into his appearance, were a necessary part of convincing those about him that he was human. And, electronic analog or not, perhaps he truly was still human, a corner of his cybernetic brain reflected as a tear trickled down his cheek.
He hovered there, far, far above the scene of that ancient carnage, that long-ago murder which had happened only months ago, as far as he was concerned. He didn't stay long, actually, though it seemed far longer. Just long enough to accomplish the thing he'd come here to do—to mourn his dead, and to promise them that however long it took, whatever challenge might arise, the purpose for which they had died would be achieved.
Langhorne and his adherents had named this place Armageddon Reef, the place where "good" had triumphed over "evil" for all time. But they'd been wrong, Merlin thought coldly. The atrocity they'd wreaked here had been not the final battle of that struggle, but its first, and the end of the war it had begun would be very different from the one they had envisioned.
He hovered there, feeling that promise sinking into his alloy bones, and then he turned the skimmer's nose back int
o the east, towards the approaching dawn, and left that place of sorrow once again.
VIII
Royal Palace, Tellesberg,
Kingdom of Charis
"Your Majesty," the distinguished-looking man said, bending his head in a respectful bow as he entered the council chamber.
"Rayjhis," King Haarahld responded.
The distinguished-looking man straightened and crossed to the chair at the foot of the long table. He paused and stood beside it, waiting, until Haarahld's waving hand invited him to be seated. He obeyed the gesture, then, and settled into the elaborately carved armchair.