Charon: A Dragon at the Gate

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Forced Decisions

“That girl—Zala or Kira or whoever she is—worries you, doesn’t she?” Darva asked.

I nodded. “Not the Zala part There’s something even likable about Zala. But ever since Korman told me about the other part of her I’ve wanted to meet that part—and now that I have, I’m not sure I should have forced it.”

“I guess I’ll never understand you,” she sighed. “You force her out, then get really unhappy about it. Why? Isn’t Kira more or less the same type as you?”

I whirled and felt my blood pressure go up. I paused a moment to try and get control of myself. I was going to make a nasty remark and strong denial, but Darva had really hit the nail on the head. Admitting that to myself calmed me down.

“All right. Yes, in a way. Never that cold, that unemotional, but, yes, she is a lot like I used to be. The way I still really think of myself. But she’s me stripped down to the least common denominator. No morality, no cause, no feelings of any sort. That’s what those biotechs managed with that two-mind technique. She’s able to shift all her emotions, morals, feelings into Zala. It gives Kira the mind of a computer, unencumbered by any traces of—well, humanity. Zala may be dumb, shallow, and not good for much, but she’s all that’s human in that body and brain. And, still, when I look at Kara, talk to her, I see—me.” I see a man I used to be, sitting up there, a third of a light-year off the Warden system, I added to myself.

And, in fact, just how different was Kira from that man up there? Outside of assignments, psych blocked and mostly wiped, he was really nothing more than a Zala with money. A playboy in the haunts of the rich and powerful, contributing little and totally hedonistic. The only difference between Kira and me, deep down, was that when I got all that information back before a mission, like now, I still had at my base that other man, that playboy lover of fun. Kira, on the other hand, experienced everything vicariously and never felt that her cover was anything more than that—certainly not a part of her.

The technique by which Zala/Kira had been formed remained a mystery. The medics here had poked and probed and found nothing. Her brain, aside from the Warden organisms’ odd grouping, appeared normal. Nothing in medical science could pinpoint the difference in any way. And yet it was not a psych technique, or some mental aberration—the wa showed clearly a true biological division there somewhere.

To look into a mirror, to see such a personality—the perfect assassin—and see in all its ugliness the perfection of those qualities you always prided yourself on, this was the problem. Nor did I have the faith, the moral certitude, any more that I was on the side of right, justice, and good. Charon and its viewpoints and my own experiences here had killed that certainty, and even though I was still, for now, on the same side, I was there because the opposition repelled me, not out of any lingering loyalty to the Confederacy ideal. Had this, I wondered, happened to the others, my counterparts on Lilith, Cerberus, and Medusa? I knew this—I was more completely human now than ever before, and both the weaker for it and yet, somehow, whole as Kira was not and might never be.

Explaining all this to Darva wasn’t easy. Although it helped to share it and talk it out, the fact was she could never fully understand. She hadn’t been raised to believe.

And that, in the end, was the bottom line of difference between Kira and me. I had been a believer who lost his faith but found his humanity. She had never believed in anything, and, because of that, could never find or even fully comprehend her own humanity. I had been literally reduced to the animal on Charon and been reborn a human. Kira was reduced to the machine and locked there for all time.

In a sense, she’d forced me to take a good, hard look at myself—and in the process, I was free. The last bonds were cut. Like that little Cerberan, Dumonia, I severed my last ties to my past and stayed allied with it only because, for the moment, our interests coincided.

For the first time I reached back and examined myself, and much to my surprise, was able to locate through my own wa that tiny piece of organic goo in my brain. Still there. From Lacoch to changeling to bunhar to changeling again, it had somehow survived. So you’re still listening, my brother out there? My… Kira.

Koril looked grim-faced. His office was littered with reports and photos, and he wasn’t pleased with whatever they said.

He got straight to the point. “We have been compromised. After all these years, we’ve been compromised.”

“Somebody got word out?”

He nodded. “Somehow. I’m not sure how. But this complex is doomed, Park. It’s only a matter of time. Oh, it’s safe enough against ground assault, but once its location is known they could bring in heavy stuff, off-planet stuff, and fry hell out of us.”

“Then why haven’t they?”

He smiled. “Funny. Basically because the Confederacy monitors the system so well. They don’t have the heavy weapons on Charon to do the job, and if they tried to get them they’d be shot to hell in space. To hit us hard they’d have to bring in one of their alien friends’ vessels—and that would force them into the open. But it’s only a matter of time until they work out some way to fool our Wardens.”

“How much time?” I asked uneasily.

“Who knows? A day? A week? A month? A minute from now? Whenever they can work it out. We can’t take the chance of its being long.” He sat back in his chair, and for the first time he looked very old, old and incredibly tired. “Well, perhaps it’s for the best. To end it, one way or the other, once and for all. He looked up at me, the weight of his decision showing in his face. “You know, Park, for the first time I realize how I’ve been kidding myself all these years. I enjoyed this place. I loved the research, the peace, the lack of demands. I even loved being the rebel leader. It was far more of a challenge to be the opposition than to actually run the place. It’s funny—always preparing but never acting. That’s just what Dumonia was saying the other—son of a bitch!”

•What’s the matter?”

“That old bastard! Outside of people directly under my control, Dumonia was the only one who knew precisely how to determine this base’s location. He had to—his people stocked it. Why, I ought to…” He was turning so red I feared his rage, but he soon calmed down.

“Oh, hell,” he said, “I guess he had a right. Without him I wouldn’t have all this.”

“You mean the Cerberan betrayed you?”

He nodded. “Had to be.”

“But why?”

“Just to get me to move. Damn it, Park, I’m ready. I’ve been ready for over a year. You saw Bourget—just a little test. That’s why Dumonia was here. We talked and talked and talked, and I gave him a hundred excuses, but hell, the man’s a psych. He knew I would have to be pushed, and so he pushed.”

I frowned. “Who is that man, anyway? Where does he get the resources and power he uses?”

“He’s probably the most dangerous man in the Diamond, and that’s saying something,” Korfl replied. “He could be Lord if he wanted, or just about anything else, I think. He’s absolutely brilliant, particularly at making other powerful people do what he wants. Right now he has the Confederacy and who knows how much of the Diamond doing his bidding. What his motives are I can’t say—but I know it’s not power for its own sake. If he wanted to run things, he would. I asked him once why he was helping me and you know what he said? He said it was a relief from boredom! But, enough of him. He’s kicked me hard now—and I have no choice but to act.”

“You’re going to try and retake control then?”

He nodded. “Now, I don’t want to minimize anything. You’re still new here—a little over a year total, I think. You still don’t really appreciate what we’re up against.”

I waved my hands around. “This place is equipped to take the whole system, and your planet wide underground is effective. I can’t see why you’d have a problem at this stage.”

He smiled grimly. “Ah, but you see only the surface. First of all, we can’t depend on the weapons here. Didn’t you ever wonder why those troopers in Bourget had projectile weapons? I took a great risk with the laser stuff there. One small tabarwind and we’d have been blown to kingdom come.”

“You know, ever since I’ve been on Charon I’ve heard about tabarwinds,” I told him. “And yet they have to be rare. I never saw one, or met anyone who did.”

“It only takes one to scare hell out of you. It’s, a whirling electrical storm that reaches from the ground to the ion layer surrounding the planet. Nobody knows what causes them, but they look like something out of the most fanatical of religious hells. There’s even a religion based on them, if you can believe it. They just appear—i-no cause, no real reason we’ve ever found. They can be anywhere—except here, in the center of Gamush, for some reason. They follow no set path and no logic, and they vanish as quickly as they come. It can be a year between them—and then there can be dozens, even hundreds. Aside from the direct fury of the storm, almost anything electrical within a dozen or more kilometers of the storm just goes crazy. Overloads and explodes, often with a force beyond anything inherent in the exploding device. No sorcery, no force of will can stand against them. And electrical energy attracts them like a magnet.”

“Sounds like an experience I can gladly skip,” I told him truthfully.

“And they’re more common than you think,” Koril went on. “There are three right now in the north, and that’s where we have to go.”

I sighed. “I see. But reduced to those primitive weapons, numbers mean even more—and I think you have them. If Bourget is any indication, the masses of people here really don’t give a damn who runs things.”

“As usual anywhere,” Koril agreed. “Oh, it’s certain that we could take as much as seventy percent of the north and the few settlements on Gamush without problems. Tukyan’s hardly worth worrying about it’s so primitive. I have enough powerful sores, trained and developed here, to carry the day, force the government to a few strongholds like Monttay and Cubera. But it makes no difference. As long as they hold the Castle they hold one of only two spaceports on the planet, and they hold the power really. The trade, the records—the whole economy. Holding that, they can disrupt the business of the planet. Things don’t work right, people get hungry, or angry. And while we deteriorate sitting on our seven-tenths, they wait for reinforcements either from the other three Lords or, maybe, directly from the aliens. Basically, we take the countryside without the Castle and we take nothing we can hold. Take the Castle and the rest falls automatically into line.”

“Then we must take the Castle.”

Tulio Koril laughed. “Easier said than done, my rash young assassin. Far easier said than done.”

We sat in a small briefing room, eight of us and Koril. I looked around at the faces there, but aside from two I didn’t recognize any of them. The two I knew were Darva, of course, and Zala Embuay whose presence was unexplained. It was definitely Zala we were seeing, not Kira, but we all knew that Kira was present too.

The room was darkened, and a picture appeared on the screen of a huge, black circular stone building set atop a commanding mountain. Pagodalike, there were a series of stone porches around it at regular intervals almost all the way to the not quite fiat top of the building.

“This is the Castle,” Koril told us. “It is eighty meters high from ground level, but there are an additional forty meters below ground. The building is divided into fifteen levels, and has excellent drainage. Its walls are solid stone, a meter thick, reinforced with steel plating and mesh. Beneath it, inside the mountain, is a network of tunnels leading to remote, below-ground armories. You could probably blow a nice hole in it with a laser canon, but you’d never get a second chance at it. Even so, you would have to be a genius to make that first hole, since the outer rock surface is chemically coated with a clever armorite compound developed on Cerberus. It will deflect a laser and, if you’re not careful, reflect it back at you. Because of the coating, the wa of the Castle is inert to us. It acts like a true physical barrier to the best wa sense. You can’t throw a spell to disperse anything or anybody behind it. Of course, they can’t do it to you either—but, remember, they don’t have to. They can hold on until reinforced either from other areas or from space. That topmost area is a shuttle cradle.”

I had to admit the place was most impressive, although I knew of two dozen weapons that could bring it down. Of course, none were available in the Warden Diamond—and two would also destroy the planet.

“The top level is shuttle receiving,” Koril continued, “and there is a series of lifts around the exterior for moving people and goods up and down, mostly by a clever counterweight system. The fourteenth floor is the living quarters of the Lord of the Diamond, her servants and whatever entourage she might permit. On the next eight floors below are special troopers and a defense force, living quarters for the rest of the top government and their staffs, and central records. The bottom five floors, all below ground level, include a supply level and warehouse with tunnel access, a special prison known as the dungeon, a reception level and general offices, and more defensive and trooper personnel. Additionally, on many of the upper levels there are governmental and experimental offices, labs, and the like. All in all, quite a complex.”

Koril flipped a switch, and a schematic of the building came on.

“Get to know this. You will all have copies provided, and I want you to know every passage, service corridor, twist and turn in the place. Within the next two days I’ll be putting you to the test, showing blind areas on a computer simulator. Better know your way around or you’ll get quickly lost. Speed is important, but I don’t want any of you in there to get lost in any way, shape, or form.”

The picture flipped again, showing the bottom level and the tunnel complex.

“This is the weak spot of the Castle, if it can be said to have one,” the sorcerer went on. “If you look closely, you’ll realize that this is more than a complex of tunnels and caves in a mountain. This is a maze. It is certainly possible to get into the maze more than two kilometers from the Castle itself, but once in you have even more problems. There are spells and sensors everywhere. Apparent rock walls show where there is clear space, and there are literally hundreds of rock plugs that can be—and are—shifted regularly, changing the entire maze. There is, literally, no way to know the configuration of the maze at any given time. At one time, several years ago, I did discover the key to it and sent in some of my best people. Most of them got into the Castle, but only a handful got out again—and none lived to get back to me. You understand the meaning of that. Many of them were top sores. The best. Therefore, should we manage to get in, we’re in. We either take the Castle or we die. No alternatives.”

That outlook was pretty grim, but we all could see his point. Still, somebody had a question—I couldn’t tell who.

“How will we solve the maze?” the questioner sensibly asked.

“The only advantage I have is that I know the entire area. I know what sort of things are Installed and what are not, and I can orient myself even to changed circumstances. Basically, I’m betting that I can solve the maze based on my prior knowledge. If I can’t, it’s all over.”

There was a nervous shuffling in the room at that. We were all being asked to put our necks entirely in a noose made for Koril, and were totally dependent on Koril to keep that noose from tightening.

“Now, it’s inevitable we’ll trip something, bringing troopers and defense forces,” Koril continued, “but these don’t worry me and should not worry you. None are above the level of a low-grade apt, maybe VII tops and more likely DCs. The least of you is a VII, and most of us are far higher than that. They keep the troop grade low to prevent any possible internal revolts, of course. But don’t kid yourself—also in the Castle are some incredibly powerful sores. The tops. The best we know. With luck, there’ll be no more than four or five Synod members there—they roam about much of the time. But the odds are extremely good that there will be at least that number, and we can’t discount Morah. We can only hope that he’s out—and then try and rig things a bit our way.”

“What about Mature?” somebody else asked.

“She’ll almost certainly be in. She rarely leaves, and never for any extended visits. Without her, of course, the Castle is valueless, but I feel certain the odds are with us on that much. As for Morah, well stir up a big dish of trouble in the south coast region, as far from the Castle as we can. With any luck, the fracas will bring him there. Then we enter the Castle. Finally, as a distraction, there will be a general uprising and a well-coordinated but futile attack upon the Castle itself. Our own movements will be determined both by events inside and by the shuttle schedule, which we most certainly know. It puts down at four every afternoon and remains for an hour. That means we launch our south coast diversion a day before we go hi. We go in at five the next day. Once we’re discovered, we’re committed. We must accomplish everything before that shuttle returns the next afternoon. If not, if we’re held in the lower areas through then, Aeolia need only take the shuttle up to the space station and we’re dead.” He paused a moment, then added, “Remember, you all volunteered for this.”

Well, maybe we had—but there were a lot of ifs in this proposition. If all the attacks were coordinated. If Morah could be drawn off. If there were no more Synod members in residence than we could handle ourselves. If the shuttle kept its schedule. If Aeolia Matuze was home. And if we could think, fight, and ensorcel our way through that huge building in only one full day.

I looked at Darva in the gloom and knew she was thinking the same things I was. “I really wish you wouldn’t come,” I told her. “You’re not strong enough for the sores and you’re a knife at my throat They kill you, they get me.”

“I have other skills,” she reminded me, “not the least of which is the weapons practice I’ve been through here. And I’m no more a knife at your throat than you are at mine. If you’re going to take me with you I don’t want to get it sitting out the action someplace.”

I smiled and squeezed her hand. “All right, then. It’s a team we are.”

Her smile in return was weak. I knew she really thought we were going to die in this, and I understood that she was willing to go, particularly if it was in the pursuit of something important.

And, I think, she understood me as well. Hell, up to the last I’d never expected to be in on the end of this thing, not directly. As it was, I was going to have more fun than I’d had in the past ten years.