Denner's Wreck

Chapter Twenty-Three

“The Power called Leila of the Mountain of Fire lives inside a mountain, in the great jungles far to the southwest. The top of the mountain was blasted away long ago, and inside the hole that the blast left burn fires so hot that the rock itself melts and flows like water. Whether it was Leila who blasted the mountain and lit the fires, or whether that happened before she came to live there, no one now remembers.

"Whatever the cause, the mountain burns, but Leila lives in it unharmed. Her skin is darker in hue than any mortal's, even a southerner's-almost black. Some say this is due to the heat of the flames surrounding her home.

"There is a village at the foot of her mountain, a large and prosperous village, and Leila looks after the people there. When one falls ill she comes to his bedside and touches him, and five times out of six he is well again the next day. When the crops fail or the hunters return empty-handed, Leila's creatures bring baskets of strange food and leave them in the village square, for the Elders to distribute to those who need it most. Storms always pass by the village without harming it, yet there is never a drought.

"This might be paradise, save that Leila asks a price for her protection; once a year she chooses a handsome young man from the village who must come alone to her home atop the mountain. This man knows he has been chosen when a voice calls him by name, a voice that speaks from the air.

"If the chosen one refuses, then Leila's protection is withdrawn from the village; no baskets of food are brought when supplies run low, the ill are left to recover or die on their own, storms no longer pass by, and a thousand lesser evils go unhindered. Leila takes no vengeance, she merely withdraws her aid.

"But that is enough; in all the memories of the villagers, and in all the tales going back many generations, no chosen one has held out against the summons for more than a season.

"And what becomes of the chosen ones, the sacrifices? No one knows. Some have returned alive, after a season or a year or ten years, but these fortunate ones never remember anything that happened after they passed the rim of the crater. Most never return at all. None have ever been found dead-if they return, they return alive and well, and usually live long, happy lives, troubled only by their inability to recall what befell them…"

– from the tales of Atheron the Storyteller

Bredon paused, hesitantly glancing up and down the slick grey walls of the passage. He had counted four doors in the left-hand wall of this corridor, two of the regular large ones, and two wide, low ones intended for service machines, so that the next would be the fifth. Aulden had said to take the fifth door on the left.

The door, of course, was closed. That was not the problem. Getting through doors was easy. All he had to do was yell, “Emergency override! Human in danger!” and the doors would slide out of his way. That was a safety feature that Aulden said had been built into every hold on Denner's Wreck, back when they were first erected by the automated equipment Mother-the mother ship-had provided.

Of course, some of the Powers had removed safety features, or altered them, or tampered with them in various ways. Thaddeus certainly had. However, he had apparently not known about this one. At least so far, the command had worked on every door Bredon had shouted at in Fortress Holding, allowing him to roam freely.

No, the problem was not that the door was closed, nor even that he was unsure whether it was the right door.

He was unsure, he admitted to himself. The Fortress was a maze, with rooms and corridors criss-crossing apparently at random, almost all of them a dismal, uniform grey. It made the colorful and variform chambers of Arcade, which had utterly baffled Bredon at first, seem simple.

Aulden had given him instructions for reaching Thaddeus’ war room, which Aulden had provided unwilling assistance in building, but the directions were hard to follow in the face of the endless corridors and the frequent encounters with patrolling machines. He could easily have miscounted somewhere, or turned the wrong way.

But it was not the chance that he faced the wrong door that worried him. It was the patrolling machines that caused him to hesitate. What if one was just behind the door? What if this one was not as cooperative as the others? After all, this would be the very heart of the Fortress, and it might be more carefully guarded than the corridors.

The first patrol machine had terrified him. A low, boxlike silver affair with several jointed appendages, it had stopped suddenly, pointed something at him, and demanded, “State your business."

Bredon had mouthed the meaningless syllables Aulden had taught him, hoping he pronounced them correctly.

“Acknowledged,” the machine replied.

“Abort all programming and await orders,” Bredon told it, his voice unsteady.

“Acknowledged,” the machine said again. It stood, silently waiting, completely harmless, while Bredon walked on.

That was no standard safety feature, of course; the universal password was something Aulden had done his best to infiltrate into every system in the fortress when he first began to distrust Thaddeus, decades earlier. He was unsure how successful he had been.

Bredon knew that it had not worked everywhere; the doors, for example, were too simple to be tampered with subtly, but those still had the original safety overrides. Other machines Thaddeus had programmed entirely by himself, in careful isolation, so Aulden had never gotten a chance at those. Those would be the most dangerous, should Bredon encounter any, even though they were generally stupid.

Even with the ones Aulden had tampered with, there were ways Thaddeus could overrule Aulden's gimmick, without necessarily even realizing the password existed. He had hit on one quite by accident. Thaddeus had programmed his machines to literally not hear Aulden's voice, either spoken or transmitted.

It was a simple enough procedure, really, but not something Aulden had ever thought of. He grudgingly admired Thaddeus for coming up with it.

Even when the other captives had told him what Thaddeus had said about it, Aulden had had trouble believing it could work completely. It was a simple concept, but Thaddeus was so technically inept that Aulden had hoped for some loophole.

Aulden had tried to use his secret password to force the machines to free him and the other prisoners, but without success. Monitor heard him, but simply didn't react to the password at all; Monitor was apparently an independent entity of Thaddeus's own creation, not linked in any vital way to the rest of the fortress, and not built to any of Aulden's own designs.

Most of the other machines did not acknowledge Aulden's existence at all.

Aulden had always thought that he would be safe, that his mastery of the machines would allow him to resist any sort of coercion Thaddeus-or Brenner, or any other potential troublemaker on Denner's Wreck-might apply. He knew that he, or his built-in equipment, could dominate almost any program.

He had to make himself heard, though, before he could affect an artificial intelligence. When the metal claws had reached out for him and he had shouted commands at them, both orally and through his skull-liner and other internal systems, it was as though he had simply stood silently. The claws had picked him up and carried him away.

He had puzzled it out during the hours he spent in chains. The machines had not heard him. That was the only explanation.

When Brenner and Sheila and Rawl and Lady Sunlight had been delivered to the prison they had confirmed his theory. Thaddeus had told them the machines could not hear them.

Aulden had tested that. He had had each of the other prisoners shout coded commands to the machines that brought food and water, and the commands had been ignored-not merely refused, but ignored, as if they were not heard at all.

And of course, Thaddeus would have made sure that his machines could not hear any of the other immortals, either. He did not have to worry about any sort of infiltration. Machines could very easily be instructed not to accept orders from anyone but a human being-in many cases that was standard default programming-so no machines or artificial creatures could deliver commands from his enemies. The other immortals would need to give orders personally, rather than through any sort of inhuman proxy, and Thaddeus had made sure that such orders would not be heard.

Bredon, though-Thaddeus had had no records of Bredon's voice, no reason to blank that voice out of the hearing of his machines. With Aulden's passwords, Bredon could override Thaddeus's control of any machine that Aulden had ever worked on.

Aulden was the only real technician on the planet, and Mother and all her subsidiaries had been built to his design. Most of Fortress Holding's machines would now obey Bredon, if he could get to them.

Fortress Holding had one unfortunate feature, from Bredon's point of view. It had no central controlling intelligence, no equivalent to the Skyland's mind, or Arcade's Gamesmaster, or the housekeeper at Autumn House. A single central intelligence susceptible to being overridden by Aulden's universal password would have been very convenient, but Thaddeus had not been obliging enough to provide one. Aulden said that Thaddeus had something called a “frankenstein complex” and refused to trust a single central intelligence. Instead, he used hundreds of separate intelligences.

All the major ones, however, could be commanded from a central control station. That was where Thaddeus spent most of his time, where he concocted his schemes, where he had directed the attack on the High Castle. He called it his war room. If Bredon, or any other mortal who knew Aulden's password, could get into that room he could cripple Thaddeus's entire fortress in a matter of seconds.

Accordingly, that was where Bredon was headed, leaving a trail of open doors and blanked machines behind him, trying unsuccessfully to follow Aulden's hurried directions, unaware that he had miscounted doors in the corridor because of differences in terminology. Bredon, trained to be observant, had counted access panels. Aulden, trained in remembering details, knew quite well that the access panels were there, but did not consider them to be doors, and failed to realize just how spotty Bredon's grounding in the culture of the immortals was. To Bredon, anything a human or machine passed through in going from one chamber to another was a door; to Aulden, only openings intended to be used by humans were doors.

The correct door, the door Aulden had meant to direct him to, was a hundred meters further on.

Bredon hesitated. He was, he believed, nearing the war room now, with just two more chambers and a short passageway to pass through. What if, worse than a mere machine, Thaddeus himself waited on the other side of this door?

Well, he would just have to risk it. “Emergency override!” he called. “Human in danger! Open up!"

The door slid obediently open, and he found himself looking into an unlit storeroom lined with dusty, vacant shelves and smelling of ink. No doors led to the war room antechamber. No doors led anywhere.

“Oh, you stinking demons!” Bredon hissed, realizing he was lost.

Worse than lost, he was alone in the enemy's stronghold, unarmed and virtually defenseless, without even a symbiote to hold wounds closed or counteract poisons.

No, he corrected himself, he was not unarmed or defenseless. He had Aulden's password. He turned and looked back down the corridor.

No one was coming. His danger, though real, was not immediate.

He still had no idea why Aulden's directions had failed him, but that did not matter. He was a hunter; when one trap or strategem failed, he devised another instantly.

He turned and headed back for where he had left one of the machines awaiting orders.