Empire from the Ashes

Chapter Nineteen

Sean snaked around the feet of the towering summits at a cautious four hundred KPH. His sluggish speed had made the journey long and dragging, but it was the best he could manage, for the cutter's terrain-following systems were down. That forced him to fly hands-on, which was a pain. But few things were harder to spot than a stealthed cutter with no active emissions and flying low, slow, and nape-of-the-earth through mountains, and until they knew the quarantine system wouldn't swat atmospheric targets, anything that might draw its attention was right out.

Inconsequential thoughts flickered as he concentrated on his flying. All the unoccupied seats in the twenty-man cutter made Israel's human crewmen uncomfortably aware of just how alone—and how far from home—they were, yet it was even worse for Brashan. They had to leave someone aboard the battleship at all times, and his nonhuman appearance made him the obvious choice. He'd taken it better than Sean could have, especially since they'd agreed to forego any com signals that might be detected. Not only was Brashan barred from sharing their exploration trip, he couldn't even know what they'd found until they got back to tell him!

The cramped valley narrowed further, and he dumped another fifty KPH. It was nerve-wracking to fly solely by Mark One Eyeball (well, Mark Two or Three, given his enhancement) through the inevitable distortion of its stealth field, and he swore softly as they came up on an acute bend.

"The Force, Sean," Sandy whispered in his ear. "Use the Force!"

"Jerk!" he snorted, but there was an edge of laughter in his retort and tense muscles loosened back up a bit. He spared her a brief smile, then returned his attention to his console as their valley joined another. He checked his nav systems and headed up the new gorge with a small surge of excitement. It was even narrower and twistier, but they were getting close enough that this one might take them all the way in.

He made another forty kilometers, then cursed again—less softly—as the valley ended in a steep cliff. He halted the cutter and lifted it vertically, hugging the rock wall. The dim light of Pardal's small moon washed scrubby trees and bare rock as tumbled mountains fell away on every side, and Harriet sucked in a sharp breath beside him as they topped out.

"I'm getting something on passive!" Sean went into an instant hover, and his sister closed her eyes, communing with her sensors, then scowled. "I can't resolve it, Sean, but it's coming from just beyond that next mountain."

Sean banked the cutter, angling down and around the side of the next peak, and she opened her eyes.

"Now I've lost it entirely!" she groused.

"Good," he said. "If it's line-of-sight, it can't see us, either. And for your information, sister mine, our objective is 'just beyond that next mountain,' if you and Sandy have it plotted right, so it sounds like we're going to find something when we get there!"

Tamman grinned at him, but Sandy plugged her own feed into Harriet's console to study her recorded scanner readings.

"Not much, is it, Harry?"

"No." Harriet turned her own attention back to the data. "I make it at least six distinct point sources, though."

"Yeah. But did you notice the one at about oh-two-one?"

"Hm?" Harriet frowned, then nodded. "Lots stronger than the others, isn't it? And there's something about it... Damn. I wish I had a link to Israel's computers! It reminds me of something, but I can't think what."

"Me neither. Tam?"

Tamman glanced at the emissions through his own feed and shrugged. "Beats me. Most of those look like power leakages, not detection systems, but the biggie is something else." He tapped his teeth. "Hmm... . You know, that just might be an orbital power feed. Look there—see the smaller source tucked in to the east? That looks like a leak from a big-assed bank of capacitors, and the big one's definitely some sort of transmission. How about a ground beacon for an orbital broadcast power system?"

"Could be," Sandy mused. "Hard to believe it could still be up after all this time, but you're right about it's being a transmission, and it'd sure explain why it's so much more powerful than the others—not to mention how there could still be power for any active installations. But if it really is a receptor, that means the Valley of the Damned has an active link to at least one power satellite. Even if it's only a passive solar job, you'd think the quarantine system would spot the transmission."

"So?" Tamman countered. "If you and Harry are right, the Temple's running the system by rote, so what could they do about it? For that matter, why should they even understand what their 'Voice' was talking about?"

"Yeah." Harriet twisted hair around a finger and glanced at her twin. "I think Tam's right, Sean. Either way, the transmission's just a steady tone, not a detection system. I don't see anything that looks like one, either, but I'd rather not take the cutter much closer or give away any more scan image than we have to until we're certain of that."

"You and me both. What d'you think about that for a landing site?" He pointed to a wide ledge. It was at least thirty meters across, covered in the local equivalent of grass and brush, but a visible depression had been worn through the vegetation. "That looks like some sort of game trail, and it's headed just about the right way."

"How far out are we?" Tamman asked.

" 'Bout thirty klicks, straight-line. Don't know how far by foot."

"Suits me," Tamman agreed, and Harriet and Sandy nodded.

Sean slid closer, studying the ledge. A swell of rock broke the grass close beside the game trail, promising no hidden surprises for his landing legs, and he set the cutter down. He held the drive until the gear stabilized, then cut power but left the stealth field up.

"End of the line." He tried unsuccessfully to keep the excitement out of his voice. "Let's get our gear."

He rose from his couch and opened the weapons locker while Sandy and Harriet slipped into the shoulder harnesses of a pair of scanpacks. He strapped on a gun belt and grav gun and handed matching weapons to the others. The Malagoran mountains were home to at least two nasty predators—a sort of bear-sized cross between a wolf and a wolverine called a "seldahk," and a vaguely feline carnivore called a "kinokha"—both of whom had bellicose and territorial personalities. None of them felt like walking around unarmed, and Sean wished privately that Israel's equipment list had offered something a bit tougher than their uniforms. The synthetic fabric the Fleet used for its uniforms was incredibly rugged by pre-Imperial Terran standards. He had no doubt it would resist even a kinokha's claws, but it wasn't going to stop a seldahk's jaws, nor would it stop bullets. Of course, it was unlikely, to put it lightly, that they'd meet any armed natives this close to the Valley of the Damned in the middle of the night, yet kevlar underwear would have been very reassuring. Unfortunately, neither Battle Fleet nor the Imperial Marines issued such items, which he supposed made sense, given that nothing short of battle armor could hope to resist Imperial weaponry.

He grinned at his own thoughts as he and Tamman clipped extra magazines to their belts and shrugged into knapsacks heavy with spikes, pitons, ropes, and assorted mountaineering gear Sean hoped they weren't going to need. Then he eased his pack straps more comfortably, opened the hatch, and led the way out into the night.

The game trail helped, but it was far from straight, and many of its slopes were almost vertical. Tamman took the lead while Sean brought up the rear. The formation freed Harriet and Sandy to focus on their scanpacks (which had far more reach than implant sensors), without worrying about anything they might meet, and the four of them moved at a pace which would have reduced any unenhanced human to gasping exhaustion in minutes.

The moon was still high when Harriet threw up a hand and beckoned them all to a halt. Sean closed up from behind as the other three clustered to wait for him, and his eyes brightened as he looked down at last into the valley they'd come so far to find.

It was bigger than he'd expected—at least twenty kilometers across at its widest point and winding deep into the mountains. A sharp bend fifteen kilometers to the north blocked their vision, and the shallow, rushing river down its length gleamed dull pewter under the moon. He adjusted his eyes to telescopic vision and felt a shiver of excitement. The shapes clumped on either bank of the river at mid-valley were half-buried in drifted ages of soil, but they were too regular and vertical to be natural.

"I'm getting those same readings." Harriet swung the hand-held array of her passive backpack unit slowly from side to side and frowned. "There's a batch of new ones, too. They're lots weaker and more spread out; that's probably why we didn't spot them before."

Sandy turned, directing her own attention down-valley, and nodded.

"You're right, Harry. Most of what we saw before seems to be clustered in those ruins, but I'm getting a line of weak point sources about ten klicks to the south. Looks like they run clear across the valley."

"Yeah." Harriet shaded her eyes with her free hand as if it could help her see farther. "And there's another line just like it up there where the valley curls back to the west. I'm not too sure I like that. I can't lock in well enough to prove it, but they could be passive sensors, and those're logical places to put some sort of defensive system."

"Good point," Sandy agreed.

"Um." Sean moved a few meters south, peering in the direction of Sandy's find, but not even enhanced eyes could pick out any details. The valley floor was too heavily covered in scrub trees and tall alpine grasses, and moonlight and shadow did funny things to depth perception even in low-light mode. He pinched his nose in thought, then turned back to the others.

"Anything right in front of us?" he asked, pointing down the steep-sloped valley wall, and his sister shook her head.

"Not on this side, but that big one's just about opposite us. And I'm getting something else from it now. Do you have it, Sandy?"

"No, I—oh. That's funny." She made painstaking adjustments. "The darn thing isn't steady, almost like it's got some sort of intermittent short." It was her turn to frown. "See how the beacon power level fluctuates just a bit in time with it? Think it's some kind of control system?"

"If it is, it looks kind of senile. Then again, from the state of the ruins this whole place must've been abandoned thousands of years ago." Harriet tinkered with her own scanpack, then shrugged. "Let's spread out a little and see if we can triangulate on it, Sandy. I'd feel better if I at least knew exactly where whatever-it-is is."

"Suits me." The two of them separated and took very careful bearings, and Sandy nodded and pointed across the valley.

"Okay, I see it... sort of," she said, and Sean stood behind her and followed the line of her finger until he saw the more solid patch of shadows. He couldn't make out much in light-gathering mode, but when he switched to infrared things popped into better resolution. Not a lot better, but better. The ruins were built out from a bare stone precipice and whatever they were made of had different thermal properties from the cliff. Small trees sprouted from a thick roof of collected dirt, but the vertical walls were clear.

"Any better ideas about that intermittent source now that you know where it is?" he asked, but Sandy shook her head. He glanced at Harriet and sighed as he got a shrug of equal mystification. "That's what I was afraid of. Well, whatever else this is, it's clearly the leftovers of some Imperial site, and I'm not too surprised it's in such lousy shape. In fact, if I'm surprised at all it's that anything's live down there. But it looks like we have to go on down if we want any more to go on. Any objections?"

There were none, though Harriet looked a bit dubious, and he nodded.

"Okay, but we'll play this as smart as we can. Let's rope up, Tam, and since you're the closest we've got to a Marine, you take point. Sandy, you stay up here and play lookout till the rest of us get down. Keep an eye on the whole place, but especially on that thing on the far side. Harry, you follow Tam with your scanpack, and I'll bring up the rear."

Tamman nodded and slid out of his pack to extract a two hundred-meter coil of synthetic rope. While he and Sean rigged safety harnesses, Harriet and Sandy went on trying to analyze their readings without much success. Sean wasn't too happy about that, yet there wasn't a lot he could do about it, and he waved Tamman over the side.

Tamman picked his way as carefully as he could, but the hundred-meter slope, while less sheer than the bare rock face to the west, was both steep and treacherous. The soil was soft and shifting despite a covering of grass, and he slipped several times. Harriet had it easier. She was taller than he but as slender as her mother; even with her scanpack she was much lighter, and she had the advantage of watching where he'd put his feet ahead of her.

Sean should have found the descent easiest of all, despite his height and weight, since he was behind both of them and placed to learn by their mistakes, but much as he knew he ought to, he couldn't seem to keep his mind on where he was going. He kept looking up at the ruins on the far side of the valley, and when he wasn't doing that his attention kept trying to stray to the ones out in the middle. He knew he should ignore them—after all, Sandy was keeping watch on them and he was anchor man for the safety rope—but he just couldn't. Which was another reason he'd put Tamman in front, where they needed someone who wouldn't let curiosity distract him from the task in hand.

Yet perhaps it was as well he was distracted. It meant he was looking up, not at his feet, when Sandy suddenly screamed.

"Something's coming up over th—!"

A boulder two meters to Harriet's right exploded, and she cried out in pain as a five-kilo lump of stone slammed into her shoulder. It didn't break her bio-enhanced skin, but the impact threw her from her feet, and that, Sean realized later, was what saved her life. The heavy energy gun needed a handful of seconds to reduce the boulder to powder; by the time the first energy bolt hit where she'd been standing, she wasn't there anymore.

He dug in his heels instinctively, hurling himself backward to anchor her, but the next bolt of gravitonic disruption sliced the rope like a thread. Her fall accelerated, and she tumbled downslope, slithering and bouncing. She tried frantically to avoid Tamman, clawing for traction as she gathered speed, but the loose soil betrayed her and he couldn't get out of the way in time. Her careening body cut his feet from under him, sending them both crashing downward in a confusion of arms and legs, and more bolts of energy came screaming out of the night. Gouts of flying dirt erupted all about them as ancient, erratic tracking systems tried to lock on them, and only their unpredictable movement and the senility of the defenses kept them alive.

Sean almost fell after them as soil crumbled under his heels, but he managed to hold his position, and his grav gun leapt into his hands in pure reflex. The scarcely visible energy gun fire was a terrible network of fury to his enhanced vision, and a fist squeezed his heart as it reached out for his sister and his friend. But he'd been looking in exactly the right direction when it started. Whatever was firing on them wasn't shooting at him—apparently he was still outside its programmed kill zone—but his implants told him where its targeting systems were, and his weapon snapped up into firing position without conscious thought.

It hissed, spitting explosive darts across the valley at fifty-two hundred meters per second, and savage flashes lit the dark as they ripped into the ruins. Each armor-piercing dart had the power of a half-kilo of TNT, and the crackle of their explosions was a single, ripping bellow as ancient walls blew outward in a tornado of splinters.

He held the trigger back, firing desperately and cursing himself for not having brought any heavy weapons. Even his implants couldn't "see" well enough to target the energy guns; he could only pour in fire and pray he hit something vital before their control systems killed Harriet and Tamman.

A fist of pulverized soil slammed the side of his head, and a corner of his mind noted that the defenses had finally noticed him, but it was a distant thought as his three-hundred round magazine emptied. He ripped a fresh one from his belt, then grunted in anguish as the energy bloom of a bolt of disruption clawed at him. He rolled desperately to his left and managed—somehow—not to plunge downward after the others. Sandy had gotten her grav gun into action as well, and the thunder of her fire filled the valley as he finished reloading and opened up again. He cursed viciously as Harriet and Tamman slithered to a halt, but Tamman had figured out what was happening. He wrapped a powerful arm around Harriet and hurled both of them back into motion a split second before the automated guns could lock on.

Flames licked at the brush atop the ruined structures as Sean and Sandy pounded them, and Sean cried out as an energy bolt blew his backpack apart. His nervous system whiplashed in agony, the stunning shock threw the grav gun from his hands, and he heard Sandy screaming his name through the roar of her fire. He clawed after his weapon with numb, desperate fingers, and then an explosion far more violent than any grav gun dart lit the valley like a sun at midnight. The ruins vomited skyward as the capacitors feeding the energy guns tore themselves apart, and the concussion blew Sean MacIntyre into unconsciousness at last.

"Sean?" The soft, anxious voice penetrated his darkness, and his eyes slid open. He was still on the slope, but his head was in Sandy's lap. He blinked groggily, and she smiled and brushed dirt from his face.

"Are you all right? Are you hurt?"

"I—" He coughed and broke off, wincing as a fresh wave of pain spun through him. His implant sensors had been wide open as he tried to find a target, and the corona of the energy bolt had bled through them. His nerves were on fire, and he moaned around a surge of nausea, but he was alive, and he wouldn't have been without his enhancement. Not after taking a shot that close to his heart and lungs.

"I'm okay," he rasped as his implants recovered and began damping the pain. He swallowed bile, then stiffened. "Harry! Harry and Tam! Are they—?"

"They're all right," Sandy soothed, pressing him back as he tried to sit up. "The guns never managed to line up on them, and—" a ghost of humor lit her face "—at least they got to the bottom faster than they'd expected. See?"

He turned his head, and Harriet waved up at him from the valley floor. Tamman wasn't looking in their direction; he was down on one knee, grav gun ready as he scanned the valley for any fresh threat. Not, Sean thought muzzily, that there was likely to be another. All the ruckus they'd raised dealing with the first one should have drawn the attention of anything else that was still active, and he relaxed.

"Thanks. If you hadn't gotten to it in time—"

"Hush." Sandy's hand covered his mouth, and his eyes smiled up at her as she kissed his forehead. "We got to it, and we're all lucky you left me behind. Now kindly shut your mouth and let your implants finish unscrambling themselves before we hike down after Tam and Harry. Hopefully—" her free hand caressed his hair and her lips quirked primly "—a bit more sedately than they did."