Empire from the Ashes

Chapter Twenty

Harriet watched Sandy and Sean work their way down the valley wall, and her anxious eyes noted the way her twin favored his left side and leaned on Sandy. She'd almost started back up when she realized he couldn't get up at once, but Sandy's wave had reassured her... some.

She ran to meet them as they slithered down the last few meters, and Sean gasped as she enveloped him in a fierce hug.

"Hey, now!" He raised a hand to her dust-smutted black hair. "I'm in one piece, and everything's still working, more or less."

"Sure it is," she said tartly, accessing his implants with her own, but then he felt her relax as they confirmed what he'd told her. What that near miss had done to his enhanced musculature was going to leave him stiff for a week, yet the damage was incredibly minor.

"Sure it is," she repeated at last, softly, and raised her head to peer up into his eyes, then kissed his cheek. He smiled and touched her face, then tucked one arm around each young woman and limped over to Tamman.

"See the conquering hero comes," he said smugly. Tamman chuckled, yet he, too, reached out and cupped the back of Sean's head, and the four of them clung together.

"Well!" Sean said at last. "The last step was a lulu, but at least we're here. Let's see what we've found. You still reading anything, Sandy?"

Sandy gave him a last little hug and returned her attention to her scanpack—the only one they had after Harriet's tumbling descent. She turned in a complete circle, then sighed.

"I think you were right about the power receptor, Tam. Most of the power sources're gone, and the ones that're left are fading fast. Looks like we finally killed the Valley of the Damned."

"Pardon me if I don't cry," Tamman replied dryly.

"True, true." She pivoted back to the ruins at mid-valley and nodded. "Looks like at least one of them had some reserve, but the others are gone."

"Let's go see the one that's still up," Sean decided, "but cautiously. Very cautiously."

"You got it," Tamman agreed, and swung out to take the lead towards the ancient, half-buried buildings.

Sean studied their surroundings as they moved up the valley. Waist-high waves of grass rippled between clumps of dense thicket and tangled trees, slashed with moonlight and hard-edged shadow under the cold night wind. It was a wild and desolate place, still more haunted somehow after the thunder and lightning of their battle. Yet that very desolation, coupled with the effectiveness the automated weapons had displayed even in their senescence, brightened his eyes, for it was clear no one had gotten through to disturb whatever of pre-bio-weapon Pardal might have survived.

They reached the ruined buildings at last. Centuries of windblown dirt had buried their lower stories, but the worn walls were intact, and tough, transparent Imperial plastic, cloudy with age, still filled most of the window frames. Others gaped like open wounds in the dark, and he felt himself shiver as they stopped outside the ancient tower which contained the single remaining power source, for those age-sick walls had brooded over this lonely valley for nine times the life of Egypt's Sphinx.

The tower stood in the center of the long-dead settlement. Faint swirls of decoration still clung to its ceramacrete facade, and the roots of a tree in its lee—a stubby, thick-trunked thing with peeling, hairy bark—had invaded a window frame. Their inexorable intrusion had pried and twisted at the plastic, and the entire pane fell inward with a clatter when Tamman tapped it.

Sean swallowed. That tree grew on almost level earth heaped twenty meters high against the tower, and he expected to feel the centuries when he touched the hard solidity of the frame.

Tamman dug into his knapsack (which, unlike Sean's, had survived the trip down the valley wall) for a hand lamp far more powerful than the smaller, individual lights clipped to their gun belts, and all of them gazed into the building as he trained its diamond-bright spear through the opening. A drift of dirt fanned down from the sprung window, but the bare, stained floor beyond it looked sound, and Tamman picked his way cautiously down the dirt ramp, then turned in a circle, flashing his lamp over the walls.

"Seems pretty stout, Sean. We've got water damage to the floor, but it looks like it all came through the window; no sign of seepage on the walls. Want me to try the door?"

"Sounds like the next logical step." Sean tried to hide how much his left side hurt as he limped down after his friend, but Sandy and Harriet were there instantly, offering him support with such obvious tact he chuckled. Sandy grinned up at him, and he shook his head and abandoned his attempted machismo to lean gratefully on her small, sturdy shoulder.

Harriet crossed to help Tamman with the door, but it refused to move, and he finally dipped back into his pack for a cutter. Brilliant glare chiseled his intent face from the darkness, and Harriet coughed on the stench of burning plastic as a line of fire knifed through the ancient barrier.

Tamman sliced clear around the door frame, then kicked sharply. The cut-out panel toppled away from him, and it was his turn to sneeze as pyramid-dry dust billowed. He flashed his lamp through the opening and grinned.

"No sign of water damage in here, people! And there's something else to be grateful for." His light settled on a spiral-shaped well. "Good old-fashioned stairs. I was afraid we'd have to rappel down dead transit shafts!"

"That's because you have a poor, limited Marine's brain," Sean said. "If that receptor was their only power source, they couldn't have had the juice to spare for things like transit shafts." He smiled pityingly. "Obviously."

"Go ahead—pretend you figured that out ahead of time. In the meantime, smartass, do we go up or down?"

"Sandy?"

She consulted her scanpack, then pointed at the floor.

"We go down, Tam," Sean said, stooping to clear the edge of door still filling the top of the frame.

They inched downward, unwilling to trust the stairs' stability until they'd tested it, yet the building's interior was remarkably intact. One or two of the dust-encrusted rooms they passed still contained furniture, but not even Imperial materials had been intended to last this long, and Sandy touched one chair only to snatch her hand back with a soft sound of distress as the upholstery crumbled. She shivered, and Sean tucked his arm about her and pretended to lean on her only for support.

It took half an hour to reach the tower's basement, for it was buried deep in bedrock and they had to deal with several more frozen doors along the way. Yet the stair finally ended, and Tamman's lamp showed half a dozen sealed doors circling the central access core. He raised an eyebrow at Sandy.

"That one." She pointed, and he gave it a shove. To their collective surprise, it moved a centimeter sideways, and he set down his lamp as Harriet joined him. They locked their fingers through the opening and heaved, grunting with effort, until the stubborn panel groaned open, and Tamman bit off a surprised expletive as a tiny glow leaked back out at them through it.

"Well, something's still live," he announced unnecessarily, and the four explorers edged into the room beyond.

The wan light came from a computer console, and Harriet and Tamman scurried over to it, all caution forgotten. It was a civilian model, with more visual telltales than military equipment, but very few were green. Most burned amber or red—those that weren't entirely dark—but they bent over it like a pair of mother hens and probed delicately for a live neural interface.

Sean and Sandy stayed out of their way, and Sean sighed as he found a counter sturdy enough to support him. He sank down on it gratefully and watched Sandy explore with her beltlight while the others fussed over the computer.

Clearly this had been a control center, for the one live console was flanked by a dozen more that were completely dead. But it had been more, as well, for it was cluttered with an incongruous mix of utilitarian equipment and personal furnishings. Someone had lived here, and he wondered if whoever it was had moved in to baby the computers as the settlement began to die.

"Sean?" He looked up at Sandy's hushed voice. She stood in a doorway across the room, and her shadowed expression was strange. He rose at her gesture and hobbled across the room to peer through it beside her, and his own face tightened. It was a bedroom, as time-conquered as the rest of the building, and the bed was occupied.

He limped further into the room, staring down at the dust-covered body. The bone-dry air had mummified him, and his parchment face showed the unmistakable features of a full Imperial framed in tangled white hair. He must, Sean thought, have been the oldest human being any of them had ever seen, and the fact that he lay here still was chilling.

Sean turned away from the sunken eye sockets with a shudder. What must it have been like, he wondered, to be the last? To lie here in the emptiness of the ruins, knowing he would die as he had lived—alone?

He slipped an arm around Sandy, urging her away, and they crossed silently to stand behind Harriet as she and Tamman concentrated obliviously on the computer.

Forty minutes passed before the two of them straightened, and their expressions were a curious blend of delight and disappointment.

"Well?" Sean asked, and Harriet glanced at Tamman and shrugged.

"We don't know. We can get into the operating system, sort of, but it's in terrible shape. I've never seen one this bad off—as far as I know, no one's ever seen one this bad—and we can't access any of its files."

"Crap," Sean muttered, but Tamman shook his head.

"It may not be quite that bad. The main memory core's shot, but there's an auxiliary wired into the system. I'd guess somebody hooked in his personal unit as a peripheral—it's all that's keeping anything up, and there's a chance we can recover some of its memory."

"How much?" Sean asked eagerly, and Tamman and Harriet laughed.

"Spoken like a true optimist." Tamman grinned. "We can't tell you that till we can get at it properly, and we can't do that here. It's going to take Israel's 'tronics shop to access this, Sean. We'll have to pull the unit and haul it back with us."

"Oh, lord!" Sandy knelt and ran her fingers over the dusty console, peering into it through her implants. "That's gonna be a real bitch, Tam."

"I know." He propped his hands on his hips and frowned at the glowing telltales. "I'm not real crazy about carting it out of here by hand, either. Molycircs or no, this thing's fragile as hell. Dropping it down a cliff or two wouldn't be real good for it."

"Then let's take it out the easy way," Harriet suggested. "Sandy and Sean blew what was left of the defenses into dust bunnies, so why don't I go back and collect the cutter while you and she take it apart?"

"Now that," Tamman murmured, "sounds like an excellent idea."

"I don't know, Harry," Sean said. "You're all better techs than me. Maybe I should go back while all three of you work on it."

She snorted. "Seen yourself moving lately, brother dear? It'd take you till dawn to hobble back to the cutter!"

"Hey, I'm not that bad off!"

"Maybe not, but you wouldn't enjoy the hike, and Tam and Sandy are better mechanics than me. That makes me the logical choice, now doesn't it? Besides, I haven't had a good jog since Terra kicked us overboard."

Sean didn't like the thought of splitting up and letting any of them out on his (or her) own, yet they hadn't met anything worrisome on the way in. None of the native predators, if any, had put in an appearance, and this was the Valley of the Damned. No Pardalian was likely to be wandering about in its vicinity in the middle of the night. And she was right about how he felt. The trek back to the cutter was more than he cared to face, and he discovered he'd been dreading the thought of it.

"All right," he agreed finally. "I'll stay here and hold lights and pass tools or something, but keep your belt light lit. That ought to discourage any of the local beasties from wondering what you taste like. And you take a real close look through your passive sensors before you try to land out there! You're probably right about the defenses being down, but don't take any chances."

"Aye, aye, Captain!" She tossed him an impudent salute, then whipped about and fled with a trill of laughter as he started for her. She paused at the outer door just long enough to stick out her tongue, and then her light, quick step receded rapidly up the stairs. Sean shook his head, then smiled and eased down to sit on the floor beside Sandy and Tamman as they produced tools and began removing the front of the console.

Harriet jogged happily through the darkness at a steady forty kilometers per hour. Sean might be fourteen centimeters taller, but he had their father's long body and broad shoulders; her legs were almost as long, despite his height advantage, and she was much lighter. Without even the weight of her scanpack she was free to attack the steep slopes, burdened only by her holstered grav gun, and she savored the opportunity. The moon had set, but her belt light was more than enough for someone with enhanced eyes, and running on Israel's treadmill paled beside the sheer joy of filling her lungs with the crisp, cold mountain air as her feet spurned the ground.

It took her just under eighty minutes to reach the ledge they'd landed the cutter on. She paused, jogging in place, to wipe sweat from her forehead, then trotted onward a bit more cautiously in light of the hundred-meter drop to her right.

She was less than a kilometer from the cutter when her head came up in sudden surprise. Her eyes widened, and she slithered to a halt as the sound of human voices cut the darkness.

Her head whipped around and she went active with every implant, probing the night. People! At least a dozen people, coming around the bend ahead of her! Her implants should have picked them up sooner, and she cursed herself for not paying more attention to her surroundings and less to the pleasure of running. But even as she raged at her foolishness a part of her mind whirred with questions. She hadn't looked for them, but, damn it, what were they doing out here in the middle of the night without even a torch?

Questions could wait. She killed her belt lamp and turned back the way she'd come, and a voice shouted, loud and harsh with command. Crap! She'd been seen!

She abandoned her attempt to sneak away for a blinding pace no unenhanced human could have matched, and her thoughts flashed. They'd agreed not to use their coms in case they were picked up, but if there were people here, there might be more of them, closer to the Valley, as well. The others had to be warned, and—

Light glared and thunder barked behind her. Something whizzed past her ear, and something else slammed into her left shoulder blade. She staggered and snatched for her grav gun, spun to the side by the brutal impact, and the beginning of pain exploded up her nerves. A second fiery hammer hit her in the side, throwing the grav gun from her hand, but before it really registered there was another flash, and a sixty-gram lead ball smashed her right temple.