Priam's Lens

TWENTY The Caves at the Gates of Oz

All tiredness vanished. Every one of the group felt their hearts jump almost out of their chests. In an instant they were on their feet and eyeing the distant oval, which was now showing some sunlight filtering in.

Littlefeet was in a combat stance, and N’Gana and Harker had reflexively pulled the gun barrel truncheons they still carried.

“Who are you?” the colonel called. “Where are you? Show yourself!”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, as I’m not really much of anywhere at all,” the voice, a rather mild, almost bland man’s baritone, responded. “However, I do believe I should turn on illumination. I apologize that it is only emergency lighting, but I dare not risk anything more powerful.”

The tube did not illuminate, but at the far end a pale yellow glow turned on, showing an entry into a larger area beyond.

“What do you think?” Kat asked nervously.

“A trick!” N’Gana hissed. “I don’t know what this is, but it’s not possible!”

“We have a choice?” Gene Harker put in, considering their position. “Come on! If we’ve got light, let’s use it.”

“Ghosts! I will not go down to where the ghosts live!” Littlefeet said firmly. “Anything living I will take on, even the demons themselves, but you can not fight a ghost!”

“That’s no ghost, Littlefeet!” Kat tried to calm him.

“I’m afraid that’s about what I am,” the voice responded. “But I will not harm you. I will not harm any of you. I cannot. I was built by your kind to serve and protect, and that is what I continue to do.”

Both N’Gana and Harker started to breathe again. “You’re a computer?” the colonel asked.

“I am a mentat. I was supervisor of this installation until the Fall. Please—come down, all of you. You cannot know how happy I am to see you. I began to fear that my message had not gotten out with Jastrow.”

“It’s okay,” Harker told Littlefeet and Spotty, who still seemed more frightened of the voice than of what they’d just come through. “It’s a friend. We know who it is now and it is on our side. Please—you trusted us this far, trust us now.”

They made their way carefully down toward the yellow glow, and finally reached a point where the great tube had a section broken out of one side. Looking through the break, the first underground level of the old complex showed in eerie indirect light.

It was huge. It was also, astonishingly, pretty much intact. Robot arms and huge control cabs were all over, and sheets of various fabricated parts of some great machines were stacked up here and there.

Just below was a catwalk, intact except for one section immediately below that had been more or less dissolved. The remaining section was only a couple of meters away, though, and easy enough to reach.

“The breach in the pipe was quite recent—about five years ago,” the mentat told them. “When the water rushes down the pipe, a little more goes, but it’s not that serious. Only a small amount reaches here now.”

One by one, they lowered themselves down onto the catwalk, each helping the next. Harker decided to be last, to ensure that Littlefeet and Spotty would go in as well. He not only didn’t want them to run, he particularly didn’t want them to go back up and outside and fall into the data stream of the Titans. Not now. Not after all this.

The two natives managed, although they were transfixed by the vast scene in front of them. Neither had ever even been inside a building before, and certainly neither had seen the ancient places when they were still whole.

“How are you getting power?” N’Gana asked the century-old machine. “Surely nothing is still running.”

“No, the Titans absorb all our power like a sponge. It is only in the security areas with the low-level trickle charges just a few amps, really—that any of the original stored power is still used or even exists. It is too low-level for their mechanisms to pick up. In truth, I was as surprised as anyone to get even this power. It is Titan power.”

“Titan power!”

“When their installation was fully constructed and turned on, the grounded base intersected one of my old power plates. So long as I do not vary the flow and simply use what seeps in, I have been able to maintain this level and my own existence. Of course, I am mostly shut down unless someone is here, and you are only the second in almost ninety years.”

“Nobody was left trapped here when they took over?” Harker asked.

“Yes, some were, but as I lost all power for a period of almost two years except trickle from batteries, this place was uninhabitable. No power, no food, and even the water turned off—well, they had to evacuate, those who could. I went dormant due to lack of power then and did not revive until Jastrow showed up a few years ago. Since then I have remained awake, in a standby setting. Unfortunately, I have been unable to do very much, since I cannot draw more power than seeps through and I dare not use it for any mechanical purposes lest they detect it and eliminate this place and me. They are capable of doing so, but do not bother unless there is some threat. I have detected several security stations and some places that were almost certainly old refuges for survivors that appear to have been subjected to sufficient energy to turn them and everything inside into molten rock. It is a delicate balancing act. I have, however, managed to recharge virtually all the security and backup power supplies over the period.”

“Where to from here?” N’Gana asked.

“Down the catwalk, then use the ladders to go down to the floor. From that point, I will direct you to where the problem lay for Jastrow. I see that you have brought a Quadulan per my recommendations.”

“That was your message? I thought it was that poor fellow’s,” Kat commented as they made their way along the very cold metallic catwalk.

“Oh, Jastrow sent it. It was the only way. He was quite a brave man. He had the morals of a thief and the qualities of a devil, but I provided him with the only thing he could do that he found satisfying—revenge. He wasn’t afraid to die, I can tell you that, if in so doing he felt he could get the Titans. I was quite afraid that he wouldn’t make it to one of the only three remaining monitoring stations with sufficient reserve power to send a message. He couldn’t send it from here, obviously. The moment he did, there would have been a rather rapid and interested investigation and that would have given up the game.”

They reached the old factory floor now, covered in fine dust. Harker noted that there were other prints there, those of a single barefoot individual coming and going. Although they were almost certainly those of the unfortunate Jastrow and years old, they looked as if they had been made yesterday.

“Follow the footprints,” the mentat instructed. “You will come to it.”

They walked across the ghostly floor, the huge machinery all around making it an eerie place. Every voice, every cough, was magnified and echoed back and forth in the place. Only the mentat’s voice was devoid of any acoustical naturalness; it seemed to come from a closed and baffled chamber.

“What are these things in here?” Kat asked the computer. “What was it that was made here?”

“Caps and plates for genholes,” the mentat responded. “The device works by capturing the stringlike pulses from the temporal discontinuity in the lens. It cannot, however, be truly capped or controlled. The only way to handle it is to capture a string and put it through a genhole and out somewhere else. Right now the junction caps direct it into an area of space where it can do no real harm. It is the junction that is the key to the operation. In relays, you can redirect it so that it emerges out of any genhole you determine. After that you have no control. You can, however, see the possibilities. If you can switch genholes at various junctions, then you can direct it to specific targets. There are countless genholes out there now, each a potential exit point. After that, though, it is wild. That is why they could not test it against anything planetary. Nobody knows what will happen. Nobody knows what the strings are, or if they are strings or energy spikes or temporal discontinuities or something else. Once you have an object generating these energy spikes by virtue of a temporal loop in which it is always trying to fall out of our universe, well, you can see we are in uncharted waters. That was why The Confederacy abandoned the idea even though it had no alternatives. Early tests were inconclusive. The trick was getting a burst short enough to keep from tearing apart everything.”

“I don’t see why it wouldn’t destroy the genhole and the gates as well,” Kat commented.

“It doesn’t. It is drawn to a charged plate as if it was magnetized and goes through the center,” the mentat explained.

“In a sense, the twisted space-time inside a genhole appears to be a natural, or compatible, environment for it.”

“So what is in the security modules below?” Harker asked. “What is it that they need up there?”

“The control codes for the fourteen thousand six hundred and thirty-seven junctions established in this sector before Helena’s fall,” the mentat told them. “With these codes, anyone in the control center can route the string or pulse or whatever it is to any exit point under junction control. I made them all, you know, right here, and I am certain that they will work as designed. You can see why the codes and locations were kept separate, though. It is quite possible that the use of it on, say, Helena, would destroy the planet. Anything is possible. Nobody was sure what happened to the asteroids and small moons used in the early Confederacy tests, but it scared them. There was a sense that this was a weapon that would not only destroy the enemy but would also destroy what you wished to protect. The debate raged even as the Titans closed in. It was agreed that there would be a master code that no one person or family would have. Karas had part of it, Melcouri a second, and the supervising engineer, Doctor Sotoropolis, had the third. All three parts were needed before the station would even accept the coded commands. When the time came, sooner than they thought it would, Melcouri and Karas had no qualms about giving the code, but Sotoropolis balked. His wife pleaded with him to withhold his consent since all that they had in the world, their families, their lives, were here. He vacillated long enough that it was almost too late. He was trying to set up a close-in gate that would intersect Titan ships instead of hitting them after they were down, but when they came, it was too swift. He wasn’t ready, and he died for it.”

N’Gana stopped suddenly, causing an almost comic backup of the others. “Then what in hell’s the use of getting these target codes? We don’t have all three parts of the master code, right? Or is that down there, too?”

For the first time, Harker realized just exactly what had led to all this, and even what had led the Dutchman to the family survivors offworld rather than attempting it with his own crew.

“Sotoropolis gave the code to his wife,” he guessed. “The old diva’s had it all along. All these years she’s been living with the guilt that she stopped her husband from using the weapon. It cost him his life, her adopted world most of its life, and, even now, we have no other way to deal with the Titans.”

“Then why didn’t she just come to your people—the Navy—with the codes?” Kat asked him. “Why all this time, all this misery?”

“Her code was meaningless without the master target code modules,” he pointed out, “and they were down here and believed to be lost. She had the missing part of the master code, but no way to aim the damned weapon. The Dutchman knew where the necessary modules were and probably could have followed up his man’s failure and gotten them, but he wouldn’t have had the master code. Because they argued and agonized as the enemy came, the enemy won. Now they need each other to do what they couldn’t so long ago.”

“Why weren’t the damned targets just programmed in on Hector?” N’Gana grumbled. “Damned amateurs!”

“Probably fear that the Navy would close in and stop them,” Harker guessed. “Or take it over and maybe not use it where Karas and Melcouri were interested in using it. You’re right—it was a tragedy of errors and misjudgments and mistakes, and there’s enough blame to go around. That’s all over and done. It’s past. Enough people have agonized and suffered too long for those mistakes. No use in rehashing it. The important thing is that we may be able to give it a try at last. As the mentat said about Jastrow, if you can’t survive, at least get even.”

Kat wasn’t so sure. “Um, Gene—if they use it here, then it might well shatter the whole damned planet. Might I point out that we are on said planet?”

He nodded. “And we’re gonna be on it for quite a while. You know that as well as I do. I want to live, but I’d rather die and take them with me than live as one of their experimental subjects.”

“But—”

“Let us not refight the arguments of ninety years!” N’Gana snapped at her. “If we can do it, it will be used. Never mind even thinking of revenge. We have nothing else we can do.”

“At least now you can feel for what they were going through when push came to shove back then,” Harker noted. “Imagine having to do it with everybody and everything you hold dear in the balance.”

She sighed. “Well, maybe they won’t even use it on us anyway. We’re kind of a backwater now in the fight.”

“They have to,” Harker pointed out. “If they don’t use it and knock out the Titans here on Helena, then the Titans are going to be quickly turning Hector into a molten mass. Krill and company are in a worse position than we are. It’s possible we can escape and live—if you call it living. They can’t even take a practice shot. The moment they get the codes they have to shoot and shoot straight at us. We’d better damned well think about that angle. Never mind what happens if it doesn’t work. What if it does?”

Although much of the ancient factory seemed intact, the far end was a real mess. Here some of the structure had collapsed.

“It happened when they began to expand the base,” the mentat told them. “The bedrock shifted, then cracked, and there was a general collapse like a small earthquake.”

Not only was there a great deal of rubble, but just beyond was the bank of freight elevators that carried material from one level to another. The giant cages were at the bottom where they’d fallen, and because these were magnetic levitation systems, there were no cables just deep, dark shafts.

“Jastrow actually managed to get down to the bottom level,” the mentat told them. “However, the car itself has been crushed at the bottom, blocking access to the tunnels beyond. I have no sensors in the area, so I could not see or predict what was down there. I know he worked down there, using metal rods and other scavenged items to try and enlarge the hole, to get in there, but after two days he was only bloodied and scratched. He said it was impossible. That only a Pooka had a chance of getting through that.”

“I do not like that term,” Hamille croaked. “I am Quadulan.”

“Very well. But it is a bit late to be offended. The question is, can you get down the shaft?”

The creature slithered over the rubble, then extended tentacles to hold on to what it could and stared down into the shaft. Finally, it pulled back.

“Get down, yes,” it said. “Back up much harder.”

N’Gana studied what he could see of the shaft. “I assume this Jastrow used the service ladder here, which is in this indented area?”

“Yes,” the master computer responded. “It is the emergency service access and exit.”

“How deep is the shaft?”

“One point two kilometers,” the mentat told him. That brought them all up short. “How deep?”

“One point two kilometers, give or take a few meters. Straight down. There are, of course, many other floors, but the security storage was at the very bottom for obvious reasons.”

Harker whistled. “Well, that lets out dropping cables down, I’d think. Even if we had such cables. So what do we do now?”

“Hamille, with one of us for backup, goes down there and gets the damned modules,” N’Gana replied. “Any volunteers?”

“I don’t have the imprinted information and I don’t think Kat is the best one in a technical situation,” Harker noted. “The kids are getting claustrophobic even in this spaceship hangar of a building. That leaves you, Colonel.”

“Colonel—I can do it,” Kat said. Harker turned to her as if she’d just gone nuts, but he needn’t have worried.

“No, Doctor, Mister Harker is correct. It’s my job.” The mercenary looked down at Hamille. “Rest first or should we just go do it?”

“Let’s do it,” the Quadulan croaked. “I would rather be tired than dying of thirst.”

N’Gana took a deep breath, went over to the shaft, judged the distance as best he could, then jumped over to the indented platform from which the ladder descended straight down into the darkness. Hamille looked down into the pit, then slowly oozed in, the rows of tendrils now extended slightly, giving it a millipedelike appearance.

“I thought with that rotor action of yours you’d just fly down,” Harker said.

“In the shaft?” Hamille responded. “I fly like spear. In there, you fly like rock. Get down fine, but the landing would be messy.”

With that, it oozed further on in and vanished, and those who remained behind could hear N’Gana begin the long slow descent as well.

Harker turned to Kat. “Why in hell did you just volunteer to do something nobody sane would volunteer to do?” She shrugged. “Haven’t you noticed? He’s got problems. Mogutu noticed, after we were down. He went out of his way to do things the colonel might well have done for himself, and he was constantly worrying.”

“N’Gana’s just hiked over a terrain under severe conditions that few others could,” Harker countered.

“Yes, but I’ve seen his face when he didn’t know it, and heard him sometimes in the night. I don’t think he knew it or he wouldn’t have come, but I’m pretty sure it’s his heart. Back in civilization, he’d be put in stasis, they’d clone another heart from his heart cells, and he’d be better than new in months, but here—no. I think his tolerance for pain may be enormous, though.”

“You think he can get back up?”

“I don’t know. I hope so. I don’t think he wants to die, particularly down there, but unless you take physicals every few months and follow the rules all the way, it can always happen. I think he knows it full well, too.” She paused. “He must have been a hell of a soldier in his day.”

“I never used to like him, and he had a reputation as a bloody butcher,” Harker responded. “Now, though, I’m not at all sure.”

They went over and sat on a long crate. Littlefeet and Spotty huddled together, staring at the mysterious shapes suspended all around them.

“Cold,” she said, and he nodded.

It was cold in there, in a relative sense. Littlefeet had been colder, up on the mountain, but this was a different kind of cold. Dry, a little dead, and going right through you.

“Sorry, kids. I warned you not to come along,” Kat said, sitting nearby. “It’s kind of a creepy dump, isn’t it?”

“Dump?” Littlefeet asked. “If you mean strange, yes, it is. As strange as anything the demons build. Was this the kind of place where our ancestors lived?”

She laughed. “No, no. It was the kind of place where they worked, or some of them did, anyway. They had their own kind of power, like the demons have, and their own machines, like the ones demons fly in. The voice is a machine. It was built, not born, and information was fed into it instead of taught like we were. With that information—using all this, and with the aid of just a very few humans—it could build great machines, great ships that could go between the stars.”

It was tough explaining this to a pair who had no technological background at all. Even the word “ship” had no real meaning for them, and the only machines they knew were magical things of the enemy.

Spotty looked around, a little scared, a little awed. “Where is this—thing that speaks in a man’s voice?” she asked. “Why can’t we see it?”

“You are looking at me,” the mentat responded. “I am everything you see here, and much of the rest of the complex. Oh, I have a brain, if you want to call it that, and it’s in one place deep in the center of this complex of buildings, but my eyes, my voice, the things I see and hear come from every part of this place that’s still connected, that still has power. I’m even in another far-off place at the same time. That’s because the man who was here before you turned on the power there. The surge was enough for me to feel it and find it.”

“You mean like the demons talk through their lines in the sky?” Spotty pressed, showing an intelligence than her quiet subservience had concealed.

“Yes, sort of. I don’t know how they do it, and I think they probably would barely recognize how I do it, but the general idea is the same. In fact, at one level, energy is energy, whether it’s my kind, the demons’ kind, or things like the lines in the sky or lightning. I’m awake now because some of their energy proved convertible to what I needed. Unlike you, I do not need food or water, but without energy, electricity of some sort, I either go to sleep or even die.”

“Plants get energy from the sun. Are you a plant?” Littlefeet asked. “The others called this place a `plant.’ ”

“Not that kind of plant, no. But, again, the idea is the same. Flowers and trees and grass get their energy, their food, from the sun.”

“Do you move? Can you walk?” Spotty asked it.

“No, I can’t. I’m stuck here. Anything that comes in I can see, hear, and work with. But they must come to me, as you did. I cannot move.”

“A big rock once spoke to me,” Littlefeet remembered. “When I was a kid and all, I got scared and ran. I guess that was something like you, huh?”

There was a moment’s silence, and then the mentat responded, “That was me. So you were one of the boys who came along after those creatures killed poor Jastrow. I would not have known you had you not spoken of it. Your voice has changed. In these three years you have become a man. And now you are here… How… coincidental…”

Both Harker and Kat Socolov sensed a slight hostility creeping into the mentat’s otherwise bland tones, but it wasn’t enough to start wondering about it. Not yet.

“We might as well try and get some sleep if we can,” Harker suggested to them. “Until we hear from that hole over there, all we can do is worry and wait.”

There was no effective light at the bottom of the shaft, but the moment N’Gana almost slipped on the rubble of the collapsed elevator car and started cursing, a sliver of pale yellow light shone through a small opening in the wall between the car and the shaft itself.

Voice-activated, he thought. Handy.

With even that little bit of light, he could see the remnants of Jastrow’s frustration. So close and no cigar, the colonel thought. There were long, bent pieces of metal, indentations where things had been pounded or attempts had been made to pry open a larger hole, but it had ultimately only damaged the tools.

Jastrow must have been almost mad down here. The hole was a bit jagged, perhaps large enough for one leg. There even seemed to be some dried blood on some of the jagged edges, which meant that Jastrow may well have tried to force his large body into a very tiny hole.

Inside, there were rows and rows of storage consoles. He could clearly see the posts where human agents would sit, with robotic security controls around them. It looked so normal, as if everybody had just shut down and gone to dinner, and yet it was so unapproachable.

He felt the Quadulan ooze up next to him. The thing was furry, but it felt more like being touched by a porcupine. He rolled back to give it full access to the hole. “Think you can get in there?”

Although it was a bit larger around than the hole, it was an enormously flexible creature and very, very tough. “Piece of meat,” it said.

“Piece of cake,” N’Gana corrected.

“Whatever. Question is, if security is still powered on, will it take passwords from Hamille?”

“That’s part of why I’m here. It’s aware of us now, so we might as well get started.”

The Quadulan eased up to the hole and then began pulsing its body, stretching itself out as much as it could, and then it pushed on in, oozing through like paste through a straw. It was not as easy as it looked, and Hamille was extremely slow and cautious. More than once, one of the sharp edges snagged the skin or threatened to dig deeper, and the creature had to stop, back up a bit, and try it again. Still, within a quarter of an hour, it was through.

Almost as soon as it hit the floor, a series of tight red beams struck it, and a voice that sounded very machine-like and inhuman said, “Halt and give the proper password signs or leave as you came. You are targeted by seven different lethal devices.” It was designed to sound artificial so that there would be no doubt in the intruder’s mind that it was dealing with a tightly programmed machine.

N’Gana felt some sharp pains in his chest that brought him up short for a minute, but he willed himself to ignore them. They had not come this far to have him blow it.

He took a deep breath, pressed his face against the hole in the wall, and said, in his best theatrical voice, “And let the heralds Zeus loves give orders about the city for the boys who are in their first youth and the gray-browed elders to take stations on the god-founded bastions that circle the city!” he intoned. “Let it be thus, high-hearted men of Troy, as I tell you! Let that word that has been spoken now be a strong one, and that which I speak at dawn to the Trojans, breakers of horses. For in good hope I pray to Zeus and the other immortals that we may drive from our place these dogs swept into destruction whom the spirits of death have carried here on their black ships!”

There was silence for a moment, and Hamille felt as tense as N’Gana. Then, just as the old colonel feared he had blown a line, the red targeting beams switched off.

“Code accepted,” announced the security voice.

It was an appropriate passage from a little-known translation, with a devilish little trap in it. A part of Hector’s great speech before the battle, but with some sentences left out here and there. The result fit the defenders of Helena against the Titan invaders as well as it did the defenders of Helen thousands of years ago on a far distant planet.

The Trojans, too, had lost to the invaders in their black ships just as the defenders of Helena had lost to the invaders in their shimmering white craft. The Trojans stupidly fell for a simple trick and lost it all; the defenders of Helena dithered until the invaders had already breached the inner walls and they could no longer decide. In both cases, their worlds died by the unwitting duplicity of their defenders. Ancient Troy vanished off the face of the earth for three thousand years, and existed after only in partly excavated ruins. Helena was in a century of darkness which might last as long as Troy’s but for this one second chance.

It was odd, he thought, fighting the pains, that only military men knew any history in this day and age. Nobody else really cared. Nobody else had to repeat the mistakes of the past.

He leaned back into the hole. “Hamille! Do you have them?”

For a moment there was no answer. Then the croaking voice of the Quadulan came back, echoing slightly, “Yes. I see them. Old-fashion memory bubbles, but labels are clear. Need to type in code phrases to unlock case. Very hard with my tentacles. Will do it.”

“Take it slow! No mistakes!”

The three phrases, one from each member of the triumvirate who created this project so long ago, were all in Greek. One was a line from a poem about Helen of Troy, the second a quotation from the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Ephesians, the third a line from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. All had to be typed in on a Greek alphabet manual keyboard embedded in the security casing by a creature for whom the instrument was not designed.

The pains had subsided, almost vanished, but now they seemed to be starting up again as he saw in his mind’s eye the serpentine alien trying hard to hit every last alpha and omega.

It could have been worse, he told himself. It could have been ancient Mandarin.

And if it worked, if Hamille got it all right, if that case popped open and the electronic code keys were in its grasp, could they make it back up? Could he make it back up? It was a very long way, and he was so very, very tired.

Time passed slowly while they could do nothing but sit and wait, hungry and thirsty, and very, very tense. With so much idle time, though, none of them could avoid talking about things most on their minds.

“What happens when and if N’Gana and Hamille come back with the keys?” Kat mused. “I mean, how the hell do we send it up to the others? Whoever does will be the same kind of target that Jastrow was.”

“I will send them from the spaceport security system, which is still operational if I can shift the majority of power to it,” the mentat told them. “The codes are supposed to be on standard data keys, although encrypted. I can’t read them or copy them, but I can transmit the encrypted codes. If, as you say, your people have the station in standby mode, then it will receive the signals. Once it does, then targeting and shooting will be as simple as someone up there in the command and control chair willing it so.”

“The moment you send, they’ll blast you,” Harker pointed out. “Probably send some of their creations down to make sure we’re not hiding any other surprises, then they’ll reduce this whole thing to lava.”

“I know. I do not know how to deal with that, but I must accept it. It is difficult for me to contemplate the end of my conscious existence, but I see no other way. I have understood this ever since Jastrow filled in the blanks, as it were. You must be well away when I transmit. Out of the coastal plain, certainly. We have no way of knowing how long it will take those on Hector between getting the codes and being ready to implement them. I should like to be able to see it in action, even once. If I am to cease to exist, I should like to know that it was for a good cause.”

God, I think we’re building our machines too well, Kat thought, but said nothing. Instead, she asked, rather rhetorically, “And then what happens to us, I wonder? We’re not going to get back to the ship. Not with those monsters in the way and the rafts surely dissolved by now…

“We survive until they come to find us and take us off,” Harker said. “And you get to really do a field study.”

She sighed. “I wonder if they’ll bother to try and find us? How could they anyway? We’ll just be two more savages out there on a world that, even if it’s freed of the Titans, will be a pretty low priority for exploration and rebuilding, I suspect.”

“Well, we have nothing else we can do but settle down and wait for them, no matter when or if they come,” he noted. “Not unless we build and launch a boat that can sail out to the island. It’s a possibility, if we use all natural wood and have the time—and I think we’ll have the time.”

“Do you really think that’s possible?” she asked, genuinely interested.

“I think it’s possible, yes. I know how to do it, although that’s with modem tools and the like. From scratch it’ll take a lot longer, but it’s possible. If the grid’s down and the Titans are run off, at least nobody will want to stop us, and maybe we can have a straw hut and a fire and all the rest. That’s if we survive the next few days, anyway.”

“It’s worth a try. I’d like to try,” she told him. “I keep being afraid that we’ve already been somewhat reprogrammed.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“The general program for all survivors. The one they transmit constantly over the grid, and which transfers itself to us via that nightly special rain. I’ve been thinking about it and about us and how we changed even in so short a time. We should be dead. Instead, we’ve become more like Littlefeet and Spotty. Think about it. After the first couple of days, did any of us think of doing the absolutely normal thing and finding some kind of cover or shelter from that storm? No. Even though we knew that it was ruining our stuff, we started walking right out into it. That’s the first directive. Be sure you can get the message. Maybe even the chemical bath. We’re already part of their experiment. Everything in the world, this world, gets bathed like that. We eat it, drink it, wash in it. Even if the grid collapsed, I think it will continue, at least for a while. And yet I want that boat, Gene. I really do want to ride in that boat.”

It may have been hours, it may have been a day, but suddenly there was a sound from the shaft. Slowly, an exhausted Hamille oozed out onto the rubble and collapsed, breathing very hard. They rushed over to the Quadulan expectantly. “Where’s the colonel?” Kat asked.

“Did you get it?” Harker wanted to know.

“Go down and help the colonel,” the alien croaked, each word a heaving breath. “He is not that far but he is in trouble.”

Harker sprang to the shaft, saw the jump to the ladder, made it, and quickly started down, his old ship’s reflexes giving him total confidence.

He found N’Gana mostly by the moans and gasps, perhaps seventy meters down, sitting on the platform and holding on to the ladder.

“Colonel! Can you make it? Come on! I’ll help you!”

“No,” N’Gana gasped. “I will make it on my own. You can’t carry me up there, you can’t pull me up, and if you follow and I fall, I’ll take you with me.” He fumbled for something, then handed a small box to Harker. “Take them and go back on up! I’ll follow you if and when I can! Go! Without those, it’s all meaningless!”

Gene Harker understood, and grasping the box firmly, he went back up the ladder toward the light above.

The three others waited anxiously at the top, and Kat’s eyebrows went up when she saw that he was alone.

“He’ll make it on willpower,” he assured her. “I can tell you, a man like that’s not going to check out by falling down an elevator shaft.”

They looked at the box. It was a plain box of artificial wood, and it had a golden Greek cross on the top and a pure gold clasp. Harker slipped the tiny gold pin over and down, and opened the box. Inside, resting in a soft feltlike lining, each wrapped with a protective bubble seal, were the code modules.

“Oh, my God!” Kat Socolov breathed. For the first time she realized that they had not only gotten what was needed, but that it was almost certain to be used.

About fifteen minutes later, an ashen N’Gana crawled out of the shaft and tumbled down the pile of debris. They rushed to him; he was in awful shape. He was covered with perspiration, and not just his face but his whole body seemed a dull, almost dark gray. Still, after a while, he managed to sit up and look around. When he spied the box, he looked extremely satisfied.

“We did it,” he sighed.

“We did nothing until we can blow the hell out of that satanic fairyland out there,” Harker replied. “We have to feed these in to the mentat and get out of here.”

“Go feed ’em in,” N’Gana gasped. “Then we’ll talk.”

The women tried to make him as comfortable as they could, but it was pretty clear to them and to the others as well that Colonel N’Gana would not be going anywhere anytime soon.

The mentat directed Harker to an old, dust-covered terminal far on the other side of the great factory floor. It didn’t look operational, but carefully he unwrapped each module and, one by one, he inserted them into the slot.

“I have the data. I have no idea what it means, but my counterpart on Hector certainly does. These mathematical algorithms will combine with what is already up there to give precise switching and firing instructions to any and all of the active genhole gates.”

“How soon can you transmit?” Harker asked it.

“I can transmit now. I will not, however. Not without giving you a chance.”

Harker walked back over to them and put the box back on the floor. “Too bad that’s all made of high-tech state-of-the-art synthetics,” he sighed. “Otherwise we could take the extras with us.”

Kat sighed. “Yeah. Where’s Father Chicanis’s communion set when we really need it?”

“I will get the message out,” the computer assured them. “I am not anxious to create the act nor am I looking forward to my own cessation of existence, but you must go, and quickly. Every moment now risks some sort of discovery. I want you well away from here.”

N’Gana shook his head. “I think I’ll just stay and keep you company,” he told the mentat. “It’s important that a commanding officer ensure that the mission is completed.”

“It is not necessary,” the mentat responded, unable to catch subtlety or monitor the physical condition of the colonel.

“Yes, it is. I’m dying anyway. Everybody knows that, even me. If I’m going to go, then I’m damned well going to go in action. The rest of you, get out of here! Now! I have an idea I want to discuss with our new friend here. One that’ll let us do this in style.”

“You’re sure?” Kat asked him.

“Doc, I’ve never been more certain of anything. And I want it quick, since I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to animate this corpse and I’m hungry and thirsty and there’s nothing here for even a lousy last meal, understand?”

“Colonel—” She felt tears welling up inside her.

“Get the hell out of here, Doc. And the rest of you! Few men in my profession get to plot their own glorious demise! Besides,” he added a bit more softly, “I would go absolutely insane stuck here for the next ten years or so. This is one of the dullest worlds I’ve ever known!”

Harker brought himself to attention and saluted. The colonel, reflexively, returned it.

“I, too, am going to remain, with Colonel’s permission,” Hamille croaked, still breathing hard. “I am too tired to go on, and there is nothing for me in this world. I, too, am fighter. My family, my young, are already in the next universe thanks to Titans. I would like to join them.”

N’Gana looked over at the Quadulan. “I’ll be glad for the company, but you might just get picked up.”

“To go where? Not like human people. Very few worlds are Quadulan.”

Harker leaned over and half whispered to Kat, “Let’s get out of here before we all go down in a suicide pact.”

She nodded. There wasn’t much more to say, and she realized that the strange alien who’d done the job the humans could not had never intended a different fate.

The mentat had no comment on the other two, but did step in now. “Mister Harker, you and the two women should leave at once. The boy must stay.”

They all froze. “What?” Kat asked in an acid tone. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

“At heart, all minds, all brains, whether artificial or naturally grown, are calculating machines,” the mentat noted. “I can do some calculations better than any human. I can tell you the exact odds that the one boy who discovered Jastrow’s body far away and who ran from my transmission should be the one who shows up here at this point in time. Unfortunately, you do not have time for all the zeros. You are here by choice. This boy was sent. There is no other explanation. And if you let him leave here, they will know that we have a weapon and where it is and they will move swiftly against us before we can move. The boy stays.”

“What d’ya mean, sent?” Littlefeet snapped. “You can’t guess how hard it was just to stay alive to get this far! You don’t know what we went through!”

“I’ve heard your stories while you’ve been here. I believe I do,” the computer responded. “I am not saying that you are a conscious agent, only that you are a tool. You have all been speculating about how the Titans think, how different they are, how they could never be understood. Don’t you think that, in their own way, the Titans are thinking the same about you? They can experiment with you, they can genetically alter you, they can mess with your minds, but they can only make you more like them or like their models. They don’t understand you as you are. They got an ugly surprise at that transmission of Jastrow’s. It wasn’t supposed to be possible, nor was there supposed to be anyone left who could work it even if one or another device were accidentally left operational. I think they started a hunt to find mentally receptive humans they could use as monitors just in case another Jastrow came along. They couldn’t recognize him—it would take a native human to do that. I think they’ve had some natives they could directly influence all along. Perhaps even the tribal leaders. The priests and nuns and the like. You were finally adopted into their network of control when you climbed the mountain. Why did you climb that mountain, Littlefeet?”

“Huh? I—I dunno. Oh—yeah. Some members of a Family got struck dead. Father Alex sent me. He wanted me to do a complete survey. To go as high as I could stand it.”

“Yes. I doubt if he knew he was being influenced, either, but they ordered him to send one of his flock into the stream and he sent you. Later, they cut off your family, then attacked and scattered it when you were not there. But your one real love somehow gets away and gets right to you. She `heard’ you, she said. And you move south, even though you know that rivers get wider as they near the sea. You certainly know that. You thought you might be able to cross at some point but that defied your knowledge, experience, and logic. They wanted you to find the newcomers, and they even used a Hunter attack to delay them so that you could reach them. Not because they understand what’s going on here, but because they do not. But if you go back out there, you will tell them. You will not even know that you’ll tell them, but your mind is linked to theirs, they can read it out. They won’t understand it, but they will get the record and know that technologically sophisticated humans have landed and risked all for some reason. It does not take a lot to understand that this would be a threat. They will know about me, and this place. You will tell them and you will not know that you tell them. You will tell them in your dreams and visions. That is why you cannot go, Littlefeet. That is why you must remain until the codes are broadcast.”

Littlefeet shook his head in disbelief. “No, it is a lie! A dirty lie from some—ghost! The demons do not own my soul! I pray only to Jesus!”

“It is not your faith I am interested in,” the mentat said, perhaps a bit sadly—if that were possible. “I do not have a lot of records, but I can guess that good men have been used unwittingly by evil since the dawn of humanity. You are full of coincidences, my young friend. Far too many coincidences. Deep down, you know it, I think, now that it’s been laid out. You cannot go. Like the guards of a Family’s night kraals, one must be ready to die for the many. All of this has come too far to be allowed to fail now. I have accepted that my existence must terminate for that reason.”

“No!” Spotty screamed at him. “You can’t have him! I won’t let you!”

“I can manage a sufficient charge through the plates and catwalks that you will need to navigate, and I will not hesitate to use it. If Littlefeet does not remain, I will use a kind of lightning bolt and strike him dead as he tries to leave.”

They all had their mouths open, but there was nothing any of them could say. Finally, Spotty said, “Well, then, if he stays, so do I. I do not want to keep going without him.”

Littlefeet seemed to snap out of it. “No! That’s wrong! And the ghost or whatever is right. Maybe I’m being used by them, maybe I’m not, but he can’t take the chance. That’s what he’s saying. But you—there’s a different duty for women and you know it. You didn’t bleed this time so you probably have my kid in you! I won’t let you kill it! Go with them! Be a part of this new family! It’s your duty. Just like my duty, and the others’ here, is to kill the demons.” He grabbed her and held her and kissed her like he’d never kissed anybody before, and then he let her go and stepped away. “Now, go! And tell my son that his father died heroically!”

“Let’s get out of here before we all get killed,” Harker muttered anxiously.

Spotty stared at Littlefeet, and there were tears in her eyes, but she said nothing. There was nothing to say and no way to argue it further. Particularly if she carried his child, it was her duty, to him and to God, not to die. She turned, wiping away the tears, and gestured to Gene Harker and Kat Socolov to go. They started, and she followed, not looking back, although she knew that Littlefeet stood there fighting back his own tears and looking at her until she was out of sight in the far reaches of the catwalks above.

N’Gana shifted, uncomfortable that he would not be the only one to die, but resigned to the business at hand.

You two! Come over here!” he managed, gesturing. “Mentat? You still there?”

“Yes. I just wish I was not. On the other hand, I have just seen the most logical justification for my imminent destructive actions that I could possible imagine. We must free these people.”

“I don’t just want to free these people,” N’Gana told it and the others. “I want to go out with a bang. Most of all, I want to know if the damned thing works. Don’t you?”

Littlefeet nodded. “Something that will kill demons? Yes!”

N’Gana looked up at the great machinery, frozen for nearly a century, and pointed.

“Well, if that thing up there in those giant mechanical pincers is what I think it is, and if there’s a charge left in it, then I think we might have a shot. Mentat, what was the procedure when you made a gate? You couldn’t do more than trickle-charge testing down here, but was it encoded into the Priam’s Lens weapons system before it was shipped or after it was installed?”

“Why, it was encoded right here, since the security system was on the lower level,” the computer replied. “The targets are addressed by code numbers.”

“So, if I’m not mistaken, that’s a finished plate up there, stuck where it was when the power failed. Am I right?”

“Yes.”

“And it’s already encoded by number in the keys, so if its number were called, then theoretically it would, if charged, be an end point for the energy strings?”

“Why, yes, I believe so.”

“Can you determine the number? And can you bring it to a full charge?”

“Yes to both, I suppose. At the point of broadcast, I could shift whatever remaining power I had to the plate. It should charge it for a short period. But why?”

“Then let’s send those codes with a command to target this one first,” he suggested. “Let’s shoot the bastards from right here if we can!”