Reclamation (48 page)

Avir stepped under the canopy over the entranceway but couldn’t see anything through the open door except piles of camp equipment and Panair’s back.

“Stand still and be identified,” barked Panair.

“All right, all right, I’m standing. Look, here I am.”

Avir stepped sideways, squeezing between the wall and a stack of storage crates. Panair, dart gun out and ready, faced a bony, brown-bearded man with a hand lamp and a tool belt raised up over his head. Behind him, incongruously, a fire burned in an empty crate. Next to it, an artifact lay on a pallet of blankets, staring at the ceiling. Its mouth moved constantly, but it made no sound, nor was it paying any attention to what was going on around it.

Avir, forgetting dignity and propriety, hurried to the artifact’s side. She knelt and unsealed her glove. She touched its skin. It was clammy and goose bumps prickled its dusky surface. Its eyes were glazed over and flickered back and forth, seeing something, but nothing that was in the room. Nal knelt beside her and also touched the artifact. He measured its pulse and fever with his expert hands and his mouth tightened.

“What did you do here?” Avir demanded of the bony man.

“It’s hard to explain,” he said. “Who in the backwaters are you lot?”

In answer, Ivale removed his helmet. The man saw Ivale’s bald head and the neck of his scarlet rappings.

“Vitae,” the Unifier croaked. “Jay …”

“You will be questioned about him before long,” Avir stood. “But first you will explain what has happened to this artifact?”

The Unifier cast about as if he needed to try to identify what she was talking about. “Broken Trail?” he said finally. “I …” His gaze slid sideways to the security team. Two stood beside the door. Two more stood on either side of the dome and one had stationed herself beside the open hatchway in the floor. Avir wondered for a moment if the Unifier was going to make some escape gesture. She hoped not. If they had to dart him, it would be hours before they got any information at all.

But he didn’t. He just sighed so heavily that his bony shoulders heaved. “It would be easier to show you.” He tilted his head to indicate the trapdoor.

“Do so,” ordered Avir, and she switched to the Proper tongue. “Bio-tech, tend the artifact. Stabilize her if you can.”

“You hold my name,” said Nal absently. He was busy fumbling in his tool belt for analysis patches.

Panair climbed down the rope ladder first, followed by one of his Beholden. After a long moment, he shouted, “Clear!”

“Go,” Avir said to the Unifier.

With another resigned sigh, he fastened his tool belt around his waist and climbed down the ladder like it was something he’d been doing all his life.

Avir envied his poise as she herself descended. The ladder wriggled and wobbled under her weight. She was very glad to see the Unifier didn’t dare to grin at her when she stood beside him. Avir was not surprised to see the string of lights that led down the corridor and glinted off curved walls of translucent silicate that held back drifting shadows.

This was Avir’s first chance to see the shadowy containers up close. She leaned toward the wall, pressing her hands against the smooth, cool surface. She watched the blobs that moved with a fluid grace and random pattern. She swallowed hard. It was as if they stood in a vein the Ancestors had sunk into the world and were now surrounded by the blood the Vitae had sworn by for all their centuries.

Ivale and six of the security team descended the ladder, one by one. Panair waited until the last of them were down before he gestured for the Unifier to lead them onward.

The shadowed corridor was one continuous archway extending toward a second drop. The Unifier took them down another rope ladder and down a second corridor toward a brightly lit arch. Shadows drifted silently past them and Avir felt them like a weight sliding across her skin.

The archway opened into a chamber. Avir’s gaze slid over the more ordinary ruins—the empty tables and rotted chairs. It caught for a moment on the banks of empty sockets and gleaming stones. Then it swept the room, trying to take in everything at once. She saw tanks of gelatinous matter bulging from the walls. Bundles of capillary-like tubes pressed against the chamber’s walls. Blobs and nodules of silicate, all seamless, held viscous liquids that rippled like the shadows in the corridor did. Star-shaped patterns pressed against the skin of what could have been a table. Nerves. The liquid pulsed in the smooth bank of empty sockets against the far wall as if controlled by a heartbeat.

There was no question of it in Avir’s mind. This place was alive.

Avir felt her own breathing become shallow. “How big is this place?” she asked, not caring about the hushed tone the Unifier couldn’t possibly miss.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve mapped out about ten square kilometers’ worth of tunnels. Not that it’s done that much good.” There was a smirk in his voice. “Half the stuff back of the walls and tanks didn’t even show up until we’d had the lights on twenty-four hours. And you should see what’s down there.” He nodded to a second archway.

“Ivale, see what you can find out about this place,” she said, already halfway to the other arch and barely aware that the two Security Beholden had closed ranks to follow her.

Avir knew she was letting herself get distracted. Exploration should wait until they had the proper personnel, but she kept right on going. There was no light, except what was at their backs. One of the Beholden raised a hand lamp to light her way.

Ahead, the corridor curved. A burst of red light flashed off the smooth, clear walls. It flashed again, and again. Avir’s steps quickened. The footsteps of the Security Beholden echoed as they marched behind her.

She rounded the curve and the pulse of light hit her right in the eyes. Dazzled, she dropped her gaze and raised her hand. She saw the reflection of another flash on her own boots. The shadows under the surface of the corridor roiled as if in response. The intensity of the light faded as her faceplate darkened.

At last, Avir could look up again. She stood less than a meter from a cavernous opening. The corridor came out near its ceiling, but the floor, if existent, was invisible. The far wall was likewise lost in shadow. From darkness to darkness stretched more of the Ancestors’ veins. Avir knew they must be enormous, but the cavern around them made them look like silken threads. They crossed each other and spread out again at every angle. It was a geometrician’s dream. It was the work of a thousand spiders over a thousand years. The ruby light flashed down the threads like bottled lightning. A single strand flashed on the edge of her line of sight. A dozen lit up right in front of her. Ten meters below, five, now ten, now twenty, horizontal strands pulsed with light and then blacked out all at once. Pulses of light raced up and down the verticals, chasing each other through the network of threads.

Peripherally, she noticed a platform in front of her, obviously made for movement into the vast network. Flat balconies and bubbles that could have enclosed rooms were supported by the threads. This was a complex. People, the Ancestors or the artifacts, traveled into the heart of this gigantic web of light and … did what?

“There is yet more work in the heart of the Ancestors. May those hearts be revealed to me. May my eyes see the wonder of the work …” It took Avir a moment to realize her voice was reciting the Second Grace. She closed her mouth but her eyes couldn’t stop straining to measure and define the impossible wonder spun out in light and glass in front of her.

Then her heart began to thud heavily against her rib cage. It was too much. It was too big and too incomprehensible. As precisely as she could manage, she turned around and shouldered her way between the Security Beholden. The ruby light pulsed and flickered against the corridor’s curved walls, each beat raising the level of unreasoned panic inside her. She didn’t dare run, but she didn’t know how she’d hold herself to a walk.

They were in a hollow world. A hollow world with veins and nerves, and who could know what else. But it lived. She knew that with an utter certainty. Like the artifacts that grubbed on its surface searching for their lost function, it lived.

Avir almost gasped with relief when she crossed the thresholds into the first chamber again.

The Unifier grinned at her. “Something else, isn’t it? And I’ll tell you what, those lights? They weren’t there when we got here. That didn’t start up until we got Broken Trail down here.”

Avir tried to collect herself, but didn’t feel very successful at the attempt. Her mind was full of light and threads. “Explain what you have done.”

Apparently ready to accept his prisoner status, the Unifier described the hunt for Stone in the Wall’s genetic relatives and how Broken Trail was led to the “control bank” to lay her hand on one of the spheres that still remained in the bank’s sockets. He went on to tell about how the lights had switched on in both the chamber and the cavern, and how the artifact had lain in a stupor since then and he wasn’t sure she was ever going to come out of it.

Avir didn’t realize how chilled her cheeks were until she felt the heat of anger rising in them.

“Do you realize what you have done!” she demanded. “You animal without Lineage!” Her fists clenched. “You played with the work of the Ancestors without even a preliminary test? Without a survey or any kind of analysis! You thought you could just …”

“We were in a hurry,” he said blandly. “We’d had word your lot was coming down like vengeance on this place for no particular reason, except maybe the people.”

Little by little, Avir clamped down on her emotions. This was not just unseemly, it was unacceptable and grossly unproductive. The Unifier had to be questioned thoroughly by experts. The Reclamation Assembly had to be notified of these developments at once. Measures had to be taken to secure the human artifacts, all of them, immediately, from the Imperialist clutches. Teams had to be brought down here as quickly as possible.

All time was gone. It was already too late. The race had started without them and now they could only run to catch up.

I am child of the Lineage. I will not see the work of the Ancestors end at the hands of the Imperialists. I will not.

Now the real work begins.

“
This is the truth. This is what we learned too late. We should not have made them Human
.
Even a little bit of Humanity was too much.”

Fragment from “The Beginning of the Flight”, from the Rhudolant Vitae private history Archives

A
S IT TURNED OUT
, they didn’t even feel the collision. There should have been a long, slow, grinding crash, but there wasn’t. There should have been the sound of straining metals and ceramics, but there wasn’t. One minute the screens were full of filthy ice, the next minute they were black.

Adu felt the smooth surface of the control boards under his hands and for a moment wished Dorias hadn’t decided to house him in the android. It was convenient, but it was isolating. If he had been loaded into the ship itself, then he would have been able to know where the hull stresses were as soon as the ice touched the ship. He could have compensated for them instantly and monitored them where compensation wasn’t needed yet. He would have known everything, without needing to call up the data, or turn his head, or wait while his mind processed what his eyes saw.

Next to him, Eric Born and Arla Stone blinked at the blank screens.

Eric looked down at Arla in the communications chair. “Now what?” he asked her.

“Now, we push it toward the Realm. What’s supposed to happen is the heat exhaust melts the ice as we push and we slide father into the shell. When we get to the Realm, we head to ground looking like a great, hulking lump of ice.” She frowned. “Did I say that right?” Her hand fell onto her pouch of stones and she jerked it away.

“I, for one, hope you did,” said Adu. “Although what they’ll think when they see a lump of ice going this fast, I don’t know.”

“We’ll just have to hope the satellites don’t think.” Eric stretched his arms over his head until his joints popped.

“They’re Vitae satellites,” Adu reminded him. “How can we be sure what they do?”

Eric swung his arms down. “Adu, that’s not really helpful.”

“My apologies, Sar Born.”

Eric nodded and, almost absently, stroked the curve of Arla’s shoulder. “Let us know when we have to strap down,” he said, and he left the bridge. Arla stood. Her concentration focused on Adu, but she said nothing. She just followed Eric Born out of the chamber.

Adu shifted himself to make room for the work being done inside his skull. Most of the processing right now was actually being done by the Cam programs. It was able to calculate the angles and bursts of thrust needed to push them around the binary, keeping their “tail” angled away from the suns. They would fly into the system between the satellites, and get just a little too close to the planet. Its gravity would grab hold of them and drag them down. Nothing surprising. Nothing unnatural. Nothing to rise from the ashes and craters.

Adu tried to be content. He tried to draw comfort from the fact that he would be able to fulfill his parent’s first instructions. Down in the Realm of the Nameless Powers he’d be able to find out the origin of the Vitae’s plans.

But there was nothing down there. He tried to tell himself that he’d eventually be able to find an open line, or a satellite transmission, or something that would allow him to get a message through to his parent. As it was, though, the only networks existed in the android body and in the shell of the ship, and the ship would soon be gone, even if its passengers survived.

Survive, yes, but for what? To pace the ground carrying the useless Cam routines around with him, until something was found for him to do? What would it be? There was nothing down there but stone and water and vegetation. He’d checked as soon as they’d entered the system. The only life was the uninterpretable Vitae transmissions, flitting between their ships.

“You will stand by them.” Dorias had sunk deep into him. “Eric Born will find a way to get you back out once we know what is happening.” A pause. “Do you think I want you lost? You’ll be carrying everything I need to know.”