Revenge of the Damned (13 page)

Next came the difficult problem of communication with the electronic moron. In such primitive conditions, how did one send and receive symbols? Oddly enough, the answer came rather simply. Why not a spark transmitter? Sten had asked. Alex had just gaped at him a moment and then put his little team to work on it. They quickly broke Kraulshavn's symbol language down into dots and dashes. A simple key—a spring device manipulated by hand—was used to transmit. A tiny speaker was used to receive the computer's buzzing response.

The memory banks had created the biggest problem. No one had been able to offer even a silly suggestion for storing the data. Alex had lied to Kraulshavn and Sorensen, telling them that he had the solution in mind and urging them to press on with the computer. As the on-line date grew closer and closer, Alex found himself growing increasingly frustrated.

Ibn Bakr gave him the answer. The big tailor needed to age cloth to make Tahn peasant costumes. He used a mild caustic in near-boiling-temperature water and washed the cloth over and over again in one of the huge industrial washing machines. One day Alex found himself considering the problem as he stood in front of the machine, hypnotized by the twin agitators chugging back and forth. His jaw dropped as he realized he was staring at the answer. If he played with the gearing… spooled wire from one spindle to another… reversed the polarity of the wire… then fed the data from the computer to the wire… Voila! After several thousand years, Kilgour had reinvented the wire recorder.

Finally the big moment had come. Sten and Alex hovered over Sorensen and Kraulshavn as they got ready to fire up the computer. Sorensen wagged his fingers for Kraulshavn to start. The being shook its head.
No
. Finger wagging came back.

"What's the problem?" Sten asked.

"He says it needs a name." Sorensen laughed. "Otherwise it won't know who we're talking to."

Sten buried a groan of impatience. It was obviously important to Kraulshavn. The last thing he needed was a big pouting bird for a programmer.

"How about Brainerd?" Sten suggested. "Wasn't he the guy way back when who got us all into this computer mess?"

Sorensen ran it through for Kraulshavn. No problem. Brainerd it was. Feathered appendages manipulated the key. Tiny sparks began rhythmically leaping between the gap. Sten imagined the dot-dash symbols flowing along the wire. Unconsciously he found himself leaning over the small speaker, waiting for the crackling response of the computer.

Nothing. More flying ringers. More sparks.

"Come on, you little clot," Sten breathed. "Wake the hell up… Come on… Come on… Speak to us…"

There was a crackling stutter. Then silence.

"Clot! What the hell's wrong with it?"

"Patience, young Horrie," Alex said. "Maybe the wee beastie is afeared to wake up."

After all the time and energy invested, Sten failed to see any humor in the situation. He was all for putting the boot into it—and he did not mean the electronic variety. A big, heavy leather boot was more along his line of thinking.

The one-sided conversation continued for many more long minutes. Finally, Kraulshavn leaned back. There was some finger wagging, silent quizzing from Sorensen, then more finger wagging.

"What's he saying?" Sten asked.

"It doesn't like its name," Sorensen said. "He says we should try something else."

"I don't clotting care what we clotting call it," Sten gritted out.

The big washing machine/wire recorder
gaaronked
its agreement in the background.

"Call it anything you like. Call it gaaronk-gaaronk for all I give a clot!"

Sorensen nodded quite seriously. Fingers translated. Kraulshavn responded.

"Well?" Sten finally asked.

"Kraulshavn thinks one Gaaronk will be sufficient," Sorensen said.

And before Sten could kill someone, the sparking started again. Almost instantly there was a return crackle. It was hesitant at first, and then there was one long stream of crackling. Kraulshavn bent his head to the speaker, listening. Then his fingers flashed at Sorensen. The big farm boy turned his innocent face to Sten.

"It's awake," he said. "It likes Gaaronk just fine!"

CHAPTER TWENTY

C
ristata had passed the word that he wished to see Big X after the last roll call—which meant after all prisoners were securely locked into their cells.

Sten pulled on the tatters of a dark coverall and picked the lock on his cell. By that time, the lock tumblers were so used to being picked that a sharp smack on the doorjamb probably would have sprung the lock. He ran down the corridors and stairs toward the ground without worrying about guards—the few patrols that the Tahn ran inside Koldyeze's wings at night were large and noisy.

He picked the lock that led out into the courtyard and waited. He was following instructions.

Cristata's emissary had told him to wait until the large search beam—the one that was slightly blue—swept across the courtyard. He was to count six, because there was an amplified light beam behind it. "Then walk—do not run—
walk
twenty-six paces toward 1430 hours, assuming that the search beam is at twelve."

He paced the requisite number of paces, then stood, slightly hidden behind a ruined column, feeling stupid and waiting for the search beam to pick him up on its next sweep. Instead, the paving stones next to his feet slid away, and Cristata's tendrils probed out.

"If you wish," he said, "you could jump down beside me."

Sten wished—and jumped.

He found himself in a narrow pit next to the furry being. The paving stones—Sten realized they were a very clever trapdoor—slid noiselessly closed above him.

After a moment there was a spark, and then there was light. The lamp Cristata held was a small pannier with what looked a great deal like one of the prisoners' standard rations floating in its center, surrounded by liquid.

Cristata explained that the lamp was just what Sten thought it to be—they had boiled extra rationpaks until they yielded fat, then used the fat for fuel and the packs themselves as wicks.

"But that is not what I wished to show you. Come with me."

Cristata, without waiting for a response, dropped down into a narrower pit that Sten had not noticed and disappeared.

Sten followed.

The pit dropped about two meters and then, Sten could see, opened into a tunnel. The tunnel was completely boarded and reinforced, top, bottom, and sides.

Crawling through it was hardly claustrophobic—it was more like moving down a small but perfectly engineered corridor that led slowly but certainly downward.

At what Sten estimated were twenty-five-meter intervals, the passageway opened up into small but equally well built way stations.

It was, Sten thought, something that would take humans five years to engineer—or longer. But there was no one in the tunnel except the flailing fur-covered rump of Cristata moving ahead of him. Then the lay reader's rump wiggled and then vanished.

Sten crawled on and found himself at the lip of a larger, rocky chamber.

In it were Cristata and three humans. Sten vaguely recognized them as fellow prisoners. He levered himself over the edge and settled onto a granite boulder. There was complete silence except for the hissing of the fat lamp.

"Well, sir? What do you think?"

The question was asked by a woman wearing the stripes of a lance bombardier—Markiewicz, Sten remembered. He answered honestly.

"I've dug some tunnels," he said. "But this is the best one I've ever seen. You've done a clot—sorry. An excellent job."

"In the spirit of the Great One," Cristata intoned. "By his leave only."

"In the spirit of the Great One," the other three said. What the hell, Sten thought. So Cristata was converting the masses. If believing in whatever Cristata did could produce a tunnel like that, Sten was ready to be baptized himself.

"I'm impressed, as I said," Sten said. "But I've already said that you people can have any help we can give. Why'd you decide to show it to me?"

Cristata's facial tendrils wiggled. "Because," he said, "we appear to have a problem." His tendrils indicated. Sten looked: The large rocky chamber, he realized, was composed on three sides of roughly cemented chunks of rock—what must have been the cathedral's foundations. But directly in front was one very large, very solid piece of stone, like unto a wall.

Sten figured out why Cristata had brought him down there. It was not pride. They needed help.

If Sten had not been Big X, he might have been more cooperative. But he had several thousand other people to consider, and so he put on his blandest face.

"You need help in getting through that clotting—beg pardon—rock?"

"We do," Markewiecz said.

"I could have more diggers come in," Sten said. "But it'd still take about a thousand years to chisel through that beast. And blasting, I'm thinking, is contraindicated."

The humans slumped. But Cristata had no reaction.

"But I mink we might be able to help," Sten went on.

Cristata's tendrils wriggled once more. "When a more senior reader offered to deliver what might be considered the less interesting—forgive me, Great One—portions of the lesson, portions which were my duty under normal circumstances, normally there were what I have heard called tradesies involved."

"There are," Sten said.

"We are listening."

We
, Sten wondered, far underground.
We
meaning Cristata and his converts, or we and his Great One? Sten considered the tons of rock, earth, and stone above his head and decided this was not die place to be terribly agnostic.

Sten was not offering a pigless poke.

Kraulshavn and Sorensen's computer had already begun
gaaronking
through the surveyors' figures. And yes, indeed, there were big missing spaces between what the measurements produced and what Koldyeze looked like.

Most interesting were the cheapjack echosondes the surveyors had run. Some of Avrenti's supersensitive antitunneling microphones had somehow ended up in the hands of Kilgour's thieves. Those had then been implanted in the stone courtyard, and an impulse had been introduced. The impulse was generally a somewhat unconnected chunk of stone atop the cathedral's battlements. When said chunk of stone came crashing down, of course as a result of natural causes, the crash was recorded at various points and fed through Gaaronk.

The crashes did not match—and showed that, mysteriously, there was a lot of unknown there underneath Koldyeze. Empty unknown there.

Cellars.

That was Sten's oinker in the sack.

"If," he began, "I can show you a way around or through this rock, your tunnel is no longer going to be exclusive."

The three humans growled.

"Continue," Cristata said.

"I would like to use the tunnel to take more escapers out."

"How many?"

"I don't know. But you four would be the first. And you would have all the assistance my organization could provide."

"We have all the aid we need from the Great One," Cristata said. His converts nodded in agreement.

Sten felt slightly sorry for what he was doing, but as yet there was no other viable escape plan in motion. And Sten remembered once again that warrant officer crying over his parcel.

"We'll give you more diggers. Diggers working under your direction. And nothing will be done without your knowledge and approval."

"Do we have any choice?"

Sten did not bother to answer.

Markiewicz glanced at Cristata and answered for the four of them. "It appears as if the Great One wishes this."

It was unanimous.

Sten sort of hated to give them what looked to be the answer, because it was simple.

Dig down.

Disbelieving—except for Cristata, who reasoned that somehow the Great One was speaking through Sten—they did.

Many days later, they broke through into the cellars of Koldyeze.

And that, for Cristata, created an even larger problem.

Once again Sten went out and down late at night, then shinnied down from that small rocky chamber into caverns. High stone-ceilinged caverns that led on into darkness. Caverns that were flagstone-floored, with pillars stretching up. Caverns that, Cristata pointed out, held all the temptations of Xanadu.

Sten took a quick torchlight inventory, whistled, and agreed. Evidently the simple, monotheistic agrarian communards who had originally built Koldyeze had planned for some very rainy days. And they had planned on spending those rainy days in more than ascetic meditation. There were chambers with large barrels. Sten thumped them, and they appeared to still have liquid in them. He ran his finger along the barrel staves and tasted alcohol.

Other chambers held foodpaks; still others, clothing.

"And we have not fully explored these chambers," Cristata went on gloomily. "But it would appear that whoever stored these substances enjoyed life."

Sten eyed the foodpaks hungrily—and stopped thinking about what a meal composed of real food could do for him. Instead, he made plans.

Cristata—personally—would make a full survey of the cellars. What was in them would be told to Colonel Virunga and Mr. Hernandes only. The last thing Sten needed was for that tunnel, which looked to be their only salvation, to get blown because a bunch of tunnelers started looking fat, well dressed, and—worst case—drunk. The assigned tunnelers from the X organization would be conducted into the rocky chamber blindfolded and then taken through the cellars to the working face. Only Cristata and his converts would know what those cellars of plenty held. They would be kept secret for emergency rations and to help the escapers get into shape. And Sten hoped most sincerely that none of Cristata's true believers would suffer a lapse of faith and a subsequent big mouth.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

S
enior Captain Lo Prek sat nervously on the edge of his bunk, trying to decipher the radio chatter between the freighter captain and traffic control. The mysteries of naval patter were beyond him, but he could tell from the tone of the captain's voice that all did not bode well.