Shaman (23 page)

He had nearly forgotten. If the
Shadayan
fired, every ship in her faery fleet would fire with her, and the aliens would know the depth of their falsehood. He spoke over his shoulder to the hologram technician. “Tsad, freeze the hologram. Project static image.”

“Done, sir.”

Tomin B-nath brought his eyes back to the external display. The Human warships continued toward them. The
Shadamela
was beneath now, and a bit astern. He wondered if he should suggest that she flee.

“Deploy web,” he said.

“Web deployed.”

It sailed away from them like a glorious cup of light, spreading as it neared the Human ships. They fired at it. A completely futile thing to do, since the web's fibers absorbed whatever energy was thrown at it. Their weapons were interesting—sabers of light that slashed at the gleaming fabric but failed to cut its threads. A beautiful display.

The web touched the dozen or so ships, then, and brushed through them like the little wisps of sheer lace woven by Kamorg's tiny wind-riders. Their running lights dimmed, flickered, then winked out altogether, and Tomin B-nath grew tense, hoping the power loss would have no adverse affects on their life-support systems.

“Time to power restoration,” he asked Tsad.

“Five chimes... four... three... two... one... zero.”

The lights flickered back on. Tomin heaved a sigh of relief.

Munira shrieked. A saber of intense light cut across the
Shadayan
's bows, all but blinding her bridge crew.

“Dive!” yelled Tomin B-nath. “Twenty beams negative!”

The ship dropped like a stone, falling away from the alien fire. Again, Tomin knew relief; they had missed
Shadamela
by less than thirteen beams.

o0o

“My God!”

Commander Fremont's stomach plummeted with the alien ships. It took only a heartbeat for him to realize that several of them would collide with ships from the wing below, only a breath to register than they had collided, only a blink to notice that they had collided without disintegrating.

Fremont gaped, as his entire bridge crew gaped. At least five of those ships had dropped right through their fellows without so much as a piece going missing. And that, as any armchair physicist would tell you, was impossible.

The sheer rock wall climbed straight up out of a jumble of boulders, brush and mountain ferns. Rhys Llewellyn stood below and blinked at it, barely aware of the buzz of voices behind and below him. All the sensations had been right, every single one. And yet, here they were, winded, aching, and stitch-ribbed, staring at an unbroken face of solid stone.

In a moment, Rhys told himself, he would get his wind back and climb the last seven or eight feet. To what purpose, he wasn't quite sure. He felt movement at his shoulder and knew it was Javar who stood there. The recognition brought with it a strange, savory sense of kinship, as if he and the Tsong Zee were cut from the same internal mold, as if their common bond had nothing to do with modern gadgetry.

“A rock slide, perhaps?” suggested Javar.

Rhys shook his head. “That'd be some slide. But of course, it had to have been. Ah, I guess even an Avatar can't foresee everything.”

Javar glanced from Rhys to the wall and back, his lips twisted thoughtfully. “I am not so sure of that. There is a poem attributed to the Tsadrat which says, in part, ‘And if I have dropped my offering bowl and it has broken, I shall mend it. Ah, but how shall it be mended with a missing shard? Who shall find the piece and set it, and of what substance shall the glue be made?'”

Rhys's heart insinuated itself into his throat, fluttering tightly there—a butterfly on a rope. “Do you think... Do you think he meant the Tsong Zee would be missing a piece of their puzzle—that he foresaw the loss of the Walkers and this?” He gestured at the motley group scattered among the rocks.

“I am continually surprised by circumstance,” Javar replied.

Rhys turned his gaze back to the rock face.
All right
, he thought.
Let's suppose the Avatar—the Tsadrat—did foresee the rockfall. If it was a rock fall
.

His eyes moved up and over the sheer rock. It was curving, concave, and smooth—almost too smooth to be natural. He raked his eyes across the boulders strewn just above them, at the branches and fronds of greenery bobbing in the breeze.

He locked eyes on one tall fern at the same time Javar did. Their active link recorded and broadcast both bursts, creating a bizarre reinforcement in Rhys's mind—a slap-back echo of sensation. They began to scramble toward the fern in unison, reached it in breathless harmony.

Cool, dank air hit them full in the face.

Rhys grinned at Javar, who emitted a tuneful whistle through his slit lip and afforded the boulder he leaned against a resounding slap. They turned back downslope.

“There's a cave!” Rhys shouted. “A cave! Come on up!”

Yoshi, and Brasn's apprentice, Malin, were already moving, but Rhys could tell by the expressions of face and body that his announcement was not what they were responding to.

Now what
? he thought, and waited impatiently for them to reach the cliff.

o0o

“Holograms! We've been held at bay by a damned picture show!”

“What?” Joseph Bekwe sagged against a wall, his face flaccid with bemusement.

Sanchez gritted his teeth audibly. “At least a portion of the OROB fleet is a sham. They collided with each other—without effect. No damage. One of my more enterprising commanders then proceeded to fire across the bows of the ship leading the formation and, lo and behold, when their force fields went up, one whole wing winked right out of existence. Holograms, Governor.”

Bekwe sat heavily in a hospital lounge chair. Holograms. He wondered how many ships there really were. Just the ones that had fired on Haifa? Or were those also mere shades?

“How many?”

“Four. Four ships. And evidently, the closest thing they have to weaponry is a tractor web.” He shook his head. “That's a new twist on the Emperor's clothes: The invaders have no fleet.”

“What are you going to do now?” Bekwe asked.

“I'm going order down some troops—try to restore order. Then I'm going to grab a floater and pay a personal visit to the White Shrine.”

o0o

“What have you instructed them to do?” Rhys asked Brasn as he secured a small light-emitting disk to the front of his sporran. They stood in what amounted to the ante-room to a much larger cavern, preparing to take their search into the darkness beyond.

The archaeologists were gathered in an out-of-the-way corner—discussing what to dig up first, Rhys supposed—while Yoshi murmured to Danetta in hushed tones and Malin communicated instructions to the Tsong Zee vessels.

“Whatever is necessary to preserve life,” Brasn replied. “There are two hundred people up there in those ships. I will not take chances with those lives. So many of them are young—volunteers who came because they were eager to see their homeworld. It was a dangerous and clumsy ploy, having them pretend to a size and ferocity they did not have. Armed conflict is not something we readily understand. And this was not,” he added, “the way I envisioned our homecoming.”

“You've no warrior class? No... armed forces?”

“None. Well, there are the Arbitrators. They are sometimes armed with small pellet weapons which inject a mild paralytic, or with a scaled-down version of the web. That is used as a personal force field. There are some dangerous animals on Kamorg.”

“And dangerous people?”

Brasn tilted his head. “A few. But they are not organized into fleets.”

“Then how did you arrive at that concept?”

“History. We do understand the concept of an armada. Our seas were once populated by vessels of war. It was an easy enough jump to a fleet of space vessels. We had four operating already, plus four in reserve, and we knew how to... multiply their apparent strength. But, as for tactics...” He gave his shoulders an artless twitch.

“Sir?”

Rhys turned to find Yoshi at his shoulder. “What is it, dear?”

“Before you get started on the next sequence, I just thought you should know that a couple of the diggers are getting scared. They're starting to say things I don't like.” Her expressive face stated unequivocally that she would like to rivet a few sets of lips together. “They're trying to convince Gedde that the odds of them taking the Tsong Zee hostage are pretty good.” She glanced over her shoulder and shifted from one foot to the other. “And there's something else, sir. I think maybe we're being followed.”

Rhys lifted his head and glanced back toward the cave entrance. “What makes you say that?”

“Rockfall. Behind us in the canyon. And I thought I saw something moving way back down the trail. I suppose it could have been an animal, sir, but... Well, watch your back, sir.” Her brow puckered ferociously, she adjusted her headset and her light-disk, and rejoined Malin.

Followed. Rhys found himself hoping Sanchez's men had caught up with them. He turned to the Tsong Zee Speakers.

“We heard,” Javar informed him. “But since we cannot ‘watch our backs' and Trade simultaneously, we shall have to hope that Malin and Yoshi can watch them for us.”

The cavern provided its own unique blanket of sensory input. Along with the characteristic musk of cave earth, the arrhythmic music of water trickle and drip underscored by hollow wind-sough, it yielded a chill that seemed to cling to the skin with conscious tenacity. The stripe of sweat down Rhys's back felt like an icy saddle blanket.

But that was not a byproduct of the Tsong Zee physiology, nor did it figure in their key sequences. Before Rhys had taken two steps toward the far end of the cavern's first chamber, those bursts had overwhelmed his physical discomfort, crowding out sensations of clinging fabric and cold knees. His fingertips tingled, telling him he was looking for something smooth, cold, wet and solid. Something so sleek it certainly must gleam like Tsong Zee flesh.

Something like... that stalagmite.

He moved quickly to it—a sentinel near a cramped-looking doorway to darkness—set his palms to it and felt the image click into place like the puzzle piece it was. He peered into the portal. Sightlessness; close, pressing walls; slick, moist stone—the ghost sensations flew at him out of the black opening.

“This way,” he said and, not even glancing back over his shoulder, bent and pushed into the narrow way. It was a low-ceilinged corridor, its walls wearing an eternal sheer curtain of water that oozed downward, leaving greenish streaks. It was somehow longer than he'd expected, boring for over fifteen meters through the rock. He touched the walls. Smooth as glass. Might it have been literally bored by Tsong Zee hands and machines?

Half crouched, the explorers continued on through the tunnel, the sense of anticipation borne back and forth between those joined in the machine-assisted Trade—bursts of it swept along on the same waves that carried the keys.

Rhys halted suddenly at a low point in the tunnel. “Javar, your melody changed again. Is that significant?”

“I can only imagine we must have passed from the Second Sister and are now within the Third. Does this make sense?”

“Yes. Does it also make sense to hope we're near the end of this trail?” He looked at Javar over his shoulder.

The Tsong Zee's eyes were huge blue mirrors, reflecting back the light from Rhys's disk. “It does make sense to hope. I, too, feel as if we are close to unlocking the door to our past.”

Rhys only vaguely heard the murmur of human voices that rippled along the corridor behind them. He turned his face toward the goal and continued onward, the new variation on the Three Sisters theme playing continually in his head.

Ahead now, the light-disks failed to illumine the way before them, as if they approached a black, light-sucking archway. It took Rhys a moment to realize what that meant. There was a chamber ahead.

He increased his pace, aware only that Javar's melody had taken on yet another permutation, that Keere's cave-musk was now warring with a sweet, spicy fragrance, that Brasn made his face tingle with anticipated warmth, that Parsa tasted a spiced beverage.

Heart pounding, he stepped out of the tunnel and came upright, gaze reaching into the large chamber, borne on the tide of light from a dozen disks and hand torches. An uncontrollable sigh escaped his lips.

This was it; this was the White Shrine.

Its far end was dominated by a large, apparently natural platform upon which sat a group of five seats. They might have been alabaster thrones, but they were not the least bit throne-like. Austere in their simplicity, each bore a symbol which Rhys assumed must correlate to the Tribal Speaker expected to sit in it. To the right and left of the platform were what first appeared to be giant chalices carved from the pale cave rock, but which Rhys quickly recognized as braziers. And along the walls of the Shrine...