They reached Kat first, who was breathing very hard but feeling proud of herself. N’Gana was a hundred meters farther on, trying to bring his breathing under control. He was still breathing as hard as he’d been when he’d pulled himself onto the shore.
Harker wondered a bit at that. Neither he nor Kat was exactly a champion athlete and he’d never have the kind of bodybuilder shape N’Gana had, but the man shouldn’t be breathing as hard as he was.
“I’m all right!” the colonel snapped. “It’s just age catching up with me, I fear. I’ve walked this far. I’ll make the journey.”
There was nothing to do but accept his assurances, but it bothered Harker. It suddenly occurred to him, though, that if something did happen to N’Gana, then, if he hadn’t forced himself into this party, Kat Socolov might well be the only one available to get Hamille into that bunker or whatever it was.
And just beyond those hills, no more than a half day’s walk away, and maybe a day through, they would be there.
Then it would get really dangerous.
• • •
There was a reason why the energy grid was so clear in the night sky. They were close to one of its anchors, and a climb over the twelve-hundred-meter hills to the top of the pass between showed a sight that few humans had ever seen at ground level and remained whole.
Below, the remains of the Grand Highway still showed, joining other old routes that were still visible after all these years, even with large parts overgrown by jungle. Ephesus, the continental capital, had been four times the size of Sparta. There had been a spaceport out there, on the bluffs, which was still easy to recognize because of the sheer lack of anything growing there. That whole district was still possible to make out, and that was good, because that was where they had to go.
Straight ahead, though, the barren ruins of the ancient city stopped dead. They had not merely been dissolved or burned or swept away but replaced by a city of the new masters.
You could see pictures, you could see orbital shots, you could see it as a bizarre shimmering shape over a great distance, but now, this close, it was like nothing they had ever seen or even imagined.
“How would you describe that to a blind man?” N’Gana wondered.
It was a series of interlocking geometric structures, but virtually every possible shape was represented. It was a city of shimmering, twinkling light, predominantly yellow but with an odd pale green afterglow. It stretched for at least twenty kilometers, probably the entire old center city. Its beauty and symmetry, even to their eyes, was nothing short of breathtaking, but at the same time it was clearly built by and for minds so totally alien that Hamille seemed like a brother. At the very top were spires, actually trapezoids, not balanced or uniform but clearly serving the same function. Each of these protruded into the sky perhaps eight or nine hundred meters, and beams of energy ran into and out of them.
Kat Socolov shivered, though it was even hotter than usual. “It gives me the creeps,” she muttered, as much to herself as to the others. “I feel like I’m looking into the minds of beings that I can never understand.”
“Don’t keep looking at it!” Littlefeet hissed. “If the demons sense you looking, they steal a little of your mind. They got part of mine when I saw this place from the farthest high mountains. They aren’t looking now, but I think they will be!”
He was certainly serious, and none of the others quite knew how to take his comments. He did seem to have an abnormal sensitivity to, and fear of, the Titans, which he called the demons, but there wasn’t that pull that he’d reported, at least not now.
“Littlefeet—how high up were you?” Harker asked, trying to reconcile the two visions.
“Way up. Up to the snow line.”
“Above the grid?”
“Not exactly. But it was like right there. I could almost touch it. It actually went to ground not much farther up, I remember that much.”
Harker nodded. “I think that’s it. We don’t know what those beams are, but they seem to have a lot of different uses. It’s almost as if those energy strings are living things. That city looks like it was grown from some crystalline structure, maybe artificial but certainly brought here with the invasion ships. But those pulses, that glow, that sense of strangeness you get when you look at it, the shimmering effect—that’s more of this energy. They live in it. They work it, mold it, like a sculptor with clay. It’s entirely possible that they are always connected using it as well. If you got close enough to that kind of beam, your brain would be overwhelmed by the alien information it was carrying. If it’s some kind of life, even artificial life, it might have sensed you in the stream and tried to incorporate your mind into it.”
“Huh?” Littlefeet responded.
“Never mind. Let’s just say that, if I’m right, we’ll be okay so long as we don’t get close to that stuff or intersect an energy stream. We’ll have to watch it, though. Swing wide around over to the east and in to the spaceport highway. Let’s give them no reason to take a close look at us.”
That they could all agree upon.
The offworlders were more than impressed by the two natives, who were clearly scared out of their wits by the sight of the alien city, which they understood even less than the other members of the group, but they stuck it out.
Littlefeet was surprised at how little he was affected by the sight even this close. He couldn’t understand it, but when he thought about it, he remembered that he’d had very few episodes in the daytime. It was at night, and particularly when he was tired and trying to sleep, that the visions came.
The great alien base city continued to dominate everything as they descended. It was no automated station, either. At least a dozen times they were forced to dive for cover in the bush as one or another of the fuzzy egg-shaped craft sped by overhead, either going toward the structure or leaving it. They made an odd sound, like the drone of a giant insect, as they went over; some headed out over the ocean beyond, vanishing over the horizon. The only place they didn’t seem to go was straight up, but Harker and N’Gana knew full well that they’d be in orbit in a shot if they suspected what was inside that oddly shaped tumbling little second moon.
One of the craft flew almost over them, fortunately not stopping nor slowing down, but in that brief passage all of them, not just Littlefeet, could feel and sense a power and control, some kind of dominating energy that could affect them as well as the Titans.
“Discovery at any stage right now could be disastrous,” N’Gana warned them. “That is surely the place where they breed and create the creatures like the Hunters and who knows what else, and there is no way we could escape if they decided to hunt us down on this coastal plain.”
It was a restatement of the obvious, but it showed just how nervous even the iron colonel had become.
Although their descent was fairly rapid, the old city had been huge and spread out as well. They realized that they would not make their goal before sundown. That required an immediate decision.
“That place shines,” the colonel noted. “There will be light to see by, but not enough to be comfortable in this strange and dangerous region. We can either push on and try and make it through the night, chancing that we’ll be more vulnerable than they in doing it, or we can halt and spend the night in that thick growth down there.”
“I would rather move than cower in the dark,” Littlefeet told them. “I am afraid that once darkness comes, I may be drawn to them or they to me and I might betray us anyway. There is also water here but little food, and foraging would be terribly risky. I say we push on and do what you must do.”
“I think so, too,” Spotty agreed. “I am very tired, but I can see no rest if we wait and much risk.”
Harker shrugged and looked at Kat. “I’m not going to get a wink of sleep so long as I’m near that anyway,” she told them. “I say let’s do it and get the hell out of here.”
“Agreed,” N’Gana said. “We get to the jungle there and take a r
est until dark. Then we move out. I keep wondering if they let the inmates out of the asylum at closing, and I’d rather not know the answer.”
The destination had been programmed into the minds of N’Gana, Kat Socolov, and even Hamille; it was only the others who didn’t have confidence in where they were headed. Even with that mental map, though, it wasn’t easy to figure where you were and where you were going at ground level, and from the reclaiming jungle, even in daylight. In darkness, it was even harder.
They had underestimated the glow from the Titan base. Although things were distorted and shadows were menacing, there was enough light emanating from it for them to see pretty well, as much as the brightest full moon. It didn’t help, though, that the place seemed to be far more active in the night than in the day; odd sounds came from it, echoing against the hills and seeming to go right through the interlopers. These were deep bass thumps and penetrating, electroniclike sounds and pulses that would stop, start, speed up, slow down, or just throb with monotonous regularity. It was impossible to know what those sounds meant, but there was a fair amount of traffic of the egg-shaped vehicles, more than in the day, and, in the semidarkness of the glowing structures, various beams of pastel-colored light played this way and that, both into space and out to sea and across and through the grid.
“You’d almost swear the bastards were nocturnals,” Harker commented. “But who ever heard of tending flowers by night? They bloom by day, don’t they, Littlefeet?”
“I can’t say,” he responded, unnerved by the noises and the fights. “You go into those groves, you go crazy. Period.”
“They came out of the grove and attacked the Family,” Spotty put in. “They were—wild. Like mindless monsters. Their eyes were staring, their mouths foaming, and they were screeching like the damned, which they were. Their souls were taken by the flowers, and their minds with them, leaving only bodies that were maniacs.”
Harker kept trying to assemble the information into anything that might make sense. Okay, the Titans were so alien you probably could not exchange many common thoughts with them, but there were certain constants. Physics for one thing. Mathematics. There were certain constants to being in this universe. He was already hypothesizing a model that was something like an insect colony, with all of them both individuals and devoted to, perhaps even connected mentally to, one another and to central cores. The plasma manipulation was their technology, their key, and also their means of maintaining a uniform hive. They would see everything as connected, even interconnected. They would think in terms of systems. The whole would concern them; individuals would not, not even individual safety or life. They simply wouldn’t consider such things. Everything would be coopted, modified, incorporated into the continental, then planetary, and eventually interstellar system. If, as Little-feet suggested, the grid and the plasma gave them a kind of telepathic connection with everything else, then they might really not fear death or extinction. All that they did, were, discovered would be fed into the central database—an organic database that might not even have a center.
Kat had said that she felt that the grid was influencing even them, and certainly the Families, if only in a more indirect and general manner. That would fit his vision.
But how the hell could you ever talk with or reason with such a race? They could not even comprehend the idea of individual rights, of the kind of morality that humans put up as a standard. The Titans were the grid; that was what they did—extend it, world by world. The survivors of the worlds they took over would be the strongest, survivors in the true sense of the word. Eventually, as they were modified, studied, probed, manipulated, and whatever, they’d be co-opted into the grid, into the local system.
It wasn’t all a spurt of inspiration; these subjects had been bandied about by some of the brightest minds and most powerful computers in The Confederacy. But talking to natives and seeing things this close made it much easier to figure out which of those conjectures fit the facts.
Kat understood and thought that he was on to something, although they might never really know. N’Gana had a more pragmatic reaction.
“It means that the only way we can stop them is to send them to hell,” he said.
After waiting out the inevitable night storm in the cover of the jungle, they moved out and headed southeast, using the alien base as the directional benchmark, figuring that, at worst, they would wind up either on the bluffs overlooking the ocean or at the remnants of the old seaport. From that point, working back to the old spaceport and then to the fabrication bunkers would be relatively easy.
The plan was good, but the sounds and the snakelike colored beams coming from the Titan base made it difficult to think, let alone hear. Then they emerged from the jungle onto old sculpted rock strengthened with poured concrete and reinforced mixtures that had withstood everything. It oriented them, but it also meant that, from this point on, they would be exposed. And every once in a while those beams would play across the open expanse.
“Drop if one comes near,” Harker told them. “Don’t let it hit you or they’ll know instantly that we’re here. I think they’d all know. They don’t seem to be able to depress to ground level—I make the minimum clearance at about a meter. So drop and wait. Understand?”
They all nodded.
From the ground, the usually silent snakelike Hamille said, “Just move like me. Not get touched.”
The entire area seemed surreal. Different parts of the base, perhaps individual “crystals,” sometimes whole areas, would pulse and change color in time to the noises. Whatever the hell they were doing in there, the base was clearly not just a base and headquarters, airport and spaceport, it was also in some way a single unified machine. Harker thought that they were making and shaping their plasma somehow in that thing, and then sending what amounted to programs along the flows.
Like a giant computer, he thought. They were components, programmers, and everything else all in one. They and their machines were one. And the surviving humans, culled to leave only the very strongest, with the Hunters taking out the weak and maintaining the line—what were they intended to be? Some new cog in the great unity, almost certainly. Perhaps several.
But why the hell did they grow flowers that drove people nuts?
Unless...
What if the Titans were the flowers? Or the flowers were Titan young? Or Titan young hatched or whatever inside the flowers? That was possible, and would explain a lot, including why you might be driven nuts if you stumbled among them.
Or the groves might be repositories. Temporary memory? Sorters? If they grew their bases from crystals, might they have organic parts of their great system, their great machine, other than themselves?
At least his suppositions reinforced Kat’s and Little-feet’s conviction, independently arrived at, that if you could shatter just one part of this system, the rest would collapse in on itself. Divert the plasma, or the source of it, and the means of transference, and they could quite possibly die or, more unsettlingly, go mad at suddenly becoming disconnected individuals.
The terrible weapon created from Priam’s Lens just had to work. It just had to.
• • •
“Down!” N’Gana shouted, and they all hit the hard rock and hugged it as tendrils of energy snaked all about them. This was about the tenth time that the tendrils had come this close, but their purpose remained unclear. Certainly whoever or whatever was running that huge base/machine over there could identify them and pick them off anytime they wanted. N’Gana was certain they weren’t being hunted or toyed with; that would make the motivations and logic of the Titans almost understandable. They had probably been detected and ignored since they were not coming near the base and posed no apparent threat, but there was no doubt that whoever those energy streams touched would instantly be within the Titan mental network.
Littlefeet understood this better than most, and he was already somewhat connected. Terrible and unintelligible visions flooded his mind, and it w
as only by force of will that he managed to push them back enough to keep going. The others felt them, too, but never as strongly as when those tendrils came close.
It was, Kat thought, almost like someone practicing on a piano, only the keys were the receptors of the brain and they were being rapidly triggered and canceled when that energy approached. It was a bizarre sensation, or series of sensations; in a few seconds you could go from feeling pain to orgasmic delight to fear to absolute confidence to love, hate, just about the whole range. If it lasted for longer than that, it would have been impossible to take, but the tendrils always moved on, and the sensations and urges lessened, although they never totally went away.
“What the hell are they doing and why?” she almost wailed after it happened yet again.
Harker patted her arm gently. “They’re broadcasting,” he said simply. “And maybe they’re receiving as well. Bear with it. We can’t be too far from our goal now.”
It had taken most of the night, some of it spent crawling over raw stone or broken concrete on their bellies and elbows, but this was true. Hamille, who seemed less affected by the broadcasts, had kept the physical markers—mountains, sea, bluffs, and the pattern of roads and ruins on the ground—in closest focus. They had swung way out, skirting the old spaceport ruins, then come back in along the main spaceport highway.
Once this had been an industrial park for high-tech products most of which were related to spaceport maintenance and spaceship repairs. The only exception was the special project of the Karas and Melcouri families. This was a large complex now almost completely obliterated above ground, but that went down, down into the very bedrock. Now, as the sun grew closer to the terminator, the light of false dawn was spreading, and the Titan base activities lessened. They reached the same spot that had been reached a few years earlier by another offworlder, one who could neither get to its still hidden treasures nor escape from the planet, but who had had the guts to get the message out.
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