We walked down a sloping tunnel for about twenty paces, unlit save for the glow of our lamps and quoins, and then came out into a larger chamber, which was empty but for two items of note. The second of these items was a trolley, which I shall come to, but not before discussing the first.
It was a pedestal, thrusting out of a circular hole in the ground, with wires and cables festooned all over it like a particularly fecund growth of lightvine. These wires and cables went into the floor, from whence—it was reasonably surmised—they spread out to operate The Miser’s sensors and defences. On the top of the pedestal, like an oversized paperweight, was a glass hemisphere containing a dull twinkling. It was a robot, plainly enough—or a robot’s head, I ought to say. In that sense it was no better or worse than our own robot. But whereas Paladin had substituted his old body for the diaphonous limbs and far-seeing faculties of a sailing vessel, and thereby gained a new independence of movement and perception, this poor robot was stoppered into the rock like a cork in a bottle. The Miser could not move itself; it was destined to orbit according to the whims of celestial mechanics and no other influence. Nor could it communicate, except in the very limited sense of interrogating any ship that ventured within its threshold of action. And its only means of physical interaction, if we were to credit what we had been told, lay in the firing of coil-guns: a hypothetical measure that might never be needed in reality.
The time was when I would have looked on such an impoverished condition with scorn or indifference. What were robots to me but the stupid, clumsy relics of an earlier age? I had never respected Paladin when we were younger, and it was only with painful enlightenment that I had come to understand the error of my former prejudice. Robots were meant to be our allies, not our servants. And to enforce such a state of being as this upon a thinking machine—such a cruel, limited existence, with no prospect of relief or betterment was a horror at least as bad as any imprisonment, because even the lowliest captive may cling to the sweet promise of death, when all other hopes are extinguished.
Not so this poor robot. This meagre, watch-keeping existence was the sole extent of its life. It was like shutting a person in a dark room, chaining them to the floor, and giving them only one menial responsibility for the rest of eternity.
“Can you hear me?” I asked, on the general squawk. “I am Adrana, and this is Fura. These are two other friends of ours—Prozor and Lagganvor. Blink your lights if you can understand, machine. If we can help you, we will.”
There was nothing. That dim twinkling continued. The lights in Paladin’s head were much brighter and more active in comparison. I began to suspect that this robot had suffered a withering, or an attenuation, of its higher mentality. Perhaps, when it no longer had need of parts of its mind, like language, or the instruments of companionship and sociability, it had disconnected them, the one kindness it could bestow upon itself.
“Don’t feel too sorry for it,” Fura said. “We don’t know how many crews saw the sharp end of its guns, just because they got a bit too close to this speck.”
“It wasn’t the robot’s fault, what she made of it,” I said.
Fura hooked her bag of quoins to her belt, then unhitched an axe. I tensed, expecting her to use it, but she passed it to me instead.
“You feel so bad about it, you know what to do.”
The twinkling intensified. It was still nothing like Paladin, but more than what we had seen.
“I think it’s sensing us,” I said, touching a glove to the glass. “Can you really hear me, robot? Blink as hard as you can.”
Now there was no doubt. On some level, the robot was responding. It had recognised our presence, and was able to understand my words.
“Can we help you? Blink twice for yes, once for no.”
The lights blinked twice.
“Good,” I said. “Very good. Back on our ship, there’s a woman called Surt who can help you. There’s also another robot, Paladin, who Surt has helped. We could take you from this place …”
The lights blinked once.
“You don’t want that?”
There was no response this time. I suppose I had put my question in a way that would have made any answer ambiguous. Swallowing, I started again.
“Can we help you?”
Yes.
“By moving you?”
No.
“You wish to remain here?”
No.
“You don’t want to move, and you also don’t want to remain here. Is that what you mean?”
Yes.
I glanced back at my companions. “Then … are you saying that you wish to be destroyed?”
Yes.
Yes, yes, yes.
“I’m sorry,” I said, separating my feelings from the action I was about to commit. “I’m sorry, but I understand. You mustn’t blame yourself for anything she made you do, all right? You deserved none of this. And I hope that there will be some release for you …”
Gently, Lagganvor touched his hand to the axe, even as I made to swing it. “I think, perhaps … a period of reflection is warranted?”
The robot blinked: no, no, no.
“I made a promise.”
Lagganvor’s answered me gently, but with a calm and persuasive authority. “Actually, you didn’t—I was listening. The main thing, though, is that we don’t know quite what will happen if we disconnect this robot, and I’ll warrant the robot hasn’t much of a clue either. We can’t take such a chance, not until we’ve disarmed those coil-guns. Surt would also need to examine it much more closely, and so would Paladin, just to be safe.”
“The cove’s not wrong,” Prozor said. “Smashin’ that tin-head might be a kindness, but it wouldn’t necessarily be very kind to us, not with our ship turned to matchwood.”
Lagganvor twisted the axe from my fingers and gave it back to Fura.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated, but with a different intonation this time, apologising for my weakness, not my fortitude.
“It’s the right thing,” Fura murmured, as if I wanted or needed her validation. “Leave him … it … for now. We know what has to be done, just not yet, not right now.” She hefted the quoin bag. “This is what matters, this is what we came for—not to put robots out of their misery.”
There were rails in the tunnel, stretching away into the distance in the glare from our helmet lamps. At the near end, as I have already intimated, was a sort of trolley. It consisted of a large, flat platform, long and wide enough to take our entire party, with an upright metal stanchion at the end facing into the tunnel. The trolley had small wheels that rested on the rails, and the stanchion contained a set of levers that operated a winching apparatus, as well as a manual brake, like the kind I had seen on the trams on Mazarile.
We examined it for a minute or two, but such was the simplicity of the arrangement that there was no great mystery to the trolley’s operation. The winch was for hauling it back up the slope of the tunnel, by means of a long cable, while the brake was to allow the trolley to free-wheel down the length of the tunnel, to its presumed destination.
“We shouldn’t trust anythin’ she left behind larger than an eyelash,” Prozor was saying.
“There’ll be no traps from this point in,” Fura declared, with an imperious certainty. “This is purely a practical arrangement, for moving quoins in and out of The Miser. Mostly in, I suppose.” She hopped onto the trolley and set her hands on the brake, ready to release it. “We take it, mates. We’ve come this far, so what else are we meant to do, besides gawp?”
“What if it won’t bring us back up the tunnel?” I asked.
“Then we stroll back, just as if there’d never been a trolley in the first place.” She fixed me with a doubtful look. “You ain’t getting the shivers, are you?”
I smiled back through my glass, trying to push the robot out of my thoughts. “Why ever would I get the shivers, raiding the private treasure of a dead pirate queen?”
“Because you’ve still got
a dose of sense, girlie,” Prozor whispered, giving me an encouraging slap on the back.
25
We got on the trolley. With just the four of us there was no shortage of room, and there were rails around the outer edges to hold onto. The ceiling was a bit closer to our helmets now, but there was still room to stand up straight, provided the tunnel kept its dimensions all the way down. Without any further word, Fura let the brake off and the trolley started on its way, quite softly and smoothly at first. Of course there was no noise as such, but a vibration came up through the wheels and platform, into our boots and suits, and our minds—mine, at least—had no difficulty turning that vibration into a squeaking, squealing clamour, gathering in volume and shrillness as the trolley picked up momentum.
“Ease back on the brake,” Prozor said.
“Not until we’ve got a bit of speed up. Don’t want to be wasting half our reserves of lungstuff just getting to the motherlode, do we?”
We kept accelerating, and the rumble smoothed out. We were going faster than any tram now, the walls speeding past like the lining of some awful throat down which we were being swallowed. I wondered how effective that brake would prove if we suddenly found ourselves heading for a rocky dead end. Eventually even Fura bowed to caution and she worked the brake back and forth enough to damp some of our speed, while not sapping our momentum enough to stop us. Gradually, the tunnel levelled out, or so it seemed to me. We continued a little further, a thousand spans if that, and then our lamps picked out a change in the situation ahead. Fura jammed the brake on harder and we slowed to only a brisk walking pace, before coming to a smooth halt. The rails stopped only a trolley’s length ahead of us, in the middle of a circular chamber. Had we continued, a wall would have met us.
We got off the trolley, stepping down onto a hard, level floor. The chamber was about thirty spans across and ten high, shaped like a pill-box.
Our rails had terminated, but there were seven other sets in the circular room. They started near the middle and ran off in radial directions, each vanishing into a doorway and sloping off down a smaller version of the tunnel we had come in along.
“There’s no doubt,” Fura said, opening the bag of quoins, the golden light spilling across her helmet and face, smothering—for a moment at least—the visible manifestation of the glowy. “They’re brightening even more than before—starting to throb, too, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Odd that you never mentioned any of this,” Prozor remarked to Lagganvor.
He smiled back. “Odd that you never asked.”
We walked around the perimeter of the room, shining our lamps down the other tunnels. There were no trolleys waiting for us this time, but there were fixed winches at the top of each tunnel, set back onto the level floor next to each set of rails. Sturdy metal cables stretched away into the tunnels from the winches, under evident tension.
“The quoins must be cached down those tunnels,” Fura said. “Spread around, for some reason.” She was circling the room with the sample of quoins open before her, examining them as if some fluctuation in their brightness might persuade us that one tunnel was more worthy of investigation than the others. “Anyone’s guess. I don’t think we need to go down them just yet, though. The trolleys she sent down last time must still be laden, judging by the tension on these winches. We just have to haul ’em up, one at a time.”
“Why wouldn’t she have unloaded them?” I asked.
“Sometimes we were in and out of here very quickly,” Lagganvor said. “Those were drop-offs only, when she was in a hurry to be off on some other business—such as jumping a ship like the Monetta’s Mourn. Other times, once a year or less, she’d spend a little more time here—counting and arranging her loot, I suppose. But Captain Ness is quite right: there’s every chance those trolleys are still laden, and ready to be winched back up.”
“One way to find out,” Fura said, setting down her bag of quoins and bracing herself by the first winch, near the door that came first in clockwise order from our own tunnel. “Adrana, Proz, Lagganvor. Pick three others and start winching.”
“Why the rush?” I asked.
“Because I need to know, and I need to know now. What’s on these trolleys will only be a small part of her gains, I know. But I have to see it with my own eyes. Once we know we haven’t been sold a dud, we can spend as long as we like wallowing in the rest of it.” She bent herself to the winch, and with a grunt of effort strained at the handle. It must have been stiff to begin with, but it soon freed—it could not have been all that long since Bosa had been here, after all—and the line began to creep back through the winch’s rollers, dragging the distant trolley back up the tunnel. It was slow going, perhaps a span a second, but I had no doubt that Fura would not slacken until she had her prize.
A strange and insidious competitiveness overcame me then. Rather than assisting with her plan out of a sense of sisterly obligation, I was determined to raise my trolley sooner than hers. I went to the third tunnel and began to work the winch. Submitting to the same impulse, or one closely aligned to it, Lagganvor and Prozor took the fifth and seventh tunnels respectively. Each of us gave an initial grunt as our winches loosened, and then we settled into the tedious but bearable labour of dragging our cargoes into the light.
How far down those tunnels went we had no notion, but I did not think it could be terribly far—certainly no more than a few hundred spans—or this manual arrangement would have been superseded by something faster and less labour intensive.
“Why’d she do it this way?” Prozor asked between breaths.
“Which way?” I asked back.
“Spreadin’ out her gains like this, with these tunnels all branchin’ off. This place is already knotty enough to find, let alone break into. Why make things tricky for herself, by splittin’ up the quoins?”
I kept on working the winch as I spoke. “She had her reasons, I suppose. Maybe these tunnels were already laid out like this, and she just used what was available to her.”
“Look at the bag,” Lagganvor said.
The quoins had been glowing before, but now the throbbing yellow radiance was bright enough to spill right out of the bag, even though the neck was drawn.
“Is there anything you feel we ought to know, Lagganvor?” Fura asked.
“I was never this close to the quoins—not at this stage of the operation.”
“The banks keep quoins in vaults,” I said. “Wouldn’t someone have noticed, if they glow like this?”
“Maybe the banks never kept enough quoins in one place to find out,” Prozor answered. “Or the Crawlies and Clackers and so on never let ’em, breakin’ up the deposits before they got too big.”
Inside my helmet I nodded. “Because they knew what would happen?”
“Or no one was ever this rich,” Fura said. Then, with a sudden excitement: “It’s coming up the tunnel, coves. I can see the glow.”
After a moment Lagganvor said: “Yes. I can see a yellow light too. We can’t have very far to go now.”
I saw it down my own tunnel then, and doubtless Prozor made the same observation. The same glowing yellow throb that was emanating from the bag, but magnified in power, and gaining in brightness with every crank of the winch handle.
Gradually our four trolleys came into view. We called out our observations to each other. The trolleys were smaller versions of the one we had ridden, riding narrower rails. They had railings around the sides, and each was piled with many bags. The same yellow radiance came out of the bags, leaking not just through their tops but pulsing and throbbing through their fabric. My trolley must have had fifty bags on it, easily sufficient to hold a thousand quoins, if not two thousand or more. Even without seeing a single quoin, even without knowing their individual denominations, I did not doubt that it was the greatest concentration of money I had ever seen in my life. And yet, I thought, this could only be a tiny part of Bosa’s total wealth, for she must have loaded and unloaded these trolleys th
ousands of times over the dreadful course of her existence.
My muscles were starting to burn but the sight of the trolley encouraged a late burst of effort. Yet Fura was ahead of any of us, and it was her trolley that reached the top of its tunnel first, levelling out as it climbed over the threshold. The light from its bags flooded out to fill the entire chamber, bathing us all in its sickly phosphorescence. The trolley’s contents looked less like an assemblage of items than a single molten mountain, bursting with some vast internal lava pressure.
As if rising to the challenge, the bag of quoins was now shining even brighter than before, and its throbbing seemed to be matching the rhythm of the larger haul.
My trolley was the next to surmount the rise, then Lagganvor’s and Prozor’s arrived nearly simultaneously. Some instinct, though, compelled them to stop winching when the trolleys were still on the sloping part of their track.
“This is enough,” Prozor said. “Count a few bags, just to satisfy yourself, then put this lot back where it belongs. I’m startin’ to believe there’s a good reason she never brought all this money together at once.”
Fura scooped one of the bags from her trolley. She uncinched the neck, and almost jerked back at the brightness she had unleashed. It was yellow shading to white now, and even the filtered emanation from the other bags was starting to become uncomfortably intense. I was beginning to feel as if we were in a furnace, growing hotter and brighter with each moment.
Shadow Captain Page 41
