“Confirmed.”
Alnduul’s voice was slightly less calm. “Two hundred meters.”
Riordan jumped onto Anansi’s cargo bed, crouched behind the cargo container, saw the crocodactyl approaching out of the corner of his left eye. “Circlet, confirm weapon operational status.”
The pause was unpromising. Then, “Power supply intermittent. Probable damage at coil-battery interface.”
Riordan looked, saw the weapon was slightly crooked in the middle. He pushed upward on the muzzle; the carbine was somewhat straighter.
“Weapon operational,” the circlet reported.
“Fifty meters,” Alnduul wheezed.
Riordan shifted the muzzle carefully toward the oncoming creature. “Anansi, activate defense protocol ‘Steeple.’”
As the crocodactyl swooped down, Anansi’s eight legs swept up to meet at a point directly over the center of its cargo bed, securing Riordan within a tall, tapering cage. The creature tried to arrest its dive toward the sudden barrier, reversing the cycling of its wings. It managed to decelerate enough to merely bounce off and flop to the ground.
Riordan, holding the damaged carbine tightly, cheated it in that direction, aimed between the stacked spheres of Anansi’s legs. “Target guidon.”
An orange guidon appeared in Riordan’s HUD, arrow indicating he should nudge the muzzle to the left. As he did, the guidon became a square orange reticle, painted on the creature’s rising body.
The circlet announced, “Target lock—”
“Fire. Four times.”
The coil carbine spat rapidly.
By the fourth discharge, the computer could no longer tell which of the creature’s remaining parts were to be designated as the target.
Five seconds passed before Alnduul spoke. “I recommend delaying further travel until the weapon is repaired and the automated control system is overhauled and retested.”
“I knew you were going to say that. And Alnduul?”
“Yes?”
“Thanks.”
“You are welcome. Repair schematics are being relayed to your HUD.”
Trying to keep his hands from shaking, Riordan got to work.
Chapter Forty-One
JUNE 2124
AOZHOODN, SIGMA 2 URSA MAJORIS 2 B
Two hours later, Riordan commanded Anansi to stop at the mouth of the northern valley. What had appeared to be a sward of low, level grass was in fact a bog. Further on, surly mists hung low over the rank expanse, which stretched from the foot of the eastern slope to the base of its western counterpart. There was no sign of solid ground, so no way for Anansi to pass. Reduced visibility increased vulnerability to ambushes by predators. And the combined stink of rotting vegetation and swamp water was overpowering.
Turning Anansi west, Riordan surveyed the slopes there, first with the naked eye, then the HUD’s reified visuals. It would be hard, slow going for a while, but according to Olsloov’s mapping, the mounting foothills eventually levelled off into an extensive tableland that skirted the long, fen-filled valley.
Which was a rather strange terrain feature: although the lowland was a natural drainage basin, it did not seem to have enough inflow to sustain a marsh. Mysterious origins notwithstanding, Riordan literally and figuratively turned his back on it and ordered Anansi to ascend the foothills to the west.
Although neither particularly steep or craggy, the slopes were uneven enough that Riordan had to remain especially watchful; the bug-eyed borzoi scavengers gathered for collective mating frenzies in upland dens. Caine had no desire to turn a blind corner and interrupt one of their orgies.
As Riordan neared the rim of the plateau, he finally allowed himself to anticipate an imminent opportunity to stop, relax, gulp down some lunch, and stretch his legs. But as his eyes drew level with the upland plain, all such thoughts disappeared.
Just over three kilometers away, an immense, mostly leveled structure lay half-buried in dirt and debris. Olsloov’s initial, low-res scans had suggested that the tableland was simply covered by the spoor of long-past landslides. But at this range, other features became visible. Low corners of otherwise vanished buildings and an unnatural plenitude of shards with at least one right angle radiated outward from a vast, shattered platform made of a slatelike composite. After commanding Anansi to climb higher on the western slope in order to give the ruined expanse a wider berth, Riordan raised his hand scanner to study it in greater detail.
From that vantage point, it was evident that the entire plateau had been some kind of sprawling complex A slightly elevated central region still extended few stunted claws up at the sky. And, as Anansi’s ascent continued, further surprises were revealed.
At the northern end of the tableland, the wide-ranging destruction became a narrower path of absolute annihilation. It was as if some impossibly powerful tornado had touched down heading northwest, tearing apart rock faces and drilling into the plateau itself. However, as Anansi continued upward, Riordan discerned that the cause of the destruction had not been a natural force at all, but rather, something even more extraordinary.
Where the path of annihilation descended from the plateau, Riordan saw toppled sections of what had either been a titanic tower or a stack of monstrous tubes. The behemothic remains continued along the same northwest heading, eventually disappearing between two small hills. But on reexamination, Caine realized that the gigantic objects hadn’t fallen between the two hills: they had crashed down and through the crest of what had originally been one larger hill.
Further on, the wreckage had blocked and diverted a river, its new course marked by a distant, serpentine glimmer. Riordan traced its original downriver course to the northernmost end of the swamp. Its desiccated bed was now a channel that collected runoff from all the surrounding hills and shunted it into the low-lying valley.
Caine leaned back, tried to take in the full footprint of the past catastrophe. The debris had toppled down from whatever facility had once dominated the plateau. But even if there had been an impossibly high and heavy tower rising up from the central platform, it still would not have had enough force to smash through terrain features. That would have required a much longer fall.
Wait. Olsloov made planetfall in Aozhoodn’s equatorial downport. So, could this have been a—? “Circlet, display current global coordinates.”
The data flashed on Riordan’s HUD.
He stared at the numbers, particularly the unexceptioned string of zeros in the second value, and leaned back against the cargo container. He reached into his breast pocket, activated the headset that Oduosslun had sent to him. “This is what you meant by a dead miracle, isn’t it?”
Oduosslun’s response was immediate, as if she had been waiting on the other end. “It is but one corpse from a whole graveyard of them.”
“This was a beanstalk, a space elevator?”
“And it has been over fifteen hundred years since it fell. Now, only a few curiosity seekers ever see it. And then, only from a distance.”
Now that Riordan knew what to look for, he realized that the ruined tubular colossi were the cars that had traveled along the elevator’s length, ferrying cargo and passengers from its equator-straddling mooring point on the plateau to its terminus in space. “Where is the cable itself?”
“Too narrow to be seen at distance. But your question tells me you understand the real miracle here: a substance that was strong enough, inexpensive enough, and pliable enough to bear the mass and stresses of ground-to-orbit cable transfers. Indefinitely.”
Riordan stared at the long, ragged, trail of debris. “Indefinitely?”
“With proper support and maintenance, yes. But we became too distracted, too apathetic, to caretake even the Elders’ greatest achievements. To say nothing of our own.”
“But I thought those kinds of problems only started about five centuries ago.”
“Our decline is not recent. It has only become more pronounced, more noticeable, in recent times. The seeds w
ere sown even as we reached for greatness.”
“You mean, during your first wars with the loji?”
Oduosslun snorted, a surprisingly human sound. “Whose tutelage led you into those fishless waters? Uinzleej, I will wager. He is too enamored of the ancients to see the real truth: it was the Elders, not we, who set us on the path to lethargic timidity and from whose scraps we built our ‘Golden Age.’”
Riordan smiled sadly. “You’re starting to sound like another Dornaani I know.”
“Yes. Thlunroolt. Why are you surprised? Do you think I could possibly be unaware that Alnduul was his prized pupil? Or that I could be ignorant of his many declamations before the Senior Assembly half a century ago? And yet, while I disagree with Thlunroolt on many matters, we are of one mind on this: our reemergent civilization ‘flourished’ not because of what we created, but because of what we exhumed from the mausoleums and derelicts of the Elders. And because of that, we never mastered the knowledge that built the miracles now crumbling to dust around us.”
“And is that what I shall find at the coordinates you provided? One of those miracles?”
“Yes. Continue on your current path, toward the headwaters of that river you see far ahead.”
“What should I be looking for?”
Oduosslun’s voice was at once coy, ironic, and bitter. “You will know it when you see it.” The hiss of the headset’s carrier wave died out.
* * *
“Oduosslun was certainly right about knowing the miracle when I see it,” Riordan muttered into the circlet a day later. “Are you receiving visuals, Olsloov?”
“We are. But we must end this conversation, Caine Riordan. Oduosslun will know that you have arrived at the coordinates and may wish to communicate with you. However, she will not do so if she knows we are still comm linked. We shall only intervene if you are in danger.”
“Aren’t you even going to wish me good luck?”
“We do not believe in luck, Caine Riordan. However, I wish enlightenment unto you. In every passing second.”
The connection to Olsloov faded. Riordan dismounted Anansi and approached the object before him.
Two hundred meters high, it looked like a pyramid that had been stretched skyward: taller than its base was wide, and also thinner in cross section. The upper half of the mirror-black object was cooled by breezes, giving it a shiny coat of condensation that ran in rivulets down its unnaturally smooth face.
Bisected face, Caine mentally corrected. A split three meters wide began where the object’s apex should have been and descended to a point only two meters above where it seemed to rise out of the native rock. At the midpoint of that vertical gap was a perfectly round hole that cut straight through the object. And in the center of that twenty-meter-wide hole was a perfect black sphere, ten meters in diameter. Floating in midair.
Looking at that motionless, lightless sphere, Riordan felt his sense of reality begin to fall away…until he reaffixed it to the certainty that everything had an explanation. Neither the handheld multispectrum scanner nor the carbine’s scope had detected anything unusual about the structure during his descent into the shallow dell that it dominated.
His study of the floating sphere became more exacting, clinical. How to reach it? He had no way to fly up, and certainly no way to climb, those slick surfaces…
Wait…no way to climb?
Riordan looked back at Anansi, wondered if his emerging idea was too bizarre to work. Well, only one way to find out…
“Anansi, lower cargo bed to one meter.” As soon as the octobot kneeled, Riordan began emptying the cargo box.
* * *
Caine glanced down at his piled supplies and equipment, now far below him.
The octobot was suspended seventy-five meters above the ground. It straddled the edifice’s central slit, locked in place by six of its legs, three of which pressed against either side of the channel. Anansi’s last two legs stretched straight out into midair, ready to shift and maintain an optimal center of balance in the event of insufficient traction on either side.
One last chimney-climbing push and Riordan would be able to scramble out onto the near rim of the hole and discover how the black sphere was being held aloft at its center. But the moment he reflected upon doing so, the voice of reason calmly deafened him with, You are mad. You’re one slip away from becoming a high-impact meat-pie.
But the part of him that kept seeing Elena’s face reiterated the countervailing facts: Oduosslun didn’t contact me when I got here, didn’t answer when I tried reaching her on the headset. So it seems my choices are to go up or to give up.
There was no way either of those voices were going to relent. So he ignored them and ordered his control circlet, “Assess surface for next ascent routine.”
The circlet spent a moment accessing the handheld scanner he’d clipped on the box, facing upward. “Surface moisture on left is two percent greater than on prior ascent surface,” it reported. “Surface moisture on right, three percent greater.”
Taken as a total, this last ten-meter ascent would exceed what Riordan had approximated as the traction safety limit. But he hadn’t come this far just to give up.
“Ascend,” he ordered.
Anansi repeated its chimney climbing motions. Of the three legs maintaining full outward pressure on each side, first the middle one on the left withdrew slightly. Its spheres contracting, it then curled slowly upward until it contacted the channel’s wall approximately half a meter higher than before. The leg flexed and stiffened, exerting full pressure against the slick surface. Then the other legs took turns at completing identical motions: first the right middle leg, then the right front, then the left rear, then the left front, and finally, the right rear. At which point, Anansi was once again balanced.
So far, so good. “Ascend.”
The right center leg moved up.
Riordan studied the increasing dampness of the surface above him.
The left center leg moved up.
How close should I get before trying to scramble up to the rim of the hole? A meter? Two?
The right front leg curled upward, then reextended to lock itself against the wall…
Except it didn’t.
With a squeal, the leg’s contact, or pedal, sphere slipped down a few decimeters, throwing Riordan to that side. Which caused the leg to slip farther.
Anansi’s programming compensated. It pulled the right front leg back quickly in order to reposition and regain balance. But when it came away from the wall, the sudden load increase overcame the right middle leg’s traction. Its pedal sphere also squeaked, skittered, and then stopped. But the leg’s servos started groaning.
Fear raised the hairs on Riordan’s forearms as he assessed his predicament. Anansi was listing sharply to the right. The right front leg was dangling in midair, unable to get solid contact with the wall because of the extreme angle. And now the servos of the right rear leg were groaning in chorus with those of the middle leg: a consequence of carrying more than double its normal share of the load. Any moment, it might give and Anansi would go down—
Wait! That’s it! Go down! “Rear left leg, descend.”
Anansi obeyed; it was no longer tilted so far forward, but the right rear leg was still groaning.
“Left middle leg, descend.”
Anansi obeyed, Riordan watching for the leg to reextend to the wall. But as it did, he could hear a grinding where the right rear leg’s pedal sphere was pressed against the surface of the channel. It began to quiver.
“Right middle leg, ascend to match left middle leg.”
Anansi complied. The right rear leg shook, and then stopped quivering.
Riordan breathed heavily. “Right front leg, establish contact with surface.”
With Anansi’s tilt reduced, the right front leg was finally able to connect with the wall again.
“Equalize legs. Minimal movements.”
After about thirty seconds of the pedal spheres pushi
ng slightly upward and downward, Anansi was once again balanced.
Riordan stared at the distance to the hole. He’d lost about half a meter. He sighed. “Circlet, reduce distance of individual ascents by eighty percent.”
“Reducing current ascent interval by eighty percent: confirmed.”
Okay, baby steps, now. “Ascend.”
Chapter Forty-Two
JUNE 2124
AOZHOODN, SIGMA 2 URSA MAJORIS 2 B
After ordering Anansi to lock itself in place and enter sleep mode, Riordan pulled himself up and over the rim of the hole and checked his wristlink.
The climb had taken slightly more than an hour. At this rate, it might be dark by the time he got back down to the ground. So, whatever was keeping this ten-meter sphere in the air, he’d better figure it out quickly.
Seen up close, its utter motionlessness was even more striking. If it was being held up by electromagnetic forces, they would have to be as finely tuned and nearly as powerful as those in an antimatter containment chamber. But that required megawatts of power, which his hand-scanner should have detected.
Whatever the trick was, though, there had to be forces acting upon the sphere. Logically, to overcome the planet’s gravity, the most likely candidates an attractive force pulling upward, a repulsive force pushing upward, or both.
But testing that hypothesis could prove dangerous. Whatever was projecting those forces was probably equipped to eliminate any obstructions between itself and the sphere. And, given the sphere’s pristine surroundings, Riordan conjectured that those means of elimination were kinetic enough to discourage local avians from nesting in or even visiting this natural eyrie. So, step one: test for a safe approach.
Caine undid one of the cargo straps he’d been using as a safety line. He swung it gently through the space beneath the sphere.
As the strap traversed the midpoint, which was also the centerline of the channel in which Anansi was perched, Riordan felt its mass drop significantly. But it wasn’t the result of a mysterious field effect. Severed, the strap’s further half fell toward Anansi. Riordan studied the length of strap still in his hand: an industrial laser could not have cut the end more cleanly. Frowning, he lowered himself to examine the space directly under the sphere.
Marque of Caine Page 31
