Ring nodded. He seemed oddly detached, even for him. Griffin was about to ask if Ring needed a break from wearing the armor when Leto’s startled voice rang out. “The door that isn’t there has been opened. This facility has been breached!”
* * *
Julyan couldn’t follow half of what Falkner did to get the massive door unlocked and prompt it to open. Once again, he found himself very glad that the long-ago seegnur had a mania for backup systems. Otherwise, even if the door was unlocked, he didn’t think they could have budged it. But Falkner found a system of cables and pulleys hidden behind a wall panel. He had to splice one the of the cables but, once that was done, Siegfried—muscles straining—could open the door without assistance.
Alexander and Falkner were standing by with weapons drawn, but all they encountered on the other side was another chamber. It was smaller than the one that had ended the tunnel, but still large enough to hold all of them and the three scooters. Walls, ceiling, and floor alike were such a brilliant white that Julyan felt profoundly uneasy. It wasn’t natural for a place to be so clean. The only interruption in the white was a thin line bisecting the opposite wall. This seemed to indicate another door.
Siegfried mounted his scooter, put the defensive shield up, and glided through the opening. When he came to the wall with the door in it, he extended his still shielded hand to poke at what Julyan now saw was a pressure plate, such as those that they had used to open other doors in the seegnur’s facilities.
A female voice, light but still authoritative, made most of them jump. “All doors must be closed before the facility door will open. Please close the corridor door and press the plate again.”
Siegfried swiveled around. “Maxwell and I could go through, check things out, come back for you.”
Alexander shook his head. “We’ve already seen that our scooters’ communication units have trouble penetrating the hull metal. If you got into trouble, you’d have no way to call for help.”
“But if this room is trapped,” Siegfried said, “the entire group could be taken out.”
Alexander acknowledged this with a reluctant nod. “How about this? You go in as you said, with Maxwell, with the shields on your scooter on full. Once the door is open, you block it and open the door on this side to let us through. No gallivanting off on your own.”
When Siegfried looked as if he might balk, Falkner added, “Alexander’s right. My only suggestion is that you take Julyan rather than Maxwell. Julyan’s proven himself a good fighter already. No offense, Maxwell, but you just don’t seem to have the skills.”
The Old One gave a thin, slightly embarrassed smile. “I fear I have been more a scholar than a fighter of late.”
The statement was absolutely true, but Julyan—who had seen how fast and vicious the Old One could be in a fight—wondered that the others could swallow the lie so easily. Surely they could see how those grey eyes saw everything, the power in that deceptively slim body. Still, warmed as he was by Falkner’s phrase, Julyan felt no desire to comment.
He swung up behind Siegfried, gripping his long knife—almost a short sword.
Alexander called, “Don’t disappoint me, Julyan. Bring my big brother back safe and sound.”
The words held the force of a command, but Julyan wouldn’t have done otherwise. He had nothing against Siegfried Dane. Keeping him alive would be a pleasure.
And the enemies of my enemies are almost my friends, he thought. This time, what Alexander and I want is the same. Our hunt brings me closer to where Adara may be. How could I want more?
“Before I close the door from out here,” Falkner called, “do you see a release there?”
“I do,” Siegfried called. “There’s a matching panel. Probably opens to the same mechanism.”
“Good luck!”
The hull metal door slid shut with a ponderously final thud. When nothing could be seen behind them other than a thin dark line that matched the one on the door in front of them, Siegfried again punched the pressure plate. The female voice spoke with even precision.
“Password requested. Speak clearly or enter the characters into the associated tablet.”
Something bright shimmered into being against the whiteness of the wall alongside the pressure plate. Siegfried cursed softly.
“Speak clearly,” the female voice repeated. “That last did not transmit to the audio receptors.”
Siegfried looked frustrated. Then, moving his fingers rapidly, he touched a series of glowing characters. Julyan could read, but this was no alphabet he knew. He wondered if Siegfried did or if he was only guessing.
“Incorrect password,” the voice said with definite disapproval. “One final attempt is permitted before counter-intruder actions will be taken. Timer activated, now!”
A new picture appeared on the wall. Julyan couldn’t read the characters on this one either, but a brilliant green line rapidly decreasing in length left no doubt as to what was indicated.
Without bothering to turn the scooter around, Siegfried thrust it into reverse, backing with incredible speed and force. Only the trust Julyan had learned to put in the protective force shield kept him from screaming in protest or trying to jump clear before they hit the door.
As they hit, the female voice spoke with dispassionate clarity. “Instituting counter-intruder measures.”
A hissing noise filled the air. Julyan felt his ears pop. Cursing, Siegfried slammed the scooter back again into the door with no effect. Julyan’s jaw snapped shut and blood streamed into his mouth from where he’d bitten the inside of his cheek. His ears popped again and he began to feel light-headed. Blood was running from his nose. He wondered when he’d hit it.
“Damn! They’re voiding the air!”
Siegfried swung off the scooter and staggered over to the wall that hid the manual door lock. Spitting blood onto the floor, his spinning thoughts making peculiarly significant patterns from the brilliant red against the icy white, Julyan forced himself to join Siegfried. Together, the two big men tried to pry the panel loose, but either this mechanism worked differently or the counter-intruder measures included locking the panel in place.
Sensible … Julyan thought, his knees buckling. Consciousness was swaying in and out of focus when with a loud slam, the door behind them burst open. Air swooshed into the room. There were shouts of alarm.
He recognized Alexander’s voice, shrilly excited. “We’ve gotten to them in time! They’re both alive.”
Then a low hiss in his ear. “Didn’t I tell you to take care of my big brother?”
* * *
When Julyan’s head cleared, Seamus was sponging the blood off his face and the three Dane brothers were talking all at once in their own language. When Seamus said with flat disinterest, “Julyan is coming around, seegnur,” the chatter switched to the language of Artemis.
Alexander must have forgotten his anger, for he was the first to come over to Julyan.
“You passed out from a combination of blood loss and lack of air. Suck this. It will help with the pain and speed healing. You took a nasty bite out of your cheek.”
Julyan, his spinning head mingling this order with others, began to refuse. Then he realized that Alexander was holding out a small, flat tablet. It smelled faintly of some sort of berry. Alexander smiled when Julyan took it.
“Good. We’ve already given you something for the blood loss. You’ll be in fighting form in no time.”
Alexander stepped back to make way for Siegfried, who sank down next to Julyan, waving Seamus away. Siegfried had blood on his coverall but, from the splatter pattern, Julyan guessed not all of it was his own. The deliberation of his movements showed that Siegfried, too, was recovering from their ordeal.
“Good job in there, man. I’m sorry about not warning you before I slammed the scooter. I felt the change in the air and thought they might be pumping in some sort of gas. Wanted to try and bust us out before we couldn’t do anything.”
“Instead,” F
alkner called from a short distance away, “it looks as if the mechanism was designed to remove the air from the chamber so that any intruders would pass out. It wouldn’t have been a complete vacuum, but very unpleasant. Wouldn’t work against anyone wearing an environmental suit, but against a wandering tourist or local, very neat indeed.”
“So we can’t get through?” Julyan asked. His mouth felt thick, but speaking wasn’t impossible.
“Actually,” Siegfried replied, “I think we can. Alex and Falkner took a look around. Five hundred years dried out the insulation and sealant. The pressure shifts during the attempt to remove the air pulled a lot of it loose. Falkner, Maxwell, and Alexander are clearing enough away that if the same trick is tried we might feel a pressure shift, but that’s about it.”
“The woman?” Julyan spoke very carefully, all too aware he might bite his numbed tongue or lips. “Who spoke. She’s not complaining?”
Siegfried looked puzzled, then smiled. “It wasn’t a real person. It was a recording—similar to the sort you’ve seen us make on our datapads or that the scooter uses to provide piloting updates.”
Julyan nodded. He was feeling stronger with every breath. One advantage to working with these off-planet seegnur was that their medicines were very good and they were liberal about sharing them.
“So you’re not worried about her not liking things being pulled apart.”
Alexander, his coverall now dusty and littered with bits of pale yellow and burnt orange stuff, rejoined them. He held out one hand to show them a small device cradled in a gloved palm. Julyan had no idea what it was, but he didn’t figure the charred black hole near the center had been part of the original design.
“We’ve found several of these or things like it,” Alexander said. “Guess?”
Siegfried looked annoyed, as he often did with Alexander’s little games, but he played along nonetheless. After inspecting the bit of machinery, he said, “The air voiding system was only one of several anti-intruder measures. Someone came through here and disabled the ones that would do the most damage, but left the one—probably the least fatal—activated just in case.”
“That’s what we think,” Alexander agreed.
Falkner wandered over, holding more charred pieces of equipment. “The walls, on the other hand, would take an industrial-strength construction beam to cut through—and that’s if there’s not another layer of something even tougher sandwiched between where I can’t get a look at it. If we’re going through, it’s through this door or back down the tunnel to Spirit Bay and overland to Maiden’s Tear—and then hope we can find a way in.”
“And hope,” said the Old One, coming over brushing more of the yellow and orange litter off his clothing, “that Griffin and his companions still remain. Might not the warning we were given have triggered an alarm elsewhere? If we delay, we might arrive only to find our quarry flown.”
“That would be a nuisance,” Siegfried agreed.
Falkner cut in. “Even if we don’t find Griffin, consider what might be on the other side! We can’t give up with taking a closer look. The walls are tougher than we can cut through, but any place made to open will be a system’s weak point. I think I can get us through fairly quickly.”
“You opened several other doors,” Siegfried said. “I don’t have a problem with giving you a chance at this one—but you do your work with the first door blocked open, understand? And you let us know before you trigger anything. Julyan and I got lucky last time. We’re not going to trust to luck again.”
* * *
“This facility has been breached!” Leto’s voice as she repeated the warning sounded very much like that of a frightened little girl.
“Where?” Griffin asked. He was already turning in the direction of their exit into the valley, when Ring broke into a ponderous run and vanished deeper into the facility, heading for a point where there were several very wide corridors. Griffin had wondered about these during their initial tour, since there seemed little reason for such so deep in the facility.
I dismissed them as relics of the original construction, he thought as he ran after Ring, especially since they faced into the mountain range. What if they weren’t relics? What if they were for bringing in supplies from one of the landing areas? From Spirit Bay? The direction’s right …
He wondered at his own shortsightedness, then decided to give himself a break. After all, their first encounter with Leto’s facility had been one of horror—the place knee deep in the dead. Later, when the cleanup had been concluded and Leto had softened somewhat to them, they had discovered the spaveks and other wonders. Oversized corridors were minor puzzles by contrast.
Terrell was loping alongside him. “The Old One?”
“Who else?”
“He may have more allies than just Julyan,” Terrell said. “I wish Adara and Sand Shadow were here. We may well be seriously outnumbered—and if it’s an attack group, they’re going to be far better armed than we are.”
Ring had outdistanced them. Now they heard his voice speaking with the vibrant note that indicated he had sealed the helmet of the blue spavek. Griffin realized he was relaxing. Their enemies better armed? Terrell was forgetting …
“Halt,” Ring’s voice boomed. “Go no further.”
The voice that replied was not the Old One’s, but one Griffin knew all too well.
“Sweet lodun’s balls! Working power armor!”
Griffin heard himself calling out before he knew he was speaking. “Falkner? Falkner!”
He ran forward, feeling Terrell’s hand tug his sleeve as if the factotum had begun to hold him back, then refrained. He heard Falkner’s voice, shouting in excitement.
“Griff! Griff! We have found you then.”
Behind Falkner’s voices, others: Alexander? Siegfried? Griffin had no time to slow his charge forward when he recognized another: Julyan. And that other, soft and level, surely that was the Old One! The scene that met his gaze when he rounded a corner and came up alongside Ring was somehow incongruous, even though the voices had given him some warning.
The hall had opened into a large white chamber in which stood six people: three of his older brothers, the Old One, Julyan, and a boy little older than Kipper. They were mounted in pairs on three all-purpose travel scooters. These had their defense shields up, encompassing their riders behind protection that Griffin realized nothing but the weapons in the spaveks might penetrate—and he wasn’t about to bet on that.
Falkner was beaming, genuinely happy to see Griffin, though his gaze kept drifting to the unknown element represented by Ring. Siegfried looked pleased, but his eyes were narrowed in what Griffin recognized as calculation. Alexander’s face bore a feverish expression that someone who didn’t know him might take for delight, but that made Griffin’s blood chill. An overexcited Alexander could be extremely dangerous.
The Old One sat behind Siegfried, his features schooled to careful neutrality. Griffin had been his captive long enough to recognize that the Old One’s apparent passivity was far more dangerous than it seemed. He wondered if Siegfried knew what sort of creature he had seated behind him.
Probably not, or he would never have let him inside his shield.
The boy’s expression was slack, barely interested. He reminded Griffin of someone, someone he’d seen recently … He remembered then. Several of the captives they’d rescued from the Old One’s breeding project had worn just such expressions, though whether they were the result of some birth defect or of their training he had not had opportunity to learn.
It took a moment for Griffin to realize that the white-haired man with the lined face who sat behind Alexander was Julyan, but the way that the handsome mouth pulled into a hungry smile gave him away. Julyan’s dark-eyed gaze darted back and forth, searching for someone he did not find. Griffin was aware that Terrell and Bruin had joined them, of Kipper huddling near the back. That was all of them, other than Honeychild, Sam the Mule, and the horses, who then?
Adara! He’s looking for Adara and for no good reason, either.
Suddenly, Griffin’s pleasure at seeing his brothers again, at being found, melted into apprehension so severe he had to fight to keep his knees from shaking. Julyan with that expression on his face meant no good for his Artemesian friends—maybe not even for himself. He had assumed his brothers commanded this expedition, but perhaps the Old One was actually in charge?
Siegfried was speaking. “Do you command this?” He indicated Ring with a gesture.
Griffin looked at him. “Aren’t you going to say hello, Siegfried?”
“Hello, Griffin. We had heard you were alive. Now, do you command this thing?”
“And if I do?”
Griffin was aware of motion behind him. Terrell strode up to stand next to him. Only someone who didn’t know him as well as Griffin did would believe there was anything but innocent pleasure in the action.
“Griffin, are these your brothers? Surely they’ve found you far more quickly than you imagined possible. And the Old One! What a tremendous surprise … Or perhaps not so great a surprise at that. We all know he has a tendency to turn any circumstance to his advantage.”
Confusion flickered for a moment on Siegfried’s face. The wicked merriment that lit Alexander’s eyes brightened. Falkner suddenly looked wary. Julyan reached for a weapon, but halted in midmotion at some low voiced command from Alexander. Only the Old One and the dull-faced boy did not react.
Griffin took advantage of the diversion. “Yes. These are three of my brothers—Siegfried, Falkner, and Alexander. How did you three link up with my former kidnapper, anyhow?”
“Kidnapper?” It was Falkner, always the least scheming of the three, who spoke. “And who is this Old One? These are locals we encountered soon after we splashed down near the old landing facility and started looking for you.”
“Certainly, Julyan and the Old One didn’t pretend they’d never heard of me,” Griffin countered. “Did they somehow leave out that the Old One kept me imprisoned until my friends broke me out? Did they fail to mention that at my last meeting with Julyan he was either trying to kill me or kidnap me once more?”
Artemis Invaded Page 24
