"You didn't penetrate through any farther in that direction?" Xelu inquired.
Caton shook his head behind his helmet visor—although in the darkness it would be invisible. "The plan showed there were only sealed storage compartments that way. The access door through to them was closed, and we couldn't pick up any readings of movement or identity transmissions. It seemed better to use the time we had to check other places." He was beginning to wonder uncomfortably if the SA party had uncovered more bodies that they thought he should have found. But in times like that, these decisions had to be made. Xelu would understand that.
But Xelu said, "Let's have a look, then," and picking his way carefully through the wreckage ahead of them, he continued, "One of the things we're doing is increasing our weapons stocks at various strategic locations. But to avoid attracting undue attention with sudden manufacturing requests, we're trying to make as much use as possible of the stocks that were built up during the Emergency period." He meant a time around twelve years prior to Athena, when there had been fear of the political tension that had existed between Kronia and Earth at that time leading to armed conflict. "Our records showed that there was a considerable inventory here that hadn't been recovered. The reports sent back after the impact wrote them off as inaccessible and probably not worth the effort. But our needs have changed since then, and we were sent out to assess what would be involved in retrieving them. And what we found is this. . . ."
Xelu stepped aside to let the beams of light show a dark opening leading on through what had been an impassible barrier. He ran a finger of his gauntlet over the end of a piece of metal ribbing. The edge was rounded by melting, showing that it had been cut by heat, not broken in the impact. His flashlight beam picked out spatterings of melted metal on the floor below, and beneath more severed members beyond. "It wasn't like this when you last saw it, Mr. Caton?' Xelu asked. "Either at the time of the accident, or in any of your visits subsequently."
"No!" Caton was bemused. "There was no way through there. As I told you, all that we had reason to believe existed there was a closed door leading into a sealed storage area."
"That was where the weapons were," Xelu said. "The door has been cut open."
A gasp sounded from Norburn. "And the weapons?"
"What's left are old or of inferior quality. Whoever took them knew what they were doing. We made a circuit of the area before calling you. The ground in the immediate vicinity was churned up by the activity going on here up to the final evacuation. But there are traces of a ground track leading away toward the east that cuts through the other markings, meaning it was made more recently. It gets lost farther out among the general impact gardening. What it looks like is that whoever pulled this off landed some distance away in the opposite direction from Omsk, below the radar horizon, and came overland."
"How long ago did this happen?" Caton asked. The question was mechanical. He was still grappling with the implications.
"Impossible to say," Xelu answered. "From the degree of erosion of the tracks, given the current conditions, I'd say six months at least. . . . It could have been anytime in the last year." He paused for a moment, then went on, "It seems there are those among us who would try to impose their wills by methods that are not the Kronian way. We hoped it would never come to this. But if we are left with no choice but to defend against force with force, then that is how it will be."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The impression that had registered most forcibly with Keene was the frightening thoroughness with which practically all traces of a civilization that had taken such pride in its global extent and achievements appeared to have been wiped out. Without Kronia, by the time a new order rose again of its own accord, just about all memory of what had gone before would have been lost.
Europe was a wilderness of volcanic desolation and cooling lava sheets, with a two-hundred-mile-long canyon gouged across the center, carved during one of the titanic electrical exchanges that had occurred when Earth's and Athena's magnetospheres intersected. Everything that was once Southeast Asia had disappeared, subducted miles deep beneath crustal plates overthrusting from the south, and from what could be made of the acoustic patterns being sent back from seismic packs scattered about the surface, it was still sinking.
Currently, he was looking down from a height of about three thousand feet over a landscape of marshy valleys and mud flats winding among ridges of sand and gravel below a gray overcast. As far as could be judged, it was where New York City had been. Yet not a brick nor a girder was to be seen, not a sign of turnpike or a piece of dockside wall. Not even the lines of the Hudson or the East rivers, Long Island Sound, or the New Jersey shore could be found. The entire former seaboard from Maine to the Carolinas lay buried beneath a thousand feet of sediments deposited by immense walls of water surging up the continental slope, leaving the new coastline meandering a hundred to three hundred miles farther east.
Keene banked into a slow turn and began following an expanse of black, oily pools and yellow sulfur sludge extending away into a haze of sullen hydrocarbon vapors. A data set superposed itself on the view, showing the updated bearing, speed, and rate of climb. A zoom-in on one of the pools showed it to be bubbling torpidly. A forlorn tatter of reeds had somehow managed to appear along its edge.
"An anguished dawn," Gallian had called it. The beginning of a new world. New life would be given, and a new story would unfold. Keene thought about the story only now being uncovered of a past far more rich and complex than the simple tale that had once been told of an orderly progression from uncomplicated beginnings leading undeviatingly through the historical ages neatly labeled in generations of textbooks to the civilization that had ended in the twenty-first century. But now a different story was emerging. How many other sagas of human existence had been written and lost in folds of time now vanished between convulsions that had rent and reshaped the Earth—of entire peoples who had lived, loved, died, raised their children and their cities, they and all their works as lost and forgotten as yesterday's footprints on the beach before a storm? How close had even the latest technological-industrial culture, with all its illusions of superlativeness and permanence, come to being just another of them?
"Well, what do you think?" Heeland's voice asked.
"Impressive," Keene replied. "Who ever would have thought that flying could be so easy?" The complete aerodynamic repertoire was controlled by a few set motions of the gloves.
"Some people say they feel the signal delay when they've gotten tuned to it. We're talking about almost ten thousand miles each way just at the moment. Do you notice it?"
"I can't say I do. I guess I'm still too new."
"Do you want to carry on for a while longer?"
"No, that's fine. You can bring me back. I just wanted to get a taste of how it works."
The image in Keene's helmet vanished and was replaced by blackness. Moments later, he felt the helmet being loosened and raised his head to help Heeland lift it clear. He was back in the Varuna's Survey Control section, from where the probes sent down to view and map the surface were controlled, and the landing of instrumentation packages directed. The scene of northeast America that he had been viewing was still showing on a screen above the console, creeping by slowly as the probe continued flying on automatic program.
"Do the probes link directly to the satellites?" Keene asked curiously as he unfastened his seatbelt and nudged with his elbows to drift clear.
"We prefer not to, until we've established full synchsat cover," Heeland answered. "It's too easy to get stuck in a dead spot—especially when you're putting a lander down. We keep a high-altitude airmobile circling as a relay over an area where we're active—as we're doing with the probe you were hooked into just now. The mobile that's relaying from it is up at around sixty thousand feet. They can stay up for months if they have to. We also use them to ferry probes to remote operating areas."
"Months?" Keene repeated.
"Plutonium-fuele
d, helium-cooled fission pack. Your kind of toy, Lan. Like to see one?"
"Sure."
Heeland pushed off from a structural beam and navigated ahead from the instrumentation room, through a hatch into a side gallery. Keene followed him down to the Fitting Bay below, which was where the probes were equipped and maintained. It was a large space, with technicians working on various satellite packages as well as aerial pods and probes. Heeland indicated a peculiar-looking vehicle at the far end. It consisted of a large disk-shaped body maybe twenty feet in diameter, orange on top and white underneath, with three ducted fans in pivot housings around the periphery, and a pair of black fins above. Three semi-enclosed racks on the underside were obviously for carrying probes, although they were empty at present. They looked as if they hinged open to launch the probes downward, like bomb doors.
Heeland had started to head toward the airmobile, but checked himself and turned when he realized that Keene wasn't following. Keene had stopped beside a sleek metallic gray shape eight feet or so long, secured in one of the berthing cradles. A technician in white coveralls was working on it, using tools arrayed on a magnetic rack at the end of a jointed arm clamped nearby. "Mind if I look? I think I was just flying one of these over New York," Keene said.
"Be my guest," the technician said, gesturing. Keene knew his face from seeing him around during the voyage out, but they had never had cause to talk. He was of heavy-set build, swarthy skinned with a ragged mustache, and had dark wavy hair held down by a cap.
"Is this one of the probes I was in?" Keene called to Heeland.
Heeland moved himself back. "Yes, exactly right. This is Owen Erskine, one of the bay crew here. Owen, Dr. Landen Keene. He's in charge of the power system."
"Yeah, I've heard the name. Homecoming for you too, eh?"
Keene peered more closely but didn't recognize him as being from among the refugees brought back by the Osiris. "You weren't one of the refugees, were you, Owen?"
"No. But I'd only just moved to Kronia when it happened. Used to be from Jersey. Did network stuff. How did things look there to you?"
"I don't think you'd want to renew your lease," Keene said.
"But we'll start all over, eh? That's why we're here. That's what it's all about, eh?" Erskine's eyes were bright, hopeful almost.
"Is that why you came back?" Keene asked.
"Maybe . . . Part of it anyhow. Couldn't stand living in those tin cities anymore."
Keene drifted slowly around the probe, touching a part of it here and there, taking in the details. "More elaborate than I realized," he commented to Heeland. Its form reminded him of an old cruise missile, but instead of a warhead it carried a nose unit bristling with lenses and sensors. Panels were opened to give access for whatever work Erskine was doing on it. One of the exposed compartments contained boxes that looked like rations packs. There was also a medical kit, a stack of folded fabric items, and various tools. "What's all this?" Keene asked, gesturing.
Heeland pulled himself closer. "One of those ideas that mission planners come up with," he replied. "In this case, probably not a bad one."
Erskine patted the probe's engine cowling affectionately. "These babies go everywhere, and they can get down just about anywhere," he explained. "There are going to be people all over that vacation heaven of a planet down there, and some of them are going to get hurt, get lost, or otherwise get into some kind of trouble."
"Okay, I get it. Mobile survival units," Keene completed.
"Exactly right," Heeland said.
"A good idea," Keene agreed. "I'm actually with the planners for once. So what have we got?" He leaned over the hatch and began poking around. "Food, medical stuff, uh-huh . . . And these here—a clothing store too?"
"Survival tent. A few keep-you-warm, keep-you-dry kinds of things. Some good stretchy boots," Heeland answered.
"And this looks like a Boy Scout kit."
"Mend it, fix it—everything but the tool that gets stones out of horses' hooves. I guess they didn't reckon on having any horses."
"An automatic and ammo? Who are we starting a war with now?"
Heeland shrugged. "You never know what you might come up against, I guess."
"It's a phone booth too," Erskine said. "That panel at the back—emergency band link via the airmobile, or direct to satellite."
"We like to take care of our customers," Heeland said. Typical Kronian. Appretiare.
The compad in Keene's tunic pocket beeped. "Excuse me," he said, drawing it out. The caller was Shayle. She looked excited.
"Lan, we've just heard. The African site has been selected. The descent team is clearing the ground, and the backup crew is preparing to go down now. We'll be following pretty soon!"
"That's great!" Keene said.
The latest candidate site for a base was located in what had been the area east of the Great African Rift, and was now a four-thousand-mile-long peninsula extending south from the crumpled remains of Iran to a splayed tip formed out of Mozambique and Madagascar, between the reduced Indian Ocean and the new ocean forming to the west. The peninsula had been named Raphta, after a large East African trading center described in Roman times but never positively identified. As far as could be ascertained, the area surveyed for the base lay in what had previously been northern Tanzania. Once tropical parkland, it was now a wilderness of crustal upheaval, flood-scoured tablelands, and swamps, its climate cooling under the influence of the new polar region to the south.
"Does it mean the base has a name now?" Keene asked.
Shayle nodded. "Borrowed from the old days. Gallian has decided to call it Serengeti."
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The skies had changed in the course of the last year or so—not that Rakki had any clear concept of what a year was or why it was important. It was something that White Head kept track of by marking notches in a piece of bone for every day that passed. There were still storms and lightning, and winds that brought cold, sometimes with snow, if they came from the south; rain if from the west; dry, choking dust from the east. But the sky overhead had lightened and seemed higher, breaking up at times into patches of gray cloud and streamers moving against a ceiling that came close to white. In fact, on one or two occasions, even the ceiling had opened briefly to reveal glimpses of a pale, watery blueness that Rakki had heard was supposed to exist up there but had never known whether to believe. Perhaps the flashes he sometime saw in his mind of a dazzling light in the sky shining down over a world of color and life were real after all. And yet, strangely, he was unable to recall any details of that world—of the trees that White Head said had stood high overhead everywhere, or the places filled with people. Sims said that people's minds protected themselves by shutting out memories that it would be too painful to know could never be experienced again. Generally, the air seemed to be colder, which caused aches in his wounds and in his leg at night.
Even so, the valley was looking greener these days. Slim shoots were appearing in more places, which the Oldworlders said would one day become trees many times the height of a man. When Rakki asked them how long that would take, it turned out—strangely—that none of them really knew.
He took in the view as he and White Head came over the crest of the ridge, riding side by side on what White Head called "mules"; but at the same time he said they weren't like "real" mules, whatever that meant. Being carried on animals had been widespread in the former times, White Head said—but the animals they had then were larger and faster, but apparently were not the cattle that had existed in herds of thousands. Rakki had thought it strange that they would bother riding animals at all if they also possessed metal birds that they could fly in. But he had long given up trying to make sense of the conflicting and often seemingly contradictory things that Oldworlders said.
It had never occurred to Rakki that animals might be made to carry people. With his crooked leg that no longer bent fully, it was his main way of getting around these days, and his only means of traveling l
ong distances. Sims had found the mules petrified in a canyon after an earthquake and suggested using them, initially as a way of moving Rakki more easily. That had been in the times following Rakki's rescue, over a year ago now. All he remembered was returning briefly to consciousness as he lay on the rocky ledge where he had fallen, and then nothing more until a long time after that. He knew the story only from the things the others told him.
It was White Head who had first grown suspicious after Rakki's departure from the caves with Shingral and the others, when he heard Gap Teeth's account of Zomu's warning to Rakki. From his own observations, White Head had seen signs of too close a collusion between Zomu and Jemmo to trust Zomu's story. When he learned of how the result had been to separate Rakki from one of his two staunchest defenders, he became alarmed that this might have been precisely the intention. Convincing Gap Teeth that it was Rakki, not Shell Eyes, who was in danger—and that in any case he, White Head, would watch over her—he had persuaded Gap Teeth to set out after the party in order to aid Rakki and Shingral if they encountered trouble. But before Gap Teeth caught up with them, he had spied Alin and Dorik returning alone and was barely able to conceal himself before they passed. Two miles farther on, as night was falling, he came across Shingral's body lying on a trail above a high precipice, stabbed from behind. On looking over the edge, he spotted Rakki on a ledge some distance below. He could see no sign of Zomu.
With darkness falling, there was not much Gap Teeth could do but find a way to climb down. Rakki had lost consciousness, but there was little doubt that Gap Teeth's attentions in tending and binding his wounds, covering him with skins that he carried, and lending his own body warmth through a long night had saved Rakki's life. Morning found them covered in snow. Rakki was delirious by then, and although he took some sips of water and a few berries, he hadn't known who Gap Teeth was. Trying to maneuver an injured and inert body back up to the trail single-handedly would have been impossible. So, after making Rakki as comfortable as he could and tying a line looped around a flake of rock to his belt to prevent Rakki from rolling off the ledge, Gap Teeth climbed back up on his own and set off back for the caves.
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