by Chris Bunch
There was a hole where his chest had been and a pile of white dust above and below the hole where a strange decay was spreading.
“This was a looter,” Wolfe said. “Somebody managed to land without alerting the Federation or else came down before the interdiction was put on.”
“What would he have sought?”
“Hardware. Programming. Raw knowledge, maybe. The word was your computers were faster, more intuitive than ours. I never knew anybody who’d operated both, so I can’t say. He must’ve believed the story. He” — Wolfe looked around at the other six bodies — “and his friends. They had enough brains to find this place …” He shrugged. “Now what do we do?”
“I do not like this at all,” the Al’ar said.
“I’m not exactly overjoyed. What are our options? Find another world?”
“No. This is the only location I know for certain. We could spend the rest of our lives on other homeworlds’ undergrounds, looking,” Taen said.
“And maybe running into another one of these nasty little traps,” Wolfe said. “All right. We’ll come up with another plan that doesn’t require heavy thinking. Drop the computer idea.”
“We have one option. We could seek out the computer itself.”
“Which you said is under us. How far down did the Al’ar dig? I never knew of anything other than the upper civilian levels when I lived here, you know.”
“We dug … very deeply.”
“You said we could spend two forevers looking for a simple operating station. How will it be easier looking for Big Mama?”
“Easier in the looking because its location will be close to our Final Command Station. This is where we would have fought from, if you had landed on Sauros. Instead … we found another Way.”
“All right. And I would guess that there’ll be even more traps for intruders.”
“Not just for Terrans,” Taen said. “No Al’ar was permitted to go to these places without special permission, guides, and passes.” He paused. “The machine will be as perfect a deathtrap as our finest soldiers could devise.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The ramps curled down into darkness, broken now and again as still-sensing lamps flared, died as they passed.
Three levels below the military tunnel system, huge doors hung open. Inside was a great hangar with lines of in-atmosphere interceptors, sagging drunkenly, their skid-shocks slowly collapsing as fluid leaked away.
“We would have launched these when your ships entered Sauros’ atmosphere,” Taen explained. “Buildings above had been constructed with demolition charges so they would fall away at the proper time.”
“Clever,” Wolfe said neutrally. Both spoke in Al’ar. It seemed safer.
The next level was barracks for the pilots and maintenance crews, with long rows of resting racks stretching away into darkness. The padding on the racks had begun to unravel and trailed on the decks. Wolfe noted that nothing, not man, not rat, not cat, had made trails in the thick dust. He thought he could hear the faint whisper of a still-functioning air-circulation system.
Taen moved in front of Joshua as they went on. Wolfe found his hand hovering over his gun and grinned wryly, wondering what in this long-dead labyrinth would need shooting. Booby traps are impervious to a quick draw.
Taen held up a grasping organ, crouched, and pointed to the wall. Wolfe saw nothing, felt beyond.
Death … the snout of a blaster muzzle behind the metalloid … trigger-sensor still alive …
They crawled under the sensor, got up, and went on.
The corridor they were in opened up, the walls hidden in the gloom, and another ramp went down, winding, turning. Joshua felt great space around him.
More and more of the automatic lights had failed, and so they took flashes from their packs, continued on.
Wolfe heard a whine of gears and went flat. The sound grew louder, and the ramp swiveled sideways, trying to dump them off. Joshua scrabbled toward the edge of the ramp as it turned, held it, and Taen’s grasping organs had him by the leg.
He hung, gasping, over emptiness.
The Al’ar clawed his way up Wolfe’s body, found a hold on the ramp, and they clung for long moments until the ramp settled back to level.
“I did not sense that coming,” Taen whispered.
“Nor I. I heard the sound of its machinery just before it began functioning.”
“But you sensed it before I. Perhaps you should lead. I must tell you that none of these devices was operative the times I was ordered to come this way.”
Wolfe hesitated, then obeyed. The Lumina was warm against his skin. The darkness around him was chill and smelled faintly of ozone.
The walls drew in once more, and they walked down a corridor that might have been on a spaceship.
At the end of the passage was a door. Wolfe was about to insert a finger into the opening sensor notch, then stopped. He knelt, peered into the slot, saw nothing.
He took the pack from his back, and pulled out a jimmy and a hammer. He motioned Taen out of the way, then tapped the dogs of the hinge free, caught the door as it tottered, and eased it to the deck.
Taen held up his grasping organs in a questioning gesture. Wolfe turned the door over and slid the tip of the jimmy into the sensor notch, turning his head away as he did.
A violet laser-blast flashed, burning a half-inch hole in the ceiling above them. Taen hissed, said nothing.
Their way was level once more. Taen came close, whispered, “Now we are on the base level. What we seek should be close.”
Once more the walls were far distant, invisible. Wolfe coughed, and sound echoed into the distance.
Taen took the lead again and went on, his head moving back and forth like a questing hound’s.
Domes, some small, some huge, rose around them. Taen stopped at one.
“Here is the place we would have commanded the final battle from.”
Curious, Wolfe started to activate the door to the command center. Taen stopped him.
“Our business is not in there. Why should we risk encountering another trap?”
Wolfe held up his hands, agreeing, and abandoned curiosity.
He heard the purring of engines and then light crashed up around them, blinding them. The engine-sound grew louder, and something hovered toward them from the darkness.
Wolfe knew it from the war.
It was a four-barreled auto-cannon, triggers linked to motion detectors. Wolfe rolled as the cannon churned rounds, tearing up the metal deck where he’d been. The cannon swiveled, long-disused bearings squealing, spat a stream of solid bullets, and once more he rolled, coming up in a squat.
The Lumina burned against him as he frog-jumped sideways, and the cannon swept past him.
He froze, barely breathing. The cannon’s pickups scanned the area he was in, found nothing, swept in increasingly greater arcs.
Wolfe inhaled sharply, about to dive for the gun’s base, into its dead zone, and Taen rose from the darkness, blaster in both grasping organs, and blew the sensor off the cannon-mount.
The cannon blatted a burst into nowhere, ground into silence. It floated away, aimlessly, its guns looking here, there, nowhere.
Taen beckoned, and Wolfe followed him, around the great bulk of the command center.
An arched doorway rose from the deck. Taen tried the opening sensor. The door remained locked.
Wolfe took lockpicks from his beltpouch and slipped them into the slot. He felt as he moved them, trying to think as an Al’ar.
He felt a humming through the picks, jerked his hands out as the door slid smoothly open.
Inside were the banks of a great Al’ar strategy computer.
Taen slid his hand down a multicolored strip next to a rack, and around him screens lit. A larger screen, almost a yard on a side just in front of Taen remained blue-black, inactive.
“It lives!”
“It would have been a not life-enhancing experience if it had not, considering o
ur passage,” Wolfe said.
“That is what you call sarcasm I would guess,” Taen said. “I did not know it was possible to do that in Al’ar.”
The holograph rose in front of him, the computer’s “keyboard.” Dim green light formed vertical squares, and in each was a character or combination of characters in Al’ar.
“Let us hope that it will recognize me.”
Wolfe pulled up a resting rack and made himself as comfortable as possible.
Two hours later the dark screen in front of Taen blinked into life, swirled through a color wheel, shades unseen by Wolfe since he was last on an Al’ar world.
“Now we have a starting point,” Taen said.
“Start by asking about the Guardians.”
Taen’s impossibly long fingers moved, screens showed figures, then a diagonal multicolored band appeared across the main screen. Taen’s grasping organ shot out, and the screen blanked.
“That I do not like.”
“What occurred?” Wolfe asked.
“Be silent. Let me attempt the task again.”
Again his fingers moved against the “keyboard,” and again the diagonal band flashed and Taen was cut out of the program.
“The machine has defenses and takes precautions. I thought I had a high-enough permission, what you call clearance, but any attempt to inquire in the area of Guardians produces a warning. If I persisted, I suspect the whole computer would shut down on me. Do you have a suggestion?”
“I think,” Wolfe said, “we stay light-years away from that area. You realize that what just happened confirms the existence of the Guardians.”
Taen’s hood flared slightly, then subsided. “No, I had not yet … of course. Certainly it must. I wonder what has become of my intelligence? I am behaving entirely like a broodling.”
“Don’t concern yourself,” Wolfe said. “I never thought you were highly gifted in the arena of thinking.”
“Such is obvious,” Taen said. “I chose to associate with Terrans.”
Wolfe looked at the Al’ar in considerable astonishment. “Taen, did you just make a joke?” he asked in Terran.
“Perhaps I did. It was an error. How shall we pursue the matter now?”
“I wondered if there might not be some kind of block within the computer,” Wolfe said, “so I brought some backup.” He dug in his pack and took out two microfiches, a viewer, and a notepad.
“This will take a few minutes,” he said, inserting the card into the viewer’s slot. “If we can’t get ‘em high, perhaps we can nail them down low.”
“What are these locations?”
“These are twelve battles fought during the war. I got them from the standard Federation history of the Al’ar war. We gave these battles their own names, which I assume could have different labels in Al’ar, so what you’re looking at are just the ana/kata coordinates.”
“Why were — are these battles special?”
“Because these were fought in the middle of nowhere, for no discernible reason. All of them are deep inside the Al’ar sectors. Generally a Federation Fleet or Fleets would be traversing a certain area and be met with a sudden attack that ended only with the complete defeat of one or another force.”
“What makes that extraordinary? There were many such fights.”
“True. But these catfights appear to have been by accident, and especially ferocious, when our forces stumbled into yours. The Al’ar ships were already in place, as if they were holding a specific defensive position.”
“Perhaps,” Taen said, “your security was inadequate. Perhaps our forces had advance knowledge of your Fleet movements and were able to prepare ambushes.”
“That was what the Federation Command worried about. I was consulted on two of the battles, which is why I remembered them. They’d assembled all data on the two events, but no one could find any congruence that might suggest a mole. They wanted to know if I could provide any interpretation of what happened. I failed. The explanation settled on was the imbecilic one of ‘aliens do alien things in an alien way.’ ”
“Do not be angry at them. My own Command On High frequently used the same simplistic thinking,” Taen said.
Wolfe returned to Al’ar. “I would like you to examine these locations on a small-scale starchart and tell me what the computer tells you about them.”
“I do not understand what you are seeking, but I shall obey. Rest yourself. This shall take some time, even with a device as sophisticated as this.”
• • •
“I have some interesting data,” Taen announced. “First, I can confirm your hypothesis that these battles were anomalous, being fought far distant from any known Al’ar bases and not part of any known offensive plan. Look at these two. Nearly in the same location, yet fought seven years apart.
“What could have been so valuable about that sector of seemingly empty space that our forces would defend it so resolutely, as well as all the others?”
Wolfe’s eyes gleamed. “I can conjecture a better place to begin thinking,” he said. “Take those two points and connect them. Project the line out.”
“I have done this.”
“Now take the other battles, and project a line from each of them to intersect with this line.”
“Shadow Warrior,” Taen said, and Wolfe thought he detected impossible emotion in his voice, “the intersection point is at the fringes of our sectors, but well within the area of Al’ar control.”
“Worthy of consideration,” Wolfe said. “Now, might you not wonder if our Fleets just happened to wander into these areas and were brought to battle because they were on the ‘approaches’ to something very secret, something that perhaps even the forces assigned to defend them might not be informed of?”
“Such as the planet of the Guardians?” the Al’ar said. “You do not have enough data to make such an inference.”
“Here might be an additional piece of data. Can you find out what units were involved in any of these battles?”
“Perhaps.” Taen’s fingers blurred once more. Time passed.
“Unusual,” he said finally. “I can find an order of battle for five of the earlier conflicts, but nothing on the later ones.”
“I find it significant,” Wolfe said, “that all records of units can be blanked from the files of a strategy computer. This is generally done only when a formation is involved in something most secret. Such as defending the Guardians.
“Try to find out anything about any of those units, what we call the unit history, which is kept from day to day.”
“Our military also had the custom. I shall try.”
Wolfe watched as Taen again manipulated the machine. Quite suddenly a diagonal bar slashed across the main screen, and Taen blanked away from his search.
“The same cutout for security reasons as when we inquired about the Guardians?” Wolfe asked.
“Just so,” Taen said.
“Will you allow that as a second, possibly confirmatory bit of data?”
“I shall.”
“Might it not be interesting to return to our ship and make periodic jumps down that line, toward that point, to see what we might encounter?”
Taen turned from the “keyboard.” His hood was fully flared. “You might have found the path, Joshua Wolfe. I hope your thinking bears fruit.”
“Me, too. But let’s look up something else, as long as we’re up to our elbows in Al’ar secrets.”
• • •
“I cannot believe your Command On High placed such a low secrecy value on this file.”
“Why should they have?” Taen said. “Now you are thinking like a Terran, not like an Al’ar.
“This information needed no higher a classification than to prevent the casual reader from seeing it. Otherwise, it offered what our leaders thought was a valuable insight into the dishonorable nature of the enemy, something any battle commander might find valuable.”
“I am sorry,” Wolfe said. “I stand corrected. B
ut this is in an older form of your language. I have trouble reading it. Would you give me its merits briefly?”
“I shall. This is the summary of what occurred when a group of Terrans who called themselves Chitet secretly visited our civilization, about two hundred Earth-years ago.
“They felt that they were predestined to rule the Universe and wished to form an alliance with the Al’ar to share this power with them.”
“Did the Al’ar know the Chitet had attempted a coup against the Federation about a hundred years before that?”
“They were informed of this by the leader of the expedition. They spent much time discussing the situation with the Chitet and were somewhat bewildered at just what secret powers my race was supposed to possess beyond the obvious, the known.
“These Chitet were equally vague about just what they sought, but said that their projections of future history showed, once the unexpected appearance of the Al’ar was integrated, that nothing in their projection would be altered. Their role as Rulers-to-Be was still a given.”
“What,” Wolfe said in Terran, “was the response to that? Why didn’t your leaders accept their offer? They could always have double-crossed them later. The Al’ar,” he said dryly, “weren’t exactly bound by human standards of fair play.”
“The offer was not accepted, according to this file, for two reasons. The first was that our leaders had not finally determined that war between our races was inevitable. Perhaps that was foolish of them. The second reason is that all traitors are always unreliable. A blade that slips once in the hand and cuts its wielder will most likely turn once more.”
“True. What happened then?”
“The head of the Chitet expedition evinced the Terran emotion called anger, and said if the Al’ar did not change their minds, when the Chitet returned to the Federation they would announce they had discovered secret battle plans for the obliteration of humanity. It is sad, but of course no such plans existed at that time.”
“Now that,” Wolfe said, “was one of the dumbest-assed things I’ve ever heard of. Sit in the middle of the enemy and try blackmail. So that was why all seven of the ships were destroyed and their crews slotted. And these clowns call themselves the most logical folks who ever lived.” He snorted amusement.
