Grimke was just an outpost, she realized. This must have been a main fortress.
Maia and Brod soon found that not everything had been taken away when the inhabitants were banished. They came upon a region packed full of complex machinery, room after oversized room, stuffed with devices. Some clearly dealt with electricity—distant relatives of the useful little transformers and generators she knew—but on a magnitude vastly greater than anything used in today's Stratoin economy. The scale of things staggered her. There was more metal here than existed in all Port Sanger! Nor was it probable she and Brod had more than scratched the surface.
One chamber stretched a hundred meters across, and seemed to climb at least three times that height..Almost filling the entire space towered one massive block consisting of an amber, translucent material she had never seen before, braced by heavy armatures of the same adamant, blood-red metal that had made up the puzzle door. Dim flickerings within the outlandish gemstone told that its powers were quiescent, but hardly dead. It made them both want to creep away on tiptoe, lest the slightest noise waken whatever slept there.
The sanctuary-fort seemed endless. Maia wondered if their doom would be to wander forever like damned spirits, seeking a way out of a purgatory they had striven so hard to enter. Then the corridor spilled onto a broader one, with walls more heavily reinforced than ever. To their left stood another massive, crimson-metal door, this one almost a meter thick and resting on tremendous hinges. It gaped open. On this side, someone had set up a wooden easel, bearing a placard on which were printed bold, unfriendly letters.
YOU WERE WARNED KEEP OUT!
So anomalous was the message, so out of the blue, that Maia could only think, in response, Don't speak nonsense. Whoever you are, you never warned us of a thing.
As if we care.
"Do you think the reavers left it?" Brod asked. Maia shrugged. "It's hardly like them to admonish. Scream 'n' leap, that's more their style." She bent toward the lettering, which looked professionally done.
"It must be an important room," Brod said. "Come on. Maybe we'll learn something."
Following close behind, Maia considered. If it's so important, why do they use signs? Why didn't they just close and lock the door?
The answer was obvious. Whoever they are, they can't close the door. If they do, they'll never get it open again. They don't know the combination!
The long, tubelike chamber spanned forty meters, lined all the way with adamant red-metal and triple-braced buttresses. Presumably to resist even a direct hit ... though a hit of what Maia still couldn't imagine. She did recognize computer consoles, many times larger than the little comm units manufactured and distributed by Caria City, but clearly relatives. It all had the look of having been used just yesterday, instead of over a thousand years ago. In her mind's eye, she saw ghostly operators working at the stations, speaking in hushed, anxious voices, unleashing horrific forces at a button's touch.
"Maia, look at this!"
She turned around. Brod was standing before another placard.
Property of the Reigning Council If you are here, you risk summary execution for trespass.
Your entry was noted. Your sole option is to call Planetary Equilibrium Authority at once.
Use the comm unit below.
Remember—Confession brings mercy. Obstinacy, death!
"Your entry was noted," Brod read aloud. "Do you think they've wired all the doors? Hey, maybe they're listening to us, watching us right now!" His eyes widened, turning and peering, as if to see in all directions at once. But Maia felt oddly detached.
So, the Council knows about this place. It was naive to think they didn't. After all, this was the heart of the Great Defense. They wouldn't have left such power lying around, unsupervised. It might be needed again, someday.
But then, what about my idea—that old Bennett said what he did because he had inherited some mysterious secret?
Perhaps there had been a secret, left over from the glory days of Jellicoe. Something that survived the shame and ignominy following the brief episode of the Kings. Or perhaps it was only the stuff of legend, a yearning for lost home and stature, something carried on by a small coterie of men through the centuries of their banishment, losing meaning though gaining ritual gravity as it passed on to new men and boys, recruited from their mother-clans.
"We could follow the antenna to the entrance they normally use." Brod motioned to the comm unit mentioned in the announcement, a completely standard unit, attached to cables crudely stapled to the walls. Those cables would be severed if the great door ever sealed. "You know, I'll bet they don't even know about the route we took! Maybe they don't know we're here, after all."
Good point, Maia thought. Next to the comm unit, another item caught her interest. A thick black notebook. She picked it up, scanned several pages, and sighed.
"What is it, Maia?"
She flipped more pages. "They not only know about this place, they train here ... every ten years or so, it seems. Look at the dates and signatures. I see three, no four, clan names. Must be military specialist hives, subsidized in their niches by council security funds. They come out here once a generation and hold exercises. Brod, this place is still in business!"
The young man blinked twice in thought, then exhaled heavily. Resigned resentment colored his voice. "It makes sense. After the Enemy was beaten, the tech types who lived here must've gotten uppity—both men and women—and demanded changes. The priestesses and savants and high clans got scared. Maybe they even concocted the Kings' Rebellion, to have an excuse to kick out all the folk who used to live here!"
Brod was doing it again, reaching beyond the evidence. Yet he spun a convincing scenario. "But it would be stupid to forget the place, or dismantle it," he went on. "So they chose women warriors suited to the job and gave them permanent sinecures, to keep trained and available in case of another visit by the Enemy."
Or by unwelcome relatives? Maia wondered. The most recent entry in the logbook was off-schedule, dated about the time Renna's ship would have been seen entering the system. That drill had lasted five times normal duration. Until, she noted, his lander departed the peripatetic vessel to alight at Caria Spaceport. Nor was there any guarantee the fighting clans would stay away. With the Council in an uproar over Renna's kidnapping, they could return at any time.
It might have been a cheering thought—offering a surefire way to overwhelm the reavers with a single longdistance call—if only Maia hadn't grown wary. Renna might be even worse off in the clutches of certain clans.
The comm unit lay there, presumably ready for use. The quandary was no different than it had been before, however. Whom to call? Only Renna knew who his friends were and who had betrayed him in Caria, a quarter of one long Stratoin year ago.
Every time it seems I've gotten myself in as deep as anyone can, don't I always seem to find a hole that goes down twice as far? Compared to this, Tizbe's blue powder is a joke, a misdemeanor!
Maia knew what she had to do.
It proved simple to trace the path used by the warrior clans. Maia did not even have to follow the antenna cable. The main entrance could be in only one place.
From the control room, she and Brod followed the main corridor as it climbed several more ramps and stairs, passing through a series of heavy, cylindrical hatches, each propped open with thick wedges to prevent accidental closure. At one point, the youths paused before a shattered wall that appeared once to have carried a map. A portion was still legible in the lower left, showing a corner of the convoluted outline of Jellicoe Island. The rest of the chart was burned so deeply that not only the plaster was gone, but the first centimeter or so of rock.
"That's okay," Maia told Brod. "Come on. This must be the way."
There followed more stairs, more wedged blast shields, before the hallway terminated at a closed set of rather-ordinary-looking steel doors. A button to one side came alight when Maia pressed it. Soon, the aperture spread open with a fa
int rumble, revealing a tiny room without furniture, displaying an array of indicator lights on one wall.
"Well, I'm tied down an' Wengeled," Brod exhaled. "It's a lift! Some big holds in Joannaborg had 'em. I rode one at the library. Went up thirty meters."
"I suppose they're safe," Maia said, not stating it as a question, since there was no point. She did not like there being only one entrance or exit, but the two of them must use the conveyance, safe or no. "I'll leave it to your vastly greater experience to pilot the smuggy thing."
Brod stepped inside gingerly. Maia followed, watching carefully to see how it was done. "All the way to the top?" the boy asked. She nodded, and he reached out, extending one finger till it touched the uppermost button. It glowed. After a beat, the doors rumbled shut.
"Is that all there is to it? Shouldn't we—" Maia cut off as her stomach did a somersault. Gravity yanked her downward, as if either she or Stratos had suddenly gained mass. There are advantages to not having eaten, Maia thought. Yet, after the first few seconds, she found perverse pleasure in the sensation. Indicators flickered, changing an alphanumeric display that Maia couldn't read because the bottom half had gone dead. What if another, more critical part fails while we're in motion?
She quashed the thought. Anyway, who was she to question something that still worked after millennia? The passenger, that's who I am!
There came another disconcerting-exciting sensation. The pressure beneath her feet abruptly eased, and now she felt a lessening of weight. An experience not unlike falling or riding a pitching ship-deck down a swell. Or, Maia supposed, flight. Involuntarily, she giggled, and slapped a hand over her mouth. The other hand, she discovered, was wrapped tightly around Brod's elbow. "Ow!" he complained succinctly, as the elevator car came to a halt and they both stumbled in reaction.
The doors slid apart, making them blink and shade their eyes. "Will they stay open?" Maia asked hastily, while staring onto a stony plateau capped with a fantastic, cloud-flecked sky.
"I'll wedge my sandal in the door," Brod answered. "If you'll let go of my arm for a minute."
Maia laughed nervously and released the boy. While he secured their line of retreat, she stepped further and regarded a vista of ocean surrounding the archipelago known as the Dragons' Teeth. Sunlight on water was just one sparkling beauty among so many she had not expected to see again. Its touch upon her skin was a gift beyond words.
I knew it! The military clans from Caria wouldn't arrive by boat. They're too high-caste, too busy. Besides, they wouldn't risk someone seeing them, and noticing a pattern. So they come here only rarely to train, and only by air.
The flat surface extended several hundred meters to the south, west, and east. Here at the northern end of the plateau, the elevator shed sheltered machinery that included a substantial winch, probably for tethering and deploying dirigibles. Maia also noted huge drums of cable.
The Dragons' Teeth were even more magnificent when seen from above. Tower after narrow stony tower stretched into the distance, arrayed like staggered spikes down the back of some armored beast. Many bore forested tips or ledges, like Grimke, while others gleamed in the afternoon sunshine, bare and pristine products of extruding mantle forces that long predated woman's tenure on Stratos.
No tooth in sight reached higher than this one, at the northern edge of Jellicoe. Because of its position, she couldn't see due south, where lay other giant island clusters, such as Halsey, the sole site officially and legally inhabited. No doubt the war clans counted on this shielding effect, and timed their rare visits to minimize chances of being seen. Still, Maia wondered if the men who staffed Halsey ever suspected.
Perhaps that's why they rotate the station assignment among low-ranked guilds. Less chance of a rhythm being noticed, even if men did happen to spy a zep, now and then. Especially with visits only three times in a lifetime.
She turned and marched to the right, where more than two score monoliths could be seen clustered close at hand—some of the many peaks which, welded together, made Jellicoe the chief molar of this legendary chain of Teeth. When Maia got close enough to see how vast the collection was, she realized how even the extensive tunnel network below could easily be hidden in this maze of semicrystalline stone.
Maia had to descend a rough, eroded staircase in order to reach a lower terrace, and then crossed some distance before at last nearing the vista she wanted. Brod cried out for her to wait, but impatience drove her. I've got to know, she thought, and hurried faster.
At last, she stopped short of a precipice so breathtaking, it outshadowed Grimke as a gull might outsoar a beetle. Her pulse pounded in her ears. So good was it to be in open air, breathing the sweet sea wind, that Maia forgot to experience vertigo as she edged close and looked down at Jellicoe Lagoon.
The anchorage already lay in dimness, abandoned by the sun after a brief, noontime visit. Her gaze bypassed still-bright stony walls, readjusting until at last she found what she had hoped to see. Two ships, she realized with a thrill. Reckless and Manitou.
I was afraid they'd change hideouts. They should, since their ketch was captured. Maybe they're planning to, soon.
Maia realized, with not a little disbelief, that the escape from Grimke with Brod and Naroin and the others had only been three or four days ago. That may mean we still have time.
She felt Brod's presence as he came alongside, and heard his ragged sigh of relief. "We're not too late, after all." He turned to regard her, a glitter in his eye. "I sure hope you've got a plan, Maia. I'll help rescue your starman, and your sister. But first, there's a band of unsuspecting reavers down there with a pantry to raid. If I don't get food soon—"
"I know," Maia interrupted with a wave of one hand, and quoted,
"A much worse thing to see by far, Than a summer rutter, Stand between a hungry man, And his bread and butter."
Brod grinned, showing a lot of teeth. When he spoke, it was in thick dialect.
"Aye, lass. Ye don't want me reduced to bitin' the nearest thing at hand now, do ye?"
She laughed, and so did he. Such was her trust in his nature and friendship that it never occurred to Maia, as it might have months earlier, to take him at his literal word.
.T©fin3 (oHal is HiDDEH ... under strange lost stars
—from the Book of Riddles
24
Maia lowered her sextant and peered at the little calibrated dials a second time. The horizon angle, where the sun had set, fixed one endpoint. The other, almost directly; overhead, fell within the constellation Boadicea.
"You know, I think it may be Farsun Eve?" she commented after a quick mental calculation. "Somewhere along the way, I lost track of several days. It's midwinter and I never noticed." She sighed. "We're missing all the fun, in town,"
"What town?" Brod asked, as he knotted thick ribbons of cable at the edge of the bluff. "And what fun? Free booze, so we don't notice the whispery sound of clone-mothers stuffing proxies into ballot boxes? Getting pinched on the streets by drunks who wouldn't know frost from hail-fall?"
"Typical man," Maia sniffed. "You grouches never get into the spirit of the holidays."
"Sometimes we do. Throw us a party in midsummer, and we might be less grumpy half a year later." He shrugged. "Still, it could help if the reavers are celebrating tonight, wearing paper hats and going all moony. Maybe the pirates won't notice gate-crashers droppin' in while they're busy harassing male prisoners."
There's an idea, Maia thought, folding away her sextant. Providing the men are still alive. After the massacre aboard the Reckless, the reavers' next logical step would be to eliminate all other witnesses, before moving on to a new hiding place. That included not only the men of the Manitou, but also the rads, and perhaps even recent recruits, such as Leie. Renna was probably still too valuable, but even his fate would be uncertain if Baltha's gang were ever cornered.
Such dire thoughts lent urgency to their wait as Maia and Brod watched full darkness settle over the archipelago. With t
wilight's fading, the many spires of Jellicoe Island merged into a single serrated outline that cut jagged bites out of a starry sky. Below, in the inky darkness of the lagoon, tiny pale pools of color encircled lamps stationed on the narrow dock where the two ships were moored. Now and then, clusters of smaller lanterns could be seen moving quickly, accompanied by stretched, bipedal silhouettes. Faint, indecipherable shouts carried up to Maia's ears, funneled by the narrow, fluted confines of the island's cavity. "Looks like they're in a festive mood, after all," Brod commented as a company of torch-bearing shadows trooped off the larger vessel, filing down the pier and into a wide stone portal, set in the base of the cliff. "Maybe we should wait. At least till they've turned in?"
Brin, David - Glory Season Page 53
