by Mike Sheriff
Twenty hours had passed since the Unum issued his cull order, and chaos already embroiled several districts. Despite Cang’s instructions to avoid unnecessary culling, some Jireni sub-commanders had taken matters into their own hands, including those in her own district of Zhongguo Cheng.
At the Librarium, three assault teams had entered the Spires and culled hundreds of Libraria and prospects. Three habitation complexes in Yindu Cheng had been decimated; on-scene reports cited the dart-impaled bodies of men, women, and children littering the pediwalks. In districts under the control of commanders loyal to the Unum, Jireni were going abode to abode, culling entire families. To make matters worse, communications couldn’t be established with Pyros. The problem might stem from any number of banal events, but the more ominous explanations weighed Cang’s mind.
The news wasn’t all ill though. Commanders in the southern and eastern Chengs had gained tacit support from the leading dissenters in their districts, broadening the groundwork for an alliance between the Jireni and denizens who wanted to end the Unum’s reign. In Yindu Cheng, the news was even better.
As de-facto commander of the district in Pabbu’s absence, Hyro had arranged for several tons of personal arms and armored levicarts to be dispatched for servicing. At first light, a dozen huvvatrains laden with arms departed the depot. They made it no more than five miles before being intercepted. Su and his men had already put the weapons to good use, launching attacks against Cognos Populi targets in Yindu Cheng and Zhongguo Cheng. Of course, the precise details of how this transpired had to remain hidden from the Unum.
“Any day now, commander.”
Cang registered the Unum’s irritation, but masked its unnerving effect. “Can you bring up the most recent tactical plot?” she asked Radan.
Radan manipulated the tile. Tactical symbology resolved on the plasmonic projection, summarizing the ongoing operation. Green swaths covered sizable parts of Zhongguo Cheng, Yindu Cheng, Riben Cheng, and the southern districts.
Cang motioned to the swaths. “The Jireni have lost control of these areas.”
Red blotches mottled the Unum’s scalp. “How did they lose control?”
“Fighting in built-up areas favors the defender. Denizens are overpowering groups of Jireni and stripping them of their weapons.”
“What kind of weapons have they acquired?”
“Mainly personal arms, but dissenters seized a shipment of arms in Yindu Cheng a few hours ago. It contained heavier armaments, including scores of Hexalite levicarts.”
“Why didn’t I hear of this from Commander Pabbu?”
“His whereabouts are unknown. We think he may have fallen during the attack.”
“Why haven’t you dispatched aeroshrikes to flatten the Cheng?”
“It’s home to one million denizens,” she said, unable to blunt her shock. “Most of them are innocent and going about their lives. Do you wish to provoke insurrection throughout the entire city-state?”
“I want this uprising quelled, and I’m holding you responsible, Cang!”
The blustering demand marked an opportune moment to end the briefing. Cang bowed. “I’ll do everything in my power to end it, Unum.”
She and Radan strode to the door leading to the outer chamber.
“My sorrow for my ineptitude,” Radan said once they’d passed through the door. “The delay didn’t help the Unum’s mood.”
“No need to apologize,” Cang whispered. “You can make up for it by getting me an update on the number of armored levicarts seized by Su and his men. I need to know how much firepower we can bring to bear against the Unum.”
“At once, sireen.”
“And I don’t care how you do it,” she added, “but get me in contact with Pyros.”
12
A Silica Curtain
MORNING TWILIGHT SEEPED through the control gondola’s port windows and splashed across the starboard bulkhead. Mites of silica dust danced in its ruddy beams, animated by thermal eddies and cross-currents of circulating air.
The hypnotic movement entranced Daoren. It would be easy to mistake the mites for living organisms if it wasn’t for the—
“Are we going to relocate to the next grid?” Laoshi asked from the aft console.
The question broke Daoren’s trance. “Repositioning now.”
He gripped control yoke and nudged it—the aerostat broke from its hover and pulsed forward. He refocused on the navigation console’s search plot.
Red tint filled three-quarters of its square grids.
He rubbed his eyes and yawned, the maw growing so wide his jaw momentarily locked. They’d searched throughout the night, finding nothing below the desert’s surface except for five potential artifact caches. At Laoshi’s insistence, he’d marked their positions for future examination, but the primary objective so far eluded them.
The possibility they might not find it had been nibbling at his mind for hours. The echolocation transmitter could penetrate up to eight hundred feet of sand and substrate. What if the pyramid lay below that depth? What if Laoshi had miscalculated its location? What if the efforts they’d made to get here were a folly?
He purged the thoughts and glanced at the starboard bulkhead.
Heqet and Cordelia slumped over a workstation, heads resting in their hands, dappled in sunlight. They’d abandoned interest in Laoshi’s pixelated screen hours ago.
He couldn’t blame them. The search ranked among the most tedious, repetitive tasks he’d ever undertaken. Only one condition could make it worse.
Searching in vain.
They approached the center of the search grid. He brought the aerostat into hover for what felt like the thousandth time. “In position.”
The quadruple thuds of the deploying feedback sensors preceded a sonorous boom. “Nothing,” Laoshi called from the aft console moments later, his tone devoid of emotion.
“Repositioning,” Daoren said, barely noticing the transmitter’s impulse. He tapped the monitor, tinting yet another square, and nudged the control yoke forward. Bulging star dunes glided past below the gondola’s windows. He pulled back on the yoke and slowed to a hover above yet another indistinguishable patch of sand. “In position.”
A boom rattled the deck for what felt like the thousandth time. He poised his hand over the yoke, anticipating another report of nothing. Instead, a stuttering gasp wafted forward. He glanced over his shoulder.
Laoshi stooped, face inches from the echolocation transmitter’s screen. “There’s an object under here!”
His shout rousted Heqet and Cordelia. Daoren scurried aft and joined them at the transmitter console.
On its screen, a three-dimensional figure appeared amid the cascading white pixels, assembling in sequential rasters from the shallowest to deepest depths. A malformed human head with an angular covering resolved, followed by a prone body with utterly foreign symmetry.
Laoshi let out a high-pitched whoop. Heqet leaned toward the screen. “What are we looking at?”
“Our quarry, child.” He traced a trembling finger over the elongated appendages beneath the figure’s head. “Those are paws!”
“They’re what?” Heqet asked.
A ferocious smile hiked Laoshi’s beard. “It’s the Sphinx!”
The strange name held no meaning for Daoren. One question mattered. “Will it help us find the pyramid?”
“It’s the key to finding it!”
Daoren’s shoulders drooped, unburdened by the news. The glimmer of hope he’d felt when they’d first arrived at the Great Saharan Desert—and then lost over the course of the search—rekindled. “Then we’ve no time to waste!”
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Laoshi gazed at a newly resolved three-dimensional structure on the echolocation transmitter’s screen.
Its presence struck him as more miraculous than anything. For years, he’d poured over the pyramid’s references in obscure glass scrolls—mere snippets of data harvested from the time of the ancients. The structu
re had taken on a mythical quality, the data entries more lore than fact. He would never have admitted it to Heqet, Daoren, or Cordelia, but part of him had wondered if the pyramid actually existed.
He dabbed a tear from his eye. After five years of research and innumerable hours of planning, he was looking at the Great Pyramid of Giza—or at least the acoustic energy reflected from the buried structure. Its bearing and distance from the Sphinx matched those found in the cultural records to within three seconds of arc and one-sixteenth of an inch. Its apex was thirty feet below the surface.
His body boiled with excitement, melting the decades away. He was twenty-one again, minutes from jumping into Havoc on a moonless night. This leap of faith, however, wouldn’t require a deceleration canopy or involve opposing ground fire.
“I’ll deploy a beacon to fix its position,” he said. “Daoren, you can finish the calculations based on the depth of the apex.” He motioned to Heqet and Cordelia. “Can you start loading screw mines onto a huvvadolly?”
“How many mines do we need, Daoren?” Heqet asked.
Daoren was already seated at a workstation, running calculations on a quantum tile. He looked up. “Twenty mines based on the apex being at the surface. With it thirty feet below the surface . . .” His gaze rose to the deckhead. “I’d say twenty-five should be enough.”
“What size?”
“The largest ones.”
“Got it!” She led Cordelia into the cargo hold.
Laoshi deployed the beacon and paced to the navigation console. He grasped the control yoke and guided the aerostat into a shallow, descending turn. Beyond the forward windows, a glass lance strobed atop a dune. It marked the pyramid’s buried apex.
He slowed to a hover and activated the mooring cables, anchoring the aerostat to the desert one hundred feet south of the beacon.
TWENTY MINUTES AFTER mooring the aerostat, Laoshi ambled down its access ramp, the aches of his old wounds vanquished. He stepped off the shaded ramp and strolled into the brilliant sunlight of the Great Saharan Desert.
He crouched and scooped a handful of sand, letting the sun-baked grains slip between his fingers, relishing their welcoming warmth. It was a good portent.
Daoren and Heqet guided the loaded huvvadolly down the ramp and traversed the one hundred feet to the strobing beacon. Laoshi and Cordelia followed in their footsteps.
Cordelia took his hand. “Are you as excited as I am?”
“You have no idea. I’ve dreamed of this moment for years.”
“Did the cultural records mention how big the vault might be?”
“No, but considering the variety of seeds that once existed, it must be vast.”
“And all are food stocks?”
“There may be seeds from every type of vegetation,” he said. “That’s what makes this so thrilling—not knowing what we’ll discover in there.”
They halted at the beacon. Daoren kneeled beside it and consulted his quantum tile. “You’re sure about the calculations?” Laoshi asked.
“Positive. Twenty-five screw mines will be adequate.” He angled the tile so Laoshi could see its screen.
It displayed a rendering of the submerged pyramid. Precise depth plots, blast angles, and pressure-gradient curves bloomed from twenty-five points, each representing a screw mine.
Laoshi took a cursory glance at the glut of equations underpinning the rendering. Daoren was, after all, the one who’d written a perfect S.A.T. forty-eight hours ago. “Then we’ve no time to waste, hmm?”
Daoren used the beacon as a datum to cross-fix the entry point for the first screw mine. He handed the tile to Heqet and hoisted a mine off the huvvadolly. “What are the settings?”
Heqet read from the tile. “Depth four hundred thirty-two-point-two feet. Blast direction true north to zero-two-seven degrees. Acoustic pressure four hundred sixty-two atmospheres. Set for remote detonation point-one-nine-nine-six seconds after initiation.”
Daoren tapped the numbers into the mine’s guidance panel and thrust its tapered nose into the sand. Another tap activated the helical corkscrew surrounding its body.
The corkscrew spooled up, drawing the mine into the sand. It disappeared in the space of ten seconds, burrowing toward its destination more than four hundred feet below the surface.
Laoshi grinned. “One down, twenty-four to go.”
THEY SPENT ANOTHER fifty minutes deploying the rest of the screw mines. Laoshi had estimated thirty minutes to complete the task, but one of the mines shorted after the device spooled up. Fortunately, the anomaly occurred three feet below the surface and extraction posed no major difficulties. They’d used another mine in its place.
Daoren and Heqet guided the empty huvvadolly toward the aerostat, chatterwailing between themselves. Their rasplaughter resonated across the sand.
Laoshi trailed them by a dozen paces with Cordelia. He felt weightless, buoyed by the prospect of impending discovery. Ahead, Heqet gave Daoren a playful shove in response to an unheard quip.
Laoshi chucklebucked at the sight. It warmed his heart to see them so engaged, so vibrant, so alive. Considering what should have befallen them after the May S.A.T., it was as miraculous as the pyramid’s discovery.
“They’ve come a long way,” Cordelia said. “I haven’t heard them argue once since we left Daqin Guojin.”
“They’re good for each other,” Laoshi said. “You don’t think they’ll . . .”
“End up in union?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe,” Cordelia said. “I saw something yesterday, when Daoren and Heqet were talking near the forward windows. There was a moment when he looked . . .”
“Looked what?”
“I don’t know . . . at ease with himself?” Her brow rumpled. “It’s hard to say. I’ve never seen the expression.”
“I imagine it must be difficult reading him, given his lineage.”
Cordelia fell silent, but her rumpled brow persisted. Laoshi sensed he’d overstepped propriety.
Her capture by a foraging mongrel patrol had taken place shortly after Mako was born, while she was accompanying Lucien on one of his silica-sourcing expeditions in the Great Eastern Regolith. She’d spent ten months in Havoc along with eight other denizens before being rescued by Jireni. Three of the hostages were killed during the operation, but Cordelia had emerged unharmed . . . in part.
She’d emerged from captivity pregnant.
“Reading Daoren isn’t difficult for me,” Cordelia said after a moment of brooding. “He has my blood. But Lucien found it a constant challenge.”
“Did you ever consider telling the boy the truth?”
“Lucien wouldn’t hear of it, especially after what he’d paid to falsify Daoren’s genetic-sequence records. He thought the truth would make things worse.”
“But now that he’s . . . gone.”
“I’ll tell him someday, when the time is right.” Her brow smoothed. “How would you feel about Heqet taking union with a boy who has mongrel blood?”
“I’ve seen no evidence of barbarity in him. I’ve only seen you . . . and your father.”
“So you wouldn’t object?”
Laoshi gazed at Daoren and Heqet.
The pair bumped shoulders as they walked behind the huvvadolly. What words passed between them, he couldn’t say, but it was clear they were no longer charged with acrimony. Cordelia was right; they’d come a long way. “Not at all,” he said.
“Well, I can’t say it’s occurred to Daoren to ask her to bind with him,” Cordelia said. “You know how he is.”
Laoshi also knew that Daoren wasn’t the same boy he’d embraced in the funeral aerostat. His sullen isolation had given way to active engagement. The challenges he’d faced since Lucien’s death had brought out his natural leadership qualities, a crucible forging his true character. The metamorphosis was breathculling.
“Has Heqet said anything to you about Daoren?”
“No,” he said. “Nor would she. She’s al
ways held matters of the heart close to her chest.”
Ahead, Daoren and Heqet traded more playful shoves. Heqet squealed.
“They’re excited.” Cordelia chucklebucked. “I forget how young they are.”
Laoshi could relate. His excitement had increased by the second since they’d set down. Somewhere beneath a million tons of sand, the entrance to the Great Pyramid tarried. Somewhere within the pyramid, the seed vault would soon have its first visitors in Sha-knows-how-many centuries.
Sha willing.
They climbed the aerostat’s ramp with Daoren and Heqet and helped them stow the huvvadolly before proceeding forward into the control gondola. One hundred feet beyond the forward windows, the beacon strobed atop the dunes.
“Will the sonic blasts be very loud, Grandfather?”
“It’s hard to shift a million tons of sand without making a little noise, dear.”
Cordelia gave the beacon a fretting glance. “Should we move the aerostat farther away?”
“We’ll be fine,” Laoshi said. He handed out sets of ear plugs. “We’ll want these though.” He rolled the glass cylinders between his fingers, forming them into blunt cones. “You might want to keep your mouths open as well to prevent damage to your teeth.”
The others inserted their ear plugs and adopted an open-mouth stance. Laoshi stuffed the plugs in his ears and nodded at Daoren.
Daoren turned to the forward windows, a finger poised over his tile. He tapped its screen.
Laoshi didn’t hear the sonic blasts, but he certainly felt them. Twenty-five fists punched his chest in rapid succession. He needn’t have warned the others to keep their mouths open; the sensation was jaw-dropping.
Beyond the windows, a million tons of sand erupted from the depths. A solid, silica curtain rose from the surface, launching into the air at a fifty-five degree angle. The apex of the ejected material topped a thousand feet and showered the desert for miles downrange.
