by James Axler
Frog-boy scampered up the shaft, clutching and kicking off the rungs. Kane came after him, imitating his method of propulsion. It wasn't as easy as it looked. The troll's small stature allowed him more clearance to move around, and Kane scraped his back on the tube wall and banged his chin on the metal rungs more than once.
Grant underwent the same painful experience. The hollow shaft echoed with his breathless curses.
Kane lost all track of time. He had no idea how long he squirmed his way through the shaft. He focused only on putting one hand after the other on the rungs of cold steel.
After a long, miserable period, he realized the climb was requiring more effort, more muscular tension and strain. He felt a growing pressure against his eardrums. Chains seemed to weigh down his limbs.
Although his thoughts moved sluggishly, he understood his body was reacting to a return of gravity. The longer he climbed, the more it settled on and over him like a heavy cloak. He wasn't certain if he was happy about it, since the increased gravity doubled the difficulty of scaling the ladder. He had to work at it, and the hand-over-hand process became strenuous. His knife cuts stung, and his right knee throbbed.
However, he smelled fresher, richer air, and his respiration slowly became less laborious and painful.
At a scuttling, clanking sound above him, Kane craned his neck, looking up just as Frog-boy's grotesque feet slipped out of sight over the lip of an open hatchway.
Kane sighed in relief, caught himself, fought back a cough and hauled himself up the last yard. He thrust his head out of the metal-socketed hatch and stared directly into the grim, graven face of a god.
Chapter 16
The room was enormous. It had to be in order to contain the gargantuan head. It loomed above Kane, silently judging him and finding him wanting.
Kane blinked, and by degrees he saw the head was a colossal effigy made of stone or rockcrete, supported within a taut webwork of steel cables. He followed them with his eyes, noting how they were anchored to eyebolts driven into metal girders running the length and breadth of the high, domed ceiling.
A hand prodded his rump from below, so he obligingly heaved himself up and out of the shaft. He stood beneath the head, giving it an appraising once-over. It didn't look quite as gigantic as his first impression. Now that he had it in perspective, he realized it was about twenty feet long by fifteen wide.
He detected a raised outline of a headpiece or stylized hair running across the breadth of the massive brow and framing the face on both sides. The eye sockets were deeply, darkly sunk, the nose only an undetailed lump with a straight slash of a lipless mouth beneath it. The mouth was slightly open, as if it were about to utter pronouncements of doom. He noted a suggestion of sculpted teeth between the lips.
Despite its lack of a clearly defined expression, the face exuded an ineffable emotion, either a soul-deep sadness or a profound resignation to ruthless destiny.
A pleasant voice carried to him over the cavernous room. "No need for caution, Mr. Grant. He won't bite."
Kane cast a quick glance backward, expecting to see Grant climbing out of the hatch. Instead, he saw a troll pulling himself up.
The voice spoke again. "My apologies for addressing you incorrectly, Mr. Kane. To Lilliputians, all of you giants tend to look alike, despite insignificant differences in skin pigmentation."
Hearing the rhythmic clacking of boot heels on the hard floor on the other side of the massive head, Kane shifted position so it didn't block his view. A very small man approached him, walking hand in hand with a very tall woman. Brigid gave him a jittery smile, her jade eyes acknowledging her relief at seeing him safe and apparently sound. She looked taller than she actually was because of her hip-to-head proximity with the little man.
His crystal-clear blue eyes stared at Kane boldly, gesturing around him with a black cane. "I trust you're feeling a little more comfortable. I managed to restore optimum oxygen circulation to the warehouse, and since it is located on the far outer ring of the station, the gravity is closer to what you're used to."
Kane didn't answer, but inhaled gratefully. The hatch disgorged another troll, then Grant's head and shoulders. He swept the stone head with a penetrating stare, glanced over at Brigid and the little man, then climbed out.
"Let us get the introductions out of the way," the man said incisively. "According to Miss Brigid, your names are Kane and Grant. She doesn't know your given names, a deficiency to which I can relate, al-though my lack of one is due to personal choice. I am called Sindri. S-I-N-D-R-I. It's pronounced the way it's spelled. Follow me, please."
He and Brigid started off across the vast room. Grant and Kane exchanged questioning glances. The stunted woman carrying the harp climbed out of the shaft. She gave the two men a sharp, beady-eyed stare. Grant shrugged, falling into step behind Sindri and Brigid.
Now that he had the air for it, Kane vented a deep sigh and followed his companions. He didn't know if the three of them were prisoners, but drawing on their experiences of the past few months, he assumed they were. Like that of Sverdlovosk in Russia and Strong-bow in Britain, Sindri's hospitality was probably a facade.
Sunlight flowed down from a round skylight in the high, arched roof, glinting from stacked metal crates and long trestle tables. Elevated boom arms stretched out over the floor, cables and winches dangling from them.
Symbols and lettering were visible on some of crates through the cargo netting draped over them. Kane walked casually on an oblique course that brought him close enough to read them. Some of the cases bore the acronym NASA; others had strings of indecipherable letters that seemed like a deliberate jumbling-of the alphabet. Several read Parallax RedCydonia Compound.
The symbols differed, too, ranging from stylized eagles gripping olive branches and arrows in their talons, to hammers and sickles. He saw an insignia he immediately recognized, and his belly fluttered in a cold reaction, but not really shock. It was more of a grim I-should-have-known.
The symbol looked like a thick-walled pyramid, en*-closing and partially bisected by three elongated but reversed triangles. Small disks topped each one, lending them a resemblance to round-hilted daggers.
It was the unifying insignia of the Archon Directorate, one adopted by Overproject Excalibur, the Totality Concept's division devoted to genetic engineering.
Kane managed to keep the angry revulsion from registering on his face. He knew the symbol was supposed to represent some kind of pseudomystical triad functioning within a greater, all-embracing body.
To him, all it represented was the co-opting and deliberately planned extinction of the human race.
The female troll waddled up beside him, making shooing gestures with the harp. Kane obeyed her, but he took notice of how her gait seemed slightly uncertain and how her black eyes appeared glassy, like damp obsidian. He remembered what Baptiste had said about Earth's oxygen levels having an adverse effect on the trolls, and he wondered if the ugly little bitch might not be a bit tiddly.
Grant was eyeing the contents of the trestle tables when he rejoined him. They both looked at chunks of ores, stones and minerals. Little adhesive labels were stuck to some of them, identifying them as terbium, tantalum, promethium.
Bisymmetrical forms like outlandish sculptures also rested there, made of substances which appeared to be wood overlaid with a metallic lacquer. The labels on these items read ID Pending.
A large number of objects scattered over the tables were completely unrecognizable, bearing no labels or striking any chords of recognition within either man.
They followed Sindri and Brigid down an aisle formed by plastic-sheet-shrouded banks of equipment. A few feet beyond lay a small living area, with a low table, a couple of chairs, a fraying sofa and a small refrigerator. A few personal items cluttered the table a hairbrush, a sheaf of computer spreadsheets, crum-pled-up self-heat ration packs. A glass-fronted, wire-shelved case held all of their equipment, from blasters to their helmets, all within easy reach
if the handles had not been chained and padlocked.
A scrawny orange cat dozed on the arm of the chair and regarded their arrival with sleepy yellow eyes. Sin-dri gestured to the furniture. "Take a load off, but don't spit on the deck or call the cat a bastard."
Kane, Brigid and Grant exchanged mystified looks. Sindri uttered a short laugh. "Old Navy talk. Picked it up from a book, as I have so many things. Forgive the eclectic mixture of furnishings. They were the best of a bad lot I was able to salvage."
A quartet of trolls stood by watchfully, including the woman. Uneasily, the three of them took seats, Kane easing down on the sofa, at the far end from the cat. He was moderately fond of animals, but he had not spent much time in their company, especially cats.
The animal looked his way, made a quizzical noise that sounded like "Ralph?" rested its chin upon its paw and fell back asleep.
Sindri said, "Don't mind old Robinson Crusoe there. He's the latest in a very long line of feline Robinson Crusoes who took possession of this station after its bipedal inhabitants fled."
"Cats?" Grant's tone was skeptical. "Cats lived here?"
Sindri opened the door of the refrigerator and bent down to peer inside. Distractedly he said, "Evidently a few of the original colonists of Parallax Red brought their pets with them. They and their descendants survived long after their owners perished."
"What did they find to live on?" Kane asked, interested in spite of himself.
"Oh, there was plenty of water still in the reservoir, dripping from pipes in the lower levels. As for actual foodstuffs, the station supported a thriving population of rats."
"Rats?" Grant's tone wasn't skeptical now; it was alarmed.
"Experimental animals that escaped their cages, got into the food stores and were fruitful and multiplied."
Sindri rummaged through the contents of the refrigerator, muttering, "What to offer you, what to offer you..."
With an exclamatory "Ah!" Sindri straightened up, holding a heavy carafe in his hands. Placing it on the table, he said, "Permit me a moment to scare up some glasses."
Kane eyed the carafe distrustfully. "Mind telling us what's in it?"
Sindri plucked three tumblers from a shelf, blew on them and set them down on the table. "No, I don't mind at all, Mr. Kane."
He tipped the carafe, pouring a clear fluid into a tumbler. He smiled disarmingly. "Water. Plain, ordinary distilled water. After your period of weightlessness and exposure to the thin air, you're all touched with dehydration. It would be unwise to offer you anything else, even had I anything else to offer you."
Kane noticed the last remark seemed to be directed at Brigid, but he was too busy gratefully gulping the water to reason out its meaning.
Sindri waited until the three of them had downed two tumblers of water apiece before saying, "I'm certain you have just as many questions for me as I have for you, so allow me"
"Question one," interrupted Kane. "What do you intend to do with us?"
A puzzled line creased Sindri's high forehead. "I don't understand."
"Are we your prisoners?"
Understanding shone in the little man's eyes. "Not unless you offer violence toward me or my people. I have your weapons locked away so some of my more curious brethren won't be tempted to play with them. No, I fully intend to allow you to return to where you came fromwherever that might be."
No one spoke.
Gently Sindri said, "That was a conversational lead-in. You are to provide me with the name of your place of origin."
"We're not much for polite drawing-room chitchat," Brigid said dryly. "Just ask us what you want to know outright."
Sindri laughed merrily, his blue eyes alight. "But don't you see, it's more fun this way. I can deduce that wherever on Earth you sprang from, English is the native tongue. You have access to higher technology, else you would not be here. You are also accustomed to treading dark, dangerous ground."
He waved to their blasters on the shelf. "You came prepared. Furthermore, you have a fair amount of education. Or at least" he inclined his head toward Brigid "one of you has. It is contraindicated that your arrival here was not simply serendipity. No, it was instigated by our brief occupation of the installation code-named Redoubt Papa."
Sindri's expression changed suddenly, the smile disappearing from his lips and the humorous light in his eyes turning cold and implacable. "An occupation from which my cousin Brokk did not return. I was told he was wounded unto death. Is that true?"
Brigid stated frankly, "True. But we were not responsible for his death. We found his body and removed it from the redoubt."
Sindri passed long fingers over his brow. "I am the responsible party. The quantum interphase inducer controls here were computerlocked on to the one in Papa. It was reported to me that the area was not suitable for our needs, but I viewed it only as our first, tentative step on Earth."
He sighed regretfully. "I should have devoted more time to searching the database for initiator codes to other gateway units in other places. Instead, I wasted my time with petty administrative details here."
"How long have you been here?" asked Kane.
Sindri gave him a detached, preoccupied glance. "Here?"
"On the station."
The man's mouth pursed in thought. "Three months. Or is it four?"
Grant glowered at him. "Only three or four months?"
Sindri nodded.
"How did you get here?"
"The same way you did. By mat-trans unit."
"But from where?" Kane demanded.
Sindri's eyes widened in ingenuous surprise. "Did I
forget to mention that, Mr. Kane? Forgive me. Mars, Mr. Kane. We came from Mars."
Sindri's revelation stopped conversation for the next few moments. Grant was the first to start it up again. "Do you expect us to believe that you are extraterrestrials? Aliens?"
Sindri chuckled. "Yes to the former, no the latter."
"The difference," said Kane in a quiet monotone, "escapes me."
"You were born on Mars," Brigid declared. "Technically that makes you extraterrestrial, but since you're of obviously human ancestry, you're not aliens."
Sindri smiled broadly, nodding. "Precisely, Miss Brigid. I and the twenty people here and the thirty back in the Cydonia Compound comprise all that remains of a human Martian colony, seeded there some 190 years ago."
"Seeded by who or what?" Grant demanded.
Sindri fixed him with a direct, unblinking gaze. In a soft voice not much above a whisper, he answered, "I sometimes wonder about that myself, Mr. Grant. If nothing else, Parallax Red supplied me with confirmation of several suspicions I'd harbored all my life."
"Such as?" inquired Kane.
Sindri pointed to the cavernous storage facility beyond the living area. "Come with me, and perhaps together we can work out the knottier problems that plague both our houses."
He marched purposefully past them, swinging his cane. Robinson Crusoe blinked after him, asking again, "Ralph?"
As they rose from their seats, Grant said in an aside to Kane, "He and Lakesh must've attended the same schools."
Overhearing, Brigid shook her head disapprovingly, touching a finger to her lips. Kane felt a flash of annoyance. The oddly dressed little man displayed polished manners, but he was still an enigma and they were still, regardless of what he said, his prisoners.
Brigid's concern that Sindri might take offense at one of Grant's sarcastic asides seemed to be a fairly low priority at the moment.
Flanked by a retinue of trolls, they followed Sindri out into the warehouse. He flung his arms out wide, pirouetting on his toes. "What you see here is all that the Cydonia Plains of Mars yielded in the way of wonders. Hundreds of people labored over the final, pitiful handful of years of the twentieth century digging them out of oxidized soil. They were collected, dusted off and transported here for final identification and conveyance to Earth."
Dropping his arms to his sides, Sindri added dol
efully, "Of course, after the month of January 2001, nobody on Earth was too interested in picking over the leavings of a long-vanished race. I imagine the subject struck a bit too close to home."
"Mars was inhabited?" Brigid asked, voice holding a note of excited interest.
"It was indeed, Miss Brigid, although nothing very exact was ever established about who the original inhabitants were or what happened to them."
Sindri strode over to a trestle table and picked up a bizarrely fashioned piece of sculpture. "They were evidently humanoid with a high level of civilization and technology. Philosophically it appears they lived by a certain moral duality, an integrated dichotomy between enlightened self-interest and a readiness, if not a facility for war."
"What makes you say that?" Grant asked. "You found weapons?"
Sindri turned to face him. "Devices. Instruments that could deal death and bring life, that same moral duality incorporated into one mechanism."
Kane shook his head. "I don't get you."
"Perhaps you should have a demonstration so you can, as you say, 'get it.'" A thin, bleak smile creased the little man's mobile lips as he turned toward the female troll. "Elle, if you could play a lively air for Mr. Kane?"
The woman grinned and pointed the elongated neck of her harp at Kane's chest. Her fingers strummed the stiff, double-banked strings. Soft notes sounded, weaving and dancing in the air.
Kane received the startled impression that responding notes sounded deep within his body, but disharmonious with the ones struck by Elle.
Like a bolt of lightning, agony ripped through his nervous system. His nerves were aflame with it, and he fell on his face and lay with his mouth opening and closing against the hard deck, too consumed by pain even to scream.
Chapter 17
Over the roaring sleet storm of agony that filled his head, he distantly heard Brigid's and Grant's voices raised in furious, demanding outcries.
The harp song drowned them out, and again he had the impression of his body ringing with answering musical notes. This time, they seemed in harmony, complementing and blending together. He tried to understand how this could be. At the same time the pain left him, his strength and balance were restored.
