Crown of the Serpent

by Allen Wold

  "All of a sudden? Just like that?"

  "I guess so." He thought about it as they went from one pale blue room to another. "It is kind of odd," he said.

  "How did you feel before?"

  "I'm trying to remember. Closed in? No, that's not it—"

  "You ought to feel closed in, in a place like this."

  "That wasn't it. Too many people." And even as he spoke, he felt shivers run up his back, and he looked over his shoulder the way they had come. "Like in that town on Natimarie." He stopped where he was. "Very faint, but that was it. I didn't recognize it—being closed in was 'good,' the people were 'bad,' and they sort of canceled out. But now..."

  "Let's tell the major," Falyn said, and they hurried to catch up with the others, who hadn't noticed them falling behind. The platoon was crossing a room far larger than usual and Sukiro was in the middle of the group.

  "Major," Rikard called as he hurried up to her. "Wait a min­ute." Sukiro stopped and turned around, but the rest of the pla­toon went on. "I felt the Tathas."

  "Good," Sukiro said, "that means we're getting close."

  "No, back there."

  "Somebody out exploring. Come on, we don't want to get too far behind." She walked away.

  "But the trace was back there."

  "We'll check it out when we come back," Sukiro said. "If we can. We've got to locate the base first."

  "But I don't feel it here," Rikard insisted as they rejoined the goons. They were now crossing a transverse corridor. Denny was waiting for them.

  "You get lost in here," she said to Rikard, "and we'll just leave you."

  "No we won't," Sukiro said. "But keep up with us," she said to Rikard. "The closer we get to that other hatch, the more dangerous it's going to be."

  Rikard didn't say anything more. Sukiro was probably right. But the feeling he'd had—it wasn't like a Tathas had actually been there, but more like being near it, a room or two away. And now the Tathas were behind them—or had been, at least.

  As they neared their objective the group moved both more quickly and more carefully. Denny kept her goons moving through door after door and they no longer hesitated to look at anything. Nelross had his squad right behind, ready at the first sign of trouble to take cover and blow away doors if they had to. The rest of the platoon brought up the rear, with Sukiro, Rikard, and Grayshard out of harm's way should there be any shooting.

  Then at one door the first two goons to pass through stopped short, then hurriedly backed out, guns leveled. Denny had reached in and turned on the light, but she stepped out of the iris and it snapped shut.

  "Somebody's been in there," Sladen said. "There's footprints all over the floor."

  Nelross came to stand by the iris, opposite Denny, and their goons took up a formation, weapons drawn, ready for a fight. Denny palmed the switch, she and Nelross stepped into the threshold, the goons charged in through the gap in the counter, fanned out, squatted down, and covered the area with their blasters.

  There was nobody there. It was a small room, with no place to hide. But the dust on the floor had been churned up over almost the whole area. The rest of-the goons moved in while several of the first to enter wenrto-the other two doors, which were set into blank walls.

  Rikard followed as quickly as he could and looked around. "Look here," he said. He pointed to an object on the counter, right beside the door, a rusty gray box like a cube, except that none of the angles were square.

  Falyn, who was standing beside him, turned to look at the object. Sukiro came in right behind her and looked too. "So what?" she said.

  Denny, standing ready at one side door, looked back at the boxlike object on the counter. Her face registered dawning sur­prise, and her gaze turned to Rikard. "Is that...?" she started to ask.

  Rikard picked up the box and turned it over in his hands. "Here's where I tried to break it open," he said, pointing out a slightly crushed corner.

  "What are you talking about?" Sukiro demanded. She reached out to take the box from him.

  Rikard looked at Denny, their eyes locked. "That door," Rikard said to the sergeant, "leads to the vestibule."

  Denny grimaced, then opened the door, reached around the jamb, and turned on the light. Sure enough, there was the vesti­bule, exactly as they had found it before.

  "We've come full circle," Rikard said.

  "Impossible," Majorbank snapped. He held out the mapping pad. "We've followed a straight line, more or less, from where we came in."

  "Then how did we get back here?"

  "We're not back here, we're somewhere else. All this—it's just a coincidence."

  "I don't believe it. Maybe somebody found this box where I left it and brought it here? Why would they do that?"

  Nobody had an answer.

  "Check the square of the room," Rikard suggested on sudden impulse. Denny glanced at Hornower and nodded.

  The goon took a device from his belt, a box with a pistol grip set diagonally under it. He went to a corner, and stopped about two paces from it. The other goons nearby made room. He aimed the corner of the box at the comer of the room, pressed a trigger on the grip, then twisted a dial on the top, and read out a number on a small screen by the knob. "Eighty-five degrees," he said. He went to another comer. "Same here." Another. "Ninety-five." The fourth. "Ninety-five. This room isn't square."

  "None of them are," Rikard said. "They all make up a geo­desic surface. Add it up, how many rooms would it take, shaped like this one, to turn us around one hundred eighty de­grees or so?"

  Homower calculated on his device a moment. "About as many as we've been through," he said. "Given a good margin for error."

  "So when we thought we were going in a straight line," Denny said, "actually we were angling off by about five de­grees, every time we went from one room to another."

  "Looks like it." Majorbank was embarrassed. "We should have measured."

  "You had no reason to," Sukiro said. Then she turned to Rikard. "And you felt that Tathas trace at about the halfway point."

  "That's right," Rikard said. "They weren't there, but they were near, or had been."

  "There's got to be some mistake," Nelross insisted.

  "There was," Denny said, "just like we figured out."

  "When did you first feel these Tathas," Gray shard asked Ri-kard. It was the first time he'd spoken since they'd entered the derelict.

  "I don't know," Rikard said, "I just noticed it when the feel­ing stopped."

  "All right, Msr. Braeth," Sukiro said, "you were right after all. Let's retrace our steps, and this time, tell us when you first feel the trace." They returned the way they had come, and when they got to the room where Rikard had become aware of feeling good again Sukiro let him take the lead.

  He tried to be alert to the first sense of Tathas, but it didn't come at the next room, or the one after that. Then he became aware that he didn't like these goons pressing him so closely— they were only two or three meters from him—and he stopped. "I don't know when it started," he said, "but I can feel it now."

  "Woadham," Denny said to one of her goons, "Colder, you stay right beside him."

  "Don't mind me if I twitch," Rikard said to them. "It's part of the Tathas effect."

  He followed the trace, every now and then taking a side door instead of the one directly oppositeTifr this way compensating for the forced change in angle of their progress. He went as quickly as he could, his two guardian goons beside and a little behind him, the others following, and as he went the Tathas sensation got subtly stronger. But it was only an indication of proximity until he opened a door that led, not into another room or a corridor, but into a narrow tube, spiraling down.

  He stopped at the top of the tube and looked down the cork­screw ramp. There were four sets of footprints in the dust, one pair coming up, the other going back down again. The feeling was very strong here, but he was able to suppress most of its effects.

  "Do Tathas wear boots?" Sukiro had come up b
eside him and was looking down at the footprints.

  "No, but whoever made those prints was carrying a Tathas. Not recently, maybe eight or ten days ago."

  "How can you tell?"

  "There's something about the feel of it. I can't quite describe it. It's not the weakness of the trace, but sort of like... granular? Stretched? It's not fresh, in any event."

  Colder and Woadham led the way down. The spiraling tube ramp was so narrow that they had to descend single file, and Denny wanted trained goons to meet whatever they might find at the bottom. The spiral turned twice, then ended at an iris door that opened into a room, similar to those above, with three other doors.

  Rikard paused in the middle of the room. Sukiro was right behind him. She was still suspicious of his ability to sense the Tathas, but he had no patience with her. He chose the door on the left because it somehow felt more "recent," and the others followed him through, to another room, then to another, then into a corridor. The door at the far end opened onto the top of another spiral ramp, which led them down again, one more level.

  When they left the ramp this time they found themselves at the side of another corridor. It was at least ten meters wide and extended in both directions into the darkness. The switch by the iris caused only one section of the high, amber ceiling to be illuminated.

  The decor here was the same as above, pale blue walls with two triple dark blue stripes, and milky white floors below the amber ceiling. There were several other doors visible, those on the near side of the corridor not opposite those on the far side. All were dark blue and outlined in white.

  Other than that the corridor was empty, but all could see the marks in the dust on the floor, where someone had walked be­fore them. There were enough tracks this time, going both ways and toward some of the doors, so that they could not just follow the set from the ramp, but needed Rikard's further guidance.

  He stepped out into the middle of the corridor, looked one way, then the other, then closed his eyes and felt the subtle Tathas trace. It was everywhere, very faint, rather old.

  "All the marks look like they were made by boots or shoes," Sladen said.

  "That's right," Rikard agreed, "they'd be carrying the Tathas in containers of some kind."

  "But they'd have to be shielded, wouldn't they?"

  "The carriers, yes, but not the containers. If they had been, I couldn't feel the residual effects of their presence here."

  He closed his eyes again, looking for the- kinds of images he'd felt and seen in the caverns under the Tower of Fives on Kohltri, but nothing like that came. Just a feeling of—grayness? Discomfort? Some slight madness, surely. It was stronger... "That way," he said, pointing to the right.

  Quickly and cautiously, they moved off up the corridor, to­ward the darkness beyond the light.

  2

  They went up to the corridor to the right. As they neared the shadowed portion the ceiling ahead turned on automatically, and the section behind went dark.

  This happened at the next section, and when the one after that lit up they could see that the corridor came to ai'tT intersection. There the footprints went in both directions, but Rikard led them to the left.

  There was a dark hole in the middle of the next section of corridor, the head of a ramp leading down. As they neared it an iris behind them snapped. But when they stopped, startled, to look behind them, all the irises they could see were closed.

  They went on to the head of the ramp. The footprints led down, and so they followed, descending eight meters or so to another corridor parallel to the one they had just left.

  One line of footprints went on ahead, but most of the tracks doubled back around the side of the ramp, and this was the trail Rikard followed. As they came to the end of the lit section of corridor and the lights in the next section came on they heard two irises snapping, at the far end of the newly lit corridor, one right after another, one on either side.

  The goons froze in a crouch, ready to fire at anything that showed itself. Grayshard nearly flattened himself to the floor. They could not tell which irises had opened, and there was nobody in sight. After a pause they went on, but when they got to where the sounds had come from they could see a trail in the dust, crossing the corridor. It was not footprints, but a mark as if someone had blown or swept the dust aside, from'one iris to another.

  Beyond this disturbance most of the footprints led on down the corridor, but a single trail angled off to a side door. Rikard started to lead them that way when an iris behind them snapped open and shut. Sladen, who was in the rear, lurched forward and fell to his hands and knees as if he had been knocked down from behind, and even over the sound of his fall and curses they could hear another iris snapping.

  Longarth and Raebuck went to Sladen's aid, and even as they helped him to his feet Longarth called out, "There's another swipe across the dust here. It comes in, crosses where Sladen was standing, and goes on in an arc and back out the same iris again."

  "What the hell is going on?" Falyn demanded.

  "Does that have anything to do with the Tathas effect?" Su-kiro asked Rikard.

  "Not as far as I know," he said. When they had recovered themselves he led them through the side door into a large room.

  The floor was a half meter below the corridor level but with­out any steps. There were two strange objects set between the ubiquitous pedestal-footed table and the wall. Both were roughly rectilinear, but with complex surfaces. There was no dust on either of them.

  The larger object, on the right, was a meter long, half a meter high and wide, light red on top shading to dark red near the floor. The visible faces had randomly placed pyramidal concavities of a much lighter red, ten centimeters square and as deep, and from the near side projected a cylinder that angled upward, also about ten centimeters long, and of a much darker red. The smaller object, on the left, was an orange cube, thirty centimeters on a side, lighter above than below. Each face had a square recess, off center, about five centimeters deep. The two objects and the table left little room for the group to move through, and several of the goons tried to move the smaller thing out of the way, but it wouldn't budge.There were three other doors in the room, and Rikard led them to the far one. On the counter beside it was a much smaller object, composed of three steel-colored spheres in a row, connected by short black rods, about twenty centimeters long altogether. Jasime picked it up in passing, and found that it weighed hardly anything at all.

  The next room was larger than the first, with columns sup­porting the ceiling. Here were several more of the rectilinear objects standing on the floor. Rikard led them to the far door, but as he did so the iris by which they had entered snapped. Sladen and Brisabane, the two goons nearest the door, fell on their faces as if struck from behind. The rest of the platoon spun around, weapons drawn, to face the now silent iris. There was nothing to aim or fire at.

  Brisabane, on the floor, was lying on his back, almost under the central table. He called out, "There are things under here," and Sladen looked up at the underside of the table too.

  "What are they?" Rikard asked as he went to see.

  "There's another one of those three-sphere things," Brisabane said, "and two boxes, about as big as my hand, with lids. They look like they're made of wood." He reached up, touched one of the boxes. It fell into his hand, which startled him, and he dropped it.

  Sladen reached down and gingerly picked it up. "What was holding it up?" he asked.

  "I don't know." Brisabane took the box back, and put it up against the underside of the table again. "It's just sticking there now." He took it down again and crawled out from under the table. "It didn't feel like magnetism," he said as he turned it over and over.

  "Leave that there," Denny told him.

  Brisabane was almost glad to put it down on the table, but as he did so the hinged cover opened. He reached out to close the lid again, then decided not to.

  Rikard looked into the box. It was empty, except for a col­lection o
f tiny rods sticking up from the bottom.

  He left it there and went back to the iris where the vague Tathas trace was strongest and led the platoon through into an­other transverse corridor. Then he turned to the left and as they went on, a section of the corridor, two hundred meters ahead, lit up briefly. The ceiling light was on for only an instant, and nobody saw anything that might have tripped the automatic switch.

  With growing apprehension they went on into the next sec­tion of corridor, then through a door on the left side, into an L-shaped room. The central square of the L was half a meter below the end by which they had entered, and the far leg of the L was half a meter higher again. There were two irises in each of the long walls, and one in each of the other six walls.

  Each section of the L had its own black-topped table. In the first part of the room were two orange cubes like those they found before. In the center section, on one side, was a different kind of greenish rectangular object. In the last section, into which Rikard led them, was yet another object, one that looked like a rust-colored couch with arms and back, and about that size, light on top and shading darker toward the floor. But one half of the "seat" had a half-cube recess, the other had a half-cube projection, and the back was covered with a seemingly random set of projecting pale orange square rods, each five or six centimeters across and from one to ten centimeters long.

  Suddenly all the irises snapped rapidly several times in succession. The goons nearest the doors fired but succeeded only in damaging the walls and irises.

  "God damn it," Sukiro shouted to the noncoms, "keep your people under control."

  Falyn had fired her own blaster. She put it away, half-angry, half-guilty.

  The noncoms ordered the goons to each of the doors. They opened them all at once, ready to fire if there was any move­ment. But behind each door were only marks on the floor where the dust had been swept or blown away.

  "Something was here," Nelross said. He was getting as jumpy as his goons.

  "Let's keep moving," Sukiro said, so Rikard led them out a side door in the far leg of the L, into a smaller room, furnished with two red rectilinear objects. As they passed through, some­thing moved through the room in the opposite direction, so fast that they could not see what it was. Everyone in its path was either knocked down or jostled to one side.