by Allen Wold
"The price has been high. I could not in turn detect their presence, as you have been able to do. I had wished many times to speak out, but dared not. This thing you call the Tathas effect is simply an exaggeration of our normal mode of communication. Since I donned this apparel, I have been muted."
"Seems like your government went to an awful lot of trouble," Sukiro said.
"And hasn't yours done the same? The 'Wrinkly' stars sent out only me, your government sent all these police to the same end."
Woadham was sitting beside Gospodin and Choi. "Can you help them?" she called out to Grayshard.
The Vaashka looked over at her. "What is the matter?"
"They're bleeding to death."
"I am not sure." He "walked" over to where the two wounded goons lay, bent down, and looked at them. "I have not been trained as a healer," he said, "and I know very little about the mammalian life forms." - "But you healed Braeth."
"Those were psychic wounds, and the healing, as you call it, merely entailed a reversal of the offensive forms. This is different. Still, let me try." He extruded a thick cable of tendrils from the torn-off shoulder of his jacket and played it over Choi's bruised and burned legs.
"Does that psychic attack work against other Vaashka?" Ri-kard asked.
"It does," Grayshard said. "Why else would we have developed it?"
"As a weapon," Denny said, "against other species."
Grayshard did not pause in his probing. Fibers caressed lacerations, wove nets over massive bruises. Choi lay there, too weak to protest. "Your weapons work against other species too," Grayshard said at last. "Did you develop them for that purpose?"
Denny stifled a protest. Grayshard continued to feel the hurt man's legs. "There are mammals on many of our worlds," he said. "Even on our home world, so I am told, there are life forms which you consider higher than, ah, fungi. We are well aware of our uniqueness, as a sentient life form among the stars, and have considerable experience in dealing with biologies different from ours."
"Where is your home world?" Sukiro asked.
Grayshard paused to do—something—and Choi began to relax and gingerly flex his legs. Grayshard muttered, "There has been much subcutaneous bleeding, no bones are broken, and severe infection is the greatest danger. All I can do here is cauterize the major blood vessels. He will still need attention from your own doctors if he is to be able to walk again." Then he moved to Gospodin. "This one is not so badly damaged," he said. Only when he had spread a fine network of his filaments over the woman's scalp and temples did he respond to Sukiro's question.
"My home world," he said, "is not the home world of my species. I come from 'Thickness,' one of over one hundred inhabited planets in the 'Wrinkly' stars. Not as large as your Federation, perhaps, but in some ways more technologically advanced. We do not, unfortunately, share our culture with other sentient races, which are rare. But other star nations nearby, the Cone, Greech, and Ten-Walker nations, are blessed with other sentient, and sometimes highly technological cultures, as your Federation is.
"But that is not your question. You wish to know, are we near to you. No, we are not. All the Vaashka nations are a very long way off. So then, why have our predators come such a long way for their neuromass? Quite simply, the better to avoid detection from my government and other Vaashka governments."
He withdrew his fibers from Gospodin's head. "She will heal in her own time," he said, then drew his tendrils back into his jacket. "But this is taking far too long." He stood on his artificial legs and turned to face the crowd of goons surrounding him. "Our enemies will be back soon, to take each of you off, for your brains and bodies. We must be out of here before then."
"The iris is locked," Sukiro said.
"So we'll wait until they're inside," Denny said, "and then jump them. We'll take casualties, but we'll get their weapons."
"One blast from that Vaashka riding on the zombies," Rikard said, "and we'll all be helpless."
"The administrator cannot attack you that way," Grayshard told them, "but there may be warriors waiting outside. No, we must be away from here before they come."
He went to the door and once again extended a bundle of tendrils, this time toward the touch-plate in the center of the iris.
Rikard came up to'watch. The ivory white tendrils, some of them finer than a Human hair, probed around the interface between the touch-plate and the surface of the iris.
"If our captors had known who I was," Grayshard said, "they would not have left me here with a trivial mechanism like this." The iris clicked, and slowly—not a snap—dilated open.
The corridor outside was empty at the moment. Choi and Gospodin were helped to their feet, half-comatose, and carried out with the others. There was no ceiling in this corridor, just darkness above their heads.
"We've got to get to the hull," Denny said. "If we can get close enough to the surface for our corn-links to work we can call for help."
"We get our weapons first," Sukiro told her. "I've got tracers on mine." She looked one way, then another. "It's around back," she said, and led them to the corner. The walls on either side went up just one level, with only open space above. She turned left and led them up the hall to a door on the right.
The iris was not locked. They went in and found all their armor and weapons, dumped on tables, spilling onto the floor. The goons quickly identified their own armor and put it on. They gathered up their weapons, except for the vibracoil, which was damaged beyond repair. Gospodin and Choi were armored, too, so that they could move on their own. And Rikard was especially relieved to find not only his .75, but also his gloves, without which his gun wouldn't provide him with his special advantage.
"Now let's go get them," Denny said.
"You think we can?" Rikard asked her. "It will be just like the last time, they don't even have to shoot at us."
"If two or more warriors project," Grayshard said, "the effect will be even stronger."
"I hate to say it," Sukiro said, "but now is not the time to fight. The best thing to do is to get away, find another hatch, and call for help."
"I've never called for help," Denny said.
"Neither have I," Sukiro told her. "I guess there's a first time for everything."
They left the room and looked for a way down, intending to go as deep as they could before going to one side and then up again, they hoped far away from the raiders' base. But when Denny asked Majorbank for some idea of their position, the goon just held out his map-corder ruefully. "This thing doesn't work anymore," he said. "They must have dropped it."
"Let's take the easy way," Sukiro said, and led them up the corridor to the iris at the end. They went through it and stepped out onto a balcony, overlooking a huge space, with what looked like a collection of child's blocks, arrayed in a rectangular pattern, on the floor far below them.
Private Raebuck tensed as she looked over the rail. At first Rikard thought she was just reacting to their height above the deck, maybe ten levels below them. But after a moment she said, reluctantly, "I think I can find our way out."
2
Sukiro was surprised by Raebuck's statement, but Rikard had been expecting something like this.
"How could you possibly know anything about this place?" Sukiro asked.
Raebuck pointed down to the deck below, where the pale blue rooms were arranged like blocks, separated by corridors with no ceilings. "See that peculiar cluster there toward the middle?" she said. "Where the blocks are arranged sort of like a cross? I've seen that before, on videotapes."
"And when did you see these videotapes?"
"When I was in college." She cast Rikard a sidelong glance. "I took an archeology course that dealt in vanished starfaring races, and this was one that we studied."
"Are you sure?" Sukiro asked her.
"I am now," she said. "When we found those big square objects, sitting on the" deck like furniture, they sort of looked familiar. And then there were those
other round-edged desklike things. I was sure I'd seen something like that before, but I couldn't remember where. And then when we found that stellated object, I remembered."
"How about that thing you turned on," Rikard asked, "did those tapes show you how to do that?"
"No, but in some of the tapes we saw the Tschagan, the people who built this place, working with some of their devices—just background action I think."
"What the hell are you talking about?" Sukiro asked. Rikard told her about what Raebuck had done while they had been following the trail of Sukiro's captors.
"I see," Sukiro said when he'd finished, then turned back to Raebuck. "And now you think you know where we are."
"Yes," Raebuck said, "but the tape showed this place from a different angle. If I'm right, there ought to be an outside door on the main deck, right about there"—she pointed—"that opens onto the top of a broad ramp."
"Let's go check it out," Rikard suggested.
They went along the balcony to a ramp that led them down to the next level. "How were those tapes made?" Rikard asked. "Previous explorers?"
"No," Raebuck said, "they were recorded from broadcasts the Tschagan made. They were a nasty people, and tried to dominate the League that existed then, before the Federation, before Humans came to space. They broadcast a lot of propaganda, threats and intimidations, footage of their military victories, and so on. The League outnumbered them greatly, but the Tschagan had a well-established home cluster, some technology the other peoples didn't have, and absolutely no compunction about doing horrible things to get their way and increase their power."
As Raebuck spoke they continued to descend, level by level, along one wall on balconies, then along the second wall to the main deck. By the time they came to the second corner they could see that there was a door where she had said it would be, and they hurried to it. Rikard was the first one there and pressed the latch-plate. The iris opened and, sure enough, there was the head of a broad ramp, at right angles to the wall, descending into the darkness.
Falyn reached around the edge of the iris to turn on the lights. The ceiling illumined only the first fifty meters of the ramp. The noncoms formed up the goons and they started to descend.
"Why didn't you tell us about mis before?" Sukiro asked Raebuck.
"I wasn't sure until now that I was right, and I didn't want to say anything out of place."
They got to the bottom of the ramp, which ended in an iris door, which in turn opened onto a balcony. Falyn palmed the ridges of the light switch beside the iris, and parts—not all—of the ceiling glowed amber. They were halfway up the wall of another huge chamber, again overlooking self-contained rooms like an irregular chess board, or a huge set of children's blocks.
Raebuck looked around from the railing. She pointed to an arch in a balcony one level lower on the other side of the huge chamber. 'That looks right," she said.
"Where are we going?" Sukiro asked as they all went along the balcony to the nearest ramp down to the next level.
"There's a kind of well," Raebuck said, "where we can go down as far as we want. It should be through that arch."
"Was this place just abandoned?" Rikard asked.
"Not 'just.' Something over ten thousand years ago the people of the League finally got tired of being intimidated, and a race called the Vengatti, pretty much black sheep themselves, led an uprising. All the Tschagan establishments in the League were destroyed—many by the Tschagan themselves when the 'rebels' pressed too close—and their home system was invaded."
"I've never heard of the Vengatti," Sukiro said.
"They died out about two thousand years later, about the time the first Federation was being formed."
They reached the arch, which opened onto a broad corridor, which penetrated deeply into the space beyond, with no surface features of any kind. There were no lights here so they had to switch on their headlamps which, bright as they were, did not reach the far end of the corridor. "This is right," Raebuck said.
"So what happened to the Tschagan home worlds?" Sukiro asked as they started down the corridor.
"Destroyed, the home world itself and three or four others, and every base on the other thirty or so worlds they controlled. They were slavers, genocides, and there wasn't much left of the sentient species who had grown up on the worlds under their direct dominion." »
"And yet this place still exists," Rikard said as their headlamps at last showed another arch at the far end of the corridor.
"Everybody assumed," Raebuck said, "that their home world was their capital. But all their broadcasts came from the same place, and this was it. This was their capital, not a world but a giant space station, and nobody knew it even existed, until now."
"What worries me," Rikard said, "is how their capital came to be here."
They came to the end of the corridor, beyond which was a larger space, completely dark. About fifty meters beyond the arch was a rail, picked out in their headlights, and beyond that was nothing, not even the reflection of a floor.
"That's the well," Raebuck said.
They all went to the rail. Their lights could not reach across the huge empty space, but, judging by the curve of the railing, it must have been over three hundred meters across. They shone their lights down into the well and could see, marked clearly in the pale blue wall, the edges of level after level below them— some with openings, some with balconies—dropping far down into the heart of the station. There was no sign of the bottom.
Rikard looked up into the space over their heads. Maybe twenty floors above was a domed ceiling.
"Why don't we go up that way?" Sukiro asked.
"We're still too close to the raiders' base," Majorbank said. Though his map-corder was broken he had been keeping track of their movements in his head.
"So how do we get down?" Sukiro then asked.
"I don't know," Raebuck said, "their cameras just went out into the middle of this space and descended, on floaters obviously."
"Maybe not," Falyn said. "The gravity here is artificial, maybe it's turned off in the shaft."
Majorbank looked at his broken map-corder, then tossed it out into the well. Its arc was nearly flat, and it dropped only two floors by the time it was too far away to be seen in their headlamps.
"Looks good to me," Denny said. She stepped up onto the rail, then turned around and stepped off backward, a careful step so she would not drift too far away. For a moment she hung suspended, then slowly began to descend. When her shoulders came even with the rail she reached out and stopped herself with one finger. "Come on in," she said, "the gravity's fine."
Following Denny's lead the others spread out along the rail on either side of her, climbed over, and linked arms with each other, with Denny in the middle of the chain, and let go. For a long moment they just hung suspended, and then began slowly to descend.
"We'll never get anywhere like this," Denny said as they dropped centimeter by centimeter. She gave commands to her goons, and in midair they re-formed into several groups of three, with two on either side of a third goon, holding this one so that his or her hands were now free. At the same time other goons grabbed hold of those groups, and kept hold of the wounded, Rikard, and Grayshard. Then the middle member of each group of three pushed up at the wall in front of them, accelerating their drop.
They passed a long stretch of unbroken wall, and marked their progress by the passing of the triple dark blue stripes, which were painted at every level. Then they came to another balcony recess, and as they got within reach of the ceiling the goons pushed up against it, gaining them more speed. There was another recess immediately below, and they accelerated again. Then there was more blank wall, then another balcony, and down they went, faster and faster.
After maybe ten minutes, Sukiro asked, "How far do we go?"
"To the bottom," Raebuck said.
"How long will that take?"
"Hard to tell, maybe half an hour, maybe more."
<
br /> They fell in silence for another five minutes or so, then Rikard said, "So tell us more about these Tschagan."
"I'm trying to remember. They dominated the various species of the League for over a thousand years, and in spite of their inferior numbers they kept on adding worlds to their own nation. No other race we studied was so brutal or so violent, and there were certain secrets about their nature which gave them an advantage, and which no one was ever able to discover. They were greatly outnumbered, but in spite of that they controlled most of the League, by intimidation, threat, and frequently actual violence. They broadcast films of their victories, made demands, and sent out thousands of hours of propaganda. Originally they were from outside the League, but that area is now fully within the federation.
"There were other races in their home systems, but they were all slaves. The Tschagan had been in power at home for at least fifteen thousand years before they were put down. They had made war on every world they found, and had 'joined' the League only because the League was more powerful than they. But the Tschagan were well on their way to total dominance when the Vengatti and others rose up. They had been like bullies among a crowd of pacifists, and the Vengatti, once not thought well of, became the core of the vigilantes that threw them out."
The trip down the well lasted a lot longer than Raebuck's story. The character of the wall down which they were now falling at a considerable rate remained much the same—triple blue stripes at each level when there was no balcony or recess to mark the various floors. Occasionally they passed a silver plate set into the surface of the wall, on which were inscribed flat black characters similar to those they'd seen on the controls of the com-cons.
Sukiro began to get worried about hitting the bottom, and had Ming and Dyson keep a lookout below. They were going fairly fast by now, and if they didn't have enough time to slow down, Rikard and Grayshard would be injured when they did hit.
