by Allen Wold
"What kind of place is this?" Denny asked.
~I have no idea, but the Tschagan seldom come here, so I suspect it's off limits except to technicians.~
The railed walkway was five meters wide and, like most of the corridors, the ceiling above it lit up as they approached a darkened section, and dimmed after they left. Each section of illumination was only ten meters long, so they walked along in what was in effect a moving spotlight.
Several times they came to places where another, similar walkway crossed the one on which they were traveling, and once came to a section that was twenty meters wide and long, with one-meter catwalks angling off from the corners. Droagn did not make any turnings, but led them straight on until they came to where the walkway ended in a large iris, that was not set into the wall but suspended in the dark space, on a column ten meters wide which went both up and down into the darkness.
As was to be expected, on the other side of the iris was a spiral ramp. But this was a regular ramp, with the familiar pale blue walls, two triple stripes of dark blue, and milk-glass floor. They descended three levels, then went out an iris into an intersection of four corridors. And here Droagn hesitated for the first time.
~I was attacked here. I think we go that way.~ He pointed to the right.
After a while the corridor came to an end and they entered a large room. There were no furniturelike artifacts here, but there were a dozen or so of the round, black-topped tables, and counters along all four walls, each of which also had two doors. There were closed cabinets above and below the counters.
"This looks familiar," Raebuck said. "The museum I was looking for shouldn't be far from here."
~If you mean,~ Droagn said, ~a place where the Tschagan kept their trophies, then you're right. But how did you know?~
"I saw tapes made of the Tschagan propaganda broadcasts. I suppose there must be other museums."
~I'm sure there are, but I'm interested in only this one.~
"Because here is where the crown, ah, the Prime is kept."
~Exactly, but again, how did you know? ~
"Because I saw it in that museum, or thought I did. It was just in the background, they were showing off something else instead, but I'd seen pictures of the Prime before, and I thought I recognized it. I didn't tell anybody about it, I was sure other students had made the connection, but I guess they never did. And then when we found you, and you had the false crown on your head, I thought that was it."
~How much do people know about this Prime of mine?~ Droagn asked, with something akin to wariness in his telepathic question.
"Not as much as they'd like. It's the only functional Ahmear artifact known to exist, the oldest artifact in the known universe. Generally it's referred to as the Crown of the Serpent. Everybody thought it was lost forever after the Tschagan razed Tromarn."
~And yet you recognized it in the background of a film made for other purposes. I will not let you have it, you know.~
"I know. But let's hurry up and find it so we can get out of here."
~The way is through there,~ Droagn said as he pointed to the near door in the left hand wall.
Beyond the iris was a short corridor, at the end of which was an antechamber, separated by open arches from a large room, three levels high, but without balconies at the upper levels. The floor of the room was perhaps two hundred meters on a side, and filled with stands, freestanding shelves, high pedestals, and low platforms, on each of which stood some kind of object, with other, larger things standing on the floor itself, or sometimes suspended from the ceiling, and other things attached to the walls, or on brackets.
It was a veritable wealth of stolen art, electronic devices, furniture, small vehicles. There were paintings, sculptures, tapestries, ornamental objects of every kind. There were ancient cars, small aircraft, space runners, even several oddly proportioned bicycles. Some of the electronic devices—communicators, stand-alone computers, perhaps home appliances—were broken, others were intact and possibly functional. There were beds, thrones, fragile chairs made of ancient wood, steel shapes designed for physiologies now unknown in the Federation or in any of the nearby star nations. Some items were smaller than a fist, and stood on their own special pedestals. Others were collections of similar objects sharing a shelf.
There were too many things to make sense of any of it. Rikard found that he was holding his breath, excited by the scope of the collection, wishing he could spend hours just looking around. And what would even a fraction of it be worth, if he could "liberate" it.
Droagn led them quickly past the displays to the far side of the room, where more arches opened into another part of the museum. The collection here was much the same—overwhelming—and arches in the distant side walls revealed hints of even more treasures stored away.
But Droagn had no time for any of this. They went on to yet a third room. Rikard sensed the Ahmear's excitement, and became apprehensive as they neared a display of what looked like tubular street signs. Immediately behind these multicolored rods was a chest-high pedestal, on which sat the duplicate of the crown Endark Droagn had worn while in stasis.
Except that it seemed somehow alive. Droagn slithered up to the pedestal, his head towering above it. Rikard, Raebuck, and Sukiro were right behind, and watched as the Ahmear reached out with his upper two hands, took the crown—the Prime—off its pedestal and turned it over and over. There was power in the thing, even though there were no lights, no hums, no outward indications. It just felt alive.
Something special was happening here, and everybody seemed to sense it, but nobody knew what to do about it except watch as Droagn put the crown on his head and turned to face them with a strange expression which Rikard, sensing the Ah-mear's telepathic overflow, could only interpret as triumph. Droagn's eyes glowed fiercely, his arms trembled as he lowered them to his sides. He coiled his lower body under him and rose himself up even higher.
Then the light went out of his eyes, and he relaxed so that his head was no higher than Rikard's. All four hands reached up to touch the crown tentatively. He took it off, looked at it again, touched it here and there.
~Oh, well,~ he said. ~I guess it doesn't work on Humans.~
"What were you going to do?" Rikard asked.
~Just try it out. I would have kept my end of the bargain. But it is disappointing.~
"I guess. What is it?"
~An amplifier. It enhances part of our natural telepathic abilities, so that the wearer can communicate over longer distances than normal, and even control other beings to a certain extent.~ He put it back on his head and stared at Gray shard. ~It still works,~ he said, ~I can feel the Vaashka now. But it was made a long time ago, the technology has long been lost, and I guess it had to have been tuned somehow. ~ He removed the crown again, turned it over and over, then put it back on. ~As convenient a way to carry it as any,~ he said.
"Can we get out of here now?" Sukiro asked. She was staring at the crown with a poorly concealed covetousness.
~I think that would be a very good idea,~ Droagn said. ~I—I think our hosts are beginning to wake up.~
"The Prime can tell you that?" Denny asked.
~No, it just enhances my own awareness of other neurosys-tems—I can feel yours quite strongly—and I'm getting a distant background sensation of increasing Tschagan mental activity. Of course, it could just mean that there's a group of them coming this way.~
"Then let's get moving," Sukiro said. "And let us know when they get near so we won't be taken by surprise."
~I’ll do that,~ Droagn said.
But instead of going back the way they had come, Droagn led them to an alcove to one side. ~No sense taking a roundabout way,~ he said. ~We can go straight up from here.~
The back of the alcove was a large iris, which opened onto a ramp broad enough to allow three goons to walk side by side. They went up.
"How many of those Primes are there?" Sukiro asked Droagn as they ascended.
~Only t
his one, now. There never were very many, and those were kept for administrative use. Originally the system was to have been used as a weapon, but it didn't work that way.~
"I thought the Ahmear were pacifists," Raebuck said.
~Oh, we are, now, and have been for millennia. In fact, the system of amplifiers, of which this crown was the Prime, or the central controlling amplifier, contributed in its own way to our giving up our primitive, violent ways.~
"Our normal range of communication is—ah—about two kilometers in your terms. With the amplifiers we could talk to each other anywhere on a planet, and from the ground to low-orbiting stations. After a while we developed other means of doing this, without the control functions, and every Ahmear child is so equipped at birth.
~The control system was still used for a while, to coordinate complex activities—ah, such as military maneuvers, and later certain exploratory expeditions. But eventually most of the system was just allowed to deteriorate, or was destroyed rather than thrown away where other peoples might find it.~
~This device, however, was—ah—misplaced, and then it fell into ShaVaGa hands, and then was lost.~
~We went through several changes of culture in the meantime, and lost a lot of history in the process. And lost the knowledge of how this thing was made and properly used at the same time. I don't know what someone could do with it, with the proper training. Or what our scientists and technicians could develop from it if they had it.~
~That was my intention. We have—or had—a need for better communication over interstellar distances, and the Prime could have helped solve that problem. Maybe we've already solved the problem by now without it.~
They did not go all the way to the top of the ramp, but turned off at a landing where they entered a small room. But instead of going out the iris, Droagn opened another of the service hatches. ~There was probably an entrance like this down in the museum,~ Droagn said, ~but I didn't want to take the time to find it.~
"Are our 'hosts' getting any nearer?" Sukiro asked.
~No, but there are more of them awake now.~
The hatch did not lead to a ramp or a corridor, but to another room, big enough for all of them, and without any other exit. There was a bank of controls beside the iris. Droagn touched a silver button with a cryptic black symbol on it, and a panel slid shut over the iris. ~Service elevator,~ he explained. He touched another button, and they could all feel the increase of gravity as the elevator went up.
When the vator came to a stop they were still a long way from the surface of the station, and had to take another vator. The well down which they had dropped—how long ago?—had taken them very deep indeed. Again they stopped short of their destination, but there was no third vator here, and they had to go by more normal ways.
The corridors here were all two levels high, and there were few side doors. Ascending and descending ramps opened off small alcoves. They went up whenever they could.
As they came up one ramp Droagn slowed, made a soft hissing sound, and held out his hands to stop them. ~I smell villains afoot,~ he said, ~between us and the next ramp.~
Denny and Nelross led their goons out the door at the top of the ramp. Even though the iris snapped shut, the rest could hear the immediate sound of rapid and repeated blaster fire from beyond it. Then Denny poked her head back in through the door.
"We got a few," she said, "but the rest got away."
~It should be safe now,~ Droagn said, and the rest of the party went through the door into a corridor.
Several times during the next hour, as they went from ramp to ramp and level to level, they came across small parties of Tschagan. Sometimes one of the noncoms led an attack, but most of the time Grayshard and Droagn were able to use their peculiar psychic powers to drive the caterpillars away.
They passed through an area different from any they had visited before. Narrow ramp tubes led them up for short distances, then they ascended a long set of tiered ramps clinging to the wall of a huge chamber more than ten levels high, its ceiling supported by large columns, and with narrow balconies around the upper levels and around the columns connected by narrow catwalks with knee-high rails. They met few Tschagan, and those Droagn quickly drove away.
In one place they entered a chamber with no visible walls or floor, a dark place of freefloating catwalks that formed a maze in the air. Here there were occasional platforms like open rooms or offices, larger floors on which were typical "furniture," or floor-standing objects like those they had seen so many times before. Many of these now hummed, or blinked, or sometimes changed shape in slow, subtle ways.
They went over another huge open space, on broader catwalks this time, where occasional spotlights in a distant ceiling shone down into the spaces between the walkways, illuminating metallic and crystalline objects—machines of some kind—on the floor equally far below. They went through a succession of three-level cubical rooms, each with a huge floating object in the center, all lit now, blinking, clicking, sometimes rotating on an oblique axis.
There were small areas similar to those they had traversed before as well. And still, the few Tschagan they met were easily avoided or driven off. ~But there are more of them coming awake, now,~ Droagn said. ~I can feel them, a background hum. They are not pleasant to listen to.~
"Is it us?" Rikard asked, "Are they waking up because we got so far into their capitol station?"
~I think it's because I'm awake,~ Droagn said. ~They were using me, they admitted as much when they put me in stasis. I think that somehow they were able to tap my telepathic abilities and use them to prolong the stasis effect. Even in stasis, after a thousand years you grow old, and then you die. And prolonged stasis can have a damaging effect on the nervous system and the psyche. I know they used stasis whenever they traveled, their starships are no faster than ours, or yours, and for them, a three day trip would seem to take far longer, subjectively—not that they're that swift intellectually, of course.~
~I had dreams while I was in stasis. You're not supposed to do that, but Ahmear are different, after all. One image that recurred was of somehow expanding to fill all space—that would be when they linked me to their central controller, and I became aware of the vast number of Tschagan connected through it to me. I remember feeling motion, not of my body so much as my mind. Time didn't seem to pass so much as cycle. I'm sure a psychologist would be able to interpret each of my dreams in terms of what was being done to me, since they weren't really dreams after all, but subliminal perceptions of reality.~
~And now that I think about it, the last of those dreams was at the end of a long period of utter peace—the time the station was completely shut down I'll bet. Little sparks... a kind of swirling off to one side—that would be when the first of these villains began to wake up. For a long while there hadn't been any awareness at all, so I'd guess the entire personnel had been put under—makes sense if they had an emergency they wanted to wait out. ~
~And now they're all waking up, not all at once, just a few thousand at a time, if I can trust my senses. That false Prime, it wasn't just a mockup, it was the device by which I was connected to their stasis controller. When you took it off me, that was when they started to wake up.~
"And now," Falyn said, "the stasis devices are shutting off automatically, in an orderly fashion."
"That's what I would guess," Sukiro said. "It will take a while before they're all awake, but then, my God, how many are there?"
~Five or six million.~
The remains of the three goon squads, a force that could intimidate cities, felt very small indeed.
At last they came to an area which, though different from the vestibule to which they had entered, was obviously the foyer to an external hatchway, with its floor of steel instead of milk-glass, and walls of ribbed steel instead of pale blue enamel. Along the side walls were platforms on which rested the vehicles that could only be space-cars, and at the far end was the air-lock iris. They opened this cautiously, in case th
ere was no pressure on the other side, but there was. Ahead of them now was the broad, spiral ramp leading upward.
As they ascended Sukiro tried to reach the shuttle, or Captain Brenner on the gunship, by means of her comcon, but got no response by the time they had come to the top of the ramp. "They may be over the horizon," she said. "We don't know how far around the perimeter we've come."
"We've got to go out onto the surface, then," Denny said.
But many of the surviving goons had been wounded, and their armor had taken damage so that they were not proof against hard vacuum. They would have to wait below, in the vestibule. Rikard took off his impromptu Vaashka shield so he could put his vacuum suit on again, to accompany Sukiro and the goons with intact suits out onto the station's skin. Meanwhile Falyn, with Gray shard and Droagn, led the wounded below.
When Falyn reported that they were safely out of the lock area, Sukiro had Jasime go around the ledge that surrounded the ramp to the controls at the back of the hatch. Jasime didn't know how to recycle the air, so when the hatch opened, the atmosphere inside the ramp rushed out past them. They waited a moment, to clear the traces of frost off their face plates, then went out onto the surface. They were on a circular pad like the one at the other hatch, with the semi-dome rising behind them.
Once again Sukiro tried to signal the gunship, but could get no response. She tried on several emergency and service frequencies, hoping one of them would carry the distance, and at last she got an answer. Rikard had a radio in his suit helmet, and Sukiro had cut him into her personal circuit so that he could hear what was going on.
"We read you, Major," the voice from the gunship said. "Where the hell have you been?"
"It's a long story, Brenner. We need help."
"So do we," Captain Brenner replied. "I don't know how they avoided our scanners, but they did."
