We abruptly leaped ahead, our passage obvious by the unaccustomed fact that there were landmarks to either side of us, and at once we swerved, deep shadows swallowing us instantly. We were inside one of the domes. As we approached the far wall, abruptly we could see, from our ship’s lights, that the dome’s interior was regularly lined with hundreds upon hundreds of differently-sized holes in a pattern that was immediately recognizable: they were houses. Even in my day, we knew of prehistoric tribes that had lived in cliff dwellings in the American Southwest; here the people had done the same, except they had lived inside the mountains they had made rather than on the cliff face. In these edifices they had been safe from storm, from heat, from enemies of all kinds.
Here, we too would be safe. Even if the enemy could detect our trail, I doubted their ship would be able to make the delicate low-speed maneuvers that would be required to enter as we had. So long as they did not stoop to bombing indiscriminately, we were temporarily secure. Evidently Maire felt the same, for within moments we had come to rest a few feet from the floor.
We gathered amidships, passengers and crew, staring up at Maire standing on the raised rear deck flanked by Skull. Outside of The Dark Lady, it was truly dark, for this was not one of the domes that had cracked. The shipboard lights had been turned on, but their shine dissipated almost as soon as it left the Lady’s confines, and we could not see more than the closest wall section. It was as if this monstrous dwelling had been designed to absorb stray light in order not to disturb the inhabitants in their sleeping hours. I wondered what had happened to them. Were their bodies lying behind those blank windows, bones in the dust? Was it disease, or war, or Mother Nature who had brought them down? What mighty forces had broken so many of them, opened them like enormous eggshells? This was the kind of mystery that Maire and I had dreamed of exploring, but now a mystery had been forced upon us, an unknown enemy who had nearly destroyed us and had brought us to this sanctuary, this monument to the evanescent nature of Man. I only hoped that this tomb would not serve to shelter our bones as well.
“We have turned off all non-essential ship’s systems,” Maire announced. “We don’t know what kind of sensors that ship might have, although the fact that ours cut out as soon as we entered this dome gives us hope that theirs won’t work here either. At least they haven’t followed us, so that’s something.
“We were lucky. The Lady didn’t take a lot of structural damage, most of it was to our comp systems. The force fields were able to protect us that much. We’ve turned them off now; if these walls aren’t thick enough to protect us, there’s not a whole lot more they could do anyway. Maintenance crews will be working around the clock, obviously, but since we can’t send for help, if there’s anything we need that we don’t have in stores, we’ll have to try to scrounge it. Fortunately, we’ve landed in what appears to what an old habitat of some kind. Maybe there’ll be something we can use.
“Skull is going to organize teams to explore our surroundings. Three men each. No one is to go beyond sight of the ship. No one,” she repeated, and she was looking straight at me. A couple of the crew who knew me of old glanced my way and grinned, wiping their expressions clean before the captain could see them. “He’ll give you further instructions. Any questions?”
There were no questions. We were stuck here until we could make repairs. On the bright side, we had just taken on fresh food, and the ship’s recycling systems could supply water for weeks. On the other hand, we had no way of knowing if and when the black ship stopped hunting for us, and if we tried to flee while it was still in the area, it would bring us down as easily as it had before—except this time we might not be able to hide.
Timash, Sanja, and I having no duties, we waited to be told what to do. Skull got around to us in due time.
“I’m putting the three of you together. Maire says he’s the only one who can keep you on a leash.” He pointed at Timash, who appeared amused. “And I figure even if something happens to you, I won’t lose any of my crew.”
Sanja turned to us with an outraged expression. “Is he serious?”
Timash and I assured her that he was not. Probably.
“So what are we looking for?” Timash inquired. “And where do you want us to look for it?”
Skull pointed vaguely in what might well have been a random direction. “We don’t have any landmarks to shoot for, so you’re going to have to use the ship to keep direction. There will be other parties, and each man will have a light, so just keep in sight of the ship and try to stay spread out from everybody else. We don’t have any idea what might be lying around—or lying in wait, for that matter—so use your judgment.”
“And by that he means, you, Timash, since good judgment isn’t Keryl’s strong suit.” Maire joined us.
I looked to Sanja. “She’s not being serious, either.”
“Yes, I am.” She looked at my two companions. “Don’t let him out of your sight, don’t do anything he suggests, and whatever you do—don’t come back without him.” She kissed me in a most un-captainly manner and strode off to see to more urgent concerns.
“I will follow orders like the perfect soldier,” I called after her. It was a dangerous thing to say; had she been familiar with my army record, she might have clapped me in irons.
“Keryl, I’m pretty sure this is exactly the kind of thing Maire said we weren’t supposed to do.”
I waved off Sanja’s concerns without looking back. We had walked for what felt like miles through the dimness, lit only by our three lamps. The lamps were marvelous to me, fist-sized globes capable of being adjusted from a narrow beam to a full-on lantern. They seemed to work best as beams; the more diffused their light, the more oppressive I found the darkness. Truth to tell, I could not recall the last time I had seen one of the other search parties’ lights, but then, our job was to find useful items, not track everyone else.
“Maire said we weren’t to lose sight of the ship,” I replied absently. “Librarian, can you see The Dark Lady?”
I had let that particular genie out of his bottle, so to speak, and I believe he had appreciated it. Hologram or no, the Librarian liked a long walk as well as the next man.
“I have its position fixed,” he answered; if pressed I will admit that he did not answer me precisely, and that I may have chosen to ignore it.
“As long as we can find it, we still have it in sight. So let’s keep going. We haven’t found anything yet that makes it worth having walked all this way.”
I thought I heard someone grumble a dissent under his breath, but I could not tell who it was; the darkness seemed to dampen sound as well as light. Timash was usually as eager as I to find adventure, and Sanja had not known me long enough to make complaints, which left—the Librarian? No one could see my smile in the dark. Twenty years with no one but me to talk to had been a bad influence.
We had discovered nothing by the time we reached the wall. The floor of the dome was flat, smooth, and a bit gritty after countless years of emptiness. A sudden shiver ran down my spine—we thought the dome was uninhabited, but we had no way of knowing. Our extended sojourn started to seem like one of my less inspired ideas. Abruptly we were facing a blank wall; had we found ourselves in front of one of the blank, black doorways, I think I would have shrieked like a girl.
“We should look in those rooms,” Timash suggested, living up to my impression of him. “Like you said, we haven’t found anything yet, and if we are going to find anything, it’ll be inside one of these rooms.”
To my surprise, it was Sanja who objected. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. I don’t like this place. I think we should go back.”
I moved my light about; there was a portal only a few feet to our left, beckoning like the open mouth of a dark and mysterious beast. On impulse, I waved the light all about, but of course there was nothing there. Sanja was not the only one who did not like this place.
“I agree. We should get back. We have been gone too long alrea
dy.” I moved my beam so that I could see my companions.
Sanja looked relieved, as if the smothering silent darkness had taken its toll. And Timash—
—Timash was gone.
Chapter 18
Stalking the Catacombs
“Timash!” I called, and something in this place bade me hush my voice when I should have shouted. “Timash!”
“Where could he have gone?” Sanja asked. Raising our voices with an effort, we both shouted for him, our voices not even echoing, although we stood within scant feet of a wall. We were casting our lights at random, frantically strafing the darkness to no avail. And yet neither one of us thought to adjust our lamps for a wider glow. Was it an innate, primitive dread brought about by this enormous monument to a long-dead civilization, or was some inimical force acting on us even now?
Suddenly Sanja’s light stopped. “Look!”
She had found the doorway again, and at the sight of it, reason returned. It was the only place Timash might have wandered in these few seconds that we would not have seen him, or his lamplight. Sanja started toward it, but I grasped her shoulder.
“Wait. Just a for a moment.” I took the time to get my breathing under control, and I could feel through her shoulder that she was trying to do the same. That clinched it for me. The woman who had attacked a sandclaw with a knife was not afraid of the dark. I switched my light to my other hand and drew my pistol. “Something is not right here. We need to be careful.”
Even in the dimness I could see the annoyance on her face. I let go of her shoulder.
“All right then. Watch my back.”
I slipped through the doorway the way John Naylor had taught me a million years ago, leading with my gun, using my flash to take in my surroundings in a hurry. The entrance opened immediately into a good-sized room that would hold a dozen people and looked positively cramped compared to the outside. Satisfied it was absent of any threat and acting on a hunch, I widened my light’s glow until it filled the room. There were no shadows, no feeling that the darkness waited to swallow us. It was just a room.
What might once have been a table leaned against the far wall, so precarious I feared to breathe upon it lest it crumble and raised a cloud of dust. Other, smaller bits of debris dotted the floor, but I could identify none of them. Beyond the table was another doorway. Sanja followed me inside, and I heard the sound of her shoes on the rough floor, normal and reassuring.
“I have lost contact with The Dark Lady.” The Librarian was calm no matter the gravity of his reports.
“When?”
“The moment you crossed into this room,” he replied. “I suspect the interior walls have the same dampening effect as the outer walls, which cut off our sensors when we entered the dome.”
“I think it was more than just sensors it was dampening.”
“That would make sense in a place like this,” Sanja said. “If hundreds of people were living in this dome, it could get pretty noisy in here.”
“Then it would likely dampen thought waves, as well,” the Librarian said.
“That might explain why I was feeling so depressed and nervous out there,” Sanja said.
“You felt it, too, eh? I thought it might just be me.”
“Uh-huh. Usually you can feel other people’s thoughts, even if you can’t read them. You get used to knowing they’re around, like background noise. It’s comfortable.” She moved around me, studying the floor. “Timash came through here.”
I was not about to insult her again by asking if she was sure. “Maybe you should lead,” I suggested. Then I said to the Librarian: “I don’t suppose you have anything to offer.”
He shook his head in the manner of the college don he had always appeared to me to be.
“My sensor array is limited at the best of times. Since The Dark Lady came to ground, I haven’t been able to see much more than you can. From this point I’ll only be a distraction.” And he vanished. Although he was only a hologram, and I could have him back with a word, I missed him.
Seeing I was ready, Sanja returned her attention to whatever faint trail she could discern and moved to follow it, I unaccustomedly bringing up the rear. We found ourselves in a short corridor which made a sharp turn to the left. Sanja had once more adjusted her lamp to a narrow beam, the better to track Timash I assumed, so I copied her action, casting my light along our back path. I could not imagine what might follow us here, but I had seen and fought too many creatures I had never imagined before not to exercise caution.
Traveling backward with limited illumination and no landmarks, I had no way of measuring the passage of time. Had we not been moving forward, I might have argued that no time had elapsed at all since we entered this silent and featureless maze. Corridors bent at irregular intervals, feeding into chambers of varying sizes that might have been housing, but nowhere could I find a clue to the former inhabitants or their lives. Not a single door did we encounter. The rooms were built into the walls of the dome itself, walls which had not appeared so thick when we entered from the outer air, but that must have been a feature of the original builders. Right, left, forward, back…these terms had lost meaning, and I could only hope that up and down would continue to function as they always had, though I could not assure myself with any certainty that they would do so.
Surely we had not passed so far as it seemed, nor spent so long. How far ahead of us could Timash have gotten in the few seconds before we discovered his absence? A horrifying idea surfaced from the back of my mind: The designers of this dome, this city, had proven their ability to manipulate light and sound, and perhaps mind waves, to increase their comfort. What if it was not beyond the scope of their science to manipulate time and space as well? Were Timash and Sanja and I even sharing the same time and space?
What if we located Timash only to find that he had wandered these halls for a century and only his mouldering bones remained?
“He’s close,” Sanja said, breaking the spell. “Timash!”
I shook my head like a dog shedding water, hoping to dispel the cobwebs. Where had all of that come from?
“Timash!” she called again, but the walls seemed to suck in the sound and swallow the echoes. “We’ll have to keep going. He’s close, but he can’t hear me.”
We pushed forward with what seemed to me to be increased urgency on both our parts, leaving me to wonder what private miseries this place had driven Sanja toward. We gave vent to shouts at regular intervals, bellowing almost in each other’s ears with no ill effect due to the dampening nature of the walls, and it seemed an eternity before we both stopped, listening.
“Timash?” I called.
“Keryl! Over here!”
We needed no further urging but set off at an unwise speed, and had we more than a very short distance to go, we doubtless would have found ourselves as lost as he, but after we rounded our first corner, we entered a sizeable unlit room wherein our flashlights revealed several exits—and one bull gorilla backed against a nearby wall, weapon at the ready.
He was sprinting toward us as soon as our light picked him out, his short legs churning in what under other circumstances I would have found cartoonish, had my attention not been riveted by an completely unaccustomed expression on his hairy face.
“Let’s go!” he huffed. “Move!”
Sanja and I retreated clumsily, unwilling to lose sight of him again, and wary of whatever had caused this panic. We were too slow for Timash; he spread his arms and virtually pushed us back the way we had come.
“We need to find a defensible spot,” Timash said. “There are too many doors in there.”
“What are we running from?” Sanja demanded. “What did you see?”
“I didn’t see anything. They grabbed my light and broke it first thing. I’ve been fighting them off and waiting for you to find me.”
“Do have any idea what they were? Were they armed? Did they bite you? Did they make any noise?” I asked.
“Actually…no.
They were fast, and they were quiet, but it was more like they were trying to catch me than kill me. They didn’t make any noise, but the fact that they took my light makes me think they knew what it was.” Our corridor debouched into a small room with one other doorway. “This is a good place to stop. They’d all have to come at us from one direction.”
Sanja pulled, and perforce we followed, lest we be separated. “No. The only tracks I was following were yours, which means that whatever they were, they don’t use these hallways, and there probably aren’t any ahead of us. We should make for The Dark Lady. They’ll be looking for us.”
“I agree. Librarian, can you chart us a course back to the ship?”
He materialized at once, keeping pace effortlessly. In here, he emitted a cool glow that added fractionally to our illumination, and for that I was grateful.
“I have monitored our progress, and I can guide us back to the entrance whence we came, but I am still unable to sense the ship.”
“That’s good enough for now,” I told him.
“I would be remiss, however, were I not to inform you that the creatures from which you are fleeing have already entered this chamber and are preparing to attack you.”
Chapter 19
Disaster in the Dark
It was not until much later that I realized we had been herded into this room where our adversaries could come at us in relative safety. Had they confronted us in the corridor, we might have simply aligned ourselves shoulder-to-shoulder and raked them with pistol fire, but this way we were immediately put in danger of hitting one of our own, and so reduced to our staves. Unfortunately, by the time I had come to that conclusion and the consequent deduction concerning their intelligence, it was far too late for the information to be of any assistance.
Despite being forewarned of their interest in our lanterns, and despite our adamantine resolve that we should not lose them, Sanja and I both found them struck from our hands in the earliest seconds of the melee. The only source of light in the room was now the soft glow of the Librarian’s image, which I soon realized our foes were completely ignoring. Either they recognized it for what it was, or they could not see it—and given their preference to fight in the dark, the answer was obvious. Their disability was to cost them dearly.
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