Jinx on a Terran Inheritance (6 page)

"If you want to tell me, tell me," Floyt prompted. "I hate being a rhetorical sounding board."

"I can't. Yet."

The main party followed the bend in the tunnel, the last rearguard musician finally disappearing.

Alacrity started forward, into the tunnel mouth.

"Hey!" squawked Floyt.

"Ho, I'm going to take a look around, and it's not going to be on Redlock's guided tour. I'm not going to steal anything, and I won't run into any trouble because Redlock's marching band will be out there in front. So don't lecture me."

"That was 'Hey' as in 'Hey, wait up!' you ass."

"Sorry, I can be a jerk sometimes. Next tour group leaving right now."

They stayed close to the wall, easing through the semi-darkness as quietly as they could, but not trying to copy the nightstalk tactics of the governor's bunch. Their footsteps echoed softly. The incline grew steeper.

"Is this a typical Precursor construction?" Floyt whispered.

"There's no typical Precursor anything."

The walls were flat and smooth, but seemed to have a fine grain. Every thirty meters or so a buttress ran file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...aley%20-%20Jinx%20on%20a%20Terran%20Inheritance.htm (27 of 320)19-2-2006 17:12:28

[Fitzhugh 2]-JINX ON A TERRAN INHERITANCE

along both walls and across the floor, so the two were obliged to hike themselves over a waist-high barrier. In their worse-for-wear condition, it was a complication they didn't need. It was also proof the place hadn't been built for foot traffic, at least not the human kind.

"Redlock forgot something," Alacrity realized. "Earplugs."

"What for?"

"If one of those honeys lets fly with an H.E. rocket in this place, you're gonna know what for."

The worklights had apparently been turned off at some central point. Soon the two were feeling their way along the left side of the tunnel with their left hands, right hands on their weapons. As their eyes adjusted, they saw that the tunnel walls gave off a dim glow, a ghostly green-white that came from what appeared to be a whorled grain in the walls, but the material felt icy cold.

"Heat sink?" Alacrity puzzled as he led the way. "Redlock called this an adit. I wonder just how big the place is."

The barriers were a good spot for an ambush, or for one of Redlock's crew to shoot them accidentally.

They crossed with all caution, guns drawn. Floyt repeated the challenge and countersign to himself several times to make sure he had them straight. Their conditioning was bothering them less than their own apprehensions but, having started, they were drawn on by the mystical feel of the Precursor site.

There was a sharp, not human or even organic smell to the place—not mustiness but definitely
old.

"All right then, who
were
the Precursors?" Floyt had once asked Alacrity during the voyage to Epiphany.

"Ask anybody; they'll tell you. Then ask somebody else and you'll get a different answer. It's the biggest guessing game since religion."

They crossed still another buttress, almost two hundred meters into the tunnel by Alacrity's calculation.

He went over first, then motioned Floyt on, a motion barely visible in the glow of the walls.

But now they could make out a brightness up ahead. Human-style lighting was part of it, but so was something else, something irregular. And they could hear deep, distant sounds, unintelligible yet somehow familiar.

The incline was very steep. Floyt was worried about losing his footing; Alacrity's pathfinders still gave him good purchase. The glow before them grew brighter, outshining the walls. Its source was somewhere close, around the bend.

Suddenly they heard yells, Severeemish roars, the chatter and hiss of weaponry, and the concussion of a rocket. Floyt understood what Alacrity meant; even at a distance, the report slammed their eardrums.

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...aley%20-%20Jinx%20on%20a%20Terran%20Inheritance.htm (28 of 320)19-2-2006 17:12:28

[Fitzhugh 2]-JINX ON A TERRAN INHERITANCE

The firefight died away abruptly, raged again for ten seconds, then became sporadic.

"Now what?" Floyt asked, his heart hammering.

Conditioning and instincts told them to get out, but they were indebted to Redlock, perhaps even more so to Dorraine. Alacrity bit his lip. "You ever feel like everybody else's problems are simpler than yours?"

Floyt thought about how Redlock had intervened on their behalf and the look on Dorraine's face when she'd found out that her father was dead. "Not right now, for a change."

"Yeah? Okay, Ho; keep your head down."

They made their way to the next buttress, crouching low, then crawled behind it to the adit's right wall.

From there they could see the end of the tunnel.

The Precursors hadn't any use for landings or ledges; the adit simply ended at a sharp angle, plunging into a vast underground chamber. They couldn't make out much except that they seemed to be looking into the upper reaches of the place. Brief shadows flickered against the ceiling and there were the sharp sounds and echoes of the battle.

Someone—Weir's research teams, presumably—had built a stairway down the last, steepest stretch of the adit, bracing it with suction disks and tension members. The steps led to a catwalk grating where the adit simply emptied into the artificial cavern.

There one of the Daubin' Band musicians lay unmoving, badly wounded or dead, blood darkening the white stripes of her shimmerskins. Her over-under infantry rifle lay nearby.

"Ambush," Alacrity guessed.

"Could she still be alive?"

Alacricty made a
who knows?
face. They began to ease up over the buttress, then ducked back as they heard running footsteps on the catwalk. A figure came into view, pounding up the steps in silhouette, crouching low, impossible to identify.

Alacrity braced both arms across the barrier, aligning the barrel of the Captain's Sidearm. "Halt! Stand fast!"

The figure froze almost comically, posed like a statue of a cat burglar.

"Interlock," Alacrity called out. Floyt glanced at him. His face, merely shiny with sweat a few moments ago, streamed with it now, catching some of the glare of the cavern.

"Interlock!" Alacrity repeated. "Gimme the damn countersign; I'm not asking you ag—" He threw file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...aley%20-%20Jinx%20on%20a%20Terran%20Inheritance.htm (29 of 320)19-2-2006 17:12:28

[Fitzhugh 2]-JINX ON A TERRAN INHERITANCE

himself sideways, taking Floyt with him. They heard the enraged buzzsaw of a flechette burpgun, the reports of the rounds battering their ears, the metal slivers whining and ricocheting off the floor, barrier, and walls, nearly as much of a hazard to the marksman as to his targets.

All the tension and resentment in Alacrity—some of it dated back to Terra and the underhanded way he'd been framed and recruited—exploded. With a curse in some language that didn't sound quite human, showing his teeth and the whites of his eyes, he scrabbled back to the barrier, staying below the line of fire, and waited for a lull in the swarming of flechettes. Lying asprawl, he eased the muzzle of the Captain's Sidearm up, barely over the buttress, and let fly.

Floyt, who'd been present on a previous firing, already had his fingers in his ears.

The bulky old handgun overloaded the adit with thunder-flash, heat, and death. It had been designed for use against the dangers a vessel's skipper might face: boarding, riot, and mutiny. Its discharge was attended by almost overwhelming visible light and sonic energy.

Alacrity fired again; the shot boomed, reverberating through the place.

The flechette burpgun had fallen silent. Alacrity pushed his hip howitzer up higher for a better angle on a third shot, still without so much as raising his head. Then he swiftly wriggled to a different firing spot elsewhere along the barrier, using shoulders, heels, one hand, and the back of his head.

In the wake of the concussion and glare, he was up, forearms once more steadied across the barrier. The man was backing toward the catwalk, nearly on all fours, the burpgun aimed where Alacrity had been.

Alacrity cut loose again, just as the burpgun muzzle swung to bear on him. The fierce blare of energy caught the intruder squarely, knocking him backward through the air as it simply vaporized his middle.

For an instant Alacrity saw the disbelieving look on a face that seemed to be all bulging eyes.

The body hit the catwalk and lay smoking and crackling. Alacrity was up and over the buttress, sprinting for the catwalk. Floyt brought up the rear, the Webley in his hand, it's lanyard ring flapping and clinking.

Floyt fetched up against Alacrity's back, almost toppling them both. They were gagging on the smoke, breathless and nearly spent.

"See?" Alacrity asked in a remote voice as they gazed down into the chamber. "Didn't I tell you we'd seen a Precursor artifact?"

"Hell, no, you didn't," Floyt answered softly. "All you did was hint. I wonder if the one on Weir's terrace is an egg. A
nit
."

The causality harp they'd seen at Frostpile was small and uncomplicated compared to this shifting, file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...aley%20-%20Jinx%20on%20a%20Terran%20Inheritance.htm (30 of 320)19-2-2006 17:12:28

[Fitzhugh 2]-JINX ON A TERRAN INHERITANCE

churning titan. The Precursor chamber was wide and high—fifty meters or more through its long axis, the vertical—and most of that was occupied by this fuller, terribly complex looking nebula. The primeval smell they'd noticed was all-pervasive.

The half-familiar sounds came to them clearly, the tonalities and near-subsonic hum, the great baritone chiming of the thing. It was more alive-seeming than the first; the adumbrations and eddies, brume-shapes and hazy images seemed much more immediate, nearer to resolution.

"Quit goggling and help me," Floyt panted, snapping Alacrity out of what was becoming a trance. Floyt was on one knee by the fallen woman. A few minutes earlier she had laughed at his wallflower joke.

Alacrity leapt to help. Both could hear the sounds of the fighting below. Levels of catwalk had been set up surrounding the harp and beneath it. The vault itself didn't have a level floor; it was as concave as an egg cup. At several levels, gantries had been installed.

All around the Precusor artifact were detectors or sensors of a kind Alacrity had never seen before, something Weir's people must have developed. Some were spherical, resembling tufted dandelions three meters across, others were like metal barnacles.

Alacrity's jaw had dropped.
My god! Did Weir actually figure out a way to
interface
with that thing?

Beams and projectile shots ranged up at the catwalk where Floyt and Alacrity knelt, flaring and spanging off it. The combatants were keeping to cover; the engagement had settled into sniping and jockeying for position.

The musician-Celestial had been caught below the waist by a burst of flechette fire. There wasn't much left of her pelvic area at all.

"Ho, she's dead."

"Give me a hand here." Floyt was trying to compose the body so that he could move it without losing part of it.

She's about the same age as his daughter,
Alacrity realized. Energy bolts were exchanged below; beams in various hues and intensities lanced up at them, making molten metal run and spit from the railings and grating.

"Ho, she's
dead."

Floyt got his arm under the blond head, trying to gather her up. A brief burst of flechettes from below spattered against the adit ceiling behind them. "At least let's get her out of the line of—"

A mixed barrage of solids and energy hit the catwalk, and Alacrity, amazed in its aftermath that they file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...aley%20-%20Jinx%20on%20a%20Terran%20Inheritance.htm (31 of 320)19-2-2006 17:12:28

[Fitzhugh 2]-JINX ON A TERRAN INHERITANCE

were untouched, saw when arguing was no good any more. He wrestled Floyt loose and propelled them both back up the steps.

"I'm all right. I'm all right." Floyt clapped Alacrity's shoulder tiredly. "We have to help Redlock and Dorraine."

"Ho, we owe Redlock for his help, and I guess we both have kind of a crush on Dorraine, but
King's
Ransom
ought to be here any second. We're only gonna get in the Celestials' way."

"Then why didn't Redlock wait?"

"Huh? I guess he—I—damned if I know."

"They're going to blow the place up. Maybe if you'd looked around a little more instead of gaping at the harp, you'd have noticed."

Alacrity let loose his hold on his friend as the enormity of it hit him. "No! They can't!"

Charges were plastered all over the vault. "Probably the only reason they haven't been detonated's because the governor's got the intruders bottled up in here. The only way Redlock can win is keep them pinned down till help comes. I wonder how he knew?"

Alacrity glanced over the woman's body. "And his rearguard's dead."

Floyt hiked himself up. "I think two of the Severeemish are dead or wounded down there; I couldn't get a good look, with all the firing and the obstacles."

They studied their options. Floyt thought he caught a glimpse of Dorraine; Alacrity saw a dark figure in a chinstrapped battle helmet—not one of the
Pearl's
landing party—who snapped off a round with an energy rifle of some kind, then ducked back under cover, all too fast for Alacrity to get off a shot.

There were coruscations of crossfire and ricochet; panels blew out in showers of sparks and liquefied metal and glass. Bullets sent fragments whining. The noise was appalling.

A number of triangular passageways ran from the vault off the lowest level of catwalk. It looked like the surviving intruders were withdrawing into two of these.

As Floyt watched, Dorraine fired down a tunnel with one of her lovely little imitation derringers. It gave a high report and a more powerful beam than he'd expected. Redlock was by her side, and they advanced into the tunnel, from which came sounds of more shooting. A quiet descended on the vault itself.