The Hermetic Millennia (11 page)

Only then did he become aware that there was a breathing tube down his throat and another tube clutching his manhood. Fortunately, it was a condom catheter, also called a “Texas” catheter. He felt a moment of pride in the name of his homeland, grateful he did not have to decatheter himself with numb and unresponsive fingers.

He was willing to yank the intravenous needles out of his elbows and gastronomic tube from abdomen without further ado. Little droplets of blood floated through the interior of the coffin. He stared at them in wonder, unable to force his brain to realize what he was seeing. How were the blood droplets drifting in midair, if he was not in zero gee?

The rectal tube he tugged on, winced, and left in place.

Other parts of his body were more numb, which gladdened him, because he was able to jam the hypodermic of stimulant into the large muscles of his leg without feeling any pain.

He pulled a medical pad made of antiseptic wool out of the red emergency box and pressed it against his chest. He could feel the tiny tugs on his numb skin, but no pain, when many tiny threadlike lances from the pad shoved through his skin seeking his heart and major organs. However, the action of some of the chemicals involved must have included a suppressant, because he blacked out.

2. The Oblong Box

His head was clearer when he woke again, and this time the coffin was swaying in what was clearly a floating motion. He was being carried on a small river, perhaps a stream. The water motion was not choppy enough to indicate a large river, and the motion was that of small boat, not a ship. The clock was dead, but the fading of the greenish light from his chemical cell showed less than five minutes had passed.

There was also no sound of gunfire outside. That was a bad sign. Maybe very bad. He realized those noises had been the automatic Tomb defenses opening fire with smaller weapons meant to hurt Tomb-robbers without penetrating the coffins.

He squirmed onto his side, and his legs and arms felt like tubes of dead meat stitched to his body. It was not until he attempted this movement that he realized he was submerged in medical fluid. It should have drained long ago.

The mystery of the floating blood drops was solved. He was not breathing air: his lungs were full of hyperoxygenated fluid. He pulled the tab to open the port peephole. It floated like a firefly in his blurry vision. He saw a brown pattern of striations. It was a wooden plank, perhaps a support to help the Tomb-robbers move the coffin.

He hit the
DRAIN
switch. There was a gargling sound, but the medical fluid sloshing around inside the coffin did not remove itself. That was also bad, since his body could not transition from a hyperoxygenated fluid to airbreathing regime without paroxysms.

He pulled out another chemical cell, shook it to life, and examined the machinery and chemicals forming the cocoon around him. He fumed to himself,
Damnation and pestilence! In the old comics, whenever someone had superintelligence, they also always had weird brain wave powers or something. Okay! Think! What is in here I can use? Facing unknown enemies of an unknown race, unknown numbers, unknown capabilities, unknown year. They have a boat. And wood. That tells me the ice caps are no longer meeting at the equator.

He had to bend double to hook the cell to the radio, and he was able to broadcast on the emergency band, but there was no response from the Tomb central. He switched to the old biotechnological Nymph frequencies and sent out a squawk.

It took all the remaining power cells, three of them, to turn on the internal molecular assembler for five seconds, but that was enough for him, with numb and awkward fingers, to tap out an override and a set of commands on the flickering screen.

He was reaching his hand toward the assembler release valve, when a jolt threw him against the inner lid of the coffin. The screen flickered and went dim. The coffin tilted; then he felt a smooth sensation of motion, feeling more than hearing a harmonic note of mechanical vibration in the background. He envisioned some form of crane or mechanical arm lifting the coffin from the boat to the dock.

He pounded the emergency energy cell, and a last dull green flicker floated momentarily through it; and the screen lit back up, with the information fortunately still there. He tugged on the internal release valve, and it did not budge. The screen flickered like a fading ember. He used both hands and his teeth, and the valve opened. Nanotechnological material swarmed into the interior of the coffin, mingling with the medical fluids, and beginning to turn the substance translucent. He thrashed his limbs, and swirls of material followed his movement like little galaxies, oddly reminding him of stirring cream into his last cup of coffee.

There was no time to remove the catheter or the breathing tube down his throat. The flesh-colored tape coating his thigh hid his night-knife, which he drew and slashed through the various lines and drips and wires connecting him to the inside of the coffin.

He tightened his grip on his white glass caterpillar-drive Browning pistols.

At that moment came the screaming whine of an energy saw, and he saw sparks cutting through the first of the massive clasps sealing the coffin lid.

Good-bye, Rania. I’m sorry; I tried to stay alive. I tried.

He blew the explosive quick-release bolts and kicked with both legs. The lid flew open. The sunlight blinded him.

3. Open Lid, Open Fire

He clenched his teeth, biting shut the rubbery tube still in his throat, held his breath, keeping the oxygenated fluid inside his lungs; and he shut his burning eyes.

Inside his stinging eyelids were afterimages of silhouettes bent over the coffin. He twitched his pistol barrels toward the nearest two and thumbed the triggers. There were two blurred hisses of noise, two whip-cracks as ejected material surpassed the speed of sound. The iron dowel running down the core of each weapon had a thin wafer sliced off by magnetic fields, and the wafer was heated white-hot by the conduction, pulled into a conical shape by the shape of the caterpillar fields, and violently expelled. These were short-range pistols only, grossly inaccurate, and the shells were certain to tumble irregularly and messily when they entered flesh.

The new material he had introduced into the coffin interior had not been completely mixed with the medical fluid, so only about half the volume had formed the unstable mixture he wanted. So it was that half, rather than all, of the coffin fluid, upon exposure to oxygen, that erupted into a froth of bubble and a wash of vapor. Montrose, at the bottom of the coffin, was still in the layer below the mix, and the cold fluid protected him from the heat released.

The figures hunched over the lid were not so lucky, and screamed and barked and yowled when the lid blew open. Through the cacophony, Montrose was able to hear which figures had been struck by the coffin lid, which were merely confused and howling, blinded by the vast wash of expanding vapor, and which were burnt. The guards must have had a pack of guard dogs with them, because there was a confusion of barking, yipping, growling, and whining.

He came up out of the fluid more slowly than he would have liked, because his body was still reacting sluggishly to his commands. Still holding his breath, Montrose sat up, sloshing fluid each direction and trying not to scream as some of the cloud burned him. With his eyes still shut, he thumbed the pistols to continuous fire and sent bursts of slugs into the sources of screams. At the same time he kicked his legs awkwardly and slumped and lumbered and fell over the edge of the coffin to the surface, still firing as he fell. Underfoot seemed to be a platform of wood, perhaps a dock.

As he rolled, his body collided with one person, a man wearing a shaggy fur coat, and he lashed out with a kick, hoping to break the other man’s knee. But the other man must have been facing away rather than toward him, because he did not strike a kneecap, but the hollow of the joint, so that instead of breaking, the leg folded and the other man fell toward him.

Another motion of the thumb flicked the magnetics inside his gun to another configuration, so that the projectile mass was grated into shotgun pellets. Guessing based on the motions he had felt inside the coffin, he swung both barrels toward the crane or mechanical limb that had picked up the coffin and fired. He evidently guessed correctly, because he was rewarded by the sound of screaming metallic ricochets. Then the falling man in the fur coat landed on him.

Montrose opened his eyes, but he saw nothing but the dense fog pouring from the coffin lid, and every droplet of the fog was dazzling with sunlight. With regret, he realized that he should have mixed a nerve gas or at least a puking agent among the fumes. Well, he had been pressed for time. He brought his pistol down sharply on where he thought the back of the skull of the man falling on him would be, but Montrose must have miscalculated, because the skull was pointed toward him, not away, and his gun arm was seized in the man’s teeth.

They were too sharp and too many to be the teeth in a man’s mouth. This must be one of the guard dogs he heard barking. He heaved with his arm, thankful of the lingering numbness, and still struggling to keep his mouth shut and his breath held. He twisted his trapped hand, firing at another source of nearby noise (he saw a silhouette in the mist stumble and fall) and brought his free hand up to shoot through the skull of the dog trapping his arm and toward a second looming figure in the smoky brightness. The skull must have been both large and oddly shaped for a dog, because the skull fragments exploded in blast pattern other than what he calculated, and pain lodged in Montrose’s face. His flesh was torn, and his nose felt like it was broken.

The pistols in his hands whined suddenly. Montrose used a mental trick to speed up his nerve actions, so that the scene seemed to slow down. He went through a number of theories in his mind as to what could be causing that whining noise. It was an induction field, he decided. Some onlooker had deduced that his pistols used magnetic caterpillar fields for acceleration, and set up a counterfield to interfere. The metal dowels were being heated by the resulting conflict. The pistols were not designed for this: the metal was expanding and about to crack the barrels open.

He pondered. In combat, if the troops are not well trained, nine to fifteen seconds will pass before the troopers will react to incoming fire and return fire. Trained troops will drop or seek cover and return fire immediately, if and only if they are armed with automatic weapons. Automatic weapons allow the troops to spray toward unseen targets, hoping to hit, or at least to suppress the enemy. But troops armed with single-shot weapons were more hesitant, rarely willing to fire without a clear shot, lest the return fire kill them. So far, the combat had lasted perhaps five seconds, maybe half, maybe less, of normal human reaction time. From the position of the barks and howls, it seemed the guards near the coffin were reacting with normal human-reaction confusion. Which meant the field was being sent by someone occupying a higher intellectual topography than the guards.

There was no time for more than a guess. He looked toward where the crane that had picked up the coffin was supposed to be. Sure enough, looming up through the fog, he could dimly make out what looked like the exoskeleton of a ten-foot-high praying mantis made of steel. But why had there been no outcry from the operator when he’d shot there earlier? Either the machine was an automaton, or remotely controlled, or the operator had some means of deflecting the shot.

There was no time for more guesswork. Montrose returned to normal neural timeflow in order to operate his muscles without tearing or cramping them. He held down the thumb trigger so that both pistols ejected the entire mass of their ammo at once. Two dowels like little red-hot javelins flew into the fog toward the spider-legged machine.

Suddenly the operator was visible. He was no bigger than a child, was bald of head, and he wore a long coat studded with glittering gems. The gems lit up as if with fire, and rainbows and halos of energy surrounded the figure. In the confused light, Montrose could see the little bald man had skin as blue as a peacock’s neck.

The dowels never struck their target. Whether they were deflected magnetically, or disintegrated by some unimaginable energy, Montrose could not tell. But the dazzle shining from the many-colored coat of the strange little man was bright enough that the silhouettes of the guards stood out clearly.

Even through the fog, he now could see that they were not men, but Moreaus, modified dog things walking on hind legs, and with swords or firearms in their paws. The dog things were grouped in a semicircle and lunging toward him, ears perked up, noses high, and not confused by the blinding vapor cloud.

In that momentary, eerie flash of radiation from the gems on the coat of the little blue man, Montrose saw a rippling glitter to one side. Water! Perhaps he could reach it. The dog thing bodies were not designed for swimming, and if he somehow escaped them downstream, the water might kill his scent. If he were lucky, the river would be deep enough and the current strong enough to carry him out of range before anyone could react.

With a powerful leap he flung himself through the fog toward the gleam of water.

He was not so lucky as he might have hoped. The blind leap brought the edge of the dock sharply against his shins, so that he tumbled, both legs numb in a shock of pain.

That tumble saved him from landing headfirst, which might have killed him. As it was, the shallow, icy stream struck him in the belly, and so when he struck the streambed, no bones broke. So that was a modicum of luck.

But the current was not strong, and the water was not deep.

4. First Impressions

Striking the shallow bottom dazed him, and so the hyperoxygenated fluid gushed from the tube in his throat. His lungs then rebelled and tried to draw in the icy, freezing waters of the stream. He flung himself to his knees, puking pale hyperoxygenated fluid down across his naked, bruised, and torn chest and belly.