Voyage Across the Stars (63 page)

But then, Carron’s nervous anticipation didn’t have a lot to do with Old Race artifacts. Despite his rank—and he wasn’t a bad-looking guy—he must not have known many women.

There weren’t many women like Lissea Doormann.

Ned stepped around his side of the jeep. His right arm cocked back so that his hand could rest lightly on the butt of the submachine gun, slung with the muzzle forward.

The vehicles were parked in a perfectly circular clearing, obviously artificial. Ned lifted his visor with his left hand. He no longer needed the line projected onto the inner surface to give him a vector to their goal.

Ned laughed without humor. Lissea and Carron looked at him. “Um?” Lissea said

“We got here,” Ned said. The bunker was the physical location at which the two principals hoped to reach their separate goals.

“Yes, I haven’t been here in years myself,” Carron said. The center of the clearing was sunken. He reached down for the hasp which barely projected from the leaf mold. When Carron straightened, a flat, rectangular plate, about a meter by two, pivoted upward with him. It spilled soil and debris to the sides.

Carron moved without effort. The plate was over a hundred centimeters thick and burdened with a considerable accumulation of dirt and decaying fronds, so the hasp must merely trigger a powered opening mechanism.

Ned touched Carron’s wrist with his left hand. “Let me take a look, if you will,” Ned said with no hint of question. He grinned. “I’m expendable. Then I’ll come back up here and keep out of the way.”

“I’ll determine where you’ll go and when, Slade,” Lissea said in a thin voice.

He looked at her. She nodded toward the opening. Now that she’d greeted Carron peacefully, she’d taken her heavy powergun back from the jeep’s clamp. She held the weapon ready.

“Really, there’s never anyone here,” Carron said plaintively.

Steps led from the above-ground shadows to darkness. The staircase had no handrails.

Ned twisted a lightball clipped to his belt, breaking the partition between the chemicals so that they bloomed into white effulgence. He pulled the ball free and lobbed it one-handed into the bunker. It clattered around the interior. The bioluminescent compound would gleam with cold radiance for an hour or so, depending on the ambient temperature.

Ned walked deliberately down the first five steps. They were of some cast material with a nonslip surface on the treads. The material sounded brittle beneath his boots, like thermoplastic, but it showed no signs of wear.

The interior, which unfolded as Ned stepped downward, was light gray. There was nothing visible except dirt that had fallen in when the hatch opened.

Ned suddenly jumped to the floor and spun behind the submachine gun’s muzzle.

“There’s really no one here,” Carron repeated. He was right, and Ned felt slightly more of an idiot than he had before.

“Looks good to me,” he said with false nonchalance. He started up the steps. Lissea, descending, waved him back down again. She’d slung her powergun and carried in her left hand the heavy testing kit she’d brought from the
Swift.

“There were no artifacts at all in the bunker?” she asked Carron over her shoulder.

“The bunker itself is an artifact,” he corrected her. “When I first located it—from records in the palace library—the hatch was open and the cavity was half filled. Mostly leaves and branches, of course. At some point the settlers must have used it for storage and perhaps living quarters, though.”

He waved a hand around the circular interior. “I had the contents cleaned out and sifted. There were some interesting items from the early settlement period—some objects that must have traveled from Earth herself, five hundred years ago. But the settlers
found
the bunker here, they didn’t build it. And there’s no sign of whoever did build it.”

The bunker was about ten meters in diameter. Floor, walls, and ceiling appeared to have been cast in one piece with the staircase. Ned picked up the lightball and set it on a tread at the height of his chin, so that it illuminated an arc of wall evenly.

“What are these?” Lissea asked, touching the wall beside a spot of regular shallow, four-millimeter holes in the material. “Ventilation?” There was a sparse horizontal row of similar markings, midway between floor and ceiling.

“No,” Carron said. “There’s a gas exchange system within the wall’s microstructure. If we could determine how that worked, it would be—”

He lifted his hands in frustration—“of incalculable value. I think the holes may be data-transmission points and I even manufactured square wave guides to fit them. It would make a . . . a
burp
at me. But I haven’t been able to get a response.”

He looked around and added peevishly, “I should have brought ch-chairs. There’s nothing to sit on.”

Lissea brushed the comment away. “I’ve sat on worse than a clean floor,” she muttered. She bent close to the hole, then knelt and opened her case.

Carron noticed Ned’s eyes counting holes. “There’s ten of them,” Carron said. “Every ninety-seven centimeters around the circumference. Almost ninety-seven centimeters.”

“If the ventilation system works and the door mechanism works,” Lissea said as she chose a cylindrical device from her case, “then the powerplant’s still in operation. The place should be capable of doing whatever it was built to do.”

She looked at Carron. “Square wave guides. You brought some, didn’t you? Where are they?”

He blinked in surprise at her tone. Carron might have been used to being ignored, but he didn’t expect to be spoken to as if he were a servant.

“Yes, why I did,” he said. He opened the lid of his large belt pack, flopped the front down into a tray, and took two square tubes from pockets within. The pack was a small toolkit rather than a normal wallet of personal belongings.

“I’ll go up to the surface,” Ned said quietly.

“Yes, do,” Lissea said. She didn’t look up as she spoke. She’d taken another tool from her case and was cutting at the end of a wave guide with a tiny keening noise. “Both of you go up, will you? I don’t know how long this is going to take.”

Ned turned without speaking and climbed the stairs, two steps at a time. He heard Carron’s feet behind him. The staircase, though apparently flimsy, didn’t spring or sway under foot.

By the time he stepped over the lightball, his head was above ground again. It felt good.

Carron snicked closed the catch of his belt pack, rotating so that a spear of sunlight illuminated the task. He avoided eye contact with Ned.

The immediate forest held nothing of interest on any of the spectra Ned’s helmet could receive and analyze. He squatted to watch through the hatchway as Lissea worked. Carron moved a little farther back in the clearing so that he too could see without rubbing shoulders with Ned.

Lissea had broken her case into three separate trays which she’d laid out to her right side. She used the floor in front of her as a worktable, picking up and putting down items with precise movements. A lamp extending from one tray threw an oval of intense light across the floor. Occasionally a welding head sparkled viciously.

Ned had seen Lissea perform as the female captain of a band of hard-bitten, intensely
masculine
men. She’d done a good job, a remarkable job; but that was all on-the-job training. This was the first time Ned had seen Lissea doing the sort of engineering task for which she’d been formally educated.

Repeatedly, Lissea held a device against the wall, touched a switch, and went back to work. She was proceeding by trial and error, but there was no waste motion whatever. Each action was calculated to determine a particular question, yes or no, and thus take another step toward the goal.

“She must be incredibly brave, isn’t she?” Carron said quietly.

Another step toward
Lissea’s
goal.

Ned gave Carron a friendly but neutral smile. “You bet,” he said. “In some ways, I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody braver.”

Because she had something to lose. There were no cowards aboard the
Swift,
but most of the men knew they’d be doing this or some equivalent of this until the law of averages caught up with them.

“Aside from being brilliant, that is,” Carron added hastily. “I’ve been . . . consumed with the Old Race since—well, since I can remember thinking. And she dives in with a plan only minutes after she gets here!”

“A lot of times it’s having a fresh perspective,” Ned said dryly. Pancahte wasn’t the sticks, exactly, but the whole Pocket would have been a backwater even without the Twin Worlds strangling access. “But I agree: Lissea is brilliant.”

He waited a beat to add, “Besides being beautiful, of course.”

Carron grimaced as though by forcing his face into a tight rictus he could keep from blushing. He couldn’t. “Ah, yes,” he said, staring toward a tree ten meters away, “I think she’s very attractive too.”

Ned looked down at Lissea again. He couldn’t really see much of her at this angle. She’d lowered her faceshield to protect her against flying chips and actinic radiation from the welding.

What he saw when he looked at her was the image his mind painted. That was more than a trim body and precise features, though it included those aspects. He wouldn’t define Lissea Doormann as being the ideal of physical beauty . . . but beauty wasn’t solely or even primarily physical.

And yes, she was beautiful.

“I suppose that she . . .” Carron said. “Does she have a protector?”

Ned looked at the tree on which Carron’s eyes were focused. It was one of the tall cones. Tiny blue flowers grew among the shaggy needles. “She’s got twenty of us,” Ned said with unintended harshness. “Well, eighteen, now. But if you mean—”

He fixed Carron with his gaze and waited for the Pancahtan to meet his eyes before he continued. “—is she involved with anybody, no, I don’t think she is. Certainly not anybody aboard the
Swift
.”

Carron nodded and let out a breath that he might not have been aware he was holding. He opened his mouth to say something noncommittal.

The bunker roared.

The interior was a hazy ambience rather than clear air and pale walls. Glare quivered through the mass like lightning across cloudtops. The bioluminescent globe had faded to a shadow of itself.

Carron started to jump down the hatch. Ned grabbed him across the waist left-handed and flung him back. Lissea might be trying to run up the stairs.

“It’s all right!” she shouted as thunder coalesced around her. “I’ve gotten it to work!”

Ned dropped into the bunker in three strides, judging where the treads were by memory. He held his submachine gun like a heavy pistol so that his left hand was free to take the shock if he slipped.

His soles hit the floor. He reached out for Lissea. She was there, her shoulder warm through the tunic and her hand reaching up to clasp Ned’s.

The wall before them erupted in a massive bombardment taking place on a horizon kilometers away. White, red, and yellow light gouted, and the air shook with repeated concussions.

The image vanished rather than faded. On the opposite side of the room, blue light limned a gigantic structure composed of pentagonal facets. Either the object was hanging in space or it was so huge that the supporting surface was beyond the image focus. Bits of the ship/building hived off as bands of non-light struck and scattered and collapsed in searing bolts which flashed from corners of the pentagons.

As suddenly as the conflicting images had appeared, the circular wall cleared again. The air still had a shimmering materiality: the lightball glowed as if it stood behind a dozen insect screens.

Ned couldn’t be sure where the air stopped and the wall began. He didn’t reach out, because he wasn’t sure what his hand would touch—or whether it would touch anything.

Carron Del Vore stood with them. His eyes brushed Ned’s with a cold lack of expression. Ned took his hand away from Lissea and stepped to the side.

“I loaded a vocabulary cartridge and told the system to switch on,” Lissea said to the men. The room hissed with sound that was barely noticeable until someone tried to speak over it. “There weren’t any input devices, so it’s likely the system was voice-actuated. But it had to recognize my words as data, so I made a core load through a guide hole.”

“Ready for instructions,” a voice said from the whole circumference of the bunker at once.

“Well, I’ll be hanged,” Ned said. “You mean it’s a data bank with no security gate controlling access?”

“You loaded a vocabulary?” Carron said. “But how did that help? How did it translate the words into information it could process?”

Lissea squeezed Carron’s hand. Ned looked at his feet. He’d flipped over one of the trays when he leaped into the bunker. Now that the light was steady, Ned bent and concentrated on picking up tools he’d scattered.

“A seven-hundred-thousand-word vocabulary of Trade and Standard English,” Lissea said, “is enough self-consistent information to provide its own code—for a sufficiently powerful processor. This one was.”

Presumably the bunker didn’t care where the controller was facing, but human beings like to act as if there were a point of focus. She turned to the wall again. “There are two tanks defending a perimeter around Hammerhead Lake, fifteen kilometers north of Astragal,” she said. “How can the tanks be shut down or destroyed?”

“Define Hammerhead Lake or Astragal,” the environment said.

“I’ll handle it,” Carron said with matter-of-fact firmness. He took the control wand from Lissea’s breast pocket without bothering to ask. “Project a relief map of the ten thousand hectares of surface centered on this bunker.”

Carron was taking charge rather than begging a favor. Ned had noted the dichotomy in the young noble’s personality before.

The interior of the bunker changed. Ned felt an instant of vertigo. A vast map curved into view some meters beyond where the wall should have been. Either the illusion of flying tricked the balance canals in his ears, or for a moment gravity had shifted and he was looking straight down at Pancahte it self.

A flat, palm-sized disk from Lissea’s toolcase hung in the air, attached to nothingness by one of the wave guides Carron had provided. She hadn’t removed the device after she dumped data into the vast bank encircling them. Ned wondered what storage method the builders had used, and how long ago they had lived.