Dark Foundations (53 page)

“And war begins. And that, if we understand the envoy correctly, is now just weeks away.”

“Exactly.” Vero rose. “And there is work to be done.”

Corradon seemed happy with the suggestion of the Langerstrand site and transmitted a message about it to the Dominion ship. The answer from the
Dove of Dawn
came almost as soon as the vast distance allowed. “We will land at Langerstrand as you wish. We pose no biological threat, but we are happy to be scrutinized. We will travel in silence for the next five days as we decelerate. We prefer to speak face-to-face.”

Over the next few days, Merral felt increasingly isolated. Anya was absent from her lab, Perena was unobtainable, and when contacted, Vero seemed preoccupied, almost brusque, and his answers impossibly cryptic.

As the
Dove of Dawn
came within range of more satellites, increasingly better data transmitted from the ship. The consensus was that everything about it—its delicate smooth spindle shape, its small size, and its brilliant whiteness—marked it as a nonmilitary vessel. As each new image came in, Merral felt that there was almost a visible lessening of tension. Yet although he could not state his feelings openly, he felt unable to share the enthusiasm. In his mind the equation was obvious: either the ship was a deception or Azeras had lied.

With the increasing data, Corradon's confidence grew, although Clemant maintained his wariness. Merral kept a careful eye on how Delastro reacted. The prebendant seemed rather exasperated by the fact that the ship and its inhabitants seemed so innocuous. But he kept to the agreement he had made with Merral and confined himself to making rather bland speeches that urged those of the FDF, as “the watchmen on the very walls of Zion,” to neither slumber nor sleep.

Three days before the
Dove
was due to enter Farholme orbit, Merral sat in his bedroom wearing nothing but shorts and feeling uncomfortably warm when he heard a sound from the corridor followed by an exchange of voices. A few moments later Lloyd stuck his head round the door.

“Mr. V.'s here, sir. He's making some coffee.”

Merral threw a shirt on and went to the kitchen.

Vero, leaning back in a chair, peered at him over a large mug of coffee. “Just passing through.”

“Always a pleasure. Are you still happy with Azeras's version of things?”

“Yes,” Vero said and Merral heard a hint of hesitation in the voice. “He's a mess. I can't begin to work out what's going on inside him. There's guilt and anger and self-pity. At first he was glad of our company, but now that the novelty has worn off, he seems to prefer being isolated.”

Vero helped himself to a biscuit out of a jar. “Anyway,” he said. “I came by because I've been talking with Betafor about all sorts of things. One thing I can tell you is that she confirms this ‘great adversary' business.”

“Odd.”

“Yes, isn't it? But what's interesting is this ill-defined link between this great adversary and Lucas Ringell.”

Merral pulled the disk from under his shirt, and stared at it as it spun slowly on its metal chain. “So that explains the excitement on the intruder ship when they read this disk.”

“Exactly. A fearsome figure out of their mythology had returned.”

“Well, I'm not sure where this leaves us. I'm not sure I want to be known as the claimant to the title of Ringell Mark Two. But I'd better tuck this well away.” He slipped it under his shirt.

“Yes, keep it out of sight,” Vero warned.

“I'm worried about the Krallen,” Merral said after a period of silence. “Are you making any progress on them?”

“Hmm. We understand them better. They are fascinating in a terrifying sort of way. Betafor has confirmed what we suspected—their tiles will deflect most bullets unless they hit straight on. And did you know that they can survive very high temperatures? A thousand degrees for twenty to thirty seconds! No wonder cutter guns were almost useless.”

“So what
does
work against them?”

Vero stared away and his face seemed to look gloomier. “Ah, that is the problem. We have ideas. But . . .”

“We will need more than ideas soon.”

“I know. I know,” Vero said with an air of weariness and then sipped his coffee. “I'm beginning to feel sorry for Betafor. Creating her and her kind was a cruel act.”

“How so?”

“Apparently, the Allenix can comprehend all sorts of concepts that they cannot experience. So Betafor can understand—at least vaguely—concepts like friendship and love, but she cannot
feel
either. She understands that human beings have true personality, but she knows she can have nothing like it. She understands the idea of creativity, but she can't create anything except lies. She is smart enough to see her limits and it frustrates her. For all her posturing about her superiority to flesh, she is trapped in a mechanical body.”

“I see.”

Vero stared thoughtfully at the kitchen wall. “You sense that she wants to be a real person but knows she can never be one. But the worst thing—the cruelest blow—is that she understands death. She has a horror of permanent system shutdown.”

“She's scared of death?”

“Scared stiff. And she knows that there is nothing beyond that. There is no confident expectation of eternal life or even a faint hope. Just an awareness of an end.”

“From which we gather that her makers fear death.”

“Yes. But it's tragic and cruel to have made a creature capable of understanding eternity, but of never attaining it.”

“An interesting meditation.”

“Yes, isn't it?” Vero said. “But it's more than just a reflection. Fundamentally, she is a frustrated, unhappy, and fearful creature and she can't be relied on.”

There was an oddly conversational tone to his voice and Merral realized how much he missed it. Now there was so much pressure and so many enemies.

Vero drained his cup and got to his feet. “One other thing. You'll find the encryption program on the diary system has been modified. Betafor made some suggestions and Maria Dalphey checked them out. We hope that will give us some security against any future probing. But I'd better be off. We have some interesting days ahead. And there's lots to do, especially on the Krallen.”

Later the following day, as the sea wind rustled the fronds and the sun set in the ocean, Vero walked to where Azeras was sitting hunched in a chair under the shelter, staring at the back of his hand. Vero had wanted to move both the sarudar and Betafor from the Manalahi Shoals to the deep foundations of Isterrane for safety but, after protesting that he had spent too much of his life hiding in tunnels, Azeras had won himself a delay.

As Vero approached, Azeras looked up sharply and the images vanished.

“What were you watching?” Vero enquired.

The answer was as slow in coming as if it had been dragged up out of the very depths of Azeras's psyche. “My past,” he said and looked away.

The gloom persists. Something terrible hangs heavily over this man. When this is over, we must get this man some help. But in the meantime I must use him as he is.

“Azeras,” Vero announced, sitting down, “I've decided to keep you as part of my advisory team. There will be just four of us who know who you really are. I will try and keep you away from everyone else, but you will have an alias and have to pretend to be one of us.”

“What's the alternative?” Azeras's voice was glum.

“Solitary confinement, I'm afraid.”

“Then I will work with you as an advisor.”

“Good. Now let's talk about these Krallen again. What defenses are there?”

“Hit them before they land.”

“But we may not be able to do that.”

“Stay in tanks or armored vehicles.”

“We have none.”

“Well, we tried body armor,” Azeras said slowly. “It helps. It needs to be hard though. Their claws are tipped with an alloy that is harder than almost all metals. They have a nasty trick of putting their two or three claws together and groping for eye sockets.”

“If we were to design body armor, could you advise us?”

There was a long pause. “I suppose I could. Betafor would give you hardness details—it has its uses.”

“So we might have some personal defense. But how do we kill them?”

There was another long silence as Azeras toyed with a scar on his arm. “It's not easy. The True Freeborn never really managed it.”

“Do they have weak points?”

“No. Fire at them a lot. Get a lucky shot in between the tiles and you may do some damage, especially if you hit the circuits just below.”

“There is circuitry there?”

“A nervous system equivalent. Runs through a silicone fluid bath. Betafor's similar.”

“Yes, we persuaded her to let us see her schematics. So if we could get through the tiles and if we put a current into the wiring, they could be switched off?”

Azeras grunted. “There's too many
ifs
there.” He leaned his long frame back so that the chair tilted on two legs, and stared up at the palm tree above his head. After a few moments he sat upright and the front legs crashed down.

“Have you thought of something?”

“Maybe.” There was another long pause. “The blade that you used to cut those fronds—what technology did the commander say was used to make it?”

“The bush knife? Molecular tuning, but I'm the wrong person to explain how it works.”

Azeras looked at him with wintery gray eyes. “He said that it parted the wood molecules as it struck. And that there were blades for different subst—”

“Wait! You think we could make a blade that would cut through Krallen skin?”

“Maybe. Might be worth trying. The Krallen skin is made to deflect high-speed impact and beam weapons, not cuts.”

“W-would that be enough? Just cutting through?”

“No. You'd need an electrical charge. Twenty volts at least; Betafor would know the values. Have two electrodes on the blade—an ionic transfer battery in the handle. You have those. That'd knock them flat.”

“Permanently?”

Azeras hesitated, then shook his head abruptly. “No. You'd need to chop their heads off or smash them in pretty soon afterward to make sure they didn't recover. But that can be done.”

“A-Azeras, that's all possible. We can do this. We could e-easily make ten thousand blades—enough for the r-regulars and the irregulars.” Then Vero was struck by a problem and his enthusiasm rapidly drained away. “Ah but how . . . ?”

“How do you tune a blade for Krallen armor?” A faint smile crossed Azeras's face. “Get some Krallen.”

“Ah. Couldn't we do something based around Betafor's skin? There are spare tiles.”

“No. Krallen are different.”

“Bother. So, we really would need some Krallen to experiment with?”

“Yeah.”

“That sounds impossible.”