Dark Foundations (54 page)

“Well it may be.” There was a long pause. “But you know there might—just might—be a way.”

The next day, as Merral stared at a desk map in his office struggling with how long he could keep three thousand soldiers on alert, he heard a sudden ripple of excitement outside of his office.

As Merral's diary bleeped, Lloyd stuck his head in. “Sir, the Library has just been locked.”

Merral glanced at the screen and saw a flashing message:
Intrusion Alert! Library and Admin-Net closed.

What do I do?
Merral's fingers moved to a set of buttons in three different colors on the wall. Red was reserved for imminent or actual hostilities, orange would evacuate everyone to the war room, and yellow would allow them to stay on alert in their present locations.

“Yellow,” he said aloud as he pressed the third button. “Lloyd, I'm going upstairs.”

Grabbing his diary, Merral ran past the flashing screens of terminals and bounded up the stairs to Corradon's office.
Is this is it? Does the war start now?

He found the representative seated at a screen, his face drained of color, his eyes flicking across data. Clemant stood behind him, peering over his shoulder.

“Commander! What's going on?” Merral heard the strain in Corradon's voice, saw his shaking hands, and realized how shallow his self-assurance seemed to be.

“Library and Admin-Net are down. An intrusion. That's all I know,” Merral panted. “I've put the FDF and the irregulars on yellow alert.”

Clemant looked at the screen. “Ah, Sentinel Enand has just sent a message. He is on his way. And the satellites report no signs of an attack. The
Dove
is still fifteen million kilometers away. And the Basic-Net is up and on line.”

Five minutes later, Vero hurried in, his face beaded with sweat and carrying his briefcase.

“What happened?” Corradon asked him.

Vero sat down on a chair by the desk and wiped his brow. “There was, apparently, an attempt at an intrusion. The
Dove of Dawn
no doubt.”

“Have we lost anything?” Clemant growled.

“No. Shutdown occurred within a second. They can have extracted nothing during that time.” Vero pulled from his briefcase a small transparent box with a gray wafer inside. He handed it to Corradon. “The key, sir.”

The representative took it with care and peered at it.

“Better keep it safe,” Vero advised. “Without it, not even all the king's horses and all the king's men will put the Library back together again.”

Corradon and Clemant stared at him.

“Oh, never mind. Just don't lose it.”

“I won't. When do I use it?”

“Not until we are totally sure what the
Dove
is up to.”

An hour later they received a message from the
Dove of Dawn
. “In the process of trying to assess the damage done to your planet by the insurgents we seem to have inadvertently triggered the defenses of your Library. We apologize.”

Corradon's response was to say that the apology was accepted. The yellow alert level was withdrawn, but the Library and the Admin-Net stayed closed.

On the following day the gleaming ship entered Farholme orbit and received clearance for one of its shuttles to land at Langerstrand strip at three the following afternoon.

On the morning of the landing, Merral and Lloyd took the western road out of Isterrane. They could have flown to the Langerstrand Peninsula, but Merral had good reason to travel by road. From the moment Langerstrand had been chosen as a landing zone, he had ordered feasibility studies on defending Isterrane against any attack that might be mounted from there.

With the sun already high in the cloudless sky, they crossed the great arc of stone and cable that was the Walderand Gorge suspension bridge.

A small FDF unit was positioned on the far side, but Merral had Lloyd drive past and stop higher up the road. There they scrambled up to a viewpoint.

Merral stared at the great bridge and the crags around.
Yes,
we might be able to hold off an attacking force here and, as a last resort, blow up the bridge.

He squinted through the growing haze across the gorge, seeing the faint shapes of the westernmost suburbs of Isterrane on the far side.
But it is too close
. In winter, with the Walderand a raging muddy torrent, a long-lasting defense could be made, but not in late summer with the river reduced to a series of muddy channels.
No.
Any defense would have to be farther away
.

They drove for a few kilometers along the Western Trunk Road as it cut through the harsh shattered ridges of the edges of the Manukli Range and then turned southward along a narrower road signposted
Tezekal, Langerstrand, and Lariston
Coast Road
. Soon they were out of the mountains and on to a low and featureless plateau whose baked ocher soils bore only a few dry and dusty trees. For twenty minutes they drove west as the road skirted the high, wooded, and brooding massif that formed the southernmost outpost of the Manukli Range until a low ridge with a saw-edged silhouette came into view.

“That is Tezekal Ridge and
that
must be Tezekal Village,” Merral said, gesturing at a hazy cluster of white-walled houses atop the northern edge of the ridge. “From the maps, the road drops from there through a gorge down to the Edelcet Marshes. It's the best potential defense point. We could even put an emergency strip just here.”

They turned off the main road and drove along a dusty track past fields with olive trees and citrus orchards to a small encampment of troops that lay in the shadow of some jagged rocks.

Captain Tremutar, a soft-spoken man with a wiry physique, led Merral and Lloyd up a hot and narrow winding track to the crest of the ridge. At the top, they stopped to regain their breath and surveyed the hazy view ahead, shading their eyes against the sun with their hands.

Three hundred meters below lay the wide, flat expanses of the Edelcet Marshes with their multicolored mosaic of reed beds, lakes, and salt pans. The marshes passed southward into the blue waters of Hassanet's Sea while to the north they came to an abrupt end against the thick tree-covered slopes of a steep and rugged escarpment that led into the heights of the Manukli Range. Checking the map, Merral found the escarpment was called the Hereza Crags.

In the far distance, beyond the western edge of the marshes, the Langerstrand Peninsula shimmered in the heat. Merral traced the path of the road down through a deep gorge to the left of Tezekal Village, and along the foot of the Hereza Crags.

“Acceptable, Sergeant?”

“Yup,” Lloyd answered. “If it came to a fight, sir, here would do. They can't cross the marshes and the slopes look impossible. So they'd have to use the road. And we overlook that. The
Bodyguard's Handbook
talks about the high ground. We'd have it.”

Merral gestured up to the right, where the eastern continuation of the Hereza Crags rose high above the village. “But we are overlooked here. Is that Mount Adaman, Captain?”

“Yes, sir. Two thousand meters high.”

Lloyd squinted at it. “Tough for any army to climb that.”

“Krallen are different. But I suppose it's a risk we have to take,” Merral said. He turned to the lean soldier next to them. “Captain, you'll be hearing formally from Colonel Leopold Lanier soon. But I want defenses here. Get started.”

Lloyd and Merral drove slowly down the road as it snaked through the razor-sharp gray and brown lava cliffs of the gorge. Even with the sun high overhead, Merral found Tezekal Gorge a dark place, full of shadows.

As a vulture wheeled above in slow circles, its rough calls echoing off the rocks, Merral had a suddenly terrible presentiment of fighting, of shed blood and the cries of men. He shuddered. “A grim place, Sergeant. Even now.”

“Yup.”

In a few minutes, they exited the gorge and were on the flat road at the edge of the marshland. Merral had never been to the Edelcet Marshes before, but knew it as one of the places where ducks, geese, and other waterbirds congregated when the heart of Menaya was frozen solid in the winter.

As they drove past, Merral saw birds on the water and ghostly white egrets in the trees at the water's edge, but forced himself to turn away and look up the slopes, trying to see the nature of the ground under the trees—mostly scrubby oaks, tall dusty cypresses, and a variety of pines.

“It's a cursed business this,” he said.

“I agree, sir. But any special reason for you saying it here?”

“Because, Lloyd, I should be spending my time here looking at God's good creation and instead, I find myself considering how we might best kill things.”

Half an hour later they stopped at the gate in the new wire fencing that surrounded the Langerstrand strip. Behind it, Merral could see hectic activity.

“Welcome, Commander,” said the guard as he waved them through. “We are almost ready for the visitors.”

“Good,” he said, but as they drove on through the bustle, a question nagged him:
Are we?

20

T
he Dominion shuttle landed in the early afternoon of the same day.

Merral, along with the other members of the contact team, watched its landing from under the awning of a tented pavilion. The vessel, an elegant craft in a plain white livery, descended at a forty-five degree angle and landed delicately in the exact middle of the runway.

“Showoffs,” muttered the representative for the southern islands, and Merral remembered that she had been a pilot.

Corradon was driven out in a six-wheeled passenger transporter and walked over to the vessel. Four people descended from it and, after exchanging bows and handshakes, were transported back to the pavilion.

Merral lined up at the pavilion entrance with the rest of the contact team. Everyone wore formal clothes and Merral found the full dress uniform uncomfortably warm.

Corradon entered, relief unmistakably stamped on his bronzed face. “Ambassadors Hazderzal and Tinternli, Captain Benek-Hal,” he announced.

A fourth person, who Merral decided was a recording engineer, had stepped to one side and was already imaging events.

Merral stared at the ambassadors. Seen in the flesh this close, both were, in their own way, eye catching. They were tall, delicately built, straight-backed, and walked with smooth, precise steps. Again he probed his brain for any sense of the presence of evil. There was nothing; no hairs bristled on the back of his neck and his spine did not tingle.

Hazderzal, his hair and beard immaculately groomed, led the way, his long white jacket swaying gently and shimmering softly as if it had somehow captured starlight.

Tinternli wore a flowing white dress with a red flower pinned to her shoulder.

Stopping at the head of the line of the contact team, Ambassador Hazderzal spoke in an elegant and sonorous voice. “Representative Corradon, the rest of you, this is a historic moment for us all and for our worlds.” He opened his hands in a gesture of benevolence. “We are delighted to meet. We could wish, of course, that it was the first meeting between our long-separated human families, but alas, you have already had an encounter with some from our worlds.”