Furious Gulf (7 page)

“Ummm, sounds reasonable. Not our style, though.”

Family Bishop has always been impetuous. Perhaps that is why you have survived.

Toby remembered that Shibo had come to them from Family Knight, after that Family had been nearly killed off by the mechs.
She had been born into Family Pawn. “Well, I’ve always wanted to see a Chandelier. I s’pose we all do.”

Mechs know that, too. But I suspect your father has motives beyond curiosity.

“Such as?”

Only a guess. We shall see.

This calm, mysterious distance was typical Shibo. Most Aspects were eager to speak, to be involved again in real-world hustle
and bustle. Shibo had a serenity not shared by Isaac and the others. Maybe that was an attribute of Personalities in general,
but Toby suspected it was just a deep feature of the remarkable woman she had been. Though his true mother was still a firm,
resonant memory, Shibo had been a mother to him in the long years of Family wanderings.

Toby shrugged and reported that the flyers were positioned, swarming like bees around an elephant.

Killeen nodded curtly and ordered,—Teams in!—

Flyers all around the Chandelier angled in. There was no visible movement in response.

The flyers slipped into open entrances. Toby sorted out the transmissions and brought the most important to Killeen’s attention.
There was continual cross talk. Bishops were a gabby lot:

—Looks like a big open auditorium here. Some burn damage.—Yeah, must’ve been fighting all along this passage. Big gouges out
of the walls.—

—A whole section smashed in here.—

—All in vacuum. No air pressure.—

—Burned-out living quarters. From the door heights I’d say they were short people.—

—No signs of recent use, I’d say.—

—Right. I just ran a sample on some burned furniture in an apartment. My Aspect says that the isotope dating makes this to
be
old
—twenty thousand years, at least.—

—Anybody find any records?—

—No. Somebody sure scraped this place clean.—

—I’m picking up traces of electrical activity. Something still works here.—

Killeen broke in curtly.—Proceed carefully. There may be mechs in there.—

Toby didn’t think it likely that mechs would stay in a human artifact, even a glorious ruin like this. But then, he had less
experience than his father and the other Bishop veterans. He knew the long history of betrayals, of agreements broken, of
ambushes and raids and casual obliteration as just that—history. These men and women had lived through plenty of it; some
were over a hundred years old and still fighting, still vigorous and adamant about giving any margin to mechs.

—God, they fought all through here.—

—Yeah, smashed. Stripped clean.—

—Somebody pulled out all the metals. Looks like mech scavenging. Same typical grappler marks.—

—A graveyard of a city.—

—They clean stripped it. Like Blaine Arcology back on Snowglade, ’member?—

Toby remembered, all right. He had hiked there, taking two days, on his first major outing with Killeen and his grandfather,
Abraham. Blaine Arcology was a reverential place for Bishops, worth a half-day detour from their target, a mech factory that
housed usable foodstuffs. The colossal ruin had awed Toby. They had camped there overnight, even though Abraham grumbled about
the danger of mech ambush. He had wandered the smashed streets, reading hints of former lives among the shadows. The Arcology
had seemed to him a place of privacy, silence, space, and of memories forever lost. Memories of busy avenues and neighbors,
of long afternoons with time to waste, of barefoot fun and whispery elegance—a
city
. He had tried to say as much to Killeen and Abraham, and while Toby talked about the majesty of the place both the men had
looked away, faces pinched and brooding. When Toby had asked why, Abraham had said sadly that an old Aspect of his had just
reminded him that Blaine was really not an example of the High Arcology Era at all. It had served as a kind of refugee camp,
after the truly great places had been smashed. And Killeen had nodded, too.

A refugee camp. Yet Citadel Bishop would have fit in its sports stadium.

That moment long ago came back to Toby. Then it was blown away, the way the wind carries conversations and shreds them.

—There’s everything here. Concert halls, markets, factories, hospitals, huge shafts for elevators.—

—And blasted parks. Musta been pretty once.—

—Wait a sec, there’s an airlock here.—

Killeen sent,—Test it for activity.—

—Nothing electrical I can pick up.—

—Try the seals.—Killeen said.

—They seem okay. Intact.—

Killeen sent,—Leave a robot mechanical at the controls and stand back, far back. Then pop the seal.—

—Yeasay, doing it . . . —

Other reports came in, of more damaged vistas. Toby listened intently, filtering out the repetitious reports. His attention
focused on the team at the airlock. He ached to be in there with them, looking around.

—We opened the lock. It’s cycling.—

Killeen sent,—What’s the gas?—

—Ordinary air. Chem-sensors say it’s okay, not poisoned.—

Cermo scowled next to Toby.—Air’s still good after all this time?—

Toby said—Maybe the air system still works.—

—And maybe other things work, too,—Killeen said uneasily.

From the airlock team came,—Seems all right. Cap’n, can we go in?—

Killeen sent,—Yeasay. But take it slow.—

Cermo said,—Cap’n, there are only three in that team. They can’t help but get spread out.—

—Right.—Killeen hesitated only a second.—But we don’t have any reserves. You go, Cermo. Provide comm to us.—

Toby said,—Dad, I’ll do that. I can monitor just as well while I’m moving.—

Killeen shook his head. To Toby’s surprise, Cermo put in,—He’ll be all right with me. I could use the help.—

Toby realized that Cermo might be trying to defuse the tension between the two of them, by getting Toby out from under his
father’s thumb. Maybe his father wanted that, too, because Killeen looked relieved.—Um. Very well.—Quickly the Cap’n turned
his attention to other matters.

Into the Chandelier, Toby’s pulse quickening. They followed tracers that pulsed on the inner visors of their helmets. Already
Argo
’s computers had built up a rough three-dimensional map of this vast derelict, using the exploration team’s data. They guided
Cermo and Toby through dark lanes, down shafts, through the wrecked corridors of far antiquity. They sped through utter blackness,
guided by their helmet beams.

Toby caught glimpses of tattered clothing, trashed factories, gutted offices. Each glance was a momentary message of beleaguered
lives lost for millennia, known now only by pathetic scraps.

They reached the yawning round airlock. Their helmet beams showed a crewwoman, who waved them on in.—Can you believe it?—she
sent.—There was air inside. When we opened the lock, it near blew me away.—

The blackness all around them gave way to a broad, phosphor-lit square. The team was there, working among ranks of machinery.
Cermo gave orders for them to search the area. Toby stood, listening to other teams report their findings. They had found
nothing as unusual as this.

Toby asked Cermo,—Why you figure the phosphors work here and nowhere else?—

—Maybe there’s still a power source in here.—

—After twenty thousand years?—Somebody guffawed.

But there was. A crewman found electricity coursing through conduits high above. Cermo said,—No bodies, so far?—

—Nobody’s reported any.—Toby answered.—They’re gone, I guess. Evaporated away, like the plants in the parks.—

—But why not in here? I mean, this was sealed.—

Toby wondered why mechs would leave this vault under air pressure, if they were the last ones here. He walked among the ranks
of shadowy machinery and puzzled over what it was for. There was a certain cast to the bulky assemblages, a style that was
not like the mech machines he had feared and hated all his life.

It struck him that these were
human
machines, by far the largest he had ever seen. He smiled with pride. Men and women had once worked on the scale of mechs.
He had lived with the automatic assumption that only the malevolent, intelligent machines could achieve great works.
Argo
was an ancient human work, of course, but it was of the Arcology Era, used to fly between the Hunkered-Down colonies on the
far-flung planets. And
Argo
had used many parts scavenged from mechs. These old human artifacts were different. Beautiful, he decided.

Killeen sent,—Team Lambda has found same engraving in a wall. I want full spectro-copies of it.—

Toby had the gear for that.—Yeasay, coming.—

He turned to go and a sudden blaring signal erupted through the comm line.

I AM A BOMB. I AM SET TO EXPLODE IN THREE HUNDRED TIME INTERVALS. *
BEEP
* THIS MARKS THE BEGINNING OF A TIME INTERVAL. THERE ARE TWO HUNDRED NINETY-NINE TO GO. I AM A BOMB. I AM SET TO EXPLODE IN
THREE HUNDRED TIME INTERVALS. *
BEEP
* THERE ARE TWO HUNDRED NINETY-EIGHT TIME INTERVALS TO GO.

The signal came from somewhere in the vault, Toby’s locator told him.—Evacuate!—he called and started for the lock.

It was closing. Cermo was in front of him, moving with a speed and dexterity surprising for his size. Cermo aimed his weapon
at the lock and blew off a hinge. The door stopped.

Toby got through the entrance and then stopped.—You figure it’s a nuke?—

—Might be,—Cermo sent.—Move!—

—Let’s push the lock door back in place. It might contain anything less than a nuke.—

Cermo swore but agreed. They swung the door shut with the help of three other crew. The time wasn’t lost anyway, because others
were still coming out. The last crewwoman squeezed through and they slammed the bulky steel shut.

Nobody wasted time on breath. They rushed down silent, inky hallways. Teams came streaming out of the Chandelier. Toby got
into free space just as the relay transmitter they had left in the vault sent:

*
BEEP
* I AM A BOMB. THIS HAS BEEN A WELCOME CONCLUSION TO MY HISTORIC MISSION. I BID GOOD-BYE TO THOSE WHO CREATED ME AND GAVE
ME THIS OPPORTUNITY TO SERVE. THANKS ALSO TO THOSE WHO TRIGGERED MY COMPLETING MOMENT. I NOW DETONATE WITH RESOLVE AND ELOQUENCE.
*
BEEP
*

Its transmission shut off.

The Chandelier shook visibly. Spires sheared away. Walls split.

A helical tower cracked. Then it all came apart in slow motion, buckling and fracturing into shards that spun away, tumbling.
In the silence of space it was like watching a mountain come apart piece by piece.

Toby watched the debris as their flyer sped away. It had been a close call, but the Chandelier was fracturing with little
energy left over.
Argo
was already speeding away. They probably wouldn’t sustain much damage.

—Whew! We were lucky.—he said.

—Maybe,——Killeen answered.

Cermo said,—I don’t think that stuff can really hurt us much.—

—Me neither,—Killeen answered.—But maybe it wasn’t supposed to.—

Toby puzzled.—Huh? What else could it have been for?—

—Wish I knew. But anybody who just wanted to kill us wouldn’t have given any warning.—

Toby blinked.—And putting it inside an airlock . . . —

Cermo said,—Mechs wouldn’t be drawn to an atmosphere. They work better without one. We’d be suckered in, though.—

—So I figure,—Killeen said.—We set off a humans-only alarm.—

They watched in silence the slow-motion wreck of their ancient ancestral home. Toby’s oldest Aspects murmured, stirred by
memories he could probably never know. He felt also the unspoken anguish in the scattered comm comments. Even though picked
clean, there had been a feeling to the place, a taste of what humans had been like many millennia ago. A flavor of antiquity,
faint and echoing. Tantalizing, sweet—and then snatched away forever.

—Too bad I didn’t get to that engraving,—Toby said.

—Yeasay. Team Lambda got a few quick shots, though.—Killeen scowled, lines deepening in his face.

—I don’t get it. Why destroy such a beautiful thing? They didn’t even catch us.—

Cermo said,—Dunno. Me, I figure mechs maybe just like busting up anything human. Anything that means something to us.—Killeen
said darkly,—Let us hope it is only that.—

T
oby liked working outside. Grunt work in zero-gravs was more like dancing than real labor, demanding some body-smarts—but
there were moments that took plenty of muscle, too.

There was joy in popping out a sweat. He used it to work off his frustrations, which were getting to be many. Even the best
skinsuit got pretty swampy after a while, though, and it was a lot of trouble to pee, so you didn’t drink anything for hours
before going out. That meant your throat dried out and you got by on sips of tomato juice.

This job was tougher. Their passage through the molecular cloud had somehow shorted out some of the ship’s sensors. Cermo
said it was all those banks of dust. Then the Chandelier explosion had pocked the hull. Most of the debris was small stuff,
but each gouge had to be patched. Tedious, messy, and essential, just like most jobs on a starship. When there’s only one
skin between you and high vacuum, you take care of it.

Toby helped get a crushed antenna back into shape, depending on instructions from a Face he carried. A Face was a trimmed
down Aspect, really just a catalog of technical lore and tricks. Toby let the Face tell him which tools to use and electrical
connections to make, which left him free to just puff and sweat for a while. Techno-thinking was intricate and hard and he
tired of it. But the repair routines went into muscle-memory, so he would be able to do it better next time.

When a break came he took a stroll over the hull while the rest of the work gang rested on their tails. He was beginning to
see what his father liked about spending so much time out here, beneath the seethe of sky. A million pinprick fires shone
through the blobs and swirls of twilight radiance—dust and gas, tortured into smoldering luminescence by huge electrical currents.