Starhammer (35 page)

Jon stood forward and grasped the old man's hand. Ulip Sehngrohn was in the last quarter of his second century. Yet a balefire was alight in his old pale eyes. His hand was hard, his grip strong.

The Bey introduced the young Elchites who had come with him; they were all awed to meet the legendary Doctor Sehngrohn. When it was done, the doctor turned to Eblis Bey.

"Come, let us go somewhere private, we have much to discuss. You know the Buro were on the Oolite trail last night?"

"They came this far south?"

"I hear that they have lost four aircraft thus far. They are trying to survey the trail by flying the aircraft over it. Of course the jets cannot survive the thicker dusts. There was a spectacular crash at Fort Pinshon this morning; a jet with full tanks fell to the ground immediately after takeoff. Seven laowon officers were incinerated."

"They've been having their problems at Fort Pinshon," the Bey commented.

"They certainly have, but I fear that Blood Head has now been taken by the cyborgs. He will go to expiate somewhere far away."

"Such is the Imperial system."

"Not for much longer if we can but succeed."

Sehngrohn and the Bey disappeared into the maze.

The winds howled overhead and Melissa sweated inside her uncomfortable desert suit. Built for a laowon officer, it was much too big for her, and very heavy besides.

The climate of the planet was unrelentingly horrible. In the south a harsh gritty dust constantly flowed. It got into everything, even through the filters into the laowon suits. The darkness at least allowed the lifting of the glare goggles. Then only the polarizers had to be kept over the eyes.

Above them, waiting for the armored car to pick them up from the landing apron, the Guillotine Stone loomed, dimly visible. Beside her stood Officer Bancool, her new minder. Officer Claath's remains had been dispatched to fleet HQ for inspection and delivery to his family. Melissa doubted she would miss Claath, a cynical and sadistic type. On the other hand, Bancool was some kind of advanced religious racist and insisted on being addressed as Klor, the word for "lord" in the general laowon tongue. He had told her of his urge to see the permanent subjugation of the human subrace as part of his own dedication to the glory of the Imperiom. Since those were among his first words to her, they served to stifle any attempts she might have made to initiate conversation.

Her shoulder was comfortable at least, much better now that they were out of that aircraft.

She looked back at the plane with a little shudder. It had started out with four jet engines. One had flamed out and fallen off on takeoff. Another had died before landing.

She recalled watching two earlier jets take off from Fort Pinshon's hastily improvised airstrip only to crash immediately when their engines ingested the corrosive dust.

The smashed planes sent up great plumes of dark smoke into the winds, which promptly scattered them over the heads of the laowon waiting to board the jets as they were assembled out of the landing pod. The morale of the laowon officers on the mission was noticeably poor.

Melissa heard her name called. She turned. It was Magnawl Ahx, Chief Executive Officer of the Superior Buro himself. He who had befriended her, had saved her from the brainwipe when Bancool had found her in the aftermath of the disaster at Fort Pinshon.

"There is no trace of them here, nor did our information last night lead to anything." Immense disappointment was obvious in his voice. "I'm afraid they may have slipped by us. I dread the consequences of our failure. There will be a terrible war. I doubt seriously if the Imperiom, once aroused, will allow any vestige of human independence after the war is completed. Billions will die."

She stared at him bleakly. She could add nothing to what he already knew.

"I'm sorry, Lord Ahx. I knew your fugitive only very briefly. I have told you everything I can remember, down to the tiniest detail. He said he was going to the stars, to find an alien race, that was all."

Ahx nodded, he believed her. In truth, they were facing an appalling situation. Despite the fact that things had begun very well. They had been blessed with a spy inside the Elchite camps from the beginning, yet still they were groping. Now they faced imminent disaster.

The spy had proved of little help in the end. Only computer work had produced the command to search Baraf's main entryport at Quism, which had caught a trace of the Elchite terrorists.

Now the Buro had reacted to what seemed disinformation. Perhaps the spy had turned, in which case they had nothing to fall back on if the fugitives had already slipped past them. The Elchites might already be out there, in that blinding dust storm that went on forever.

"If we have missed them then I may have to order this world burned. Do you realize what that will mean?"

"No."

"It will be carpet-bombed with nuclear devices until nothing survives. The entire surface will be made molten."

"How long will that take?" she asked, staring off into the blinding dust. Her attention distracted by other concerns. Was Jon Iehard out there, alive somewhere, struggling toward attaining the mad dream that had the entire laowon empire writhing?

If he was still alive, what was he doing? An odd mix of emotions brought a lump to her throat.

Magnawl Ahx shrugged. "Before we begin we will have to consolidate the sector fleet. That could take days. After that it will be but a matter of hours."

"What about the people who live here, in the cities?"

"A few of them may be rescued, most will die."

"That always seems to be the way of your Imperiom."

"We are a great power, far greater than any human understands. We must move with the maximum decisiveness, we can never weaken before our enemies. It has fallen to us to unite our Galaxy. Already we become aware of other galaxies that may be united under universal states. Such states must have enormous power, we must be ready within our own Galaxy to withstand any challenge that might cross the great deeps."

The high officers in the Buro always spoke as if they were being recorded for the history tapes. Which, Melissa reflected, they probably were, in a way. The Buro constantly spied on itself as well as everything around it. The obsessions ran deep and strong.

He joined her, staring out through the thick goggles into the whirling dust. The armored car was finally approaching.

Slightly more than a thousand kilometers to the south the expedition crawled forward over the ancient seabed.

In this region near the midocean ridge the terrain was a nightmare of ridges, sharp cliffs, and endless parallel canyons. Their way across the meridian of the ancient ocean bed was marked by endless loops and doubling back. Forward progress was painfully slow.

Time and again they crawled up a long heavy gradient only to find themselves at the head of a scarp too steep for them to descend safely. Then they would backtrack and work north or south to find a way around it.

During the second night on the seabed they passed the first crustal pit, a shockingly abrupt hole several kilometers deep and wide that cut through the landscape without advance warning. Surrounding it there was no evidence of an impact, no piled rubble, no crater walls. And the sides were straight, as if cut with a giant ruler and a knife.

They paused for a moment beside it.

"This cannot be a natural phenomenon," Jon said with a bemused grin to Owlcurl Dahn.

"Certainly unlike any known to science," she agreed.

"The size of it! What purpose might it have served?" He rubbed his chin and wandered along the edge of the cliff. There was erosion, a few gulleys, but for the most part the pit was a perfect cube. The huge walls went straight down.

Angle Umpuk approached. "Astonishing, isn't it?"

"I wonder why it was made."

Umpuk shrugged. "As to that, who knows? The ancients were a strange people with a sad and terrifying end." He surveyed the pit. "This is a young one. Closer to the equator there are many with more advanced erosion characteristics, I'm told. Spectacularly beautiful, if only they weren't so damned dangerous."

"Were they perhaps made to hold water?" Jon mused.

"Unlikely. This was the bottom of the ocean."

They looked into the near distance, as far as the dust would allow.

"Are you nervous about going out there? You seem almost eager." Umpuk scanned him carefully.

"I am eager—our mission must succeed, but we race the laowon, Mr. Umpuk, as I'm sure you have realized. I have killed laowon, Mr. Umpuk, seventeen Superior Buro officers in one system alone. I cannot survive capture in this universe."

"Universe? What do you mean?"

"That we will change the way history has betrayed us, that we will reach out and bring down the laowon tyranny with one crashing blow, if we have to."

Angle Umpuk looked around uneasily. "Then we had better not linger here too long. By the way, how was it that you sensed the Zun men who were waiting for us?"

"I have slight psi ability, a rating of forty-one in Nocanicus system standards."

"Ah, one of the psi-able. And you worked for the police department there?"

"In a way. I had no choice really, there wasn't a lot else I could do, you see. I grew up on a laowon world, Mr. Umpuk. If you were to look at my forehead carefully you would find the estate brand of Castle Firgize. I have had surgery, but traces remain."

Umpuk felt his jaw drop. "How terrible! I had no idea."

"I go to destroy the laowon, Mr. Umpuk." Jon made a fist of his gauntlet. "I go to expunge them as they expunged my mother and her family. They put them in the Agony Booth. Agony until death—have you ever seen that done, Mr. Umpuk?"

"Uh, no, never." Umpuk stepped back abruptly. "I'm sorry, I meant no offense, I was just curious."

Jon stared off at the amazing walls of the cube and made no reply.

When he returned to his mantid he found Owlcurl Dahn inside. "I asked the Bey to switch places with me for a while, Jon. M'Nee and Chacks whisper together incessantly; they unnerve me. I think I need a change from their company. In truth, I dislike them and they dislike me."

"And they want to kill me."

"I know, they talk of it constantly. They curse someone called 'Bompy' and talk of exacting a terrible toll from him."

"That was the slaver they sold me to in Quism. I was to be blinded and have my tongue put out before being sold off as a slave."

"I never heard about that part."

"Oh, that's the best part, I thought."

She saw his smile and giggled. He was a strange one! He seemed almost as relentless as Eblis Bey. And something in him haunted her, a tantalizing glimpse of a dry humor behind the grim outer face he wore. She wondered if it was connected to psi ability. Before she could decide, the mantids coughed into life and set off once more.

On the third day they finally crossed the midocean ridge and came down onto a flat basalt floor, scoured of ooze by the endless winds. They made much better speed on this surface, although the lead mantid—crewed by Bergen, Hargen, and Gesme—had to watch carefully for crustal pits. Soon they became more numerous, and the expedition passed a dozen or more within a hundred kilometers. They were clearly of differing ages, some weathered and half filled with scree, others still as sharply defined as the day they were cut from the planet's crust.

It was past noon when they became aware of something hulking out of the dust to the south. They turned to investigate more closely.

As they got closer so the hulking mass grew larger. Soon they saw that it was another machine of the ancients, but this machine was built to a different and much larger scale than the machines of the northern belt.

It was also broken down, great sections had collapsed, shaken perhaps by groundquakes. A cracked dome, or shell, covered the central section, which was at least five kilometers across and three high.

As they pulled up about half a kilometer distant, they gazed up at the behemoth, appalled by the enormity of it.

"Is this what we have been seeking?" Jon asked the Bey.

"No, this machine is broken down. The one we seek is still active. It will be moving, heading west at a rate that takes it around the planet's circumference once every ten terrestrial years or so."

"What fuels it?"

The Bey shrugged. "I do not know. Perhaps some fusion generator inside—it's certainly big enough to carry one. It's not as big as this one though."

They roved the length of the moribund giant, stared at the vast treads sunk into the seabed underneath it. But the Bey refused permission to explore its mysterious interior and eventually they left it behind, continuing south and west. They were approaching the equator, the winds were fiercer than ever and the dust so thick it was hard to see more than twenty meters ahead.

When night fell for the third time on the seabed, the expedition paused to take stock and snatch a hurried meal from the supplies in the turtle.

Everyone wore a haggard, desperate air. The men unshaven, the women unkempt, all were tired of riding through the dust-swept desolation in the cramped vehicles.

Eblis Bey brought them together for a last briefing. "My friends, we are about thirty kilometers north of our destination. At least that is what the computer navigator says. We are approaching the end of the mission." He paused and looked around him. They stared back, scarcely daring to hope that the ordeal might soon be over.

"You have kept faith in me throughout enormous peril and hardship, and now I hope to show you that it has all been worth it. Though I hasten to add that the dangers ahead are as great or greater than anything we have faced before."

The old man hunkered down. They followed his example because it was difficult to hear above the wind outside the hovercraft.

"What I hope we shall find up ahead will be a group of machines, several small ones and a single large one. They are still functional, still moving. In fact, they are known in the old charts as the South Tropical Rogues, because of their movements."