The Red Queen (63 page)

‘There were times when I felt the same,’ I said, shaking off my strange dream and clambering to my feet. ‘The key must be here, but the ground is rock hard. We had better have Hendon dig down to the grave. We needn’t open the whole of it given that Miryum told me Atthis came to her and said Cassandra’s key was under the headstone. Ye gods, I can hardly take in that Hannah must have foreseen this moment.’ I frowned down at the marker. ‘Yet I don’t like the idea of opening their grave after all they went through to be together at the end. It feels like sacrilege.’

‘We don’t have to disturb them for it is literally under the marker,’ Swallow said triumphantly, and he knelt down and scraped away the earth under the front of the gravestone so confidently that I guessed he had found whatever was there already. ‘I remembered what you said Miryum had told you, and I couldn’t resist searching,’ he said, glancing up at me apologetically. ‘But when I found it, I did not remove it. I felt you should do that.’

He drew back and I knelt again and felt under the marker. There was a gap and I felt something in it. I caught it between my fingers and drew out a small, dusty, black plast case. The edges had been sealed shut with daubs of wax or maybe plast but they peeled away easily, and inside, in one part of a moulded depression that reminded me of a pair of narrow butterfly wings, lay a thin piece of dark plast shaped into a long, flat, narrow triangle. There was a hole at the thinnest end, through which a fine silver chain had been threaded. I lifted the token on its chain and gazed at it, seeing it was not quite opaque, for in the sunlight I could make out a fine threading of metal in a delicate geometric pattern within.

‘Cassandra’s key,’ I said reverently, thinking of the glass statue with my face, and its case, in which I was certain that this key had been delivered to Hannah in Newrome under Tor. After a long moment, I lifted the chain over my head and then I stood up again thinking how brief the moment could sometimes be in which immensely important events take place.

Swallow looked at the shining token for a moment, then he turned back to the grave.

‘This was the end of her quest,’ he said.

I looked at the grave, realising he was right. This had been the last thing Hannah had meant to do, and she had done it. All that had happened with God and Habitat must have happened after she buried Jacob, and I wondered if that was when she had hidden Cassandra’s key. If not, she would have had to be very sure that she would be brought here and the key placed under the grave marker. It might even be that the marker had not been scribed with its words until she had been laid in the grave. Which left the question of who had buried her.

I would never know, I supposed, and it hardly mattered.

I felt a sudden urge to speak – to pay some homage to the woman who had spent so much of her life preparing me for a quest she would never see begin or end. There was such brave faith in it.

‘Thank you, Hannah,’ I said softly. ‘Truly you have been my guide and it is strange to think that from this moment, I must go on alone, for this is where you came to the end of your story. It was an end you chose, I think, and a good end, for you did what you had sworn to do and you lie now with one who loved you. I leave you with Jacob, and he with you. I am glad you were reunited ere the end. Now you are together at last and forever.’

Swallow bent and very gently and solemnly smoothed the earth he had disturbed to find the key case and I wondered if he was saying his own words for the woman who had travelled across time and the world with the D’rekta of the Twentyfamilies, and who had been the leader of their leader.

Ana held the key up to the light and squinted at the metal inside, then her eyes widened. ‘Computermachines have these sort of workings inside them. I think this is something that is meant to be used in a computermachine. If it is a key, maybe it is made to turn Sentinel off . . .’

‘Miryum said there were two keys,’ I said, remembering. ‘Alpha and something else. An end and a beginning and something about a back door. I can draw up the exact memory but that is the gist of it.’

Dragon took her turn at examining Cassandra’s key in fascination, even as the others had done. Like Dameon, she noted the tiny dents along the edge of it, saying it felt as if something was meant to fit against one edge.

‘Maybe the second key,’ I said. ‘Miryum said the two keys needed to be used together, but how could one open a back and a front door simultaneously?’

I left the others to puzzle over the device and turned to the androne, suppressing an irrational urge to thank it for the part it had played the night before. ‘Hendon, where is the computermachine that we must use to reconnect Northport to Midland?’

It answered in its own flat, placid tone. ‘Following the instructions of God, I located the main Northport control computer terminal last night, User Seeker. I attempted to activate the computer program as required. I found that it had already been activated but I was unable to input instructions or request information because it is protected by an advanced encryption code keyed to the sound of its user’s voice.’

‘What is it saying?’ Swallow asked.

‘Can you explain more fully and simply?’ I asked.

‘I attempted to initialise the computer in order to activate it, but the computer had already been activated and initialised using an encryption code key. The encryption code key contained the voice patterns of Prime User Kelver Rhonin, which means that the computer program here will only accept his voice, unless he should command otherwise. There may also be a keying phrase or word that he should speak.’

‘It makes sense in a way,’ I said. ‘He got here and went to the computermachine and roused it using this code key, but why not complete the process if he began it?’ I thought for a moment. ‘Did he do anything at all other than activate the . . . the computer?’

‘Prime User Kelver Rhonin used it to access and activate the Whelmer Dam program,’ said the androne.

‘Whelmer Damn?’ I asked, bewildered. ‘What is that?’

‘It is a facility situated in a chasm ten kloms north of Northport. A bore was sunk to open the way for a subterranean river to flow to the surface, and the waters dammed,’ the androne said.

‘Why would he mess about trying to supply water to a deserted city? Surely he had more important things on his mind?’ Ana said.

‘Which means whatever he was doing
was
important. Maybe Northport was not completely deserted. He can’t have been the only one in the Pellmar Quadrants when the end came, after all.’ I turned to the androne. ‘Hendon, do you know of any reason Kelver Rhonin might have concerned himself with the water at Whelmer when we know his purpose in coming here was to find a computermachine that would reach a govamen terminal?’

‘There is a mainframe computer at the Whelmer Dam facility,’ the androne said. ‘It would have been logical, if, finding no connection between the Northport mainframe computer and government terminals, Kelver Rhonin decided to see if the Whelmer Dam computer had a viable connection.’

I nodded, sensing Ana’s growing excitement. ‘So he tried the link here and could not get it to work, and then he contacted the computermachine at Whelmer.

‘He
activated
the Whelmer computermachine, Hendon said,’ Ana said, sounding excited. ‘But maybe he had to go there to use it. Is that right, Hendon?’

‘Yes, Technician Ana,’ the androne said.

‘Hendon, what was the purpose of the Whelmer project?’ I asked.

‘It was part of a government post-cataclysm terrain reclamation project,’ Hendon said. ‘I have no more information about it in my memory banks.’

‘Why are you asking?’ Swallow said.

‘Because it looks to me as if the only way to discover what happened at Whelmer is to go there,’ I said. ‘One thing we know is that if Kelver Rhonin went there, he did not manage to contact a govamen computermachine, else God would have known about it. Or . . .’

‘Or something happened at Whelmer before he got back to do what had to be done to connect Northport with Midland,’ Ana said.

‘Exactly. Also I would bet my life that is where Gahltha and the others have been staying and where they have been safe.’

‘So maybe the device Hannah had to drive off the
rhenlings
is there because she went there, too,’ Swallow said.

‘But she never said anything about it to God, or God would have said something,’ Dragon objected.

‘Only if we asked the right questions,’ I said, and Ana nodded. ‘But if she did go there, neither she nor Kelver Rhonin managed to reach a govamen terminal.’

‘Or they did, but because something had happened to Kelver, there was no way for Hannah to connect back to God from Northport,’ Dameon said.

We all contemplated this depressing possibility for a moment, then Ana said, ‘Hendon, how far away is Whelmer?’

‘The Whelmer Dam facility is ten kloms away, Technician Ana,’ it answered.

Ana turned to me. ‘We can walk there in an hour or two, but some of us need to stay here and look for a glide hangar. Unless . . . Hendon, are there glides at Whelmer?’

‘There is a small glide port at the site,’ the androne answered. ‘There may be glides there.’

‘A small port,’ Swallow echoed. ‘That does not sound very promising.’ He looked more pleased than devastated, but not as overtly opposed as he had been, and the glance Ana gave him, while exasperated, was also tender.

‘Perhaps we must concentrate our efforts on your quest,’ Dameon said. ‘Upon furthering it.’

‘What do you think we should do?’ I asked him.

‘I think we must at least explore Ana’s proposal of using a glide, because if you are right, and Sentinel lies in Gadfian territory, I believe all of the places on the map are very distant and over water besides. And a glide will surely bring us to your destination more swiftly than a ship, and perhaps less perilously. Of course, it depends upon finding a glide that is usable and being able to use it.’

‘God has prepared Hendon for all we will need,’ Ana said.

‘But . . .’ Dragon said, and stopped when we all looked at her.

‘What is it?’ I asked her gently.

‘If there is any possibility that there is a computermachine at Whelmer that had contact with a govamen computermachine, oughtn’t we at least to take the time to see if we can make it reach out to God? Maybe it can be made to do it directly rather than through the Northport computermachine, if that can’t be used.’

‘That is a
very
good idea,’ Ana approved.

‘And likely one Hannah also had,’ I said gently. ‘Still, I think Dragon is right that we should at least go to Whelmer and see about it. Hannah might even have left me a message there telling me how to get to Sentinel directly, rather than having to go to Eden and figure it out from there. And if not for the sake of my quest, then for Miryum’s sake and for the sake of all the Speci and the sleepers in cryopods.’

‘For Tash,’ Dragon said softly.

‘Let’s do it this way then,’ Swallow said decisively. ‘We spend the rest of today here, looking for a glide. The wolves will have time to recover somewhat and we can have Hendon bring up the platform. Then tomorrow, some of us go to Whelmer, or all of us maybe, if we find a glide and can make it work. Elspeth can have the beasts wait there and we will come to them.’

‘It might not take all that long to find a glide,’ Ana said, giving Swallow an almost mischievous look. ‘Hendon told me there is a vast glide hangar not far from here. Not on the surface but on the next level of Northport.’

‘What
is
a hangar anyway?’ Swallow asked Ana.

She shrugged. ‘Just a place, or maybe these glides are somehow hung upon great hooks or chains. In any case, glides are to be found there. In fact Hendon says it is the only place where there are likely to be glides large enough to serve our purposes. Four to be exact. Apparently these were public glides made to carry one hundred people, as well as having capacious holds. All four were commissioned and delivered to Northport for use as transports within the Pellmar Quadrants. Much larger vessels were planned for journeys to and from Pellmar Quadrants, and smaller personal ones, too, but these did not arrive.’

Despite my unease at the thought of flying anywhere in a glide, I agreed that we should go and look at the hangar Ana had mentioned, and leave the mysterious Whelmer for the morrow.

‘But first, Gobor had better be brought over with the other wolves, and we need to fortify the basement they are in for the night, against the rising of the
rhenlings
,’ I said. I was also anxious to see how the wolves were and to contact Gahltha and try again to farseek Maruman.

It was Swallow who carried the barely conscious Gobor to the basement with the rest of the wolves, while I helped the others shift everything we would need to be comfortable that night in the basement from the square. The only problem was that the platform had been damaged somehow and it could not quickly be repaired. Dragon said she would fetch up the boxes and bundles and Dameon said he would help her. That left the wolves. All seemed well with them, save for the one that had fallen, who had died soon after my departure that morning. Ana reported that none of the other wolves had sickened further, though two were still badly hurt. I asked about Rheagor and she said that, if anything, the pack leader’s condition had improved, though he would never see again. He and Gobor had communicated when Swallow brought the old wolf in, though there was no knowing what they said to one another. But there had been some snarling and snapping and she admitted to giving both wolves a good dose of sleep potion. ‘That will keep them from one another’s throats for a few hours,’ she concluded with brisk satisfaction.

She led the way to the square and after rummaging in the pile of packages that had been piled up alongside the platform, she produced some lightsticks, saying we would need them in the lower level, since there was no God to turn the lights on for us. I felt uneasy about using them, since we would surely encounter nesting
rhenlings
while hunting for the glide hangar. But, prompted by Ana, the androne said the lower levels could be reached only by elevating chambers, which did not work. We would get there by breaking into a locked stairwell leading down to the next level, not far from the hangar.