Among the Powers (31 page)

The bristling arrays of gadgetry seemed
threatening and evil to Bredon, like the flensed bones of tortured
intelligences. He knew that that was foolish, that silicon life
needed no skin to protect it, that Thaddeus had not tortured his
machines, that the missing outer layer had never been there to be
removed, but the image stayed with him.

The machine he had ridden stood in the
center of the room, gleaming and motionless. A small scanner atop
one appendage was pointed to Bredon’s left; that, combined with the
direction of the voice, convinced him that Thaddeus was in the
left-hand corner of the vast room.

“Awaiting orders,” the machine said.

“Aren’t you supposed to be somewhere? Wait,
I know you; you’re a patrol and repair robot, aren’t you?”

“Affirmative.”

“Well, what are you doing here? I didn’t
call you. Did you get a signal from something in here?”

Bredon knew that in a few seconds Thaddeus
would find out what was going on. If he were to make any use of the
element of surprise, he needed to do it quickly.

“Negative,” the machine said.

Bredon dove through the door, rolled, and
leapt to his feet in the center of the room. Before he was fully
upright he shouted, “
Ka nama kaa lajerama, ka nama kaa
lajerama!
Abort all programming! Abort, abort, abort!”

The effect was all he could have asked for.
All around him, the hundreds of screens and image areas reacted.
Most of them abruptly went blank; others flickered or shifted.
Machines beeped and whistled from every side; dials dropped to
zero. Lights flashed, blinked on, blinked off, changed color, and a
baleful red suddenly predominated.

Thaddeus was there, inhumanly huge, wearing
flowing black robes. He had looked up from the patrol machine in
astonishment at Bredon’s sudden entrance, but before he could do
anything about this intrusion he was distracted by the beeping. He
spun, amazingly fast for so immense a man, and saw the blank
screens and red lights.

His eyes widened, and his mouth fell open.
“What did you do?” he screamed. “What did you
do
?”

Screens showed “ready” messages, red lights
blinked. Horrified, Thaddeus turned slowly in a full circle,
looking at his machines, mouth open. “No!” he shouted. “Stop it!
Defend me! I programmed you all—you
can’t
obey him!”

Bredon, flushed with his sudden victory,
took advantage of this opportunity and jumped at the huge immortal,
intending to knock him down and beat his head against the metal
floor.

Thaddeus, completing his turn, saw the
attack coming. With the speed his rebuilt nerves and muscles
provided, he was able to react before Bredon landed. The immortal’s
arms were up and braced, fending the primitive off.

Bredon responded as he had been trained; his
father had taught him from an early age that he must never let the
prey escape. As Thaddeus tried to fling him away he grabbed the
Terran’s wrist and clamped down.

Thaddeus tried to pull free, and discovered
he could not. When he pulled back his arm, Bredon came with it. He
saw that to pry the primitive loose with his other hand he would
have to bring his face and body too close for safety, that it would
give Bredon an opening.

Bredon bared his teeth in a snarl, and
Thaddeus decided against getting any closer than necessary.

“You, robot!” Thaddeus called. “Get this
thing off me!” He held out his arm with Bredon dangling from it
like a sloth in a tree.

Bredon, however, was no sloth. He kicked out
hard and caught Thaddeus in the gut. The immortal folded up, and
they both went down. Bredon’s death-grip on Thaddeus’s wrist threw
them off-balance, and both hit the floor hard, head-first.

The machine Bredon had ridden reached out a
long steel arm, wrapped it around Bredon’s waist, and plucked the
dazed short-lifer off the equally dazed Thaddeus. Bredon, however,
still kept his grip on the immortal’s wrist.

“Let go!” Thaddeus shouted.

Bredon did not bother answering. He clung
remorselessly. The machine lifted him up, extending its arm until
his feet dangled half a meter off the floor. Bredon still held on,
dragging Thaddeus back up onto his knees in the process.

The machine began shaking Bredon.

He held on, unthinking, as he fought off the
effects of the fall. His head cleared somewhat, despite the
shaking, and he realized what was happening to him.

“
Ka nama kaa lajerama!
” he called
when he had gathered his wits. “Put me down!”

He felt the arm start to loosen and added,
“Gently!”

The machine obeyed promptly, but as the
metal arm lowered Bredon, Thaddeus reached up and grabbed Bredon’s
own wrist.

His grip was inhumanly strong. Bredon had
forgotten that the Powers augmented their own muscles directly, as
well as through the various serving machines they commanded. He
felt Thaddeus’s hand tightening steadily on his wrist, cutting off
the circulation, straining the very bones.

He released his own hold, gambling that
Thaddeus would be more interested in freeing himself than in
crushing his attacker’s wrist.

He won his gamble; Thaddeus, too, let go,
and pulled free. By the time the robot had released Bredon
completely Thaddeus was back on his feet and running for the open
door, apparently not interested in unarmed combat with his
opponent.

Bredon brushed himself off and looked after
the fleeing figure.

Thaddeus had already turned a corner and was
out of sight. He knew the fortress maze infinitely better than
Bredon did, and with his modified body he was almost certainly
faster than Bredon. He was also far stronger, and Bredon had no
weapons.

And of course, he was a meter taller than
Bredon, and built proportionately. Even without any modification,
he would have been far stronger and heavier than Bredon.

Pursuit, Bredon decided, would be really
stupid. He, Bredon, had control of the war room, and with that he
was fairly certain he could handle Thaddeus. Thaddeus could still
command any of his machines that he ran into, of course—until
Bredon gave Aulden’s overriding password, anyway.

Thaddeus was still a very real threat, and
would have to be dealt with.

Running after him, though, was not the way
to do it. Instead, Bredon crossed to the console where Thaddeus had
been standing and began studying the controls.

“
Everything of value beneath the surface of the
world belongs to Gold the Delver. His is the hand that placed
jewels in the rocks, and precious metals in the earth. When we find
caves that seem to lead nowhere, these are but the abandoned back
rooms of his endless caverns, closed off because he had no more use
for them...”

—
from the tales of Kithen the
Storyteller

“Thaddeus?” Geste called uncertainly, peering about
at the blank grey walls. “Are you there?”

No one answered. Nothing changed. He was
still alone in the room, with only the gleaming mirrored sphere of
the stasis field, and the little black floater still bumping
against it, for company.

Something had happened to Thaddeus. That was
obvious. Furthermore, Geste had a pretty good idea what it might be
that had happened. Bredon, he guessed, must have freed the others
somehow, and now they were all at the war room, turning the tables
on their captor, keeping Thaddeus too busy to bother with anything
else.

Thaddeus would still have control of all the
fortress machines, though. Geste had kept in touch with his
machines for as long as he could before entering the jamming fields
in the Fortress, and he knew that the various attempts at sabotage
had virtually all been useless. Only a handful of peripheral
machines and software had been damaged. Aulden might be able to
commandeer some sort of weapons, but Geste guessed the fight would
be a close one, with Thaddeus’s control of the fortress more than
compensating for the superior numbers of his attackers,
particularly since he had removed so much of their personal
equipment.

And Thaddeus might have already dispatched
his torture machines before the attack came. They could well be on
their way to where Geste waited.

He was not entirely defenseless, of course;
he had a weapon. He had the stasis field generator.

But that was in use. It could only create
one field at a time. He could only use it against the original
Thaddeus, or against Thaddeus’s machines, if he released the
Thaddeus clone.

If he turned off the field, though, what
would happen to the body within? Would Thaddeus return to it?

From the description Thaddeus had given of
how it worked, Geste thought not. He risked it; he pushed the
control.

The gleaming bubble vanished. The triangular
floater zipped into position with its drink, and the clone slumped
forward in his seat, comatose. The chair reshaped itself quickly to
keep him from tumbling to the floor, and he hung there,
motionless.

Watching closely for any sign of life, Geste
rose and walked to the door, his every sense alert. His slippered
feet seemed loud in the silence.

Nothing happened. The clone stayed awkwardly
slumped. The floater waited patiently for someone to take the
drink.

Geste reached out, and the door slid open.
Thaddeus had not ordered it to stay closed.

The Trickster stepped out into the corridor,
relieved, and turned back toward where the others had been held
prisoner. He did not expect to find them there, but had no idea
where else to go, and thought they might have left a message for
him.

The doors he encountered in the passageway,
however, were not as obliging as the room door had been. They did
not open as he approached, nor when he pounded on them or kicked
them or gave them orders. He was trapped in a twenty-meter section
of corridor.

He paced back and forth for a moment, then,
frustrated, he turned to an emergency access panel and kicked at
it.

It slid aside.

Startled, he stooped and looked in. He had
always assumed that emergency access panels were for machines, and
had not expected this one to open, but he was not about to pass up
any opportunity.

The shaft behind the panel was narrow and
unlit, and rather than any sort of lifter it held a metal ladder,
mounted solidly to one wall.

This, he thought, would make a good place
for an ambush. If he hid in it, he could spring out at Thaddeus, or
at passing machines, unexpectedly.

Besides, it might lead somewhere useful. He
guessed that he would be able to reach the correct level, two
levels down from where he stood, and even if he could not reach the
prison chamber, that would be an improvement on his current
situation.

The stasis field generator was still in his
hand. He considered putting it back in the pocket in his ear.

Ordinarily, he could not expect the same
trick to work twice on someone like Thaddeus, but Thaddeus had not
seen
the trick. That was clear from his demand to know how
it was done.

The same stunt just
might
work again,
then. He reached up with his free hand, found the bent-space
opening, and tucked the generator in.

He shuddered once, briefly. The sensation
was so very weird!

That done, he clambered into the shaft,
swung himself onto the ladder, and began descending into the
gloom.

Two levels down he kicked open another
access panel and peered out into the corridor, hoping—although he
knew the odds were wildly against it—to see or hear Thaddeus
approaching. If the master of the fortress had happened along just
then, Geste could easily have caught him in the stasis field before
he had any idea he was in danger.

Thaddeus was nowhere in sight, but the
Trickster saw something almost as good and almost as surprising.
All the corridor doors were open.

Puzzled, Geste climbed out of the shaft into
the passageway.

He could see now that not
all
the
doors were open, but several were in either direction. He
calculated his location as best he could from his accumulated
memories of the fortress, and then headed in the direction that he
hoped would lead him to the room where the prisoners had been
held.

* * *

As Geste emerged from the shaft, Bredon was still in
the war room, trying to puzzle out the controls, none of which were
anything at all like anything in Arcade, when one of the darkened
screens suddenly lit.

“...right now, Monitor,” he heard Thaddeus
say.

An image appeared on the screen, a flat,
two-dimensional image like a weaving, rather than a proper
three-dimensional transmission, and Bredon needed a second or two
before he recognized the prison chamber as seen from above the
door.

The seven captives were still chained to the
wall, and Thaddeus stood over them, looking up as if he were able
to see Bredon.

“Listen, savage,” he said, “you caught me by
surprise, but I’m ready for you now. You come down here, right now,
unarmed, or I’ll start cutting throats.” He held up a small black
device, clutched tightly in one hand. “This is a knife.”

“It is?” Bredon asked. He had never seen
anything of the sort. The black thing had no visible blade.

“Yes, it is,” Thaddeus replied. He held out
a corner of his robe and waved the “knife” at it.

A chunk of fabric came away in his hand.

Bredon stepped back. The thought of Thaddeus
cutting Lady Sunlight’s throat was horrible, but he knew that if he
obeyed and went down there, alone and unarmed, Thaddeus would kill
him.

He needed time to think, time for a miracle
to intervene. In the stories he heard as a child, this was the time
when Rawl the Adjuster would step in on the side of virtue, but
right now Rawl was a helpless captive.