Off Armageddon Reef (24 page)

Merlin had no personal memory of the majority of Shan-wei's “fallen archangels.” Nimue had found most of them in the computers in her caves, but if the original Nimue had ever met or known them, that knowledge had never been uploaded to her PICA. Yet some of them she
had
known, and especially Kau-yung and Shan-wei herself. To see them so vilified, to know that fifty generations of men and women they had died to free reviled them not as heroes but as the darkest of devils, the source of all evil and unhappiness, was like a knife in Merlin's heart.

Part of him longed desperately to denounce the
Writ
, to break out his assault shuttle and his recon skimmers and turn the Temple into a glowing crater to prove Langhorne's entire religion was built on lies. But he couldn't. Not yet, at any rate. But someday, he told himself yet again. Someday the people of Safehold would be ready to hear the truth and to accept it, and when that day came, Shan-wei and Kau-yung and everyone who had died with them would be remembered for who they'd truly been, all they'd truly stood for.

Merlin felt the anger stirring deep inside his molycirc heart and mind and closed the book. He supposed he really shouldn't allow himself to dwell on it this way, but when it came right down to it, the
Writ
and the so-called church it served were his true enemies. Prince Hektor, Prince Nahrmahn, and all of the others plotting against Charis were impediments to his real struggle, nothing more.

Still
, he thought, lips quirking in a mustachioed smile,
they're certainly the
immediate
problem, aren't they? So I suppose I ought to be getting on with it
.

He brought up the digital clock at the corner of his vision and checked the time. He'd recalibrated it to match Safehold's twenty-six-and-a-half-hour day, and it was two hours past the thirty-one-minute period Safeholdians knew as Langhorne's Watch. On any other human-colonized planet, it would have been known as “compensate,” or simply “comp,” the adjustment period required to tweak an alien world's day into something neatly divisible into mankind's standard minutes and hours. On Safehold, anyone who found himself awake at the midnight hour was supposed to spend Langhorne's Watch in silent meditation and contemplation of all God had done for him, by Langhorne's intervention, in the day just past.

Somehow, Merlin had never gotten around to spending the Watch on just that purpose.

He snorted at the thought, and boosted the sensitivity of his hearing. The enhancing software sorted through the incoming sounds, confirming the slumbering quiet of Marytha's Tower. Given the guard post at the tower's entrance, there was no need for guards or sentries elsewhere, and given the limitations of their nighttime lighting, Safeholdians tended to be early to bed and early to rise. By now, all the tower's small population of honored guests sounded to be deeply asleep, and even the attendant servants had retreated to the workrooms and waiting rooms set aside for them on the tower's lowest levels to await the ringing bell if some insomniac should require their services.

Which was precisely what Merlin had been waiting for.

“Owl,” he subvocalized.

“Yes, Lieutenant Commander?” the AI's voice replied almost instantly over his built in communicator.

“I'm ready,” Merlin said. “Send the skimmer in as previously directed.”

“Yes, Lieutenant Commander.”

Merlin rose, extinguished the wicks of his lamps, and opened the chamber window. He clambered up onto the thick window ledge and sat there, dangling his legs into the night, leaning one shoulder against the wide embrasure, while he gazed out over the harbor.

The waterfront was a scene of activity, even this late at night, as longshoremen worked to finish loading cargoes for skippers eager to catch the next tide. There was also, inevitably, activity among the taverns and brothels, and Merlin's boosted hearing carried him snatches of laughter, music, drunken song, and quarrels. He could also hear—and see—the sentries standing alertly at their posts, or walking their beats, on the palace's walls, and by zooming in on the guard towers of the harbor fortifications and defensive batteries, he could see the sentries standing watch there, as well.

He sat there for several minutes, waiting patiently, before Owl spoke again.

“ETA one minute, Lieutenant Commander,” it said.

“Acknowledged,” Merlin subvocalized back, although he supposed it wasn't really necessary.

The transmission from the compact, long-ranged communicator, built into his PICA chassis about where a biological human would have carried his spleen, bounced off the SNARC hanging in geosynchronous orbit over The Anvil, the large sea or small ocean north of Margaret's Land, to Owl's master array fourteen thousand kilometers—
no, eighty-seven hundred
miles,
damn it
, he corrected himself—distant in the Mountains of Light. The SNARC, like the array itself, was heavily stealthed (which might not be quite as excessive a precaution as Merlin had thought when he originally arranged it), and so was the vehicle coming silently out of the north above him after loitering safely out at sea all day.

Merlin reached out and up, hooking the fingers of his left hand into a crevice between two of Marytha's Tower's massive stones for balance. Then he pulled himself into a half-standing position in the window opening.

“All right, Owl. Collect me,” he said.

“Yes, Lieutenant Commander,” the AI replied, and a tractor beam reached down from the recon skimmer hovering a thousand meters above Tellesberg and scooped Merlin neatly off his window-ledge perch.

He rose effortlessly and silently through the darkness, watching the city beneath his boots. This was exactly how Langhorne and his so-called angels had managed to come and go so “miraculously,” and Merlin had been bitterly tempted to make open use of the same capability. His recon skimmer was configured for maximum stealth at the moment, which meant its smart-skin fuselage was faithfully duplicating the night sky above it. Effectively, it was as transparent as the air in which it hovered, as invisible to the human eye—or even to Merlin's—as its stealth systems had already rendered it to the vast majority of more sophisticated sensors. But that same smart skin and its normal landing light systems could have been used to produce the blinding brilliance of the “
kyousei hi
” the “angels” had used. Coupled with the literally inhuman capabilities built into Merlin's PICA, not to mention the other bits and pieces of advanced technology Kau-yung and Shan-wei had been able to hide away, he could easily have duplicated any feat the “angels” had ever performed.

But Nimue had rejected that possibility almost immediately. Not only had she been instantly and instinctively revolted by the notion of following in Langhorne's and Bédard's footsteps, but there'd been more practical objections, as well. Sooner or later, she was going to have to tell someone the truth, which was precisely the reason Merlin had never told an outright lie. Continuing to avoid lies was going to become both easier and harder, he suspected, but when the time came that the truth had to be openly revealed, he could not afford to have told a single lie of his own. Not if he wanted whoever it was to believe him when he told them of the far greater lie which had been perpetrated upon their entire planet for so many hundreds of years.

Even more to the point, simply replacing one superstition, one false religion, with another would never accomplish the task to which Nimue Alban had set her hand. “Decrees from God,” to be obeyed without question, wouldn't engender the widespread independent, inquiring mind-set and attitudes which would be required in the decades and centuries to come. And the appearance of an “angel” preaching a doctrine fundamentally at odds with that of the Church and the
Writ
could not help but raise all sorts of accusations of demonic origin. Which, in turn, would almost certainly lead to the religious war she'd feared was inevitable anyway, but hoped to at least minimize and hold off for a generation or two.

The hovering skimmer's thick armorplast bubble canopy slid back, and the tractor beam deposited Merlin on the extended, built in ladder. He climbed it quickly, and settled into the comfortable, if not exactly spacious, cockpit's forward flight couch as the ladder retracted back into the fuselage. The canopy slid itself shut over his head, locking with the quiet “
shuuuusssh
” of a good seal, enclosing him in the cool, safe cocoon of the cockpit, and he felt the gentle, unbreakable embrace of the flight couch's activating tractor field as he reached out and laid his hand on the joystick.

“I have control, Owl,” he said.

“Acknowledged, Lieutenant Commander. You have control,” the AI replied, and Merlin took the skimmer out of hover and eased back on the stick, angling upward as he goosed the throttle.

The skimmer accelerated smoothly, and he watched the airspeed indicator climb to seven hundred kilometers per hour. He could have taken it higher—the atmospheric indicator was calibrated to a speed in excess of Mach 6—but he had no intention of creating sonic booms. Once or twice, it might be taken for natural thunder, even on a cloudless night like tonight, but that wouldn't be the case if he made a practice of it. The time might well come when he wouldn't have a choice about that; in the meantime, however, he wasn't about to let himself get into bad habits.

He headed northwest from Tellesberg, almost directly away from the site of Cayleb's encounter with the slash lizard—and Nahrmahn's assassins—crossing the waterfront and sweeping out over the waters of South Howell Bay. From his increased altitude, he could see the dim lights of the fortresses on Sand Shoal Island and Helen Island, hundreds of kilometers out into the Bay, but he wasn't interested in them tonight. Instead, he continued onward, swinging further to the west, until the steep-shouldered peaks of the Styvyn Mountains loomed ahead of him.

The Styvyns rose like a rampart, a wall across the southern end of the isthmus connecting Charis proper to Margaret's Land. The pronunciation shift in the mountain range's name indicated that it had been christened long after “the Archangel Hastings” had prepared his maps, probably not more than a few hundred years earlier, and it was only lightly populated, even now. Its higher peaks rose to as much as three thousand meters—
ten thousand feet
, Merlin corrected himself irritably; he
had
to get used to thinking in the units of the local measuring system—and population pressure hadn't been sufficient to push settlers up into its inhospitable interior.

Which suited it quite well to Merlin's requirements.

He reached his objective, just under two hundred miles from the Charisian capital, and brought the skimmer back into a hover over the high alpine valley.

It didn't look a great deal different from any other stretch of the uninhabited mountains. There were a handful of clusters of terrestrial vegetation, but they were few and far between, lost among the native “pines” (which really did look quite a bit like the Earth tree of the same name, he reflected, aside from their smooth, almost silky bark and even longer needles) and tanglewood thickets. Without terrestrial plants to provide them with habitat, there were none of the transplanted animals and birds whose ranges were still washing steadily outward from the areas of the planet humanity had claimed. There were plenty of examples of Safehold's native fauna, however, and Merlin reminded himself that a slash lizard or a dragon wouldn't realize a PICA was indigestible until after it had made the mistake of devouring one.

He smiled at the thought of one of the native predators straining to pass the undigested chunks of an unwary PICA, and punched up the skimmer's terrain display of the detailed topographical map Owl had generated from the SNARC's overflights several five-days earlier. There.
That
was what he wanted, and he sent the skimmer sliding slowly and gently forward.

The cave entrance was a dark wound in the mountainside. It looked even bigger now that he was here in person, with the skimmer to use as a visual referent, and he guided the slender reconnaissance vehicle through the opening. It was over twice as wide as the skimmer's fuselage and stub wings and widened still further once he was inside. The vertical stabilizer had ample clearance, as well, and he took the skimmer almost a hundred meters—
three hundred and thirty feet
, he reminded himself as he made the conversion, this time almost automatically—farther in, then pivoted the vehicle in place, until its nose pointed once more towards the open night beyond the cave.

Not bad,
he thought.
Not bad at all
.

In fact, it was almost perfect. Less than half an hour from Tellesberg even at the relatively modest velocity he'd allowed himself tonight, it was at least thirty or forty of the Safeholdians' miles from the nearest human habitation, and the cave was more than large enough to serve as the skimmer's hangar. It was a little on the damp side, with quite a bit of seepage on the southern wall, despite its elevation, but that wouldn't be a factor. Once the skimmer set down and sealed its ports, Merlin could have submerged the thing in salt water and left it there without damaging it.

There were signs that something large—probably a dragon, he thought, studying the leavings, and not one of the vegetarian variety—had laired here, but that was all right, too. In fact, it was another plus. Not even a great dragon was going to be able to damage the heavily armored recon skimmer very easily, and should some wandering hunting party actually penetrate into this high, mountain valley, they were…unlikely to go poking about in a cave which had been claimed by one of Safehold's most fearsome land-going predators.

The rest of the gear isn't as tough as the skimmer, though,
he reflected.
Probably be a good idea to leave the sonic system on, anyway
.