The Crystal Variation (80 page)

“I wouldn’t go that far. The rest of the artifacts are probably of interest, if the Uncle’s as keen a collector as you’ve said. And it could be that they’re the only reason the team’s here.”

“And it could be that Dulsey won’t be telling you the truth, either side. If she knows it, which she might not. Young Arin struck me as being a thought tight on the need-to-knows.”

“A man who keeps his orders to himself,” Jela agreed. “I thought so, too.” He hesitated, suddenly and forcibly remembering that, comfortable and comforting as he was here, he’d signed off of
Dancer’s
crew . . .

Cantra raised her eyebrows. “Problem, Pilot?”

“I wonder,” he said, slow and careful, “if you’d be willing to do me a favor.”

“A favor, is it? And for a change you’re asking first?” She gave him an edged grin and lifted a shoulder. “What’s needed?”

“Here . . .” He pulled the map he’d drawn from stores out of his pocket and smoothed it down on the table between them. “Sergeant Lorit tells me that the world-shield’s not in the garrison proper—and I think she was telling the truth. She suggested that it might be stashed in the mines, which is possible . . .”

“But you think it’s nearer to hand,” Cantra finished, coming out of her lean to frown consideringly down at the map. One long finger tapped the outer fort. “In here, is where I’d put it.” She looked up at him. “Let me do some soundings and a bit of a wander-round. Meet you at that bar where we saw Dulsey last e’en?”

He nodded. “Mid-day,” he said, standing. He looked down, but Cantra was studying the map.

“Mid-day it is,” she answered absently. “Give my best regards to Dulsey, Pilot.”

THERE WAS A SENSE
of anticipation in the dusty air as Jela strode off across the port, angling toward the civilian mines. It made sense, he supposed; business at the port today would be featuring Commander Gorriti’s leave-taking, which Jela hoped was being done with circumspection and not a marching band. If he hadn’t thought it might cause a riot or a ruckus, he could have shot Gorriti for desertion and been well within his standing orders . . .

It was about the time he was considering that option again that the distant sound of a lift-klaxon sounded, hard on the heels of the familiar vibration of tarmac.
That
would be the commander’s shuttle departing, no doubt.

Into his mind came one of the tree’s more unsubtle images: a large rodent, and another, rushing about.

Yes, exactly!
he agreed.
A rat hurrying to safety among other such. Much good it will do him!

The image, however, became more insistent; the number of rodents and their energy increasing as they nibbled on tender roots. It would seem that the tree had some concerns regarding the commander’s influence at his next station.

No, there you’re wrong, my friend,
he thought, meaning it for comfort.
That tree is rotten already!

But still the tree wanted to push the image of rodents at him, while Gorriti’s ship dwindled and was lost in the tan sky.

Enough!
Jela answered.
We agree. Agreeing won’t change the facts!

He strode on, the tree’s images of a gnawing horde all too firmly in his mind.

“Pilot Jela.”
Dulsey was in full thermal ‘skins, the scanplate pushed up off her face reflecting the weak light from the local star. Below it, she was smiling and animated.

“Dulsey,” he answered, giving her a smile of his own, though he feared it was a good bit less heartfelt than hers. “I meant to tell you last night—this new life of yours seems to be treating you well.”

“Very well,” she acknowledged, and swept a hand toward the comm-shack. “Come, let us be out of the wind.” She hesitated. “Will Pilot Cantra be coming?”

“Not this time,” he said easily. “There’s something I asked her to take a look at for me down in the port.”

“Ah,” she said, and pushed the door to the shed open.

“Also,” Jela said, following her in and closing the door behind him. “I wonder if you’ve found that specific item the Uncle sent you to collect.”

Dulsey’s smile faded. “Pilot Jela—” He held up a hand and she stopped, face wary now.

“I’m going to try not to make you chose between loyalties,” he said slowly. “But it seems to me that the Uncle is a resourceful man, who also happens, as Pilot Cantra tells me, to collect
sheriekas
tech. He’s got Arin and I’m betting a dozen more like him, doing research, deciphering old records, maybe even old military and captured
sheriekas
documents from the First Phase. The Uncle also knows that the end of the war is coming fast, and there’s no way we can win—”

Dulsey shifted and he raised his hand again. “Humor an old soldier,” he said. “This won’t take long. The Uncle knows, like I know, that we can’t win this war. But he knows his military history, so he knows that an important First Phase battle took place around Vanehald. The Enemy wasn’t able to land and occupy the planet, and the Frontier Fleet, despite being outnumbered and pretty much out-gunned, pushed them back.

“Now, what wasn’t written down anyplace was
why
those Enemy forces couldn’t land here. The device was secret—barely more than a whisper of a rumor, which I spent the last six years of my life, between other things, looking for.

“My information is that it’s still here—and I’m betting the Uncle has access to information as good or better than mine. And I’m betting he sent his best engineer to bring that device back to Rockhaven.”

Silence, while Dulsey thought it through. He waited, not rushing her, prepared to take silence as his final answer, or a lie, if she felt she had to. Dulsey had never been good at lying, but the Uncle might have taught her the way of it.

“I believe,” she said slowly, “that I am able to share this information with you, as it will benefit you precisely as much as it has us.” She sighed.

“If I understand you correctly, the device you seek is that which the Uncle terms a ‘
sheriekas
repellor.’ The literature is not clear, but it gives the impression that this is indeed a device similar to the many others stored here. In fact, it is not stored here at all. It is installed here.”

Jela stared at her. “I’m hearing you say that the device exists, but can’t be moved.”

“That is correct.”

He thought about that, considering his next question carefully. “Dulsey, have you seen this device?”

“I have seen plans of the installation in the outer fort,” Dulsey said after some consideration of her own. “Understand, when I say ‘installed’, I mean to convey that it is hardwired into this planet, especially tuned to its composition. It may well be that such a device could be duplicated on another planet, indeed, the project has a certain appeal. However, with current technology, it would take on the order of eighteen hundred years, Common, to produce and mount it.”

Jela considered her. “Eighteen hundred years,” he repeated slowly. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to see it through to completion.” The tree, now, he thought, with its dizzingly long life—

“Nor would I,” Dulsey said. She hesitated, then blurted— “Pilot Jela, are you well?”

“Well?” he repeated, genuinely startled by the change of subject. “Why wouldn’t I be well?”

She frowned, outright irritable. “I observe that you have lost weight,” she said, ticking the points off on her fingers— “more than ‘short rations’ might account for—especially as Pilot Cantra, who I believe would share such rations as there were equally, has not suffered a similar reduction. I observe that your hair is turning grey, and that you are favoring your right leg. Last evening, I observed Pilot Cantra, who was—startled—to see you.” She drew a deep breath. “So, I wonder if you are ill, Pilot. Forgive me if the question intrudes. I ask as one who holds you in esteem and bears you nothing but good will.”

Who would have known, he thought, that he had so many comrades? He sighed. There were, after all, certain courtesies owed to comrades, such as a clear answer when information was requested.

“I’m functioning according to design,” he said to Dulsey’s serious eyes. “More or less.”

She blinked, once. Waited. Jela sighed again.

“Pilot Cantra didn’t expect to see me because I’d told her good-bye and gone to the garrison to report to the medic, and do the necessary paperwork before being decommissioned. As it happens, I misremembered my date, but the signs you see—those are in line with the design. I’m old, Dulsey. Typically, what happens with an M is we have all our old age in one short burst, and then—we stop.”

Another blink; a hard breath. “Such design characteristics may sometimes be circumvented,” she said, in a voice of calm reason. “Come with us to the Uncle, Pilot Jela, and—”

He shook his head. “I doubt there’s a work-around. The military does a tight job on its soldiers, and there’s been a good bit of time to work all the design bugs out of the Ms.” He gave her a smile, trying to ease the sadness in her eyes. “Don’t think Iungrateful, Dulsey, but I’ve got my duty, and my life isn’t really my own.”

She bowed then, full low. “I understand.”

“Yes,” he said slowly. “Of all the people I’ve met in the last half-dozen years, you’re probably the only one who does understand.” He cleared his throat. “Now,” he said, returning to the matter at hand, “about those artifacts.”

Dulsey straightened with a startled look.

“The artifacts are many and varied,” she said. “Truly, Pilot Jela, this planet is a treasure house! There are grids, data tiles, and maps enough to keep Arin for thirty years and more! There are devices—”

“Dulsey,” he interrupted, “did you hear Pilot Cantra say yesterday that what’s in these mines besides your treasure is timonium? Raw timonium?”

“Yes, but—”

He interrupted again, ruthlessly. “The
sheriekas
have an . . . affinity for timonium. Think about it—all the captured
sheriekas
tech—all the old battle tech left over from the First Phase—what’s the power source?”

She paled. “Timonium.”

“Timonium. Which is why Vanehald was so hotly contested in the First Phase—for the timonium. That’s my hunch, anyhow, based on research. Tell me now, has your team activated any of those devices?”

“Of course,” she began—and stopped, horror filling her eyes. “They are operating in various energy states,” she said rapidly, “within a certain limited range of frequencies and harmonics. Only last evening, Jakoby said that it seemed they were building a network . . .”

“Building a network,” he finished, “and getting ready to send a beacon to the
sheriekas
.”

“If they have not already done so,” Dulsey said grimly. “If we have called the Enemy down upon this world . . .”

“The
sheriekas
have a long memory,” he said. “They know what’s here and why they were defeated. I’m wondering whose idea it was to stockpile First Phase equipment here . . .” He paused, made his decision.

“Dulsey, listen to me. I know the Uncle sent you here for treasure, but I urge you—I
strongly
urge you—to lift out of here on a heading for Solcintra. Send a bounce to the Uncle telling him that I said that the only chance for his people to survive the upcoming chaos is to immediately raise Solcintra and put himself and his at the service of a man named Liad dea’Syl.”

She bowed, stiffly. “I will bring this to Arin immediately. And, Pilot Jela, if I do not see you again—go with my very best good wishes.”

“Thank you, Dulsey,” he said, warmed. “You do the same.”

WITH AN ASSIST FROM
Dancer
and Jela’s local detail map, it wasn’t hard to pinpoint a couple likely spots to look. The first and most likely from the scans and map—wasn’t, viewed up close. The second possible, though—that was everything a fond smuggler could want.

The stairs hadn’t even been guarded. Oh, there’d been an old spy-eye on the door at the top of the flight, which it had taken her half-a-heartbeat to disable before she turned her affectionate attention to the lock. That had been a bit more of a challenge, being older than the tools in her kit were used to dealing with. She’d finally resorted to her thinnest zipper and a ceramic pick, which did the trick neat, and she was through, the door closed and locked behind her, and down the stairs.

The door at the bottom of the flight was slightly newer, and bore a sign warning her that only authorized personnel of Osabei Tower had the right to open it. The standard tool made short work of that lock and she was in.

What she was in—that was a question worth asking. She’d expected a control room, and she supposed that’s what she had, though it wasn’t like any control room she’d ever seen. There weren’t any screens, there weren’t any chairs, just an old steel stool in the corner. The walls were cast out of cermacrete, like the rest of the fort, and there were niches and handholds formed into them, though what they were for, or how they were to be manipulated was a matter, she thought with a sinking feeling in her gut, for study.

At the center of the room, a tangle of burnt looking wire was crumpled into a shallow depression, lined with—Cantra squinted, eased closer and went down on a knee, feeling the fine hairs on the back of her neck tremble and try to rise.

“Don’t go jumping to must-bes,” she told herself, her voice coming back weird and mushy off the cermacrete; “could be any old rocks that happened to come to hand.” She opened her kit, pulled out the scan, and punched it up. Sighed.

Timonium.

Well. The man’d only asked her to find the thing and get a good look at it. She’d done both. There was also the question of was it working, which she supposed Jela might have a passing interest in knowing, and to which her uninformed answer was—no. Whether it could be made to work, she had no idea, lacking the manual. Whether it could be extracted from this room—Deeps, the thing
was
the room, and the room was an integral part of the ancient pour that was the fort. It wasn’t coming loose for anything short of a pretty persuasive explosion—and maybe not then. Cermacrete was
tough
, which was why there was still so much of it in use and being occupied all this time after the Old War’d been fought and, barely, won.