Was Once a Hero

chapter Seventeen





Ahead of them lay an area of flat, scraped ground over a thousand meters long and nearly as wide, dotted with construction equipment and small trailers for workers and archeologists. The cavern was dimly lit, more so than any other section they had been through.

“The bioluminescent-panels here are obviously temporary,” said Mmok. He pointed. “Look, cart-mounted power generators. Bet they’re dead though.”

“Have the crab robots illuminate the area with red light,” Fenaday whispered. “I don’t want our low-light vision screwed.”

Combined with the bio panels, the robots gave sufficient, if bloody, light to the area.

“I don’t see anything,” said Shasti. She had the best night vision of any, save Mmok with his artificial eye.

“There is a depressed area in the far distance,” said Mmok. “The ground slopes down behind it.”

“Send an HCR forward,” Fenaday ordered.

Mmok nodded. His throat moved as he subvocalized to Vermilion. The HCR went forward without hesitation. Smooth and noiseless, the machine dropped into a crouch the humans couldn’t match, keeping its Gatling tri-auto at the ready. Vermilion could barely be seen as the HCR approached the far area.

Mmok spoke up. “This must be the place, raw earth and a huge pit area. I see a wide, flat, metal section in the center, with a hole in the middle of a metal panel. Near that is a tall metal obelisk, I guess. It’s huge. There’s a derrick over a hole. It looks like it was used to drop people in… wait a minute.”

“What?” Fenaday demanded.

“Ah,” Mmok said, “Eureka, I have found it. I have the image from your computer video, Duna. This is the spot. I can project a side-by-side comparison from memory. This is where Creda’s call came from.” The half cyborg hesitated for a second, then continued diffidently. “More confirmation. I found Creda. The clothes are intact enough for an identification. Sorry.”

“Thank you, Mr. Mmok,” Duna said. “I knew he would be here.”

Mmok looked at Fenaday, as did Shasti and the others. Fenaday hated this part. As if I know what the rules are, he thought. “OK, let’s go in. The objective is the pit area. Spread out, but always keep everyone in sight. Duna, stay next to Telisan and right behind me. We’ll need your knowledge.”

“Such as it is,” replied Duna.

They started across the cavernous space, relieved to have a roof farther away from their heads. Small trailers and various pieces of digging equipment provided cover as they moved over the underground field. The ground ahead consisted of unrefined dirt and rock, clearly the site of the archeological excavation. Dig sites pockmarked the area, small depressions with grids of wire and hand tools nearby.

A vertical slab of dark metal, ten meters tall dominated the area. It appeared to be covered by some form of script. Gleaming in the half-light, it looked new enough to have been placed there only yesterday. Yet, as they approached it, Fenaday felt an overwhelming impression of age.

Fenaday leaned against a trailer that might have belonged to Creda and looked up at the obelisk. “Can you read it, Belwin?” Obviously the product of a high technology, it showed every sign of having been there since this level of Barjan Deep was inhabited. The bottom of it was not fully excavated. A resemblance to a grave marker suddenly struck him.

“A little,” said the excited Enshari, back in his field again. The expedition was both a joy and a curse to the scholar. “It speaks of the burial of a great being. There is something I cannot translate, maybe a name. ‘We could not destroy he who was the greatest of us.’ More I cannot read. Ah, wait, this says, ‘He saved us from darkness.’”

“Darkness,” came the word, rumbling through their minds, accompanied by a sound like a waterfall in the distance. They spun back to back, hearts pounding, mouths open, eyes searching the dark. The robots did not react, though the HCRs turned toward the spacers, as though puzzled by their sudden movement.

Fenaday looked at the others. “You heard it too?”

“Yes,” said Duna, Shasti and Telisan simultaneously. Li and Connery nodded, eyes darting around as they stared at the shadows beyond the reach of their lights.

“The robots,” said Fenaday.

Mmok looked at him. “They didn’t hear it,” he hissed. “They report no sound, no spoken word.”

Cobalt stood next to Fenaday.

“Confirm,” Fenaday demanded of the robot. “Did you hear a non-team member speak the word, darkness? Do you hear a sound like a waterfall?”

Cobalt turned soulless doll’s eyes to him. “There have been no such sounds,” replied the robot in its flat, metallic tones.

“Darkness,” it came again, stronger. In their minds, faint and fuzzy images began to form. Words and concepts tumbled in a bewildering kaleidoscope. Fenaday saw a towering figure, almost glowing, standing on a rocky plain. He could not see any detail to the giant. Huge bolts of raw power rolled from the figure, filling up the sky, boiling away clouds and air.

Words came too. “Darkness, darkness closes, the end draws near. Made the change, became the One. Raised the soldiers of light and air from my new mind. Slew the Others, the Dark Ones, drove them from our worlds. The final battle, the madness, the madness, the madness.”

It faded. For a second, Fenaday became aware of himself again, crawling on the floor like a child. He steeled himself to resist, but his consciousness fled as the thing spoke again.

“Madness… destroyed my own. Captured, buried.” Suddenly it became a scream. “Buried. The little people, deaf to me, buried, worse, worse… forgotten.” A blast of hatred filled him, a hatred of the Enshari. Suddenly, as if a switch were thrown, the psychic barrage ceased. Fenaday and the others lay on the floor, gasping for breath. The presence they felt was gone. No, not gone. As they struggled to their feet, they could hear the distant waterfall-like projection. It faded, quickly becoming so dim as to be nearly unnoticeable.

The robots, standing over the humans, aware of the assault on their soft-skinned companions, couldn’t detect either a vector or a means. They could launch no counterattack.

Mmok began to update the machines. He was clearly rattled and whispered instead of subvocalizing. “Telepathic assault from the pit. No counterattack at this time.” The robots accepted the impossible with mechanical equanimity. Extra-sensory perception was the stuff of labs and telepathy only a word, until this moment

Fenaday looked at Shasti. She nodded back, her usual equanimity reasserting itself.

“Everyone else, stay where you are, especially you, Duna.” Fenaday turned toward the hole. With Shasti on his left side, he approached the section where a hole had been bored through into the chamber below. They slid on their bellies as they reached the spot. Then, with a last look at each other and a nod, they peered over, shining their battle lanterns at the widest beam.

A Titan’s corpse lay on a platform twenty-five meters below them. Had it stood, its head would have poked out of the hole. A head the size of an aircar, or a small truck. It had gone to bone an eon ago. Its skull looked up at them, from three empty eye sockets big enough for a man to step through. It had been bipedal, but nothing about the skeleton was familiar. Arms reached past the knees, the feet ended in disc-like hooves.

This was no ordinary casket. The chamber below them stretched out for at least tens of meters, from all sides of the platform. Lights and mechanical movement played around some of the perimeter and near the platform.

“Perhaps,” whispered Shasti, “it’s some form of suspended animation or stasis. It has the look of such equipment from the early days of spaceflight.”

“Or a diagnostic bed,” he whispered back. “It looks like that as well.”

“Whatever it is,” she continued, “it failed our friend down there. He has been dead for an age.”

“Yet, something down there is still alive somehow. You felt it too. The body may be dead, but something is still active in the chamber. Look at the machinery.”

“The ceiling of this chamber is two meters thick,” added Shasti. “I’ve never seen an alloy like this. I assumed they used a heavy military laser to cut this meter-and-a-half hole.”

Fenaday waved to Mmok. The half-cyborg came up to the hole the same way they had. Mmok looked into the hole only briefly. He cursed and drew back from it, unnerved.

Fenaday began to fear the nuclear device they brought with them might be inadequate. He had never believed in ghosts—despite his Irish heritage—and didn’t now. He thought some vestige of the life force of the Titan might exist in the computers and machinery shifting around the monster’s bed. Perhaps the attacks originated in the machinery, but he didn’t believe it. There was too much malice and hatred in what he felt from his encounters with their enemy.

“Mmok,” he asked, “if we fire off the bomb outside the chamber, will it do the job?”

“How the hell should I know?” Mmok snapped. “This metal is meters thick so the blast will go up and out easiest. That’s physics. The hole should still admit plenty of blast, but I don’t know anything about this equipment. I can tell you this metal is harder than anything we make. I’ve had Cobalt doing a spectral analysis. I don’t know what they used to cut this hole with but it would normally be mounted on a battlecruiser.

“This is new alien equipment, from a race we don’t know. Something spoke to us telepathically. That’s been bullshit until now. What else can they do that we don’t know is possible? Force fields? How deep does this installation go? Maybe all the really critical stuff is below another floor made of this metal. If that’s the case, then there is no way this small nuke can cut through another layer of this alloy. I’d need a shaped charge.

“The best way,” concluded the grim half-cyborg, “is to put the bomb down in there. This is our one shot. It has to work. If you cook off the nuke up here and it doesn’t do the job, then this whole area will be gone. We’ll never be able to get to back to this chamber to try again.”

Fenaday lay on his back, away from the hole. “I was afraid you were going to say that.” It was obvious to him now. They had to lower the warhead into the crypt itself. They had no idea how much blast was needed to accomplish their mission. Putting the weapon in the crypt, contained by the incredible walls of the chamber, would greatly increase the effect and perhaps even protect the areas of Barjan over them.

They retreated from the hole, rejoining the others. Fenaday sketched the details of what they had seen. He sent Telisan for a look. Connery and Li rested on their guns and stayed on guard for Shellycoats. Fenaday did not want Duna near the hole, despite the little scholar’s curiosity.

“I want to put the warhead in there. We lower it in. I’ll arm it, then you’ll pull me out, and we run like hell.”

Telisan stared at him as if he had lost his mind. “Why not arm it up here and lower it in?”

Mmok answered. “We don’t know what sort of defenses are in that pit, either mechanical or cybernetic. The bomb might draw any sort of attack as we lower it in. Once it is armed, there is a distinct chance it could be triggered by an EMP, computer virus or even mechanical damage. The other problem is this is a jury-rigged detonator, a bunch of cannibalized stuff from other systems. I don’t want to lower it down there and have to wonder if it is going to go off because some bump or jolt on the way down disconnected something. It would be embarrassing to be walking back here, wondering why it didn’t go off and get caught in a delayed blast.”

“No, the only safe way is to lower it, check it, then set the timer once we’re sure it’s working,” said Fenaday. “Can we use an HCR?”

Mmok shook his head. “No. They aren’t made for that sort of work. I don’t have that level of control over their hands. The interlocks on the timer are too delicate. If I’d thought of it before…” he shrugged.

“So,” said Fenaday, fear drying his mouth, “down I go.”

Mmok looked over at him. “Better you than me,” he said with rare sympathy.

“Madness,” the word whispered through their minds. Terror returned, and they all froze. Only silence followed.

“I don’t believe that the creature, the machinery, say the consciousness of this place, is aware of us,” Fenaday said. “Else, why aren’t we dead?”

“Your senility theory, perhaps,” Telisan speculated.

“Whatever,” Fenaday said. “Maybe it’s recovering from its previous efforts. I don’t think we have much more time before it becomes aware of us.

“Mmok, get the bomb rigged for the descent. We’ve got D-rings and rope in the supplies. Shasti, help me make a harness. The rest of you, lay low and stay quiet. Don’t even think loudly. That goes double for you, Belwin. I don’t want it to think of a live Enshari up here.”

Mmok and his robot team checked the hoist and hooked up the bomb. They took special care with the bomb trigger. Fenaday and Shasti quickly rigged a harness and D-rings, to allow him to slide down as well. She put a line on him so he could be pulled up easily. They moved over to the pit. He nodded to Mmok. The cyborg and Verdigris swung the bomb out with the derrick erected by the deceased Enshari archeologists. They stared anxiously as it descended into the pit. Despite their best efforts, the bomb oscillated on the way down.

Fenaday threw in his own rope. He wanted to wait till the bomb set down without drawing an attack before starting his drop. The bomb reached bottom, but one swing banged it into the side of the platform. Everyone but Shasti and Verdigris flinched away from the hole. It landed finally, canted at an angle.

“Just what I was afraid of,” muttered Fenaday. He moved into a position to rappel into the pit. The hardest part, he thought, is always the first lean-back, trusting the rope. He eased into the proper stance and looked up, catching Shasti’s eye. Her perfect face showed no emotion; he read anxiety in her anyway. He smiled reassuringly. She didn’t return it, just watched him as he disappeared into the hole.

Fenaday spun slowly in his harness, then eased his grip and started dropping fast, hoping to present a moving target, in case the crypt had different defenses against biologicals. He reached the floor in seconds and crouched near the bomb, laser in one hand and torch in the other. One of the crab robots extended a lantern into the pit. Its light didn’t fully illuminate the chamber. He realized the chamber was far larger than he suspected. Sidhe could have docked in it. The light uncomfortably illuminated the immense skull, only five meters away. He tried not to look at it.

Banks upon banks of machinery hummed around him. Many seemed active at a low level. He saw an irregularity in the wall, well away from the platform. He spun his hand torch to tight beam and shone it in that direction. The beam diffused over distance, but he could definitely see a section of the wall bowed in, though not breached. Fenaday remembered the stories Duna told of the rare, but devastating earthquakes that destroyed Barjan several times in ancient days. Perhaps some ancient earth movement had damaged the machinery. No lights flickered there.

This has to be a confinement, he thought with a shock. Someone meant to come back for the creature but never did. Tended by the machines, yet somehow conscious, it died, waiting for a parole that never came.

He jerked his attention back to the here and now and reached for the arming mechanism of the bomb, opening the first interlock.

The waterfall sound that had faded to background suddenly rose. Fenaday felt a consciousness fill the chamber. He heard a creaking groan, as of huge rusted hinges pushed from frozen disuse. Fenaday’s head snapped around. The giant skull was shifting, turning toward him. Its eyeless sockets came to bear on him.

“Who?” hissed the voice in his mind, with a malevolence he never dreamt existed. Fingers of thought clawed at his brain.

Fenaday screamed, a high, shrill sound of pain and terror. He snapped up his pistol, firing convulsively, shot after shot, into the horrific skull’s immensely thick cranium. Superheated bone chips flew.

*****

“Get him out, get him out!” Shasti ordered. “The thing is alive.” She hefted her tri-auto, but she had no clean shot. She feared severing the rope or hitting Fenaday with a ricochet. “I need a laser,” she yelled.

Telisan, Mmok and the others leapt to the tripod, hauling on Fenaday’s safety rope. Duna raced to the hole, brandishing his energy weapon. He leaned in for a shot and saw the nemesis of his race stretched out in all its horror. And it saw him. The terrible head ceased moving. The triple eye sockets bore into him, devouring him with their emptiness.

A blast of hatred, so intense as to have flavor and color, burst from the pit, forcing everyone but Shasti back from the edge. Shasti held her ground though it beat her to her knees. She put her head between her hands. For the first time in years and over a vow she had sworn to herself, Shasti screamed in pain.

The members of the landing force, wherever they were on the planet, heard the scream of rage sound in their minds.

*****

On the deck of the bulk-fluid hauler, Angelica Fury and Rask stumbled to their feet, their eyes wild. They stood on the open cargo platform with the five others of Rask’s fire team. The ramp was down. On the field they could see Shellycoats of many sizes forming from debris. One stood as tall as the giant marshals which had led the attack back on the island. Fury wheeled on Rask. “Oh my God, tell me you have the ramp’s power restored.”

Rask lunged for the portable generator and put it on maximum. The ramp began grinding upward, cutting off the view of the onrushing Shellycoats. Someone screamed and firing broke out behind them. They whirled. Shellycoats had formed from the tools, fire extinguishers and miscellaneous contents of the hold. Rachel Van Vugt, from Engineering, toppled forward, her eyes unseeing. A Shellycoat had impaled her on a length of pipe. The other ASATs backed away, firing furiously, dropping the things as they formed.

“We need a smaller place to defend,” screamed Fury. Despair beat in her chest as she swept up Van Vugt’s fallen weapon, blazing away, determined to sell her young life at the highest price she could extract.

Rask pointed to the raised area holding the cargo master’s crane controls. “Only two ways in and out,” he shouted in response. “We can hold there.”

“For how long?” she asked.

“For as long as we got ammo,” snapped Rask. “Come on.”

They backed away, firing as they retreated.

*****

Exploding claymore mines followed by gunfire told Daniel Rigg trouble had arrived. He bolted to the main verandah, where the guards were already firing out the windows. Shellycoats advanced from all directions on their fortress camp. Barrier wires sparked and blasted them, but as one vaporized, another appeared, incorporating bits of the destroyed one. The shuttle gun crews began to fire.

A whine sounded at his feet. Rigg looked down. Risky’s tail was between his legs. Rigg reached down, patting the dog’s head. “It looks like a fight, boy. We’ll give them a good one. You look after yourself and wait for the next expedition. I promise you there will be one.”

He drew his heavy sidearm, opening his mike on the battle frequency and started bawling orders. “Everyone keep your eyes on your own front. Cut the firing rate, controlled bursts. We ain’t making ammo, so mark your target.”

He looked up as a shadow fell across the room. A ‘marshal’ advanced toward the embassy. Made of cars, it towered thirty meters into the air.

Pooka’s chain guns took it apart. It fell with a horrific crash. In the middle distance, he saw several cars on the freeway ramp stir and crawl toward each other.