CHAPTER TWELVE
“Okay,” I said, trying to suppress the reflexive urge to look up at the sky and the clouds drifting overhead.
Trying equally hard to stay calm.
The Icarus Group’s best estimate was that this system was at least forty thousand light-years from the loose collection of inhabited worlds we called the Spiral. There was a good chance it was even farther than that.
Granted that the locals were sitting on a bunch of portals, at least one of which we knew led to a minor Commonwealth world. But even so, how in the world had they bumped into the nomadic Kadolians? How especially had they bumped into them long enough to have picked up some of their language?
Unless they’d done all that before the Kadolians became nomadic. Say, maybe ten to fifteen thousand years ago.
Selene and I had speculated that her people and the Patth had both been clients for the same patron species. Were the aliens here those patrons?
Had we finally found the Icari?
I ran my eyes over them, feeling my sudden emotional surge fade away. Up close, I could see that their fingers were just fingers, not coiled tentacles or extendable trunk-like appendages. Their arms weren’t extra long, and there were no other obvious places where tentacles could be lurking. If they were connected to the Icari, they were likely just another client species.
“We should say something back to him,” Selene murmured.
“Yes. Right.” I pursed my lips, trying to think. “Okay. He talked to you in his language, which had enough Kadolian in it for you to understand. Try saying something in Kadolian and see if he can sort out what he needs from his end.”
“All right.” Selene began speaking, talking slowly and enunciating each word. I focused on Hat Man, peripherally keeping tabs on the lads with the lightning guns. One of the ferrets detached itself from where it had been crouching at Hat Man’s feet and scurried over to me. It sniffed at my shoes, then stretched itself upward, resting its front paws on my shins, and sniffed some more at my trouser legs. I ignored it, keeping my eyes fixed on the aliens. I’d seen Ixil use Pix and Pax as similar diversions, and I was determined not to let my guard down.
Selene finished speaking, and for a moment, Hat Man was silent. Then, he gestured. The other three aliens raised their weapons to point at the sky and moved around to our sides. Hat Man said something, then turned and strode back toward the city. “Selene?” I muttered.
“I think he wants us to follow,” she said, setting off after him. “I didn’t understand most of that last part, but I think one of the words was companions.”
“Was he talking about us?” I asked. “Or about me, as your companion?”
“I don’t know,” Selene said. “All I got was companions.”
I nodded, eyeing the three aliens flanking us. “We need to get a fast handle on this,” I warned. “We won’t get anywhere with these people if all we can get is one understandable word per sentence.”
“I know,” Selene said. “I’m sure he does, too. But there’s something else. When you first started speaking—when you said hello and gave our names—their scents changed.”
I frowned. “Changed how? Hopeful? Confused? Angry?”
“I don’t know,” Selene said. “I don’t have a baseline for them. All I know is that they had one scent when they first saw us, it changed when you spoke, and then it changed again to something else while he and I were talking.”
I thought back to those particular moments. The aliens had been a good fifty meters away when we first came out of concealment, which was pretty far for even someone of Selene’s abilities.
On the other hand, the breeze had been coming toward us from behind them. That typically gave her more range. “We’ll tuck that away for future reference,” I said. “What about the lightning guns? Do they smell distinctive enough that you could find one if we needed to?”
She turned to me, her pupils wary. “You’re not thinking…?”
“No, no, of course not,” I assured her. “We’re perfectly peaceful. Remember?”
She didn’t answer. But then, she didn’t have to.
We were perfectly peaceful, all right. Right up to the point when we suddenly needed to be something else.
* * *
Hat Man and his friends hadn’t been visible when we first left the dock after dumping our vac suits, and I’d wondered how they’d managed to sneak up on us so fast. Fifty meters into our hike, I got my answer.
The reeds that lined the riverbank had given way to tall grasses and scrub brush a few meters past the row of ramshackle buildings. Now, as Hat Man led the way through the low foliage, I spotted a ramp angling downward into a tunnel in the ground, our view of which had been previously blocked by a group of waist-high red-leafed bushes.
Hat Man stepped onto the ramp and headed into the tunnel. With guards on either side of us, and with a half dozen ferrets scampering around, Selene and I had no option but to follow.
There were no lights in this section of the tunnel’s walls or ceiling, and as we moved away from the entrance the tunnel became progressively darker. Fortunately, the floor was smooth, with no bumps or debris that could pose a hazard to navigation. Forty meters ahead, I saw the first glimmerings of light, right at the point where the ramp flattened out into a metal walkway. “Is all of this Icari metal?” I asked quietly.
“Yes,” Selene confirmed. “It’s similar to the shovel and trowels.”
“Mm.” It made sense that an Icari base would be constructed of Icari metal.
The problem was that that was going to make it a lot harder for Selene to zero in on the specific variety the Icari had used in their portal directories. When I’d first proposed this plan to McKell and Ixil, I’d expected that RH’s distinctive aroma would stand out from the native flora like a flare on a moonless night. If it was instead in the city somewhere, surrounded by tons of similar stuff, that particular bet would need to be heavily hedged.
The walkway at the bottom of the ramp turned out to be a platform serving a pair of monorail tracks, one on each side. A train consisting of four eight-seat, open-topped cars was waiting on the track to our right. Hat Man climbed into the driver’s seat in the front car, Selene and I took the two seats behind him, and the three guards and ferrets settled in behind us. One of the ferrets hopped briefly into my lap, nosed at my holstered plasmic, then apparently decided I was too lumpy or didn’t smell right and abandoned me for the empty front seat beside Hat Man. Hat Man waited until everyone was settled, then touched a couple of controls, and we were off.
I’d estimated the city was a few kilometers across, with the portal ring and its central building sitting at roughly the center of the urban expanse. Subways were fairly common in the Spiral’s larger cities, and I’d occasionally had the need to ride one.
But those trains had usually had well-spaced-out stops, putting them at least half a kilometer apart. Here, the platforms were much closer together, with only one or two hundred meters between them.
That didn’t slow us down any, of course, since most of the stops opened into the abandoned parts of town and we bypassed those without slowing. Still, the arrangement seemed a little odd.
Selene noticed it, too. “I wonder if there used to be a lot of invalids living here,” she mused.
“You mean the close platform spacing?” I asked. “Could be. Or maybe they just get a lot of really bad weather. Or everyone was just lazy.”
She was silent a moment. “Those mountains to the east. Do you think any of them could be volcanic?”
“No idea. But the winds mostly come from the other direction, don’t they?”
“Mostly,” she said. “But volcanic ash can spread out in all directions.”
“Certainly with a big enough eruption,” I agreed. I looked at the next platform as we passed, catching a glimpse of the ramp leading to the surface beyond. This entrance and the one we’d used had both been completely open to the air.
Could they be sealed off in an emergency? If not, a flood of volcanic ash, or even just the rain from a moderately ambitious thunderstorm, could have disastrous consequences for the subway and anyone who happened to be in it.
“There’s another possibility,” I said, lowering my voice. “They may not have been worried so much about natural disasters as, shall we say, unnatural ones.”
I felt her shiver. “Like an attack?”
“That’s what we humans tend to worry about, anyway,” I said. “If this place can be sealed off, it would make a pretty good bomb shelter. Do the patrons in your legends have any enemies?”
She sighed. “Everyone has enemies, Gregory.”
“I suppose.”
We finished the trip in silence. Three minutes later, the car came to a halt at the end of the track.
Our marching order as we headed up the ramp was a little different this time. Two of the guards now took the lead, with Hat Man behind them, Selene and I behind him, and the third guard bringing up the rear. I wondered if this was a more ceremonial formation or whether Hat Man just figured that we were far enough in that there was no longer anywhere we could run.
Based on my assumption that the big central building was the government center, I’d expected that the ramp at the end of the subway line would bring us right up to the front door. To my mild surprise, we instead emerged between two of the nicer buildings at the edge of the well-maintained lawn of dark green grass, which put us another hundred meters from the central building. Either government workers had living quarters in there, or else they were expected to get some exercise on their way home.
I looked over my shoulder at the buildings we were passing between. Close up, they looked to be in even better shape than I’d guessed from that first distant sighting. Their walls and doors showed no sign of serious aging, their foundations were mostly free of windswept leaves or other debris, and their windows were clean and plentiful, allowing for brightly lit interiors.
Hat Man babbled a few more words, then turned forward and set off toward the central building. We took the cue and followed. “You get anything from that last speech?” I murmured.
“There was the word companions again,” she said. “Nothing except that.”
“At least they’ve figured out that you and I are together,” I said. “I just hope someone in there is good at charades. Otherwise we’ve got a really boring afternoon ahead of us.”
From Shark Tooth Rock the central building had looked generally conical. Here, closer and in full daylight, I could see it was a lot more complicated than that. The building was divided into five tiers, each one slightly smaller than the one beneath it, each one shaped like a polygon with rounded corners. The windows were of various sizes, their layout suggesting that each tier was comprised of two floors. There were also a handful of taller windows that I guessed were floor-to-ceiling versions gracing some two-story-high rooms.
The strange thing was that each of the polygon shapes was different. Assuming they were regular figures, the number of corners I could see indicated that the lowest tier had eight sides, the next one up seven, the next six, the next five, and the last one four. Sticking out of the top of the final tier was a short windowless cylinder that looked to narrow to have any rooms. The swashes and swirls of color along the sides weren’t confined to a single tier, but generally swept over all of them. The aerial view of the place must be interesting, as would be the tower’s floor plan.
There were three ornate doors leading into the lowest tier on this side of the building, one built into each of the visible corners. Each was set about two meters up from the base, with a short landing at the top and a ramp leading to the ground. Each door had a pair of aliens on guard duty with lightning guns slung over their shoulders.
But none of these entrances was apparently up to Hat Man’s standards. Instead of leading us to one of them he instead veered us off into a path angling around to the left, upriver side of the building. As we came around that side, I saw another corner and another door, this one flanked by four armed aliens instead of the two we’d seen elsewhere. “Selene?” I murmured.
“I’m not getting any change in their scents,” she murmured back. “Did you notice that none of the door guards have ferrets?”
I looked back at the door we’d passed, then at the one we were heading for. She was right. “No pets while on duty?” I suggested.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “There’s something strange about the animals’ scents. They’re similar to the aliens’ scents, but not too similar.”
“Like Ixil and his outriders, maybe?”
“No, Pix and Pax have scents all their own. Here…I don’t know. There’s some connection, but I can’t pin it down.”
“You’ll get it,” I assured her. “I have the feeling we’re going to have plenty of time here.”
We reached the ramp leading to Hat Man’s door of choice and headed up. The guards on the landing watched our approach, but left their weapons on their shoulders. We reached the door and paused while Hat Man and the guards held a brief conversation. One of the latter made a gesture and pulled open the door. Hat Man gestured back, and we headed inside, leaving the four door guards at their posts.
After the building’s dramatic exterior, I was mildly disappointed by the room we walked into. The ceiling was low, not much higher than it would be in a standard human-sized building, the floor was made of simple stone, and the walls were a plain and unadorned off-white. Hat Man didn’t pause, but continued straight through to another door at the far end. We passed through into a short hallway with a pair of spiral ramps leading off to right and left. Hat Man led us to the left one and we headed down.
An unpleasant thought tingled its way across my brain. In nearly every business or governmental building across the Spiral, the people who ran things were at the top, where they got the panoramic views and the clean air and could flaunt the less-than-subtle reminder that they were above everyone else. The lower levels, in contrast, were occupied by the men and women who toiled for those elite in silence and anonymity.
And the very lowest levels…
I caught my breath. Hat Man had said companions…
I moved closer to Selene as we continued down the ramp. “You said earlier that the human and Iykam scents were a few days old, right?” I asked quietly.
“Yes,” she said, puzzlement in her pupils.
“And your conclusion was that they’d either left or were dead?”
“You were the one who said they might be dead.”
“Whatever,” I said. “What if they were neither? What if they were locked away?”
“Are you saying they’re the companions he’s talking about?”
Ahead, the ramp was coming to an end. “You tell me,” I said. “What are you getting from the walls?”
She sniffed the air. “Nothing. But the entire area’s been cleaned recently. Very thoroughly.”
“Handy,” I muttered. “I wonder if we were expected. Maybe they spotted me last night after all.”
“Maybe,” she said, still sniffing. “I’m still not getting any human or Iykam scents. If they’re here, their cells are very well sealed.”
The ramp let us out into another hallway, this one with five doors on either side and a single larger one at the far end. The latter door had yet another pair of guards flanking it.
“I think this area is food storage,” Selene said as Hat Man led the way past the first set of doors. “There are several varieties of plants, but there seems to be only one type in each room.”
So the locals separated their various crops to make inventory and cooking easier. A fairly standard procedure. “You getting anything that might be cold storage?”
“Nothing that smells like normal refrigerants,” she said. “Maybe they don’t use cold for long-term food preservation.”
I nodded, eyeing the door at the end of the hallway. It had a more elaborate lock and handle mechanism than the others we were passing and the door was edged by a rubbery-looking material. “Those look like hermetical seals to you?”
“Yes,” Selene said. “Modified atmosphere preservation?”
“That’s my guess,” I said. “I just hope they remembered to switch out the carbon dioxide or nitrogen they’re using before they tossed their prisoners inside.”
We passed the last pair of side doors. Hat Man gave a gesture, and the two guards at the far door stepped aside. Hat Man stopped in front of the door and turned to give Selene a long look. He said something, then turned back and got a grip on the handle. He hesitated a moment, then pulled the handle down. There was a click from the lock, a sort of muffled puff from the seals, and he swung the panel open.
There, seated on rough crates in an otherwise plain metal-walled room, were the prisoners I’d expected to see. Three Iykams and—
“Hello, Roarke,” Expediter Huginn said, his unshaven face twitching in an ironic smile. “Why am I not surprised?”
“Hello, Huginn,” I said. “Nice to see you, too. You come here often?”
His smile turned into a sort of half-hearted smirk. “Not at these prices,” he said. “Welcome to purgatory. Pull up a crate and sit down.”
I looked at Hat Man. He was just standing there, his eyes on Selene, making no move to order or encourage us inside. “You misunderstand,” I said. “We’re not here to join you. We’re here to get you out.”
I gestured to Selene. “Or rather, Selene’s here to get you out.”