And of course, Thaddeus would have made sure that his machines could not hear any of the other immortals, either. He did not have to worry about any sort of infiltration. Machines could very easily be instructed not to accept orders from anyone but a human being-in many cases that was standard default programming-so no machines or artificial creatures could deliver commands from his enemies. The other immortals would need to give orders personally, rather than through any sort of inhuman proxy, and Thaddeus had made sure that such orders would not be heard.
Bredon, though-Thaddeus had had no records of Bredon's voice, no reason to blank that voice out of the hearing of his machines. With Aulden's passwords, Bredon could override Thaddeus's control of any machine that Aulden had ever worked on.
Aulden was the only real technician on the planet, and Mother and all her subsidiaries had been built to his design. Most of Fortress Holding's machines would now obey Bredon, if he could get to them.
Fortress Holding had one unfortunate feature, from Bredon's point of view. It had no central controlling intelligence, no equivalent to the Skyland's mind, or Arcade's Gamesmaster, or the housekeeper at Autumn House. A single central intelligence susceptible to being overridden by Aulden's universal password would have been very convenient, but Thaddeus had not been obliging enough to provide one. Aulden said that Thaddeus had something called a “frankenstein complex” and refused to trust a single central intelligence. Instead, he used hundreds of separate intelligences.
All the major ones, however, could be commanded from a central control station. That was where Thaddeus spent most of his time, where he concocted his schemes, where he had directed the attack on the High Castle. He called it his war room. If Bredon, or any other mortal who knew Aulden's password, could get into that room he could cripple Thaddeus's entire fortress in a matter of seconds.
Accordingly, that was where Bredon was headed, leaving a trail of open doors and blanked machines behind him, trying unsuccessfully to follow Aulden's hurried directions, unaware that he had miscounted doors in the corridor because of differences in terminology. Bredon, trained to be observant, had counted access panels. Aulden, trained in remembering details, knew quite well that the access panels were there, but did not consider them to be doors, and failed to realize just how spotty Bredon's grounding in the culture of the immortals was. To Bredon, anything a human or machine passed through in going from one chamber to another was a door; to Aulden, only openings intended to be used by humans were doors.
The correct door, the door Aulden had meant to direct him to, was a hundred meters further on.
Bredon hesitated. He was, he believed, nearing the war room now, with just two more chambers and a short passageway to pass through. What if, worse than a mere machine, Thaddeus himself waited on the other side of this door?
Well, he would just have to risk it. “Emergency override!” he called. “Human in danger! Open up!"
The door slid obediently open, and he found himself looking into an unlit storeroom lined with dusty, vacant shelves and smelling of ink. No doors led to the war room antechamber. No doors led anywhere.
“Oh, you stinking demons!” Bredon hissed, realizing he was lost.
Worse than lost, he was alone in the enemy's stronghold, unarmed and virtually defenseless, without even a symbiote to hold wounds closed or counteract poisons.
No, he corrected himself, he was not unarmed or defenseless. He had Aulden's password. He turned and looked back down the corridor.
No one was coming. His danger, though real, was not immediate.
He still had no idea why Aulden's directions had failed him, but that did not matter. He was a hunter; when one trap or strategem failed, he devised another instantly.
He turned and headed back for where he had left one of the machines awaiting orders.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“I knew a woman once from another village, a village far from here, on the south coast where the eastern forests give way to sandy beaches, who claimed that she had once been a guest of Lord Hollingsworth of the Sea. As she told it, she had been playing on the beach as a girl, throwing sand out onto the drifting watersheets and watching as they first tried to eat it, then spat it back up in hundreds of little spurts that sent it bouncing around madly-apparently that was a popular game among the young people around there. As she played, though, something rose up from the sea, a great black shape that she could never describe clearly. She once said it looked something like an ear of corn the size of a house, or perhaps a giant fish, though of course there are no true fish in salt water.
"At any rate, a man came out of this thing and spoke to her, and told her not to fling sand on the watersheets, because it could kill them. They were delicate, this man told her, and trying to eat the sand could give them the equivalent of a very bad stomach-ache, one so bad that it could kill the weaker ones.
"She thought this worrying about watersheets was absurd, and said so, despite her fear and wonder at this person's strange appearance and even stranger mode of travel, which she took for an odd sort of boat. The man retorted that she knew nothing of the sea or its creatures.
"She admitted that she knew very little, and after some further discussion she found that she had agreed to visit with the man in his home beneath the sea.
"The man was Lord Hollingsworth, of course, and his home the sunken palace Atlantis, deep beneath the ocean. They rode there together in the boat, or fish, or whatever it was, and he showed her many of the sea's creatures, weird and frightening things of every size and shape.
"You know, a watersheet is so thin that if you get the right angle, you can put your hand right through it and not even notice. It's so thin that it tears apart into practically nothing if you pick it up, so thin that you can only see it by the way it changes the texture of the water's surface-but it's so strong, in some ways, that it can live through the worst storms, storms that will smash a boat or a house to splinters. Well, this woman said that there were creatures in the sea that made watersheets seem as normal as rabbits. There were things that changed color and shape, things that swam by spitting out pieces of their own flesh, things that glowed in the dark, things with flesh she could see through, so that she could watch their blue-green blood flowing. There were worms kilometers long, things like fish with heads at both ends-oh, she could go on for hours describing the monstrosities Lord Hollingsworth showed her.
"But what she really remembered was the Power's own comments on these creatures. ‘You know,’ she said he said, ‘I never get tired of watching these. They're stranger than anything I could ever make.'
"And of course, I'm sure that you'll be struck with the same thing that struck her, and that struck me when I heard that-if he didn't make all the creatures in the sea, who did?"
– from a conversation with Atheron the Storyteller
In all the old stories, the tales of the ancient times when death was a common thing, the heroes always faced certain doom bravely, daring their foes to step forth and do battle, loudly proclaiming their faith in whatever noble cause they served, right to the last.
Geste wondered how, in all the hells of every dead religion that had ever been preached, anyone could ever believe such tripe. He was facing death now, he knew, and he was too terrified to stand, let alone laugh in its face. He fell back in his chair, teeth chattering, his entire body shaking with fear, forcing his eyes to stay open in the forlorn hope that he might see and fend off at least one or two attacks, extending his existence for a few precious seconds.
All he saw was his own face, mockingly reflected in the stasis field.
Thaddeus's laughter surrounded him, roaring laughter that did not sound sane to him.