“I never used to like him, and he had a reputation as a bloody butcher,” Harker responded. “Now, though, I’m not at all sure.”
They went over and sat on a long crate. Littlefeet and Spotty huddled together, staring at the mysterious shapes suspended all around them.
“Cold,” she said, and he nodded.
It was cold in there, in a relative sense. Littlefeet had been colder, up on the mountain, but this was a different kind of cold. Dry, a little dead, and going right through you.
“Sorry, kids. I warned you not to come along,” Kat said, sitting nearby. “It’s kind of a creepy dump, isn’t it?”
“Dump?” Littlefeet asked. “If you mean strange, yes, it is. As strange as anything the demons build. Was this the kind of place where our ancestors lived?”
She laughed. “No, no. It was the kind of place where they worked, or some of them did, anyway. They had their own kind of power, like the demons have, and their own machines, like the ones demons fly in. The voice is a machine. It was built, not born, and information was fed into it instead of taught like we were. With that information—using all this, and with the aid of just a very few humans—it could build great machines, great ships that could go between the stars.”
It was tough explaining this to a pair who had no technological background at all. Even the word “ship” had no real meaning for them, and the only machines they knew were magical things of the enemy.
Spotty looked around, a little scared, a little awed. “Where is this—thing that speaks in a man’s voice?” she asked. “Why can’t we see it?”
“You are looking at me,” the mentat responded. “I am everything you see here, and much of the rest of the complex. Oh, I have a brain, if you want to call it that, and it’s in one place deep in the center of this complex of buildings, but my eyes, my voice, the things I see and hear come from every part of this place that’s still connected, that still has power. I’m even in another far-off place at the same time. That’s because the man who was here before you turned on the power there. The surge was enough for me to feel it and find it.”
“You mean like the demons talk through their lines in the sky?” Spotty pressed, showing an intelligence than her quiet subservience had concealed.
“Yes, sort of. I don’t know how they do it, and I think they probably would barely recognize how I do it, but the general idea is the same. In fact, at one level, energy is energy, whether it’s my kind, the demons’ kind, or things like the lines in the sky or lightning. I’m awake now because some of their energy proved convertible to what I needed. Unlike you, I do not need food or water, but without energy, electricity of some sort, I either go to sleep or even die.”
“Plants get energy from the sun. Are you a plant?” Littlefeet asked. “The others called this place a `plant.’ ”
“Not that kind of plant, no. But, again, the idea is the same. Flowers and trees and grass get their energy, their food, from the sun.”
“Do you move? Can you walk?” Spotty asked it.
“No, I can’t. I’m stuck here. Anything that comes in I can see, hear, and work with. But they must come to me, as you did. I cannot move.”
“A big rock once spoke to me,” Littlefeet remembered. “When I was a kid and all, I got scared and ran. I guess that was something like you, huh?”
There was a moment’s silence, and then the mentat responded, “That was me. So you were one of the boys who came along after those creatures killed poor Jastrow. I would not have known you had you not spoken of it. Your voice has changed. In these three years you have become a man. And now you are here… How… coincidental…”
Both Harker and Kat Socolov sensed a slight hostility creeping into the mentat’s otherwise bland tones, but it wasn’t enough to start wondering about it. Not yet.
“We might as well try and get some sleep if we can,” Harker suggested to them. “Until we hear from that hole over there, all we can do is worry and wait.”
There was no effective light at the bottom of the shaft, but the moment N’Gana almost slipped on the rubble of the collapsed elevator car and started cursing, a sliver of pale yellow light shone through a small opening in the wall between the car and the shaft itself.
Voice-activated, he thought. Handy.
With even that little bit of light, he could see the remnants of Jastrow’s frustration. So close and no cigar, the colonel thought. There were long, bent pieces of metal, indentations where things had been pounded or attempts had been made to pry open a larger hole, but it had ultimately only damaged the tools.
Jastrow must have been almost mad down here. The hole was a bit jagged, perhaps large enough for one leg. There even seemed to be some dried blood on some of the jagged edges, which meant that Jastrow may well have tried to force his large body into a very tiny hole.
Inside, there were rows and rows of storage consoles. He could clearly see the posts where human agents would sit, with robotic security controls around them. It looked so normal, as if everybody had just shut down and gone to dinner, and yet it was so unapproachable.
He felt the Quadulan ooze up next to him. The thing was furry, but it felt more like being touched by a porcupine. He rolled back to give it full access to the hole. “Think you can get in there?”
Although it was a bit larger around than the hole, it was an enormously flexible creature and very, very tough. “Piece of meat,” it said.
“Piece of cake,” N’Gana corrected.
“Whatever. Question is, if security is still powered on, will it take passwords from Hamille?”
“That’s part of why I’m here. It’s aware of us now, so we might as well get started.”
The Quadulan eased up to the hole and then began pulsing its body, stretching itself out as much as it could, and then it pushed on in, oozing through like paste through a straw. It was not as easy as it looked, and Hamille was extremely slow and cautious. More than once, one of the sharp edges snagged the skin or threatened to dig deeper, and the creature had to stop, back up a bit, and try it again. Still, within a quarter of an hour, it was through.
Almost as soon as it hit the floor, a series of tight red beams struck it, and a voice that sounded very machine-like and inhuman said, “Halt and give the proper password signs or leave as you came. You are targeted by seven different lethal devices.” It was designed to sound artificial so that there would be no doubt in the intruder’s mind that it was dealing with a tightly programmed machine.
N’Gana felt some sharp pains in his chest that brought him up short for a minute, but he willed himself to ignore them. They had not come this far to have him blow it.
He took a deep breath, pressed his face against the hole in the wall, and said, in his best theatrical voice, “And let the heralds Zeus loves give orders about the city for the boys who are in their first youth and the gray-browed elders to take stations on the god-founded bastions that circle the city!” he intoned. “Let it be thus, high-hearted men of Troy, as I tell you! Let that word that has been spoken now be a strong one, and that which I speak at dawn to the Trojans, breakers of horses. For in good hope I pray to Zeus and the other immortals that we may drive from our place these dogs swept into destruction whom the spirits of death have carried here on their black ships!”
There was silence for a moment, and Hamille felt as tense as N’Gana. Then, just as the old colonel feared he had blown a line, the red targeting beams switched off.
“Code accepted,” announced the security voice.
It was an appropriate passage from a little-known translation, with a devilish little trap in it. A part of Hector’s great speech before the battle, but with some sentences left out here and there. The result fit the defenders of Helena against the Titan invaders as well as it did the defenders of Helen thousands of years ago on a far distant planet.