Littlefeet shook his head in disbelief. “No, it is a lie! A dirty lie from some—ghost! The demons do not own my soul! I pray only to Jesus!”
“It is not your faith I am interested in,” the mentat said, perhaps a bit sadly—if that were possible. “I do not have a lot of records, but I can guess that good men have been used unwittingly by evil since the dawn of humanity. You are full of coincidences, my young friend. Far too many coincidences. Deep down, you know it, I think, now that it’s been laid out. You cannot go. Like the guards of a Family’s night kraals, one must be ready to die for the many. All of this has come too far to be allowed to fail now. I have accepted that my existence must terminate for that reason.”
“No!” Spotty screamed at him. “You can’t have him! I won’t let you!”
“I can manage a sufficient charge through the plates and catwalks that you will need to navigate, and I will not hesitate to use it. If Littlefeet does not remain, I will use a kind of lightning bolt and strike him dead as he tries to leave.”
They all had their mouths open, but there was nothing any of them could say. Finally, Spotty said, “Well, then, if he stays, so do I. I do not want to keep going without him.”
Littlefeet seemed to snap out of it. “No! That’s wrong! And the ghost or whatever is right. Maybe I’m being used by them, maybe I’m not, but he can’t take the chance. That’s what he’s saying. But you—there’s a different duty for women and you know it. You didn’t bleed this time so you probably have my kid in you! I won’t let you kill it! Go with them! Be a part of this new family! It’s your duty. Just like my duty, and the others’ here, is to kill the demons.” He grabbed her and held her and kissed her like he’d never kissed anybody before, and then he let her go and stepped away. “Now, go! And tell my son that his father died heroically!”
“Let’s get out of here before we all get killed,” Harker muttered anxiously.
Spotty stared at Littlefeet, and there were tears in her eyes, but she said nothing. There was nothing to say and no way to argue it further. Particularly if she carried his child, it was her duty, to him and to God, not to die. She turned, wiping away the tears, and gestured to Gene Harker and Kat Socolov to go. They started, and she followed, not looking back, although she knew that Littlefeet stood there fighting back his own tears and looking at her until she was out of sight in the far reaches of the catwalks above.
N’Gana shifted, uncomfortable that he would not be the only one to die, but resigned to the business at hand.
You two! Come over here!” he managed, gesturing. “Mentat? You still there?”
“Yes. I just wish I was not. On the other hand, I have just seen the most logical justification for my imminent destructive actions that I could possible imagine. We must free these people.”
“I don’t just want to free these people,” N’Gana told it and the others. “I want to go out with a bang. Most of all, I want to know if the damned thing works. Don’t you?”
Littlefeet nodded. “Something that will kill demons? Yes!”
N’Gana looked up at the great machinery, frozen for nearly a century, and pointed.
“Well, if that thing up there in those giant mechanical pincers is what I think it is, and if there’s a charge left in it, then I think we might have a shot. Mentat, what was the procedure when you made a gate? You couldn’t do more than trickle-charge testing down here, but was it encoded into the Priam’s Lens weapons system before it was shipped or after it was installed?”
“Why, it was encoded right here, since the security system was on the lower level,” the computer replied. “The targets are addressed by code numbers.”
“So, if I’m not mistaken, that’s a finished plate up there, stuck where it was when the power failed. Am I right?”
“Yes.”
“And it’s already encoded by number in the keys, so if its number were called, then theoretically it would, if charged, be an end point for the energy strings?”
“Why, yes, I believe so.”
“Can you determine the number? And can you bring it to a full charge?”
“Yes to both, I suppose. At the point of broadcast, I could shift whatever remaining power I had to the plate. It should charge it for a short period. But why?”
“Then let’s send those codes with a command to target this one first,” he suggested. “Let’s shoot the bastards from right here if we can!”
TWENTY-ONE
The Ghost of Hector Rises
It was no easier getting out than it had been getting in, but at least in daylight the activity of the Titan base was far less and there weren’t those energy tendrils to deal with.
Harker, Kat, and Spotty said almost nothing while making their getaway. There wasn’t anything else to say. It was good to be able to stop at a depression filled with water and at least fill that need.
There was still traffic in and out of the base; the ships didn’t stop coming and going day or night, and in place of the strings they could see what appeared to be large numbers of humans or humanlike creatures wandering, apparently aimlessly, across the expanse of the old city, never straying too far from the front of the crystalline base.
“Hunters?” Kat wondered when they reached some cover.
“Doubtful. Not that passive or that many together. Other kinds of experiments, probably. The people they use to determine what to do with the rest of us, or what they can do. Even so, I wouldn’t like to meet up with any. At the very least, what they see, the Titans see, too.”
The jungle area didn’t provide a lot of food, but Spotty was able to round up some squashlike growths and an acidic but spongy leaf that she insisted was edible.
“Nightfall, after the storm, we should try and make the hills,” Kat told them. “I don’t think the mentat’s going to give us a whole lot of grace time, and if anybody or any-thing, even by accident, wanders down that culvert, it won’t wait ”
Harker frowned and nodded slowly. “If I know Krill, she’s had them drilled and checked and double-checked again and again up there and somebody sitting in the command chair on shifts at all times. Yes, the moment those codes come in, whoever is in that chair is going to take a few seconds to react, a few more to realize what they’ve got is a live system, maybe another minute or two to notify the others, and then it’s shoot time. The targets will be at least one base on each continent just to collapse the grid, then the rest before the Titans can regroup and move. If it’s done right, then there could be just enough shock and confusion as those nets go down to allow for a whole series of positioning shoots before the Titans even realize where they’ve been hit from. By that time there could be enough impulse energy bouncing around, along with God knows what other bizarre effects from both the Lens energies and the collapse of the Titan nets, that they may be unable to get a fix on Hector. Remember, the commands to shoot will be short numerical commands sent in nano-seconds through the orbiting genholes’ out-systems. Titan ships will go after those gates first, and probably be even more confused when they see only gates. Krill knows she needs a fast clean sweep. I expect her to do her job.”