He’d been walking for nearly an hour, and he had reached the end of the construction crew’s amateur spelunking. Dom was probably the first human being to stand on this ledge since the commune was finished, years ago. He was certainly the first one down here since the Diderot Commune had been abandoned, and that was at least a decade.
The commune complex had been his for less than a year, and it was barely operational. Dom was certain none of his people had been down this way yet; there was too much to do, too much to fix, and too few people. The commune was originally constructed to house ten thousand, and Dom only had around fourteen hundred people. Less than a thousand when he subtracted children, wounded, and elderly dependents.
Dom ran his hand over the wall. Someone had used a laser torch to carve a list of initials in the obsidian.
His fingers traced the carving. It was the most permanent thing that the construction crew had done. This carving, down here where the weather never changed, on a planet that was—for most practical purposes—tectonically dead, would probably outlast other signs of the human presence on Bakunin by a million years.
That made Dom think about the Dolbrians, who were supposedly responsible for this planet. Maybe that’s what all their mysterious sculptures, mounds, and trenches were—cosmic graffiti.
Dom surprised himself by smiling.
His old boss, Dimitri, wouldn’t appreciate that sentiment. Him with his almost spiritual worship of the Dolbrians.
But the idea struck a chord in Dom. After all, isn’t that all anyone wanted? What was life but a frantic attempt to make some sort of impact on an indifferent universe? An effort to scrawl “I was here!” as big as possible?
The Dolbrians had left one hell of a mark. People were reading their graffiti a megacentury after they’d died out. Or vanished. Or whatever.
Dom turned and faced the dark cavern. He didn’t adjust his photoreceptors to get a better picture. He stayed watching the darkness.
What kind of mark was he going to leave when he died?
His breath puffed out in a cloud as he said, “Brother, what are you doing to me?”
For the first time in a long while he was thinking in terms beyond the corporation he’d birthed.
“Mr. Magnus?” said a voice from behind, down the passage. Its owner was panting heavily.
“Mr. Magnus, sir?” the voice’s owner ran up behind him, boots echoing across the rocky floor. Soon another plume of breath joined Dom’s above the abyss.
“Yes?” Dom turned and looked at a short swarthy individual. Having an onboard computer meant he knew the names and history of everyone who worked for him. The gentleman next to him had run the third-shift carpool and dispatch back at GA&A. His name was Desmond.
“We’ve got the aircar you wanted out of stores. It’s ready on the pad.”
“The contragrav?”
“Yes.”
Dom nodded. “Can we spare it?”
“We’ll get by.”
Silence stretched. Desmond remained standing next to him.
“Anything else?”
“Well, uh, sir—”
Dom turned around so he could face Desmond.
“We’ve installed the holos and the field generators. There are people who’ve seen that and feel we’re much too vulnerable.”
“The generators were supposed to compensate for that.”
Desmond nodded.
Silence stretched and Dom finally said, “It isn’t enough.”
“The commune still feels too exposed. A lot of us are nervous, especially with the potential threat.”
Dom nodded. He had purchased this bolt-hole less than a year ago, and there had been precious little time to prepare it.
With Klaus out there, tins commune really wasn’t safe. Klaus was behind a systematic targeting of GA&A personnel. If he became aware of the location of Dom’s commune, he would eradicate it. Klaus would need only a fraction of the force he had used against GA&A.
Dom needed some way to make things more defensible.
He nodded to himself and started leading Desmond back to the fusion generators and the elevator to the commune. “Yes, Desmond. I think I have a solution, something I should have thought of earlier.”
He spent a few hours drafting a plan, organizing an engineering detail and a construction squad, getting the ball rolling. That done, he delegated authority and satisfied himself that things would run fine without him again.
When he took the aircar—contragrav, not vectored thrust—Bakunin had settled deep into a moonless night.
Dom lifted off from a snow-dusted carpool on the fringe of the commune building. He let the computer handle the initial trajectory of his craft as he watched the commune recede.
The building was a massive, white, truncated pyramid with a skirt made by the hydroponics greenhouses. The structure filled the floor of this nameless valley. The craft rose, and there was a shimmer as he passed through the defensive screens of the commune. The force field dome here was not designed to block lasers or plasma, or to fry the delicate electronics of a missile—the building didn’t have power systems that could cope with that. This field was designed with more passive thoughts in mind: reducing the stray infrared and EM signature of the commune town to that of the rest of the mountain around it.
There was another shimmer, and suddenly the commune vanished as Dom’s craft passed through the floor of the holo screen. A dozen independent projectors ringed the valley, raising the image of the valley floor above the top of the commune. From this close it was obviously a projection, but from an overflight, another peak, or a satellite, the commune would be invisible.
Sadly, both the holo and the defense screens were jury-rigged measures that took two full Bakunin days to implement. Dom didn’t want to leave until both were operational. They were last-minute compensations for the fact that he had never planned for the commune to be a target. The commune was housing for displaced refugees. Corporate wars almost never extended to targeting employees. Corporate battles were battles for assets.
Dom hadn’t anticipated Klaus.
As the dead snow-capped peaks receded behind him, he hoped his late measures would be enough to hide his people.
He should have anticipated this. The whole commune should have been built underground, with adequate ground-air defensive weaponry.
Dom turned away from the mountains and decided it was too late for regrets.
* * * *
Dom flew his contragrav in a wide circle around Godwin, above the hardwood forest that camped in the shoulder of the mountains. The forest seemed an afterthought, a result of the congruence of the equatorial “heat” and the chain of mountains blocking the moisture blowing off of Bakunin’s world-ocean. It seemed almost providential.
The people who believed in Dolbrian intervention on Bakunin pointed to this as a sign of their intervention. They also pointed to the fact that, by all rights, Bakunin should be an iceball, but a combination of its proximity to its weak star, an infinitesimal axial tilt, and a thick moisture-laden atmosphere made the equator on the planet’s one continent fairly comfortable. One side of the mountains was lush, one side desert, and the dead tectonics of the planet meant that it had been this way—except for the slow erosion of the mountains—almost since the Dolbrians existed.
Dom shook his head. He was still thinking of ancient civilizations.
It was Dimitri. Dolbrians were one of Dimitri’s little obsessions. And, unless one of Dimitris’ annual medical procedures—this year a kidney, the next his liver, nerve grafts, bone marrow—had gone wrong recently, Dimitri was in charge of the TEC mission that had cost Dom GA&A.