“There were still a few breaths of air,” she said. “There was an emergency tank inside. And some water. They must have had Protectors spending time in there controlling the processes. But it was a pretty near thing!”
“It was you killed the Protectors?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
She pointed to her feet. “I threw my boots at them. I had plenty of time to take aim and work out the trajectories and kinetic energies. They were moving like slugs. And I do still have quite a good mathematical brain.”
“You are a Hero,” said Vaemar. “There may, with good fortune, now be only one Protector left.”
“Yes. Why didn't it attack as well?”
“I suspect the answer is that those Protectors were the last parents of the Morlocks I just killed,” said Vaemar. “Despite the increase in their sapience, they were still Morlocks, still fairly newly changed, and mad with rage. The remaining Protector is the original, the one that brought us here. It has no children of its own, so it can make more Protectors without prejudice to its plans, and, at least until it comes to understand that human reproductive technology could still give it children, its behavior is not unclouded by parental emotion and anticipations. It is the one mature and partly experienced and educated Morlock Protector, obviously by far the most dangerous, and if we do not kill it we will be no better off than before. If it does not come to us, we must hunt it down.”
“That would be quite hopeless, even if we had a functioning weapon. You saw how swift and strong it is, and it is armed too.”
“You would have us ssurrendirr, Dimity-Hero?” Vaemar's human speech slipped as he pronounced the hated word. “Or flee? Urrr.”
“I think we have no choice but to press on. Explore!”
“Hero! Well said!”
“With caution. You have Chorth-Captain's w'tsai?”
“Yes! Let it regain honor in my hands!”
Dimity clicked the trigger of the beam rifle experimentally. It was still dead. “We will have to hope a Hero's w'tsai is enough,” she said.
“I had better lead,” said Vaemar.
Chapter 12
Mechanisms towered about Dimity and Vaemar. Dimity had, with Vaemar's help, improvised a breathing mask, which she hoped would keep out the smell of any tree-of-life, from the tatters of what had been the top part of her suit, and sealed the rents in the rest as well as she might with an all-purpose repair gel from Chorth-Captain's belt. They had obtained a light from the same source. Tracking the Protector by the pain it was radiating had brought them this far.
“Fusion toroids,” she said, pointing. “The energy needed to move this between stars must have been vast.”
“I am glad our kinds did not know too much about such energies in the past,” said Vaemar. “Think of a war fought with bodies like this as missiles.”
Something, too fast for human eyes to see clearly, scuttled away in the dark above them. “The Protector,” said Dimity. “Why doesn't it attack?”
“It was a Protector,” said Vaemar, “but I do not think it was the same one. Dimity, we have been too optimistic, I think. I do not think we have accounted for all the newly awakened Protectors. Perhaps its task is to watch us and report.”
They came to an opening into a vast cavern, filled with machinery.
Vaemar stood unmoving for a moment, then he said, “There are… vibrations in the air… perhaps you cannot sense them… which tells me these motors may not be dead.”
“After scores or hundreds of thousands of years? Surely not?”
“Look at the cavities in the roof,” said Vaemar. “They appear to have been artificially dug.”
“Yes.”
“Except during brief eclipses, half the external surface of this body is always in sunlight, half in the darkness and cold of space. The temperature differentials on the surface must be very large. It is a problem and an opportunity in all space-engineering.”
“Yes. I see what you mean. That would give unlimited electrical power for tunnelling robots. They could extract and refine fuel.”
“It would not, perhaps, take much to keep the engines simply ticking over.”
“Would Protectors think like that?”
“I cannot know how Protectors would think. They are more like you than me. But I sense there is power here. This asteroid was overlooked for mining because its metallic content is relatively low. But I would guess it was metal-rich when the Protectors chose to make it a spaceship. I guess some automated or natural variety of mining worm has been tunnelling and mining in it for a long time.”
“A machine refining its own ore and making its own replacement parts,” said Dimity. “We have nothing outside fiction that can do that for so long or on such a scale. Self-sustaining machinery, processes still carrying on after a million years. And we have no information that Cybernetics was a Protector talent.”
“Obviously, they could have set themselves to acquire such a talent. Dimity, this gives us a glimpse of what mature Protector technology can do! I do not like it… And look! There are lights. They could be solar-powered engines ticking over. Or powered by long-lived fission or fusion processes. Doing essential maintenance, ready to set off a fusion reaction when needed. There are many ways hydrogen could be collected and stored, for example. Or perhaps it has been completely closed down and our Protector and Chorth-Captain have reactivated it.”
“It is as well, as you say,” said Dimity, “that this moon was not properly explored before the end of the war. It could have been a super-weapon.”
“It still could be. I do not know if we should approach anything critical too closely. It may provoke a response.”
“I think we have to provoke a response. The status quo does not favor us.”
Dimity stepped forward cautiously. She gave a cry of fear and surprise. Vaemar leapt, grabbed her with one arm and pulled her back. Then he advanced cautiously and pointed. “Nothing to fear too much. An active kzin gravity-sled. Heavy-duty Naval model. Chorth-captain must have brought it here. We can avoid its field.”
“I am sorry. I am a little rattled. You can handle one, Vaemar?”
“Of course. I have flown one since I was a kit. It was one of the first things Honored Step-Sire Raargh bought when we were living in the farm country.”
“Then let us not avoid it. Let us use it.”
“To fly on? There is not much space for that.”
“To fly on and to fight with. Do you think the Protectors would let us use it? We could do great damage if we could fly. I am sure they would try to stop us.”
“Dimity, I think the God, whichever one has dominion here, has been good to us. You will have to move very quickly. I will board the sled. You will take the copilot's seat and hang on for your life, and pray that these Protectors still think like Morlock Breeders, jumping down on their enemies when they see us escaping. Now!”
Vaemar and Dimity leapt into the sled. From above, two Protectors sprang. As they did so, Vaemar's claws flashed at the sled's controls, flinging its motor into maximum reverse flux. The Protectors, directly above it, were flung straight up. One smashed into the machinery above them, and stuck among it, the other, as though swimming through air, reached the edge of the field and fell onto the sled. It clung with one hand. Vaemar had time for one slash at the hand, removing three fingers and reducing its power of purchase. Desperately he continued to slash at the leathery arm and snapping beak with the w'tsai and his claws. Dimity grabbed the flight-controls of the sled. They skimmed back along the corridor as Vaemar finally cut the Protector's grip. It changed hands. Vaemar grabbed the controls and stopped the sled, keeping the field focused on the Protector. Dimity screamed in its ear and it let go. It flew upwards, seemed to grow smaller and vanished into the blackness above.