Sep's head came up. Jarlik growled, "Tree? Tied?"
Ardan shook his head. "That part's not relevant right now. I'll tell you about it later, if we get the chance. No, I knew I had to be a captive of the Capellan forces. The one thought in my head was escape. So when I heard voices at the end of the corridor—where we were just now when the explosion went off—I went the other way. There's a set of doors on the right, down the hall, and through there is the lab I found.
"Inside were cryogenic cubicles, and in one was the body of a man who could have been Hanse Davion. I went right up to it and looked closely. The face was exactly the same. Except for one thing. Hanse wasn't behind it"
Sep nodded. Jarlik rubbed his chin, and Ref narrowed his eyes.
"Like a life-mask? When someone wears it, he looks just like the original, but the expressions are never quite right."
Ardan looked at Ref. "Yes. Exactly. The lines were right, the shapes were correct, but the total impression was wrong. That face had never been...been lived in."
"O.K. That's what you saw. What sort of condition were you in when you saw it?" Sep, as always, was down-to-earth.
Ardan considered carefully. "I had been terribly ill, but I was recovered enough to be able to walk quite a long distance. Nothing hurt very badly. I was alert. Unusually alert, as if I might have been given some sort of stimulant. I've wondered...Indeed, Melissa Steiner and I both wondered, if I was supposedto see that substitute Hanse." He shook his head.
"I was tired, of course, after moving about so much. I quickly grew weak, and barely made it back to bed. I went out at once, and the next thing I knew I was being rescued by Lees Hamman."
"So the Meds thought you were crazy. It doesn't quite make sense," said Jarlik.
"Well, there were more problems than that. I'd had a bad experience, back a way, and it had been preying on my mind. That was all mixed up with the thing I'd seen in the lab, and they decided that everything was hallucination. Part of it was, and I admit that freely, but the rest was real. As real as the three of us sitting here. As real as those ‘Mechs." He gestured toward the waiting trio.
"And you can't prove it, unless there's something on that set of holos you made off with," mused Ref. "So what are we going to do now?"
"We'll return to the moon before anyone knows we've been here, and then come back here tomorrow, officially.Or, I should say, I want youto come back tomorrow and formally request a salvage operation from the officer in charge of the garrison. I'd better stay in the drop and keep quiet If I'm connected with the request, they're not going to cooperate, even with an officer of the Guard in Hanse's own private courier ship."
"You think there's any chance of finding anything at all in that mess?" Sep asked, gesturing toward the pile of rubble.
"It would be at the farther edge. The thing was falling in on itself and slightly leaning this way. It should be some fifty meters from where the back wall was, fairly in the center of the left wing. The holos were in a cabinet that should have protected them well. I remember snapping the lock of the door—a very nice double catch. The entire cabinet was built together with a desktop below. The whole thing must have been about two meters wide by three tall. Made of solid metal with duraplast doors. It should be easily detectable with a metal detector. Of course, there's a lot of metal in that pile. But just maybe..."
"We'll give it a try," said Sep. "And if that doesn't work, we'll think of something else. I trust your judgment, Ardan. If you say you were alert, then, by damn, you were alert. You say you know where the hallucination left off and the reality began, and that's good enough for me." She rose and dusted the dried grass from her uniform.
Jarlik groaned to his feet, too. "Better make tracks before it starts to get light. We need to skip out of here so we can come back all nice and tidy and official."
Ref offered Ardan a hand up. "I never expected anything like this when Sep volunteered me for this duty. I wonder what sort of reception we'll get from the commandant tomorrow. Duke Michael's men are back in charge of garrisoning the Folly, now that the counterinvasion is over."
It turned out that Ref had hit the nail on the head. The commandant, a Hasek-Davion officer detached from the Syrtis Fusiliers and commanding a combination of Eridani Light Horse and Davion regulars, seemed indifferent, if not actively hostile.
"I have a world that has been fought over, trampled, detonated, and otherwise disrupted within a centimeter of its life. The civilian population is devastated, and there are more demands on my time and manpower than I can possibly attend to. And now you ask me to go dig in a booby-trapped installation for something you think might be there? I beg your pardon!"
He looked simultaneously irritated and nauseated.
"Then you will not object if we borrow some detection gear and go look for ourselves," Sep half-asked and half-stated.
The commandant looked startled, but gave in with a weary shrug. "I suppose not. But do be cautious. Those engineers are good at their job. The booby traps are not to be taken lightly."
Assuring him that they would take care, Sep led her companions on their way as quickly as was polite. It seemed safe to add Ardan to their group when they stopped at the DropShip for their transport, an all-purpose ground-effect machine. They hid him beneath a pile of probes and detectors, and nobody gave them a second look as they left the port city.
They travelled quickly, talking very little. It was lucky that the commandant had not insisted upon sending one of his officers along as a precaution. It would have been rather awkward, trying to explain how they came to be investigating an installation whose booby trap had already gone off. The coincidence would hardly be overlooked.
They drove south this time, circling around the southernmost finger of the Yaeger Mountains, then up through the foothills along the eastern coast of the peninsula. The marks of the war were everywhere, having left great burnt slashes of black on the green-tan grassfields. Houses broken like dropped eggs. Fields gouged out with the tracks of 'Mechs who had battled it out.
Ardan found himself thinking of that other ruined landscape, and the child in the valley. The memory was sad, but the horror had gone. The wail of the child had grown faint, and the pain, though never to be lost entirely, had become bearable.
They came around a low growth of trees. Before them should have been the ruins of the installation, but where the piles of debris had been, there was now a deep depression.
"Damn!" grunted Jarlik. "Was that part of the booby trap, or did the bedrock cave in under the shift in weight?"
They pulled up and piled out of the vehicle. A gigantic, saucer-shaped hole lay at the spot where the building had stood. They ran to the edge and peered over it.
Twenty meters below them, the ferrocrete and everything else had been returned to something like their natural state. Nothing recognizable remained among the dusty tumbles of dirt and rock.
Somehow, Ardan was not surprised. He was beginning to feel like a pawn on a gigantic chessboard, moved here and there, his perceptions a part of the game, his will irrelevant.
"I think this was deliberate. Some secondary effect meant to occur if the primary booby trap was triggered. Someone wanted that building entirely lost to human examination." He laughed harshly. "They did a damn good job."