Empyrion I: The Search for Fierra (36 page)

“And the second we climb out of the lift—BLAMMO! You can talk about us in past tense.”

“If we wait here any longer, discovery is certain.”

Treet whirled to Calin. “Listen, we've got a little snag here. See if Nho could help us out. Is there anyone waiting for us down there?”

Calin appeared about to protest, but nodded once and grew very still. Her eyes glazed over slightly as she entered that other dimension where she and Nho rendezvoused. Just as quickly, she was out of it. She drew a breath and the spell snapped. The trance lasted only seconds.

“Well?” asked Treet, genuinely fascinated.

“Nho does not see death for us,” she said.

“What does he see? Grievous bodily harm? Imprisonment? Torture?”

“I can't say more.”

“It is enough,” snapped Tvrdy with finality. “We go now.”

Treet nodded, and they gathered themselves and dashed across the open chamber toward the nearest lift. Other corridors joined the chamber and as the lift came up, withdrawing its barrier field, footsteps sounded loud in one of the adjacent passages. “Hurry!” whispered Treet. “Someone's coming!”

The others were pushing into the lift when a guide clothed in Saecaraz colors came flying out of the passage. He stopped instantly, a look of horror washing over his eyeless face, made a desperate signal to Treet, and then fled back into the corridor.

Treet made to duck into the lift. There was a shout and the sound of a small explosion. Out of the corner of his eye, Treet saw an object flying toward him. He looked and saw the guide shoot out of the passage, skimming through the air. The man screamed and clutched his chest, flames and blood sprouting from a ghastly hole. The body fell hard, skidded into the center of the chamber, and lay sprawled in an inert heap. Smoke rose from the corpse's clothes, while blood pooled on the stones beneath it. Another shout. Closer. Treet dove into the waiting lift, the barrier field snapped on behind him, and the capsule dropped.

“What was it?” Tvrdy eyed him with concern as he climbed back to his feet.

Grim-faced, Treet answered, “I think your man just took a hole in the chest to save us.”

Tvrdy nodded. No one else spoke. Finally Pradim broke the silence. “We'll get off three levels above Horizon and take another way to the Archives. They will know where we're going otherwise.”

“They probably already guess,” said Treet gloomily. The vision of the mangled body still filled his eyes.

“If we can make it to the doors, they cannot reach us without decoding the locks.”

“Or blowing them off their hinges,” Pizzle piped up.

“You
are
a cheery fellow, aren't you, Pizzle?”

“Just thinking out loud,” he said.

“The doors are shielded,” offered Pradim. “We will have some time once we are inside.”

“
If
we can get inside,” said Treet. “What if I can't remember the entry code?”

“Start remembering now,” said Tvrdy as the capsule slowed and slid to an abrupt halt. “Or there is no point in going further.”

The lift's barrier field
snapped off with a pop. Since Treet was nearest the door, he stepped out first, tentatively, ready to dive back in. But the long, arched passageway was empty. At a distance of thirty or forty meters, the tunnel divided, the left-hand side bending away and down, and the right fork continuing straight until losing itself in darkness.

Pradim pushed past Treet and flew to the fork, motioning those behind to hurry, then ran into the downward-bending tunnel. Treet pushed everyone ahead of him and followed, allowing Tvrdy to bring up the rear. After many branchings and turns, Pradim stopped to listen. There were no sounds of the chase; no one was behind them.

They pressed on and in a few minutes came to a rectangular room with a round railing in the center. In the floor below the railing was a hatch. From the debris on the floor and the cobwebs hanging in filthy sheets from the pipes in the ceiling, it appeared that no one had entered the room for decades. Pradim opened the hatch and dropped through the hole. One by one the fugitives followed. A steel ladder joined the two levels, the lower one of which appeared to be a water conduit of some size, though dry and apparently unused.

Large grated drains opened in the sides and bottom of the conduit at regular intervals of twenty-five meters. Pradim counted them as they passed each one and stopped at the twelfth. He reached up and tugged on the grate, and surprisingly the heavy steel cover came off without effort. Pradim tossed it aside, and it bounced soundlessly. Plastic, thought Treet. He wondered how many other such doctored escape routes existed throughout Empyrion's endless tangle of byways.

Blind Pradim hoisted himself up into the oval opening and turned to lift down his hands to Calin and Yarden in turn; Pizzle came next and then Treet and Tvrdy. They crawled on hands and knees in near total darkness for an eternity. Treet's kneecaps and the heels of his hands grew tender and then sore and then painful before the conduit angled upward slightly and then entered a brightly-lit room containing a row of enormous valves—all peeling paint and rusting.

Directly above the valves was a circular opening with a steel ladder leading to a hatch like the one they had dropped through earlier. Pradim, wasting no time, grabbed the first rung, pulled himself up, and disappeared through the hatch. When Treet joined the others, he emerged to find himself in a closet just off a main corridor. Pradim was missing.

“Have you remembered the code?” asked Tvrdy in a tense whisper.

“I think so. We'll soon find out.”

Pradim came soundlessly back and motioned for them to follow him. They entered a blue-tiled corridor, and Treet recognized at once that they were near the Archives guard station. In a moment they turned a corner. Two Nilokerus sat leaning against the wall, their legs out stiff in front of them, weapons clutched in their hands. Although their eyes looked straight ahead, they did not see the fugitives hurry past.

“Dead?” wondered Treet aloud.

“No. Sonic immobilizer,” explained Tvrdy. “They will tell those after us that we did not pass this way. Still, we must hurry; they'll only be restrained a few seconds.”

Treet turned his attention to the first set of doors, walked to the lock plate, and studied the pentagon of lighted tabs. “Here goes nothing.” He raised his index finger.

“Wait!” Yarden pushed up beside him. “I can help you remember correctly.”

“How?”

“Shh! Close your eyes and concentrate on the tabs.”

Treet closed his eyes and tried to think of how he had pressed the code tabs before. All he remembered was walking through a succession of doors, dreaming of what might be locked away on the other side of the last one. He distinctly did not remember pressing the buttons. “Sorry,” he said.

“Concentrate! You pressed them correctly once. Your mind remembers. Picture yourself pressing them in sequence. Feel the tabs.”

Treet closed his eyes once more, but now all he was aware of was the nearness of Yarden Talazac and the warmth of her breath on his neck. “It's not go—” he began, then felt her cool fingertips on his closed eyelids.

“Picture it exactly as it happened,” she said softly.

Treet saw himself approach the big doors, saw his hand reach out for the first tab, was aware of Calin beside him and the ridiculous priest behind, watching nervously—he had not noticed that before—and felt again the surge of excitement at what lay ahead. He saw the first tab as his finger moved toward it.

The sound of pounding feet echoed in the corridor behind them. “They're coming!” said Pizzle.

“Got it!” said Treet and pressed the first lighted tab. The light went out.

“Go on,” said Yarden calmly. “You will remember.”

Treet closed his eyes and again felt her fingertips on his eyes. “Okay!” He pressed a second tab and the light went off. “Two down, three more to go.”

“Get on with it!” squeaked Pizzle. Their pursuers sounded closer.

Treet raised his finger, and the third tab blinked off.

“They're almost on us!” cried Pizzle.

“I'm doing the best I can!” replied Treet through gritted teeth.

“They're here!” shouted Pradim as a squad of Invisibles rushed into the guard station behind them. He pulled a cone-shaped device from the folds of his yos, moved to the doorway, and aimed.

A fizzling crack split the air, and the cone device exploded in a shower of sparks in the guide's hand. Pradim turned toward the others and raised an empty sleeve. Where his hand had been, only two nub ends of clean white bone remained. His face went gray, and he lurched forward. Calin grabbed him and pulled him away from the open doorway as a second shot sent chunks of the door frame ricocheting around them.

“We're going to be killed!” screamed Pizzle.

Treet stabbed at the fourth tab, and it went off. “I remembered!” he hollered as he smacked the last button. The locking mechanism clicked open. Treet and Tvrdy attacked the door and heaved it open a crack.

Firebolts streaked the air. Scorching metal and stinging hot debris pelted into them. Somehow they all shoved through the slim opening at once and threw themselves at the door to close it as sparks and cinders rained in upon them.

Treet remembered the next code easily—it was a simple variation on the first. He stabbed the tabs, the lock clicked open, and they all pressed through and shouldered the door closed behind them.

“That was a little too close,” said Pizzle, his body shaking as much as his voice.

Yarden and Calin stood with Pradim, wrapping improvised bandages on his raw stump. But there was little blood—the weapon had cauterized the wound. The guide's face had gone dead white, and his body trembled oddly; he seemed not to know where he was.

“The doors will slow them down,” said Tvrdy. “Until they find the code.”

“How long?”

“Who can say? Rohee is the only one who knows it—besides you.”

“Would he give it to them?”

Pradim moaned. The pain was beginning to hit him. Calin sat him down and took his head in her hands. She spoke to him in low, whispered tones, and he slumped forward. “He will sleep for a time,” she said.

Tvrdy nodded gravely and said, “I am certain Rohee knows nothing of what is taking place this night. He would not move against another Director like this. At least he would observe Directorate Conventions. But Jamrog might dare to use other means to gain entrance.”

“Such as?”

“They could put a code-breaker on the lock,” offered Pizzle. “With only five code digits it would take a good computer just a matter of minutes to click through all the permutations.”

Treet turned on him. “Whose side are you on?”

“We ought to know all the possibilities,” Pizzle replied, unrebuffed. “Don't you think?”

Tvrdy agreed. “Such devices exist.”

“Then we have only a few minutes. We'd better get moving.”

Tvrdy lifted Pradim onto his shoulders, and the fugitives fled through the succession of doors as quickly as possible and at last entered the Archives. Tvrdy stepped across the threshold and lay the unconscious guide down, covering him with his outer cloak. Then he turned to stand in quiet amazement, gazing at everything around him. “It is like looking into the past,” he said in hushed tones.

“Sure,” said Treet. “Take the tour later. Right now why don't we try to find these vehicles you say we can't live without, and we'll be going.”

Tvrdy stepped lightly down the concentric ring of ledges onto the floor of the Archives, found a pathway, and disappeared into the welter of junk piled with haphazard care throughout the vast expanse.

“Okay, everybody,” called Treet, “spread out and make a noise if you see anything that looks like it might put some distance between us and those goons out there.”

“Look at all this stuff!” shouted Pizzle as he dove into it. “Just like the old Smithsonian!”

Yarden chose a pathway and moved off quickly. Calin knelt over Pradim, laid her hands on his head once more, and then joined Treet. “Nho helped us once,” said Treet. “Would he do it again?” Calin nodded and grew still.

“This way,” she replied, striking off toward the middle of the room.

Fifteen minutes, and two mystical consultations later, Calin stopped and pointed to a row of shroud-covered humps next to the great doors that opened beneath the landing platform. “Hey!” cried Treet. “Everybody! Over here!”

Pizzle stumbled up. Tvrdy and Yarden, who had also heard Treet's cry, arrived moments later. Pizzle went to the first hump and yanked off the shrouds, stirring a veritable fog of the fine, gray powder. When the fog subsided he was leaning against the hood of a strange machine, grinning. “Nice, don't you think?” He sounded like an antique car dealer showing off his latest acquisition.

“What is it?” Treet peered doubtfully at the elongated red-orange machine before him and at its two blue-and-black companions standing a little way off.

“Transportation,” said Pizzle grandly, adding, “I'm almost sure of it.”

Tvrdy squatted to peer at the underside. “What do you think?” asked Treet.