From a height, the cliff did look artificial. Louis steered the flycycle close, then skimmed along the edge.
"This would stop plains apes," Roxanny said. "Not a flycycle."
"Nope. Do you feel lucky? Protectors are--"
"Territorial, yes, Luis. Wembleth, are we close?"
"Go more slow. Go up."
Louis took them up. "Here," Wembleth said when they were flying along the rim of the cliff. "Go left, starboard."
The tilted plain of grass might have been a lawn if it weren't so big. Patterns shifted restlessly on its vast expanse. Wind? Louis borrowed Roxanny's mag specs. With their aid he could make out thousands of creatures resembling yellow sheep.
Ahead, the rock barrier had fallen. Soil above had spilled after it. "Quake? Wembleth, what makes quakes on the Ringworld?"
Wembleth shrugged. Roxanny said, "Meteors?"
"I don't see a crater."
"Then try this, Junior. We have here a protector stronghold. What if some other protector wanted in?"
"Long, long ago," Louis said. A whole ecology, several varieties of grass and a puffball forest, had invaded the fallen rock and earth. "But that track is new."
It began as a series of scorched craters in the trees below the overgrown slope that had been a wall. The scattered dots became a dashed line of freshly chewed, carbonized earth as it rose up across the lawn and higher, into the curved walls of the Citadel itself.
"We weren't wrong about defenses," Louis said. "Something climbed this slope, and weaponry fired on it all the way. Wembleth, how did you find this?"
"Roxanny sent me out to look around. The slope looked dangerous.
Something
must have done all this damage. I climbed a tree for a better look. Look, it goes all the way through those holes in the wall."
Roxanny said, "Follow that path and we'll be safe. All the booby traps are already triggered."
"You sure? Good, then I won't turn on the sonic shield."
"You've got a shield of some kind? Stet, turn it on!"
"I was being sarcastic. Roxanny, it's crazy to go in there. That's a protector's castle. There's no telling what games he's--what did she call him?"
"Penultimate. The next-to-last protector on this sea of maps. There could be a million years of miracles in there. Louis, we can't turn back now."
It's easy to be a coward when you can't fight and can't run. Louis looked behind him, seeking an ally. Wembleth's posture urged him forward, as eager and impatient as Roxanny.
Louis flipped the sonic fold on. He couldn't see it working; they weren't moving at anywhere near sonic speed.
Dark animals had been circling the yellow sheep, hidden beneath the grass. Now they streamed straight toward the flycycle, snarling crazily. They looked like dire wolves.
They'd certainly stop Homo habilis who got this far. Louis skimmed above them, through cratered grass, following the path.
It was a time of surprises after ages of predictability. Proserpina brought the mag ship down at her base, and found:
No flycycle.
Everybody gone.
She found Hanuman among the fruit trees. He hadn't known that the flycycle was missing, but his guess was the same as Proserpina's. They ran for the mag ship and set it floating toward the Penultimate's Citadel.
On the path of destruction Louis was following, they found places where the Penultimate's own defenses had blasted away thick rock wall and left windows standing or fallen intact. The windows were hexagons about the size of a man. They were stronger than the stone. Diamond?
Louis could feel mechanical senses watching him.
He took the flycycle through a gap the size of a sailing yacht.
Sound struck at them. It was almost speech, a million angry voices yelling incomprehensibly, all muffled by the sonic fold. Light blazed at them, dimmed by the mag specs Louis had forgotten to take off. Behind him Wembleth and Roxanny both had heads bowed, tears running from their eyes. Louis looked for the nearest cover: a melted hole in a second wall. It looked too small for the sonic fold. He turned it off, screamed against the sound, went through, flipped it back on.
The roar eased, the light eased.
They were in a jumble of machinery, in a corridor twenty meters across and much higher. Some of the machines were tall and skeletal, like construction machinery. Many looked half-finished. The place looked like Tunesmith's workshop, or Bram's, but more crowded.
Roxanny said, "I was hoping whatever went through here shot out the defenses." She was rubbing her eyes. Wembleth seemed okay. But--
"That
stench!"
Roxanny said. "Like a circus!"
She was right, though "Luis" would never have seen a circus. Wembleth said, "It smells like Blond Carnivores running a troll drive. I don't understand."
It was bad enough with the sonic fold keeping some of it out. Louis asked, "Pak planet panthers? That might drive away breeders, that and the lights and noise. I wonder what this smells like to a protector? That unwashed crowd stench could be someone else's children, millions of them. Maybe a thousand angry protectors smell like this. That's it, it's a warning for protectors."
Roxanny said, "Us too. Time to q--"
Wembleth jumped from the flycycle, dropped a meter, and landed with bent knees. He ran, weaving between machines and parts of machines, following the dashed line of melted floor. He looked back at the flycycle and happily waved them on.
"I was about to say, 'Time to quit'," Roxanny said. "But let's follow Wembleth.
Right
behind him, Luis. No short cuts. I think he's right; we shouldn't get high enough to be shot at either. And don't get too close."
"Stet," Louis muttered. "No point in being right there when something cremates the poor bastard."
The scars of blasting led Wembleth around the curve of the corridor, then rose up a wall. He couldn't follow on foot. He waved the flycycle down and climbed up between them. He pointed past Louis's ear. "There, high up."
The blast trail had broken through, high up. Louis looked around Wembleth at Roxanny. She shrugged.
There wasn't any cover. Louis took the flycycle straight up and through and let it fall. A beam--not a laser, a jet of plasma--fired at the hole after they'd dropped below it, and followed them all the way down to cower in a maze of ramps. The wall collapsed under its fury, a dozen meters too high to harm the flycycle.
They were deep inside the faux mountain. This interior cavity was mostly empty space laced with a maze of ramps of Brobdingnagian size. Louis wondered if it had been intended as a training ground for warriors. If that, it was other things too. As Roxanny had guessed, there were wonders. Here was a line of crude machines floating by magnetic or gravitic levitation. There, light rays in a haze of dust bent through a scintillating focus. There were guns or instrument packages mounted where ramps crossed. They all looked ruined by heat.
Louis was tempted to stray off the path of destruction. Roxanny was right, a lot of guns had been shot to pieces here... but he could still feel sensors seeking him.
Later?
He floated across a broken ramp to a blackened flight of steps. It was fatuous to suppose that a death trap wouldn't repeat, yet Roxanny's optimism seemed to be working. A projectile weapon rained bits of metal on them, but the sonic shield diverted them all until Louis could drift the flycycle under a ramp. He left the path to veer around a fallen wall. Something exploded in a glare of light; the sound barely reached them.
"Wait," Wembleth said. "What's that?"
It was a war zone lit up like a holoflick ad. Rubble like a stack of pancakes slumped in the glare, soggy but not quite molten. It had been one of Tunesmith's service stacks. An attack laser on a wall high above them bathed the rubble in pearl-white light. As they approached, it burned out.
The stack still glowed white hot, and black at the top. Those float plates wouldn't fly after treatment like that. The stepping disk at its tip--
Hold that thought. "End of the trail," Louis said.
Roxanny said, "Yah. I'd say this is what we've been following, and I'd say it was armed. Down there--" She pointed at the foot of the stack. "What do you see?"
"More melted machinery." A glitter of lenses. "Laser cannon?"
"A weapons and shield package. It sat like a cap on that, that tower. It must have shot up everything that attacked it--"
"All but one, Roxanny. That last weapon got it."
"That last weapon just burned out ten seconds ago! Everything that's tried to hurt us is
damaged.
Luis, Wembleth, we have here a perfect chance to go exploring!"
That seemed a little too fortuitous to be credible. "You say burned out. What if it's just sputtering?"
"Your point?"
"Go home now. Stick to the path, but photograph everything. Work our way back. Study what we've got. Show it to Proserpina if we can't solve it ourselves--"
"Luis, what does any of that get us?"
"Might get us another way in," Louis said. "Roxanny, have you got a better idea?"
"Get out and look around. Luis, if we're on foot, we'll look like breeders. We
are
breeders. I don't think the defenses will fire at a breeder on foot," Roxanny Gauthier said.
"Breeders are naked. Get naked?"
"You're already naked."
"And you're already schitz." Louis turned the flycycle and started back. That last plasma beam had burned a nice big hole in the wall. It ran to floor level. They'd be safer leaving than they'd been coming in.
Wembleth gripped his shoulder. "Look. Plants."
Far above their heads, greenery dripped over the edges of a ramp. It did seem a funny place for a garden.
"We know a way out," Louis insisted. "One."
Roxanny too was gripping his arm. Her voice was soothing. "What's biting you, Luis? Look, this ramp is as wide as a racing freeway. Just take us straight up. If something attacks, we fall back to here, and that's back on the safe path. Stet? Go straight up."
The ramps had no railings. Louis didn't say so. Roxanny saw him as a coward, and somehow he couldn't stand that. He lifted the flycycle straight up.
Nothing fired on them.
A green jungle spilled over both sides of the upper ramp.
Roxanny said, "The guns won't fire on crops either. This was the Penultimate's food supply."
"You don't know any of that. You're betting three lives!"
"ARM detectives do that, Luis. This is our last chance to learn anything without Proserpina learning it too. And Proserpina is not my superior officer! Take us there, Luis."
"The jungle?"
"Yah."
He started to turn, and something found them.
The sonic fold rang like a great bell, and kept ringing. Louis shouted against the sound. He turned off the lift motor, and Roxanny had better be right! The flycycle dropped. In midair he passed out.
From the moment it came in view of the Citadel, the mag ship was observed. Proserpina worked to muffle the wavelengths reflecting from the ship. As they neared the mountain, something got through: projectiles stuttered toward the mag ship, then veered away. Light blasted up at them and also veered. Hanuman kept flying. It was all he could do while Proserpina fought the ship.
His path wasn't in doubt. He hoped 'Tec Gauthier had followed the chain of chewed landscape. Even if she had, she could still be dead in a hundred ways, and her companions too.
He asked. "Do they live?"
Proserpina didn't answer. Her fields delicately plucked a section of wall away. There was an inner wall, and she plucked that away too. Light flared and was gone. Hanuman was looking at something like a beehive. Proserpina took them in.
There were strong arms around Louis, easing him down to a flat surface. Everything hurt.
He was familiar with this pain: the injuries he'd been healing from, plus a whack on his jaw and a ringing in his ears. He opened his eyes. Roxanny was lifting Wembleth into the forward seat. Blood ran from Wembleth's nose and ears.
She shouted. "You awake?" He could barely hear her. "Here, help me with this." She lifted him into position. She was trying to hook Wembleth into the medical systems. "We had crash fields," she said, "but he didn't. He might have broken his back or his neck. Look, he's got a nosebleed."
"So do you," he shouted.
She looked at him. "So do you. I guess that's the sonics. Tanj, is he dead?"
Louis, with Roxanny supporting him, finished mating Wembleth to the medical system. Readouts flickered on. "He's alive," Louis said. "Trauma all the futz over his body. He'll feel like me when he wakes up."
"It's feeding him boosterspice, isn't it?"
That ancient trademark--"Yah. He's never had boosterspice before. I think he's old, Roxanny. He'll eat up the whole supply."
"Tanj. That would have been
my
boosterspice supply. All right, Luis, put your hands on the controls."
"We can't fly in this position. We should get into seats."
"I know." She set his hands on the flight stick and the keypad. She turned on the lift. Then she pushed him hard in the chest. He flew backward into space.
He fell two meters onto rock. A sea of pain washed over him. He couldn't breathe. He saw the flycycle lift, and pause.
"You're Louis Wu," Roxanny said, leaning over from the aft seat to meet his eyes. "You're a quarter of a thousand years old. You were the servant of a Pierson's puppeteer until you changed masters, and what you serve now I wouldn't care to describe--"
Groaning, Louis rolled to his knees, then managed to stand. He stretched up, but the flycycle was floating out of reach. The controls shouldn't have served other hands than his. Maybe Proserpina had hacked the security system so she could use it herself.