The Warrior Within Page 9

  And that’s why you brought him with you?

  It occurred to Karsman that bringing Steck along might have been the smart thing to do.

  It wasn’t, Strategist assured him. Now your supplies won’t last as long. You’ll be forced to turn back sooner. And while you may have food, you don’t have enough water. The smart thing to do would have been to shoot him in the head. You still could.

  No thank you, said Karsman.

  Suit yourself.

  Do you have any other suggestions?

  Shoot them both?

  No, said Karsman.

  If you aren’t willing to do that, then the best option would be to go back and take out the soldiers. Use Diplomat to try to talk Magnan into helping you. Use the Muljaddy’s guards as a distraction while you deal with the other off-worlders one by one.

  Sometimes I think you’re as bloodthirsty as Warrior. Do you have any plans that don’t involve murdering anyone?

  Not at the moment, Strategist admitted.

  Fine. Then we’ll do it my way.

  “—Karsman!”

  He realized that someone else had been trying to talk to him.

  “What?”

  Steck and Mera were looking at him.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I got distracted there for a moment.”

  “Which way do we go now?”

  He saw that they had come to a crossroads. The passage they had been following continued onward, but two other tunnels led off to either side. He hesitated. The one to the left must run under the Road. The chances were good that it would simply emerge in a building on the other side, leaving them little better off. But the one on their right ran toward the dark-side desert. He had no idea what was out there, but he still clung to the hope that the passage might eventually bring them back to the surface.

  “This way,” he said.

  “Are you sure? What if it’s a dead end?”

  Karsman held up his hand. “It’s not,” he said. “Feel the air currents? This has to go somewhere.”

  “What’s that sound?” Mera asked.

  He listened. After a moment, he heard it—a low murmur, almost too faint to hear at all.

  “Wind?” he said. If it was the wind, that meant there was an opening somewhere up ahead. For the first time, he began to think his plan might actually work.

  “Maybe,” said Mera. She sounded unconvinced.

  * * *

  The sound grew stronger as they walked. From a barely heard whisper it grew to a murmur, and from a murmur to a muted rumble that seemed to issue from the tunnel itself, re-echoed and distorted by the blank metal walls.

  The side passage ran, as far as Karsman could tell, directly perpendicular to the Road. The perpetual twilight made it hard to get much sense of distance, but he guessed that they must have covered more than a kilometer already. From time to time he stopped, listening for any sound of pursuit.

  He heard nothing from behind them, but the noise ahead was growing steadily louder and more distinct. It reminded him of something, but try as he might he could not put a name to it. Whatever it was, it wasn’t the wind.

  At last, without warning, the narrow passage widened. The floor became a walkway and the walls retreated on either side. Between the edges of the walkway and the walls was empty space, with a cool breeze blowing up from unseen depths below.

  Karsman sometimes had the impression that the Builders had set out to build their cities along the same general lines as human-built structures, but had neglected to put in any of the details needed to make them actually habitable. In this case, the missing details included handrails on a walkway spanning what appeared to be an abyss of unknown depth.

  Mera, who had been leading the way, was already standing on the walkway, peering over the edge in a way that made Karsman feel weak. Like Steck, she had a climber’s careless disregard for heights.

  “There’s something moving down there,” she said.

  With difficulty, Karsman forced himself to follow her onto the narrow bridge and look where she was pointing. In the dim light it was difficult to be sure, but he thought they were at least twenty meters above whatever constituted a floor here. He had an impression of motion, as if something below them was in continuous, rapid movement.

  Finally the pieces fell into place. “Water,” he said. “It’s running water.” What they had been hearing was the noise that the water made as it rushed through a broad channel underneath them, the sound amplified and distorted by the strange acoustics of the tunnel system.

  Mera shook her head in disbelief. Karsman realized that neither she nor Steck could ever have seen water in such quantity before. Neither had ever seen a lake, much less a river. The grudging trickle of water that issued from standpipes hooked to the Temple’s water supply might well be their only experience of moving water.

  A faint, acrid chemical smell rose from the space below. “Water or something,” he amended. “Some kind of liquid anyway.”

  “But what’s it for?” Steck had joined them on the walkway. He pointed his handlight over the edge, and they watched the dot of light dance on the surface of the moving water. It was flowing fast, Karsman saw, a shallow river in full spate.

  “Power,” said Karsman. He had been trying to think why the Builders would need to move large volumes of liquid from one side of the Road to another. He remembered what the soldier had said. “It’s self-powering,” the man had told him. “All it needs is a kick.”

  “It’s a working fluid,” Karsman said. “The system must use the heat differential across the Road to generate energy.” In his mind’s eye he could picture the liquid flowing from sun-side to dark, giving up its heat and then recirculating back to be warmed again. It was inefficient, of course, but who needed efficiency when the planet gave you energy for free? And once set in motion, the system was self-sustaining, capable of generating energy indefinitely. With enough energy to spare, each city could even kick-start its neighbors. He imagined the Builder cities coming alive one after another in a chain reaction that followed the Road all the way round the planet. All it took was that first burst of energy from an outside source.

  “So is it dangerous?” Mera asked. She was staring down at the water as if fascinated, her eyes following the beam of Steck’s handlight as it skated over the surface.

  “Not unless you fall in,” Karsman said. He put out a hand and pulled her gently back from the edge. “If you go over the side, there’s nothing we can do for you.”

  “I’ve got ropes,” Steck said.

  Karsman shook his head. “It’s moving too fast. You’d be gone in seconds.” He had a momentary, horrible vision of Mera being swept away, arms waving uselessly as the current carried her downstream. “Just keep to the center of the walkway.”

  He took his own advice, stepping away from the edge. He was feeling oddly light-headed and wondered if the fumes rising from the liquid below were starting to affect him. This is not a good place to linger, he thought.

  “Let’s keep moving,” he said. “We’ll cross this bridge and then try to find a place to eat and rest somewhere up ahead.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Someone was shaking Karsman. He squeezed his eyes shut and rolled over, hoping that whoever it was would leave him alone.

  “Karsman, you have to wake up.” The voice sounded vaguely familiar. Someone tugged at his foot.

  “All right, all right,” he grumbled. He rolled back and felt a jab of pain as his ribs banged against something hard. He opened his eyes, frowning.

  He had a vague recollection of lying down to sleep in a small chamber with just enough room for the three of them to curl up on the floor. On the far side of the walkway, the passage had changed from a single narrow tunnel into a maze of linked rooms and corridors that branched and divided according to some obscure fractal logic of their own. Here and there were ramps, but they led only down, never up. After hours of wandering, exhausted and all but lost, they had shared a little food and then lai
n down to sleep.

  Now, however, he woke to find himself in a tunnel more cramped than any they had seen before, little more than a crawlway. The ceiling was only a short distance above his head, and his shoulders almost touched the walls on either side. He felt a sudden rush of claustrophobic panic.

  “Karsman. Come on.”

  He rolled awkwardly onto his stomach and pushed himself up on his arms. As he did so, he saw that there was a screen on the end wall of the cramped space, blank but glowing faintly with its own internal light. He put out a hand to touch it and it fluoresced briefly, a momentary glow tracing the outline of his fingertips.

  “Come on,” said Mera again, pulling at his foot once more.

  “I’m coming.” He pushed himself backward.

  From the narrow crawlway, he slid into a larger passageway. He stood up clumsily, feeling dazed. Someone was pointing a handlight at him, the glare blinding in the semidarkness. He raised a hand to shield his eyes.

  “Where the hell did you go? We’ve been looking for you for hours,” said a voice from behind the light.

  “I, uh—” He stopped. Where had he gone? He realized that he had no memory at all of leaving the room where the others lay sleeping and no real sense of how much time had passed. He felt as if he had only just closed his eyes.

  “I was looking for a way out,” he said.

  “Alone?” said Steck. “In here? Are you out of your mind?”

  “We don’t have time for this,” interrupted Mera. “We have to get out now.” She grabbed his hand and began to pull him along the passageway.

  “What’s happening?”

  “The water is rising. It’s probably filled the room where we were sleeping by now.”

  He was aware of a new sound, an almost musical thrumming accompanied by muted liquid splashes and gurgles. He touched the wall and felt a distant vibration through his fingertips.

  It just needs a kick, he thought. And he had helped to make that happen, helped to bring the vast machine back to life. Now he was trapped inside it, and would most likely die in it.

  The air in the tunnels was close and humid, freighted with a heavy smell of chemicals. When he reached out to touch the walls, he found them slippery with moisture, little beads of liquid clinging to the polished metal.

  “This way,” Mera said.

  “Where are we going?”

  “A way out,” she said. “Maybe. We found it while we were looking for you.”

  She seemed to know where she was going. For Karsman, the featureless rooms and passages had begun to blur into one and he no longer had any sense of where they were, but Mera never hesitated. She confidently called out rights and lefts while Steck and Karsman stumbled along in her wake, doing their best to keep up.

  The machine-city had clearly entered a new state. Before, the catacombs had been nearly silent. Now, they were full of noise and activity. Strange sounds echoed and re-echoed through the empty spaces: a distant groaning as of massive objects moving, muffled detonations, the hiss and burble of running water finding new channels to flow through. Karsman guessed that the water was on the rise everywhere, feeling its way through the maze. At first it was no more than a thin film on the metal floor, just enough to make them skid and slip as they ran. Soon, however, they were splashing through several centimeters of liquid. It became a constant struggle just to stay upright and keep moving forward. Karsman wondered how they would manage when it rose higher still. Would they be able to keep going once it reached their knees, or their waists? He tried not to think of the dark flood swelling behind them, rising and rising until it filled the entire complex. All it would take was an increase in the flow, or one wrong turning leading to a dead end, and they would be finished.

  At last, just as he had started to believe that the labyrinth was endless, he turned a corner and saw, far ahead of him, a tiny rectangle of orange light. It took him a moment to recognize it for what it was: sunlight reflecting on a metal wall. After the gloom of the catacombs, it seemed shockingly bright.

  Mera, who had gone ahead, was standing a little distance farther down the corridor. “You see it?” she said.

  “Is that—”

  She nodded. “We did it.”

  They stopped and waited for Steck to catch up, listening as he splashed his way toward them. The new corridor sloped upward at a shallow angle. Where Mera stood it was already clear of the water, and Karsman began to believe that they had really found the way out.

  At the far end there was a right-angle turn and another ramp leading up to an open doorway. Through the opening, Karsman could see the hazy orange of the sky, with a few ragged dust clouds pushed along briskly by the wind. He breathed a sigh of relief.

  They climbed the final ramp in single file, with Mera leading the way. As they reached the doorway, she stopped abruptly. Her shoulders fell and Karsman heard her mutter a curse.

  “What’s wrong?” he called.

  She didn’t answer him, but simply shook her head, as if not believing whatever it was she was seeing. He climbed the last few meters and stooped to peer over her shoulder.

  They stood on the brink of an abyss. From the doorway where they stood, a stub of walkway only a few meters long projected out from the wall, a narrow tongue of steel that led nowhere. All around them rose sheer cliffs of metal, the walls of a vast rectangular space open to the sky above. Below them, liquid filled the bottom of the basin. From the way that the water boiled and splashed against the walls, Karsman guessed that it was filling rapidly.

  “It’s gone,” said Mera. “The rest of the bridge has gone. We’re cut off.”

  * * *

  “There was a bridge right here,” Mera said. “It went all the way across.” She gestured toward the opposite wall of the space. Karsman could just make out what looked like stairs, climbing the distant wall in long zigzags.

  “You’re sure this was the place?”

  “Everything’s changed,” said Steck. “There wasn’t any water at all before.”

  The doorway where they stood was set in one face of what Karsman now saw to be a colossal pit dug deep into the earth. The sides were faced with Builder metal, gray steel cliffs etched with the same enigmatic glyphs that they had seen throughout the catacombs. A thin line of red dirt showed at the top of each wall where it met the soil of the desert.

  As his eyes adjusted to the daylight, Karsman saw that there were numerous openings, both large and small, in the metal of the walls. Huge pipes vomited liquid into the gulf below, the feathery streams of falling liquid turned to muted fire by reflected light from the clouds above. Shallow slots and embrasures pockmarked the metal in random patterns. Here and there were dark rectangles that he guessed to be other doorways opening onto who knew what other labyrinths. Delicate bridges of metal leaped out over the void from each of the doorways. A few, all unreachably distant, spanned the entire space. Others curved back on themselves or ended abruptly and inexplicably in midair. The whole thing struck Karsman as almost gratuitous in its sheer immensity, in the chaotic profusion of features whose purpose he could not even begin to imagine. Yet even this was, he reminded himself, only one tiny part of a still more grandiose project, a project of literally planetary scale. For the first time, he had an almost visceral sense of the ambition that must have driven the Builders, accompanied by a still more profound feeling of his own insignificance.

  It was clear they could not remain where they were. The corridors behind them were already flooded and the basin below was filling. Sooner rather than later, the place where they stood would be submerged as well. And what then?

  Even if they could somehow stay afloat in those turbulent waters, he doubted that they could ride the rising water upward and emerge from the pit that way. There was no way to tell how high the water would eventually rise. If it stopped even a few meters short of the top of the pit, all of them would drown. Steck and Mera, children of the desert who had never seen open water, would be the first to die. Karsman, who
had learned the rudiments of swimming on his travels, might last a little longer. In the end, though, his strength would fail and he too would go under.

  He eased past Mera and walked cautiously to the end of the truncated walkway, then turned and looked up at the wall behind them. The rim of the pit was closer than he had thought, not much more than fifty or sixty meters above them.

  “Could you climb that?” he asked Steck.

  The smaller man shook his head. “I don’t think so. It’s not like the towers. See how smooth the metal is? There are hardly any handholds at all. And the towers at least have seams that will take a cam. I don’t see anything like that here.” He kicked moodily at the bag at his feet.

  It was the answer Karsman had feared. The towers of the city had been, in a certain sense, tamed. Decades of patient exploration and scavenging had left many of them festooned with permanent ropes and even ladders. Routes had been mapped and marked, anchor points and ringbolts welded into place. Even adventurous climbers like Steck would make use of the existing infrastructure as a jumping-off point to reach the higher levels. But here they faced a wall of virgin Builder metal. Karsman doubted that it had ever been studied, much less climbed.

  “I’ll do it,” said Mera. She shrugged off her wind jacket, then bent down to pull off her boots. Karsman and Steck looked at each other.

  “Are you serious?” Steck said.

  “Why not? I’ve free-climbed towers taller than that. At least we’re out of the wind down here.” She rubbed her hands briskly on her coveralls. “Let’s see what you’ve got in that bag.”

  While she and Steck rummaged through Steck’s gear bag, Karsman turned his attention to the water again. It was only about five meters beneath them now, the surface troubled and choppy. Waves slopped against the metal walls of the basin, sending up bursts of spray.

  When he turned back again, he saw that Steck’s bag had been eviscerated, its contents spread out on the surface of the walkway.

  “You’re sure that’s all you need?” Steck said.