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Chapter Twenty-Four

Sieglinde, unlike the Breedmaster, had changed minimally, if at all. Her face was as long and pale as Sigrid's own, but where Sigrid's was all planes and angles, Sieglinde's was rounded, her eyes dark blue to Sigrid's colorless gray, her hair pale gold and worn in plaits like a tribeswoman's. The rest of her was curved as Soldier women seldom were, with hips designed for bearing children, and breasts made to be heavy with milk. Sieglinde was beautiful, in short, and serenely conscious of it.

"Sigrid," she said, standing in the doorway, apparently oblivious to the Breedmaster's presence, "I'll never understand why you keep chopping your hair off like that. It makes you look perfectly awful."

One tended to forget the exact and inimitable experience that was Sieglinde. Sigrid took a moment to shift her mind to the necessary level, then said, "You omitted to mention my arrival to Cyborg Rank Bonn, I see."

"Oh," said Sieglinde. "Well. He was busy, you know. And since he isn't family . . ." She shrugged her magnificent shoulders. "I've had another baby since you left. Cyborg this time. His name is Rhun. He's very good stock. Excellent potential."

"Indeed," said Sigrid. Titus said nothing. He was amused, Sigrid suspected. Or bemused. Neither of his daughters was exactly standard Soldier issue.

Sieglinde was studying Sigrid with a peculiar intensity. "How fast are the contractions coming?"

Sigrid sensed rather than saw Titus' stiffening to attention. Breedmaster or no, he was no match for Sieglinde in detecting the exact progression of a woman's pregnancy. It made Sieglinde a useful assistant, although Sigrid was better in the actual process of assisting a birth.

"It's early yet," Sigrid said to her sister. "Contractions every quarter-hour or so. I have at least twelve hours before I'll be needing the delivery room."

"Less than that," said Sieglinde, "with all the climbing and scrambling you had to do to get here. It was good for you, really, but strenuous, and the altitude you had to go to was not very safe. You ought to be lying down."

"Soon," said Sigrid. She turned to Titus. "Breedmaster, consider. The Bandari must be stopped. I admit my fault in letting them get as far as they did. My being under guard, and under oath to one of them who was of Soldier blood, does not excuse the delay."

"You swore oath to a Bandari?"

Sigrid bore the Breedmaster's icy glare with as much equanimity as she could muster. "I allowed myself to be trapped into it. I further allowed myself to break it when it suited my purposes."

"Ah," said the Breedmaster. "Tell me, then. How would you stop the Bandari?"

"Bring out a Hellburner," Sigrid said.

Neither of them failed to comprehend, which spoke well of them as Soldiers. Sieglinde even nodded, slowly, as if she had been reminded of something that she had been trying to remember.

Titus did not change expression at all. "Granted that we keep that last relic of Old Sauron in vaults so deep and so well guarded that even Cyborgs are never told of them. Granted that you found those Vaults as a child, and extracted the secret of what they held from those whose discretion should have been less susceptible to young ferocity. Granted, even, that we have in Cyborg Rank Bonn both the commander of troops in the Citadel and the holder of the keys to the Vault. Granted all that, and supposing that the bombs have not deteriorated into uselessness in the three and a half centuries since they were laid down—does this crisis merit so extreme a solution?"

"Our technology," said Sigrid, "is about to disperse into the Pale. Our Citadel is about to be attacked by a horde of cattle—and even if we drive them off, the fact remains. Our myth has been breached. Our commanders can be deluded into wild drillbit chases across the length of the Valley. Our innermost stronghold can be invaded by determined, if suicidal, commandos. The cattle have made fools of us, Breedmaster, and shown our every weakness. Haven will never forget it. Unless," she said, "we prove to them that, like gods, we slept, and let mere mortals have their will with us. Now we wake. Now we loose the lightnings."

"Prettily phrased," Titus said, "as befits a sojourner among the cattle."

Sigrid refused to be baited. "Bonn has the key to the Vault. He also has as much knowledge of the Vault's contents and its uses as any Soldier on Haven. If even one of the bombs is still usable, if he can see it armed and placed—"

"Nuclear weapons are filthy," Sieglinde pointed out. "We'll slag this whole end of the valley, and the fallout will take care of the rest. Including us."

"I don't think so. I was told there were smaller weapons. Breedmaster, I don't know, but the Archive Caste will know. Archivist Gimli has a son who knows, even if he wouldn't tell me," Sigrid said. "And isn't it about time we found out?"

"Find out. Yes, we should know. Still," Sieglinde fretted. "It's so dangerous. What if it doesn't work?"

"We find alternatives," said Titus before Sigrid could speak. "Yes, I have thought of this solution. It's final, there's that to be said for it—if it works."

"I don't think we have much choice but to try it," Sigrid said. "Get the Bandari out of here, loaded with our machines and armed with weapons they found in Nûrnen—the machines, too; they were already using them to make arrows and bullets and it won't be long before they can make other things too. Give them time, and you can be sure that the next War of the Seven won't take so long to settle."

Titus nodded. He was looking less gray, she noted. More like his old, cold self. He turned back toward the TAC. Its screen, ignored, had reverted to default: a blank and featureless square. He slapped a button on a pad next to it. "Cyborg Rank Bonn."

The Cyborg's voice sounded out of the keyboard, no more mechanical from that source than from his actual throat. "Breedmaster."

"The TAC Room," said Titus. "At your earliest convenience."

"Noted," said Cyborg Rank Bonn. "On my way."

 

Bonn was, if anything, more conscientiously perfect a Cyborg than Titus. He greeted Sigrid with minimal surprise and no evident censure. Sieglinde received the inclination of the head due a woman of the Race; Titus, a glance that determined his mental and physical condition, his relation to the two women, and his degree of emotional investment in this meeting. Sigrid assessed Bonn in the same way. Mental condition good, physical condition excellent, relation warily respectful, emotional investment neutral, but potentially strong considering the principals of this meeting and their location next to the TAC. Something, he could not help but know, was up.

Titus wasted no time in preliminaries. "How soon can you open the deep Vault and arm one of the bombs there?"

Bonn's brows went up toward his hairline—absolute astonishment. He was, as a trooper might say, floored.

Foolish of him, Sigrid thought. The expedient had occurred to Titus as it had to Sigrid. Bonn, keeper of the key and the Vault, should have considered its use long since.

He was of course aware of this. "I . . . had given the matter some thought," he said. "As extreme as the measure would be, however—"

"Extreme measures are necessary," Sigrid said crisply. The tone of command in a woman's voice brought him around to face her, drawn instinctively to attention. "How soon can you do it?"

"I would have to run tests," Bonn said. "Several hours at least. A day, two . . ."

"T-day or Haven day?"

His mouth, which was open, snapped shut. "Several hours, Cyborg. Ten to twelve, by best estimate."

"Make it six," she said.

He blinked once. "May one ask the reason for the urgency?"

"Assault rifles in the Pale," Sigrid answered. "Caravans of our machines and our munitions, leaving Nûrnen continually since the commandos failed to take the inner Citadel."

Bonn was a soldier-Cyborg. He needed no more than that to salute her, nod to Titus, incline his head to Sieglinde, and disappear.

As soon as he was gone, Sieglinde applauded. "Oh, that was wonderful! He dotes on you, you know. He'd do anything if you asked."

"Nonsense," said Sigrid. "He understands military necessity."

"He understands that you asked, and he could answer." Sieglinde smiled. "He could sire your next son. Don't you think?"

"I think that we should get a move on," said Sigrid. "Breedmaster, by your leave?"

Titus nodded. His eyes had a cold glint of what might have been humor. "By all means. The larger labor room has a communications installation concealed behind the west wall."

Sigrid had not known that. "That will do well," she said.

 

The labor room was a familiar place—too familiar, and yet perfectly strange after so long in the wilds of Haven and among the horde. As the door of its airlock sighed shut, Sigrid caught herself sighing with it, and gravitating toward the surprising comfort of the hard flat cot. The chair that she would be using later was waiting, covered with a sterile sheet. The instruments were laid out, also covered to signify that they were sterilized.

It was—yes, it was comforting. She would be safe here.

Her son would be born as a Soldier should, in a sterile, pressurized environment, assisted by those of Soldier blood.

At the moment that was only Sieglinde. Breedmaster Titus would come later, or so she surmised. He would be curious to see the outcome of her experiment with the Bandari genepool.

Sieglinde was highly efficient and very skilled. She ascertained in a glance but little slower than Sigrid's that everything was in order. That done, she went to the west wall, which supported a row of shelves and a cabinet, and pressed a corner of the cabinet. The whole wall sank in to a precise centimeter deeper than the cabinet's depth, and slid aside.

There was a room beyond. Sigrid had never suspected its existence in this precise place, although she had postulated one like it somewhere in the stronghold, a secret reserved for senior Cyborgs and First Citizens since the founding of the Citadel. She forbore for the moment to inquire as to how Sieglinde knew of it. Titus had told her, of course, most probably after Sigrid went AWOL, when he had no other of his blood to whom to entrust the secret.

She also forbore, with an effort, to resent both Sieglinde's knowledge and her own ignorance. She moved away from the labor couch toward the hidden room. It was lit, if dimly—the light here was set for Cyborg sensitivity. To some degree the place resembled the TAC room: it had a desk, a chair, a computer, and a monitor. It also held a row of blank screens set in the wall, a set of unlabeled cabinets, and a glass case. In the case lay three objects: a gray eyepatch, a hand blaster with a green light glimmering miraculously on its charge plate, and a bound printout from a ship's library computer, opened to a random page. Her glance caught a line: "Towers fell and mountains slid; walls crumbled and melted, crashing down."

"Not if I can help it," she said aloud, in silence that had not been broken, possibly, in years. Sieglinde, behind her, said nothing, simply waited—like, Sigrid found herself thinking, an acolyte at an ancient Terran rite.

Well, and it was ritual enough—ritual of destruction. The rite of war in the Soldier sect.

She spared the cabinets and the case a glance, but no more than that. They were relics, both of them, and as close to sentimentality as Soldiers could ever come. Closer, she might have said before she saw them.

She went past them to the desk, moving heavily. The baby had dropped, and solidly. Not long now before it insisted on being born.

The box next to the computer terminal was a power source, the most reliable in the Citadel according to the Archivist Caste. It was independent from the rest of the Citadel. The birthing room computer, she suspected, was like it, an independent system, linkable with but not slaved to the TAC. And some day these will cease to work, because they will be myths. Titus is correct; we regard the TAC as the cattle regard their shamans.

She took a breath, which caught on a stronger contraction than heretofore, and sat in front of the monitor. After a brief pause, she flipped the power switch.

All screens, monitor included, came to life at once. Those on the wall were surveillance screens—part of the TAC, she realized. No wonder this room was a secret. The TAC room would be only its outer manifestation, and a much lesser one at that. This must be its heart—the central headquarters for its gathering of intelligence. Some of the screens showed nothing but a gray blankness. Most, however, were still functioning. They showed barracks—most empty, a few occupied by old men or young boys—and mess halls, empty at this hour. There were the women's quarters, rooms full of silent, grim-faced women and tired children, some of them wounded, some clearly under restraint—those would have been trying to escape.

There was the TAC room itself, and the Breedmaster in it, a gray and motionless figure. Only his eyes seemed alive, glittering as they fixed on the screen. He must know that he was being observed: he had told Sigrid where to go, if not what she would find there. He showed no sign of awareness that she watched. She would have been startled if he had.

Sieglinde reached past her, touched a key. "This sets a scan," she said. "I'll spell you when the baby starts to come. You won't be wanting to concentrate very hard then."

"Bet on it," said Sigrid.

Sieglinde laughed. "Oh, brave Cyborg! You'll have your baby in this chair, you think? I think not."

"I will if it's convenient," Sigrid said. While she spoke, she scanned the screens, which scanned the Citadel. There was a pattern, she observed: top to bottom, bottom to top, uppermost Keep to lowermost corridor and back again. There were blank spots, cameras out of order or blocked. There was a pattern in that. A hint—a suggestion . . .

She tensed. A contraction had caught her just then, but that was allowed for, and therefore ignorable. Something . . .

Sieglinde touched a second key and tapped out a brief code sequence. Sigrid noted its format. The screen she had been staring at stopped scanning and stilled.

There, again. Movement. Bodies in dimness, a glow of light that would have blinded Cyborg eyes, but must have seemed faint to the cattle who crept through the passage. From its timing and placement, and the rough look of its walls, it was deep down, probably at or near the bottom. The ones lower were not tracking. That was the pattern.

Someone was knocking out camera eyes. That took knowledge or damned sharp intuition, or maybe just good eyesight. Somehow they'd missed this one. There was a bend in the corridor, a sudden ascent up a crumbling stair. A room opened beyond. It seemed to be a storage room of some kind, empty now except for a few dusty objects—mess-hall gear, Sigrid thought, as her eyes made sense of the shapes. A couple of tables, a broken bench, a counter in front of a latched door. Either some optimist had thought the population of the Citadel would grow till it even filled the bowels of the stronghold, or a pessimist had figured on a retreat this deep, possibly from fallout; though she might be projecting that from her meeting with the Breedmaster.

Whatever the place was, it had seen the passage of feet: the dust was scuffed and in places polished clean, and the door at the end was ajar. The few furtive figures crept through in file, hunched and misshapen—carrying packs, she saw, and doing something along the wall: laying cable, from the look of them.

They were not moving like Soldiers. They were too slow, and too heavy on their feet.

Cattle. What were cattle doing in the deeps of the Citadel? Why would they be laying cable?

The answer came in a flash. The solution was equally swift. The computer's screen gave it to her. It was not the TAC, that computer. If the TAC was a Cyborg of computers, this was an aging nomad, arthritic and somewhat feebleminded, with an imperfect command of Americ.

It was, however, a computer, and adequate for what she meant to do. Its keys were peculiarly crisp to the touch, and much less worn than the TAC's. This machine had had little use, as if it were intended more for backup than for actual and continual function.

It was also on a battery that could fizzle and die without warning. If she had been a Bandari she would have cursed, then prayed, to cover all eventualities. She, Soldier and Cyborg, simply keyed in the first command as the screen prompted.

A file appeared. Its label was MT DOOM.

The computer bumped and ground like a tavern whore. Sigrid herself could process data faster—but these data she did not have, nor the capacity to execute them.

Abruptly the computer stopped. A message pursued the cursor across the screen. FILE LOADED. EXECUTE? Y/N

Y, typed Sigrid. And sat back, and waited.

 

Sapper knew quite well that he had let himself be separated from the rest of his party. It bothered him, but he was much more interested in what he was finding, what he couldn't stop to examine because it was time to blow it all to Hell and gone, but surely he could look at one more heating duct, one more loudspeaker. Technology that the Pale only dreamed of, so common here that the Saurons had indulged in double and even triple redundancy in even minor installations, like water heaters in private baths and shower cubicles that didn't seem ever to have been used, just kept in reserve for emergency.

His power torch was dimming. Suddenly he was very uneasy. He'd better catch up with the others before it actually went out—or before somebody caught on and sent a Soldier down here to investigate.

He made his way back to the corridor and paused to orient himself. That wasn't easy: Saurons built with a numbing uniformity, and seemed to think that posting signs was, unlike doubled water heaters, a needless redundancy. After some reflecting, he decided to turn left. He was bliddy late—the others would all be at the rendezvous, cursing him out. And with reason. The timed charges that they'd laid in the Inner Keep of the Citadel would go off soon. Too bad there hadn't been time to do more. Much more.

The passage divided without warning. He didn't remember any such thing from the charts he'd found in Nûrnen. He chose at random again, right this time, and found a stair. It led down to where he would meet the others.

 

Sapper's assistants were having a grand time of it working their way through the bowels of the Citadel. The sounds of distant gunfire, up in the Keep, had stopped long ago. How long have we wandered in this accursed warren? Rich-in-Virtue Beagle asked himself. From the lack of battle noise in the Keep it was obvious that the raid on the Citadel had come to disaster. Soon the Saurons would sniff them out.

Let Sapper's surprise be finished in time, Oh Lord!

Rich-in-Virtue gnawed at a piece of muskylope jerky—last piece. His canteen was empty, too. They were too close to their bolt hole to lay any more charges.

He caught up with the rest of the party. Where was Sapper? So few commandos! Fewer than twenty. Are we the Chosen, or the Abandoned?

He followed them into a large bare room, long abandoned, that must once have served as a mess hall. It still had a long table set up, and two more folded in a corner, and a couple of benches. Some wag had drawn a rough outline of a man on the wall, given him a single lidless eye, and stuck an arrow into it.

The looked around at one another in the light of Sauron lamps—magic lamps, the hotnots said; they were battery torches, actually—and took stock.

"Where's Sapper?" asked Shlomo.

"Please God," said Rich-in-Virtue Beagle. "He had a last thing he wanted to do. He sent us ahead."

"Nudnik!" spat the Bandari. "Schmuch! Shlymel! You left him alone?"

"There wasn't anybody there," the Edenite defended himself.

"There, now," said the woman in command. "That's enough, boys."

Where were the Saurons? Rich-in-Virtue asked himself.

"Here comes Sapper," Shlomo said.

Something changed in the air around them. The room rocked.

"My babies!" Sapper shouted. The room rocked again and dust began to fill the air, as Sapper danced a jig. "A fig for you, Saurons!"

He's mad! thought Rich-in-Virtue. Delightfully mad.

Suddenly the doors that slid, slid shut. Those that were on hinges were closing even as one of the engineers, quicker on the uptake that the others, bolted for the nearest. He made it—caught hold of it to muscle it back again—and grunted as it resisted him. The grunt turned into a howl: the door, closing inexorably, had crushed his fingers.

One of the women had better luck and more sense. She reached the door that they had meant to leave by, and thrust her rifle barrel in between door and jamb. The door groaned to a stop. She put her back into it, using it for a prybar. Her fellow survivors ran to give her a hand.

The door stayed stubbornly where it was, and the rifle's barrel was bending slowly but surely out of shape. The knot of commandos in the middle of the mess hall unraveled suddenly in a kind of controlled panic, some heading for doors, to beat on them or dash against them, some scrambling up to see if the recesses in the walls were windows, still others—those were engineers—examining the walls for panels, partitions, or any possible way out. All they found was solid wall and no exit, not even to the mess kitchen.

The room rocked again as another round of charges went off. Rich-in-Virtue noticed that Sapper was no longer dancing. He stood frozen in thought, his brows furrowed.

Rich-in-Virtue studied the walls to see how they might escape. The recesses were full of nothing but dust. "They slide, don't they? Open, I mean."

"They don't—" Shlomol cried.

Rich-in-Virtue was too busy watching the recesses become slots, and the slots extrude what looked like, what were, long narrow tubes to answer. Gun barrels?

Something hissed. It was faint at first, especially under the hammering and banging and cursing of the people trying to get out of the room which had become a trap.

Shlomo bar Meshulam gestured, and two of his cousins boosted him to their shoulders. He was fan Gimbutas, an engineer born and bred. If he could just see a way past the metal barrels or even just figure out what they were, he being a Gimbutas and all, maybe he could do something about them.

He leaned closer to the pipes. "Gas!" he cried.

Rich-in-Virtue Beagle could hear a faint hiss.

Gas. The word was as soft as the hiss through the tubes. A word from childhood stories.

"The Saurons are gassing us!" Shlomo shouted, flinging himself at the pipes, trying to bend them into shutdown. But the metal was ancient, stronger than steel; he dropped like a stone and lay gasping. Instants later, he convulsed and died. Others followed.

Hell will be like this for the Unvirtuous, thought Rich-in-Virtue Beagle.

Commandos were screaming, clawing at the walls, doors, anything that might let them out. Here and there, people were quiet. Some had already fallen and were not in convulsions because they had already died. Others withdrew into some fastness of the spirit, their eyes shut, their lips moving, their faces suddenly old.

The mist from the pipes poured down like water.

With a swift flash of decision that even to Rich-in-Virtue's dimming eyes held rage, some of the Bandari shot themselves rather than wait . . . rather than wait again. Some shred of memory teased at his fading consciousness, then was replaced by the figure of the Bandari commander.

He hadn't been sure of this Sapper, less sure than he was of any of the clever, wicked Bandari because of the man's idolatrous love for gears and fires and stinks. Let alone this harrowing of the Citadel, which surely must be blasphemy: Christ harrowed Hell, and suffering humanity was not so pure that it dared follow in His footsteps.

The Elders in Strang would never approve of this. And they'd be right. It wasn't much consolation that he'd never live to hear them thunder retribution against them.

Sapper was closer at hand, comforting as he stood before his people, straight as the very Eldest of them all. And he spoke in a tone that was soft and yet so eerily distinct that Rich-in-Virtue knew he was going to take it into the dark with him.

"Never again! Never again, our ancestors swore."

Sapper raised those skillful hands of his, bleeding now from the fight with one of the metal doors, the first and only time he'd ever lost such a battle. His voice rose in a battlefield bellow. "Yeweh's curse be on you and all your blood, Saurons!"

Then, more gently, "No, my little ones. Not, like Saul, with your own blood on your heads."

Those of the Bandari who still lived had dragged themselves near him. His rifle was automatic, a prize from the Saurons, and as tears streamed down his face, he used it to protect his followers from one last sin.

"My followers, my children. Never again."

As gunshots still echoed in the mess hall Sapper swayed and staggered.

I don't want to be the last one! Rich-in-Virtue thought. It didn't hurt as much to breathe if he lay as flat as he could. He was Elect, he knew that, but there were words a man ought to say at a time like this.

The Lord gives, the Lord takes, blessed be the name of the Lord. He watched Sapper as he might have watched an Elder—

The engineer cast one look around the chamber, his eyes lingering on the mechanisms killing them. Then he braced himself against the wall and drew a breath that should have killed him. For another curse? Rich-in-Virtue didn't think so.

"Sh'ma Yisroel, Adonoi Elohenu, Adonoi Echad!" He ran out of air on the last word and fell as a tree falls, not bending, giving away only his life.

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