The Secret City Read online

  Those, however, were but mental adjustments. My body was also gifted with valuable new motor skills, but it had needed time to assimilate them. Some of these skills had involved matters of self-defense. The law against Thorans possessing complicated machines was so obdurate that the Nuum had developed a paranoia against allowing any such eventuality by any means. Over the years, they had grown to fear wearing personal weapons lest the Thorans rise up and seize them. Instead they had taken to carrying what amounted to a short stave, which could be expanded at need to a length of several feet, and in some instances even transformed into a sword similar to a foil. Given that I had fenced a bit in college, it was this that the Library had taught me to use, although when such skills were called into action, it was my superior strength and reach that saved me as much as my swordplay.

  Nevertheless, I had returned to fencing after I was transported back to the 20th century, albeit my discipline was spotty and for long periods I did not practice at all. Now I had picked up the stave (as I called it) again, sparring at first with whichever crew members would agree, but soon I found a more regular opponent: Sanja, whom I had thought at first to train, but whom I quickly learned was more likely to teach me.

  She was especially adept with a staff, repeatedly sweeping me off my feet.

  “You don’t think we fought sandclaws just with knives, do you?” she asked leaning on her staff. “Don’t feel bad. I’ve been doing this since I was three.” She leaned down to help me up. “And I’m faster than you. This is a lot easier than running on sand.”

  Easier to run on, perhaps, but a lot harder to fall on.

  Despite being the captain, Maire interfered little in Skull’s command, if at all. “He’s been in charge longer than I ever was,” she told me when I remarked upon it. “He knows what he’s doing.” Whether she knew what he was doing, she did not say, but he did seem to have a definite destination in mind. I reminded myself that I was no longer the captain and had not been for nineteen years by their reckoning. Even then my tenure had been quite brief. In short, our course was none of my business.

  We had been traveling at a greater than usual altitude, a precaution against a chance encounter with another vessel. For Farren to presume that Maire would make her way to The Dark Lady was an obvious deduction. We knew not if he would risk open action against us, or what mechanisms he might even be able to utilize this far from Dure, but he had surprised us once. When we began steadily to descend, therefore, it could only be because we had reached Skull’s unspoken goal.

  It was well after sunset, and from our original height we had been able to spot a few isolated patches of light on the ground, settlements in the wilderness, for we had left civilization far behind. We were gliding over a land of broad valleys and rolling hills dotted with young forests. Rivers and streams were plentiful. It reminded me of what colonial America must have looked like. Even here, however, the people had light and heat, for these basic needs were centrally distributed, not dependent on any of the personal technology that the Nuum had forbidden. One such patch of light was growing more distinct as we approached. The crew began to bring crates up from belowdecks.

  Timash accosted Skull for a quick word. “How are you going to set down in the dark? I can’t see much, but I can see a lot of trees.”

  “We’re not,” Skull said. “They know we’re coming. We’ll put the cargo down on gravity pallets and they’ll unload them. Then they load on their trade goods, we take up the pallets, and we’re on our way.”

  “What kind of trade goods?” I asked. Given the limits on technology and the isolation of this village, I was honestly curious about their trade base.

  “Mostly fresh food. Replicators are all right, but this tastes a lot better.”

  I gave him an appraising look. “Mostly fresh food?”

  He glanced at Maire, who gave a little grin and nodded.

  “Mostly fresh food, some small machines…”

  “Skull,” Maire said.

  “Guns are small machines,” he replied sheepishly.

  “Guns?” I repeated. “Where in the world do they get guns?”

  Maire grasped my arm. “They make them, silly. They’re not smart weapons or anything, not telepathic, but they’re better than the bows and arrows these people are allowed to have. This is dangerous country.”

  I thought about this for a moment. “Then why are they exporting them?”

  “Because this is a dangerous planet,” Skull put in. “And someday we might want to take it back.”

  His sentiment violently echoed by the sudden sounds of gunfire.

  Had I any lingering doubts over Skull’s leadership, they were swiftly dispelled. “Take us over the village! Five hundred foot altitude! Marsh! Ready the floodlights! Landing party assemble!”

  His words had not ceased to echo and the deck was already swarming with purposeful ants racing to and fro in a seemingly mad froth that concealed a drilled and disciplined order. I could swear I actually felt the ship abruptly change course to take it over the settlement, from which the crack of pistols still sounded at intervals. The horizon shifted roughly below us, and suddenly steadied again.

  As we watched, more lights began blazing down below. I could see the occasional muzzle flash, all coming from inside the village, but what they were shooting at was beyond me, lost in the darkness. But not for long.

  “Marsh!” Skull shouted. “Floodlights!”

  And there was light.

  The landscape became a stark contrast of brilliantly-illuminated fields and razor-sharp shadows. Even at our height, it almost hurt the eyes. We heard shouts and cheers erupting from the buildings while the lights scoured outskirts of the settlement.

  The village was under attack—but from who? Or what? All of us were frantically scanning every yard of exposed land, but nothing could we see. Whatever the Thorans had been shooting at, it had vanished from one instant to the next.

  “Bring us down to one hundred feet,” Skull directed. “And move the floods outward. Make sure no one’s waiting for us.”

  His orders were carried out at once, and we hovered for what must have been half an hour, the lights criss-crossing the trees and fields and nearby river at random angles and intervals. At one point we startled a large lizard, a monster of a fellow the size of an alligator, but he slithered into the shadows before anyone could even think of firing on him. We saw no humans, no breen, no kind of marauder that might have the audacity to raid a brightly-lit area full of Thorans. At least it had not been a thunder lizard; the small arms the villagers could have mustered would have done little but annoy him. The villagers themselves remained barricaded, silent since that first barrage of cheers, doubtless using our floodlamps to watch the perimeter as closely as we.

  Finally Maire pushed herself away from the gunwale. “Whatever was out there, it’s gone now,” she announced. “I think it’s safe to go down.”

  She was the captain and did not need Skull’s consent or even his acquiescence, but she understood his position and had no wish to undermine it. He quickly nodded and called over Mr. Marsh, his second.

  “Send the landing party with me and have the men finish the loading. Don’t send anything down until you hear from me, and keep the lamps working.” He turned to us with a wry smile. “I assume you’re all coming?”

  We landed our gravity pallets in the clearing and made every effort to be noticed as we disembarked, the better not to be shot at. We need not have worried. A welcoming committee awaited us, armed, but not hostile. Our searchlights still wandered aimlessly over the surrounding terrain, making deep shadows, filling them with light, and taking the light away in a random pattern that was likely to cause a headache for anyone watching them too long.

  Skull walked up to the group and gestured vaguely at our surroundings. “Looks like we arrived just in time, Ceda.”

  Ceda had a revolver in his left hand and eyes that seldom stopped moving. Like most Thorans, he was short and slight, but there
was a hardness to him and a purpose in his movements that his city cousins lacked, and his thoughts indicated a no-nonsense attitude. Pioneer stock. It made me like him.

  “We’ve been having trouble of nights,” he said. “Mostly animals, but a woman disappeared a week ago, and we haven’t found a trace of her.”

  “Stingers?” Skull asked. “Plant-men, maybe?”

  I had never heard of either “stingers” or, more ominously, “plant-men.” I made a note to ask Maire later, or perhaps the Librarian, whom I had kept under wraps recently and whose company I missed. Still, Skull was not the only man who guarded his secrets. I was yet unfamiliar with most of The Dark Lady’s crew, and while their captain trusted them, there was no reason for me to show all of my cards. Concealing the Library from casual view had served my purposes more than once.

  Ceda’s gaze stopped on Skull, as if to emphasize the point he would make. “An animal would have killed her and dragged her away. There would have been blood, and tracks. A plant-man would have sucked her dry.” His tone said that Skull should have known that, did know it, and was foolish even to voice such a question. I wondered who the woman had been, and his relationship to her.

  Skull accepted the implied rebuke with a nod. “The Nuum would come in like we did, except they’d be firing on you. So you must have raiders in the area.”

  Maire leaned over to me. “Raiders are roaming bands of bandits. They live off of what—or who—they can steal.”

  I had intuited as much, but since Maire knew little of my own era, perhaps she thought such an idea foreign to me. Under other circumstances, I might have playfully chided her for it.

  Ceda shook his head, and the others in his party looked grim. “This isn’t raiders. Raiders run in, or they ride, they grab what they can get and run away. This has been going on for a while. And raiders aren’t invisible. We’ve caught our share over they years, or found their bodies. We haven’t even seen whatever’s out there, let alone killed anything. Whatever they are, they aren’t raiders. And they probably aren’t human.”

  His thoughts were more precise than mere words. When Ceda said “human,” he meant more than Thoran, or even Nuum. In my short time in this era, I had seen animals that walked upright and spoke like men—evolutions like Timash, experimental hybrids like the breen, and mutations like emotionless Vulsteen. Ceda’s “human” encompassed even these. But if the marauders were not men, and they were not animals, then what in Heaven’s name were they?

  Chapter 16

  A Quiet Interlude

  We were not soldiers, not the cavalry swooping in to reinforcement the brave settlers beset by Indians. We could not fight Ceda’s people’s battles for them, even though we stayed an extra night, hovering like a dark angel awaiting the emergence of evil to smite it with every mighty sword our host could muster. In the end, however, it was not our fight; we scheduled another visit in four months’ time, and I know I was not the only one wondering what we would find when we returned. At my urging, we gifted them with a spare spotlight, in addition to the raw materials for which they had contracted with Skull originally. In return, I asked only for one of their sidearms. It felt good in my hand, familiar, and rode on my hip after The Dark Lady’s shop had made me a holster.

  It was not until we were airborne once more and secure in our cabin that I was able to ask Maire about the source of those weapons. She knew I was not asking for the location of the foundry.

  “Nineteen years ago, you left your pistol in the hands of a Thoran who worked for Lord Farren.”

  My mouth fell open. “I had forgotten that. I never knew the man’s name, but he rescued me from Farren’s greenhouse after I killed his tiger spider robot. He tried to persuade me to stay, but I was dead set on finding Hana Wen. And I did leave the Webley with him.”

  “Yes, and that man was a member of the Thoran resistance. I don’t know the details, of course, but apparently he managed to smuggle the gun out of the city to where it could be taken apart and studied. It’s not complicated. Pretty soon it was being reproduced and shipped all over the place. Now Ceda and his people make them, too. My intelligence service knew about the guns, but I managed to keep them quiet, for the most part. I imagine Farren knows about them, too, but I’ve never heard of anyone ever being caught with one, let alone that we ever found any of the factories. Like I said, it’s a big planet.”

  “I remember now. When I gave him the gun, you would have thought I had bestowed Excalibur.”

  Maire stared. “Bestowed what?”

  I waved it off. “Never mind. Long story.” I was trying to come to grips with the idea. “So I did manage to make a difference after all. Thanks to my gun, the Thorans can defend themselves.”

  Maire snorted. “Well, I wouldn’t say they could hold off the Durean navy, but it’s more than they had before. Those people back there would certainly be dead without them.”

  Smiling lazily, I reached for her. “I did a good deed, regardless, and that makes me feel good about myself. Let me share that with you.”

  She made a play of fending me off. “You’d want to share with me anyway. That’s all you ever want.”

  “Am I going to have to explain to you again just what ‘honeymoon’ means?”

  Reticent as I am to discuss Maire’s and my more intimate interludes, I must admit that I would soon have reason to be glad that we had those moments together—for it was going to be a very long time before we were able to enjoy each other’s company again.

  We fell from the sky less than an hour later.

  Chapter 17

  A Catastrophic Defeat

  The first impact almost threw us out of the bed, but so drowsily tangled were we that we were saved that indignity, at least. I fancy myself a man of action when the need arises, but Maire was up and dressed while I was still extricating myself from the covers, and gone before I could find my boots. The ship shook again with a horrific crash and my boots started to slide away on the suddenly uneven deck.

  Outside the scene was the controlled chaos of men who had seen storm and battle and met them head-on. They ran by in every direction, brushing past me with the tolerance of men who respected my position but dismissed me as not a sailor, not part of their well-oiled machine, and I did my best not to impede them.

  Timash and Sanja were at the extreme bow, probably where they had been sent to stay out of the way, since ordering them to their cabins, while sensible, would have been useless. They did not notice my arrival, their attention being focused on the sky.

  “What happened? Are we under attack?”

  “You think?” Timash snapped. “Whoever it is, he’s armed to the teeth. I don’t know if the shields can take this much longer.”

  The Dark Lady’s shields were—or had been twenty years ago—designed more to fend off bad weather and keep anyone from falling off the ship than to defend against an attack. It was obvious improvements had been made—I had once disabled another ship’s shielding with a single ray-blast, and we had already taken two.

  “It’s coming back!” a crewman shouted from mid-ship. “Port bow!” Whether those terms were still in use was debatable, but that was what I heard, and I knew what they meant, but it was still several heartbeats before we spied anything. The Lady’s eyes saw much further than we.

  And when “it” came back, it flew.

  Not literally; I mean its speed was breathtaking. It was almost more of a black streak than an object; even the Lady’s computerized firing systems—we had firing systems?—could barely track it. A series of pale flashes followed its path, but could never catch up. One bright orange blip appeared from its nose and an instant later our ship rocked again as the ambusher roared overhead, and any hits we scored with our small arms were likely as much attributable to the fact that our shots were wildly spread as to any marksmanship. For all of that, we caused no noticeable damage.

  “What the hell is that thing?” The question came not just from our mouths, but echoed around the de
ck. Whatever it was, we had no doubt it was coming back, and we could neither fight nor flee.

  “Librarian!” This was no time to keep any of our resources under wraps. He materialized instantly.

  “I have no idea who it might be,” he said in an insanely reasonable voice. “Not only are advanced tactical spacecraft beyond my ambit, but my records are nineteen years out of date.”

  “Spacecraft?” Timash repeated.

  “As limited as my abilities are, I have scanned enough to extrapolate that the ship attacking The Dark Lady is capable of attaining at least sub-orbital levels, if not actual spaceflight. We are, to use one of Keryl’s colloquialisms, a sitting duck.”

  It hardly mattered if the expression itself made any sense, the meaning was clear before he said anything. A sudden unaccustomed sinking feeling and a quick glance over the side told me that Maire and Skull had reached the same conclusion. We were going to ground.

  Under most circumstances, this would have qualified as a suicidal move, as we could not possibly hope to abandon ship before our attacker returned and either destroyed our ship or strafed us without mercy. But in my brief glance overboard, I had seen that we were descending toward an abandoned city wherein we might hope to find shelter. As the tense moments passed and there was no further outcry from our sensor bays, I risked another look.

  It was a scene from an opium smoker’s dreams. But for the ruler-straight boulevards that crossed the landscape, I would never have guessed it for a human habitation. Thousands of hemispheres in varying sizes, grey with age, were laid out almost as far as the eye could see, some evincing jagged cracks running up their sides so wide that I wondered how the structure could stand.

  We were falling more swiftly than was surely safe, and it was but seconds before we were among them, the tallest seeming to grow over our heads like colossal mushrooms whose stems we could not yet glimpse.