Authors: Christopher Rowley
Despite the fact that the light quickly built up to a fantastic brightness, the desert remained surprisingly cool for the first hour or so. Braunt and Jon were both forced to slip the big glare goggles down over their polarizers so they looked like huge insects rather than men. But to look outside with naked eyes now was to risk eye damage, possibly blindness. For a certainty, one would not see much in the tremendous glare generated by Pleione, now a blazing white fury well above the horizon.
The heat began late in the second hour. They were making good time traveling over endless dust flats. In the far distance heat devils were whirling the gritty dust into the air. Jon began to feel it, a breath of dry warmth from an inferno. A mind-sapping heat that flowed in through the broken front window like some alien force, permeating everything with its terrible power. Soon they were sweating heavily. Jon tried to shrug it off.
"If we continue like this, I calculate we'll reach the fort in another four hours."
Braunt gave him a withering look. "If the mutants haven't taken us under the ground. Besides, it hardly matters, we're soaking up radiation now. You weren't under any illusions about the roof of this vehicle were you? If so I must inform that it is not radiation proof."
"An uncomfortable thought I agree, but I have no choice. We serve a higher purpose than our mere personal wishes in the matter."
"Oh, do we now? And what the hell might that be other than the pockets of the tumor surgeons?"
Jon realized he couldn't tell the man, or trust him not to reveal what he might hear to others, including the Superior Buro.
"I'm afraid I'm not at liberty to tell you."
"Oh, wonderful. How did I get this crazy in my cab anyway? What did I do?"
"Save it, you'll understand soon enough. I just can't tell you now."
"Isn't that what religious fanatics always say?"
Jon shrugged, stared out at the sunbaked dust.
"Will you at least tell me what cult you represent? If I'm being sacrificed, it seems only fair that I know for which madness it is."
Jon realized that he, himself, barely knew what the tenets of Elchitism were beyond a veneration of things human and terrestrial, including the plan to regreen the Earth.
"I don't belong to any cult and this is not a cult affair." But as he said it, he felt a sudden loss of confidence in the whole enterprise. What if he had come all the way for nothing? If, for instance, Eblis Bey was wrong, was just some charming madman from Earth? Jon decided that the existence of the mote, which remained dormant, conserving energy next to his chest, was proof against his fear. The Bey spoke the truth; somewhere down there on the equator in the great dust belt lay their hope, the Hammer of Stars. They had to get to it before the laowon found it.
In the distance he saw a dark mass, and beyond it another. Soon he had made out several of the squat shapes many kilometers away to the south. They looked almost like office buildings or giant abstract sculptures.
Braunt gestured toward them. "The first big machines. We're on the fringe of the North Polar Machine Belt. Means we're on the lower foreland right in the Hardscabby country now, and naturally we've been under observation for the last hundred kilometers or so."
Jon peered around uneasily but kept one eye always on Braunt and the Taw Taw at the ready. Braunt sensed Jon's readiness. He stifled his own plans for revenge on the mad offworlder, concentrated instead on the dust flats ahead of him. It was much too late even to consider going back.
Jon continued to doubt that the mutants would be interested; the single mantid was too small a target.
They whistled east and south, across the dust.
Ahead of them an astonishing glow had begun. Bright beams began to shine into the cab of the hovercraft, some so bright they produced rainbows on Jon's goggles.
"What the hell is that?"
"Glass dunes, a feature of the north machine belt. Crystals that reproduce themselves when they receive sufficient solar energy. Some claim the crystals are the final evolutionary product of the ancient ones who built the machines."
"An interesting theory."
"As relevant as any of them—the truth is we have no idea what any of these remains are. Anyway, the dunes are pleochroic, they throw brilliant colors, different on each axis, constantly changing, flickering. They say it drives men mad in no time."
Beams green, orange, pink, blue, magenta, all flashed over them for a moment before falling behind. They were maddening, thrilling, stroboscopic. Jon had never experienced such intense sense of color. Braunt advised against looking out the broken passenger window too long.
Jon turned his head and glanced northward. He let out a gasp. Braunt whipped around. A black vehicle on huge balloon tires had suddenly caught up with them. At the windows loomed menacing shapes. A pennon fluttered from a long antenna above the cab, its device a scarlet skull on a black background.
"It is Blood Head! As I feared. They will run us down for meat."
"Accelerate!" Jon yelled. "How do I open this rear window?"
In response Braunt merely cursed. "Insanity, from the very beginning. I hope you are fattened for some special feast so that I can see your despair grow with the days. They always bake feast meat alive."
Jon fumbled the window bolt; finally it dropped open. Brilliant light flooded in but the Taw Taw longbarrel came up and Jon squeezed off a clip of explosive bullets that pocked the black cab's windscreens and tore big holes in the tires, without noticeably slowing it down.
He reached behind for a satchel charge and primed it, waited, and then tossed it into the path of the black cab.
The explosion fountained dust into the air. The cab rolled straight through it, but then it slowed, turned aside, and came to a shuddering halt.
Jon turned back to Braunt, who continued to drive at top speed into the pleochroic dunes.
"They've given up."
"Because we're going into their ambush. Look!"
Jon looked forward. Another black-cabbed machine on big wheels had rolled down the shining face of a giant dune to block their path. Light caromed madly in twinkling, dazzling arrays all around them. Jon pulled out the assault rifle and sprayed a burst of fire into the black cab. Explosive bullets made a halo of smoke and dust around it, while Braunt took evasive action, swinging the hovercraft up the side of a dune and passing behind the balloon tires.
Bullets whined off the hovercraft as Jon hurriedly fired back before closing the rear window.
They raced on through the gulleys between the dunes of glass, heading south and east whenever possible, eyes open for further black cabs.
After a while they realized that the pursuit had ended. Braunt climbed a long slope to the top of a dune and looked back. In the distance, through a riot of sparkling color like some desert composed of gemstones, they could see a pair of black dots, grouped together on a green glass dune.
"Onward to Fort Pinshon," Jon said with a grin.
Braunt stared at him for a moment, then returned to the controls.
The mantid continued to whistle down the dunes, through cascades of light so brightly colored that it penetrated even the heavy goggles and polarizers and produced rings and whorls of color in their vision.
Above them the sky had gone white as Pleione crept slowly toward the zenith.
The sweat ran freely inside their suits, and Jon felt his feet squelching in his desert boots. He rummaged about for a waterbottle. The wind coming in the window carried more and more grit. It was hot air, perhaps 110 degrees Fahrenheit. It was hard to breathe.
Occasionally they passed the ruins of enormous machines. Only the parts made of eternite materials still stood, like the inexplicable shells of gargantuan molluscs. They formed spires, boxes, complex walls, folded columns, many were half buried in the drifting pleochroic crystal. Others reached two hundred meters into the air.
Gazing at the strange shapes, sometimes upright, sometimes piled loosely together, where the disintegration of less resistant materials had dumped them, Jon recalled Eblis Bey's saying that the ancients had grown their technological artifacts. Their strange organic quality was totally unlike the large-scale constructions of human and laowon.
Up ahead he spotted a wall of green eternite that had been cast in a spiral curve. On top of it fluttered a blue banner. A crude concrete box had been cemented to the top of the eternite wall.
"Fort Pinshon up ahead," announced Braunt.
"We made it, Braunt, we're going to make it."
Braunt grinned dourly and shook his head. "Damnedest, craziest thing I ever did."
Behind the green wall they found what appeared to be a heap of enormous plates, piled on each other in loose chaos. Each was fifty meters or more across.
Within and underneath this pile was Fort Pinshon. In front were several crude structures in concrete, with sandbag walls and embankments arrayed in a semicircle around them. The mantid growled down to the main gate and after a swift perusal by guards crouched behind a 20-mm cannon with nine rotating barrels, they were allowed into the outer compound.
Jon pulled out some laowon Mercantile notes. He gave them to Braunt, who pocketed them eagerly and then watched stonefaced as Jon climbed out of the mantid. There were no farewells.
Fort Pinshon was an exotic outpost of civilization, built where a unique coincidence of a spring and the sheltering pile of giant plates made possible a sizable human habitation.
Crops were grown on irrigated patches of dust in the rear. In the upper parts of the pile dwelled a tribe of settled mutants, many of them of the dwarf Japanese type so prevalent as slaves in the city of Quism.
On the ground floor were several large spaces, almost rooms, with an oval configuration, that served as combination hotel lobby, dining room, marketplace, and campsite. He passed several groups of desert nomads wearing white or gray robes, sitting around horribly smoky campfires in front of their black tents.
At one end, next to a crescent-shaped opening, a long counter had been erected. It was of marble, pockmarked here and there by bullets. Over it a tangle of barbed wire was supported on steel struts. At one end a machine-gun emplacement kept a pair of barrels directed out at the rest of the room. A big sign in several languages warned against the open use of guns.
Jon found that by paying over more laowon notes he could rent a space inside the security zone of the fort, but he had to check his weapons first and the checkers were thorough, removing even the monofil blade from his boot.
He went on through the crescent-shaped passage formed by the accidental resting together of two massive plates. Inside he found rooms that might easily have been in a hotel lobby on another world, or even Hyperion Grandee. Elegantly decorated with rugs and wall hangings, they were lit by fiber optics to a pleasant dimness.
First he found his space, a coffin-shaped cubicle large enough for a bed and a sleeper. He visited a communal shower and hosed off the sweat and grime of the journey. Then he returned to the main rooms and found a bar.
Slaking his thirst with a cold beer and marveling at finding such a luxury in that harsh environment, he listened to the conversation around him.
Several trail guides, identifiable by name badges on their desert shirts, were discussing some incident at the bar.
"It just goes to show that you simply cannot expect deep-desert mutants to deal honestly. They don't understand the logic of a repeat customer. All they want is your money and then they want your flesh," said one with a round badge of scarlet and gold that proclaimed "Umpuk's Trailways, the best for ten years."
"Look, Angle," said another in a black suit with "Bayu Nashe" stenciled on his back in white, "there are some deep-desert mutes you can use. You just have to be careful. It's the same with everything in the deep—you have to use the mutes, you have to talk to them if you want to know what happens down there. Nobody else goes there, you understand. Nobody else knows."
"Bah, they're totally untrustworthy and they'd soon as kill you for the larder as look at you," Angle Umpuk replied.
"Well, this group was unusually foolish if you ask me. It was plain to see. Imagine hiring Hardscabbies!" a third man said.
"With women, including attractive ones in the group. Incredible!" agreed Umpuk.
"They deserved what happened. Such foolishness had to be punished most intensely. It is the law of the desert."
Jon felt a tremor at these words. Officers Bergen, Dahn, and Rena Kolod had been with the Orner group. Were they the women under discussion?
He was about to investigate when a movement caught his eye. A tall figure in red was coming through the tables at the far end of the bar. A laowon, bodyguards behind him, striding unconcerned through the treasure hunters, looters, slavers, and guides at the tables around him.
Jon looked for marks of nobility on the lao's tunic and found none. A rogue then, an adventurer, some lordling who had been thrust out of his family. Or possibly an upstart, some laowon commoner or criminal, with the mass of wealth required to travel the far spacelanes.
The laowon had leather accoutrements, shiny from use, including a holster at his hip. Jon looked after the retreating back and then slipped across to the bar.
The guide named Angle Umpuk met his gaze.
"You're wondering what a blue lord of the universe is doing out here in this forsaken waste?"
"Precisely."
"That's Romsini. He's lived out in the forelands for thirty years, they say. Big treasure hunter—found forty pops and snaps in one cache." Umpuk extended a hand, they shook.
"I'm Angle Umpuk, treasure guide for the North Shore and the lesser Boneyards."
"Glad to make your acquaintance, Mr. Umpuk. I couldn't help overhearing your conversation about a group, with women, that was in trouble."
"Trouble? I'll say. They came through late last night. Let some mutants talk them into hiring them as trail guides for a trip off the continent, down the Oolite trail somewhere. It sounded like archeological foolishness to me. They wanted to reach the equatorial machines."