CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO

There was something oddly regular about the mountain that, according to the watching eyes, was the kidnappers’ final destination.

Dacron studied it thoughtfully, from a distance. Regular shapes occurred in nature, naturally, but this one looked as if someone had been trying to hide something under the rock. A fortress? A castle? Or... he calculated the size of the hidden object and realised that it was around the size of a primitive DY-100 colony ship from the First Expansion Era. There were no sign of the warp nacelles that such a colony ship would have needed to move faster than light, but he’d studied the plans of all likely colony ships and knew that they’d been designed for easy removal once the ship reached its destination. There was almost nothing of the ship visible apart from its covered shape, which explained why orbital observation hadn’t detected it. The ship would be invisible from high overhead.

The ground quivered again as Dacron slipped around the hidden ship, looking for the guards he knew had to be there. There were none – and, as far as he could tell, there were no warning spells either. It made absolutely no sense, unless the colony ship was intended to remain hidden from the planet’s entire population as well as the Confederation. Guards and defensive spells would only attract attention. He completed his circuit and gritted his teeth as he realised that there was only one way into the ship. No doubt there would be a heavy guard just under the overhang, waiting to see who poked their nose into the trap.

He frowned as yet another earthquake shook the ground. They made no sense; the more he thought about it, the more he wondered if the planet’s gravity field was actually flexing, although he couldn’t understand why. The AIs had warned him that the planet was generating gravity pulses; perhaps he was close to the generator that was propelling them out into space. But they had to realise that gravity waves represented no threat to a ship from the First Expansion Era, let alone the Confederation. Or did they? Like so much else on Darius, the gravity waves made no sense.

The bookseller looked up at him as he returned to where the small assault party was hiding. “What did you find?”

“Trouble,” Dacron said, and outlined what he’d seen. “That has to be the ship that brought you to the planet.”

A DY-100 wasn’t a very elaborate starship, he recalled. They’d been cheap, mass-produced to allow thousands of disparate groups a chance at their own homeworld, completely lacking in the luxuries that had helped create the first and most successful colony worlds. It was unlikely that it had carried a computer smart enough to become the source behind magic, let alone a proper AI. And it should never have been able to reach Darius. The primitive warp drives humanity had used during the First Expansion Era could not have propelled them for thousands of light years. No, something else was involved. But what?

Picking up the signalling device, he signalled a report to orbit. It was possible that a KEW strike would destroy the source of magic, but it had to be kept as a last resort. Elyria and Joshua were inside and he presumed that they were still alive, although there was no way to know for sure. A power that had thought nothing of murdering over twenty Confederation citizens wouldn’t hesitate at murdering one more – and Joshua. Or maybe they’d seek to force Joshua to join them. It was clear that they included magicians among their numbers.

The bookseller looked at him. “How do we get inside?”

“There’s only one way in,” Dacron said. His eyes, for all of their enhancement, couldn’t peer too far into the darkened overhang. Normally, a few snoops would have allowed them a chance to see what was lying in wait, but they wouldn’t work on Darius. His implants were still completely dead. “We’re going to have to take them all out before they can get off a warning.”

“They’ll be able to communicate mentally,” the bookseller reminded him. “Use spells to prevent them from communicating and you might be able to stop them before it’s too late.”

Dacron nodded, mustering the spells in his mind. One advantage he did have over most humans was that he could cast spells without speaking them aloud, giving his enemies no advance warning of what he intended to do. There were definitely some benefits to being an embodied AI, even if he did feel slow and stupid compared to his half-remembered memories of the Gestalt. Carefully, he led the way towards the overhang, wondering how they believed they could keep the colony ship hidden. Up close, it was obvious that there was nothing natural about the flow of stone that had buried the starship.

The overhang loomed up in front of him and he slipped inside, his eyes adapting to the darkness. There was a colossal opening just inside, leading to a pair of guards standing in front of a heavy metal door, very evidently an airlock from a primitive colony ship. Dacron cast the silencing spell and blinked in surprise as it refused to work properly. Bracing himself, he jumped forward, determined not to lose what remained of the advantage of surprise and sliced the first guard’s head off before he could even blink. The second guard lifted a sword, only to recoil in horror as Dacron’s monofilament blade sliced right through it and her arm. Blood spilled down to the ground as she collapsed, gasping in pain.

“Curious,” Dacron muttered. Darius wasn’t a place that accepted women warriors, yet one of them had been a guard. He checked her rapidly, looking for anything else out of place, but found nothing. There was something about her face that made her look vaguely inhuman, yet he couldn’t identify it. A true human would probably have seen it instantly. “Does your guild accept females?”

The bookseller shrugged. “Some women join us, or are married to men who join us,” he said, after a moment. “I don’t think we’ve ever used them as guards.”

Dacron nodded and walked over to the airlock, hunting for the markings he knew were going to be there. All colony ships were extensively marked for later identification, a precaution that had been seen as paranoid during the First Expansion Era and prescient afterwards. It only took several seconds for him to locate a plate stating the ship’s name and destination; Clarke, heading for FAS-34234. Dacron wondered if anyone, back when the target star had finally been settled, had wondered what had happened to the Clarke and her colonists, or had they merely been relieved at the absence of any other settlers. The early days of interstellar expansion had been chaotic, with worlds claimed by several different groups, sometimes backed up by armed warships. It hadn’t been until the First Interstellar War that order had been imposed on the frontier – and even then, plenty of groups had fled well beyond humanity’s original borders. Some of them had never been found.

He wished, just for a moment, that he still had the use of his implants. A quick check with the records on the Hamilton would have told him what, if anything, was known about the Clarke and her colonists. He might have been able to establish what sort of world they’d wanted to build, and what sort of tech level they’d intended to allow... he pushed the thought aside with some irritation. Intentions often counted for nothing when dealing with the long-term development of colony worlds. There were thousands of examples of low-tech worlds that had suffered revolutions as the younger generations asked why their parents had abandoned the technology that would have made their lives easier.

But there had been an unseen force on Darius, manipulating and maintaining their society.

Dacron braced himself and pushed at the airlock, forcing it open. There was no power running through the ship, unsurprisingly. Primitive though she was, Clarke should have been affected by the Dead Zone too. She was hardly powered by chemical reactions and clockwork, any more than was the Hamilton. Forcing the airlock open was difficult, even with his enhanced strength. They’d effectively turned the colony ship into a fortress, simply by leaving the airlock in place. No weapons on Darius could even scratch the hull.

Inside, there was a very faint smell of decay. Clarke was ancient, easily the oldest starship Dacron had ever seen, and she hadn’t been maintained in the years since landing on Darius. The metal plating on the floor was damaged, worn down by countless people and horses walking in and out of the ship; the lighting was provided by glowing magical lights, rather than the ship’s internal lighting. It gave the interior an eerie atmosphere that clearly bothered the booksellers. Many of them were already suffering from culture shock.

Dacron mentally reviewed the plans for the DY-100 as the bookseller comforted his allies, reassuring them that their planet’s suffering would soon be over. They were presumably on the lower levels; looking back at the airlock, it was clear that they’d come through one of the personnel entrances rather than the giant cargo airlocks that would have allowed the colonists to unload their supplies and start the hard work of settling the planet. Depending on which airlock they’d actually used, they should keep walking to the right and eventually they’d discover the shafts leading up into the control deck. It was as good a place to start as any.

“Follow me,” he muttered, and led the way down the metal corridor. The sense of two very different cultures only grew stronger as they advanced, with the strange blend of magic and primitive technology combined with the technology of the First Expansion Era. Dacron found himself wondering what someone in a Dead Zone would have thought of a Confederation starship, if one had drifted into a zone and become trapped. It would be completely beyond their comprehension. He stopped and held up a hand, just as they reached what would have been the elevator shaft. Someone was talking in the next room.

Dacron listened, carefully, but none of the words were familiar. He’d been gifted with several different languages as well as Darius English and Confederation Standard, yet whatever language the newcomers were speaking defeated him. It was possible that it was an evolution of English, but if that were the case some of the words should have been recognisable. Or it might be something completely alien, even though that was unlikely. Only a handful of known alien languages could be spoken by humans, at least not without having their mouths altered to pronounce the words properly.

The voices faded away in the distance and Dacron slipped forward, weapon in hand. There was no sign of anyone in the elevator shaft – and no sign of an elevator. Instead, there were rope ladders, dangling down from high overhead. It took Dacron a moment to realise that they’d stripped out the useless elevators and replaced them with ladders, forcing their people to scramble up and down the decks. They could have installed stairs...

“It’s a security measure,” the bookseller muttered. “I’ve seen it before in a dozen castles; anyone who wants to assault the castle has to climb up the ladder, whereupon they get their heads chopped off by the defenders. Or the ropes are simply cut to make it impossible to climb up without magic.”

“And a magician would challenge the local Pillar directly, rather than fight to take the castle,” Dacron said. He hesitated. Climbing up the robe ladders wouldn’t be difficult, but it would certainly negate his advantages. He might be stronger, faster and more resistant to damage than anyone else on the planet, yet that didn’t make him immortal. “We’ll just have to get up five levels as quickly as possible.”

One of the other booksellers had a different question. “What is that?”

Dacron followed his pointing finger and frowned. Running up the side of the shaft was a long thin stream of crystal, reaching up into the distance. It didn’t look like anything he recognised, apart perhaps from a crystal lattice – and crystal lattices had only entered general use during the Third Expansion Era, when artificial crystals had been converted into datachips. Carefully, he touched it with his bare finger and felt an electric shock, as if power was still moving through the lattice. It seemed to have grown right out of the deck.

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. It was definitely out of place. “But we don’t have time to investigate.”

Taking hold of the rope ladder, he started to scramble up the shaft. It wasn’t as easy as he had thought; the ladder wasn’t secured very well, either through carelessness or as a deliberate test. There were plenty of organisations on primitive worlds that ended up with old men – or, more rarely, old women – firmly in charge, preventing them from adapting to fit with the times. Maybe there was a rule that those who could no longer climb the ladders could no longer hold authority. It would be kinder than insisting on fighting ability as a mark of status.

The crystal lattice seemed to split off into a handful of strands as they reached the second level, two strands heading out onto the deck while the remainder headed upwards, towards the higher levels. Dacron studied it thoughtfully, before scrambling up to the next deck, where the same pattern was repeated. Judging from what he’d seen, the entire ship was infested by the crystal lattice, technology that couldn’t have been produced during the First Expansion Era. Could it work in the Dead Zone? There was no way to know, but logically it shouldn’t. And yet he’d felt a shock when he touched it.

High overhead, the ropes started to shake as someone descended. Dacron braced himself as the figure came into view – a tall man wearing dark robes – and lashed out with his knife. The man let out a gasp and plummeted downwards, while Dacron forgot stealth and scrambled up the ladder as fast as he could. Reaching the top of the shaft, he jumped onto the deck and straight into a group of people. A handful of swipes with his sword cleared the way for the booksellers, just before a powerful flash of magic blasted his protections. Two enemy magicians were standing in front of him. Dacron cast a second set of protective spells and then advanced forward, using the spells as a shield. A moment later, the booksellers opened fire, blowing the two magicians away. They hadn’t thought to shield themselves against physical attack.

But then, Dacron thought, as he ran forward, who would have dared to pick a fight with a magician?

The starship’s bridge, as cramped and primitive as it was by Confederation standards, had been turned into a command centre for the mystery group. Seven magicians rose up to fight as Dacron charged inside, throwing grenades towards their positions. Four of them managed to shield themselves before the grenades exploded, only to forget that they still needed to breathe. The knock-out gas sent them collapsing to the floor before they realised that they hadn’t managed to purify the air.

“This used to be the bridge,” Dacron said. “Your ancestors would have commanded the ship from here before landing on Darius.”

The compartment was a shambles. Consoles that looked hellishly outdated had been turned into tables, even though the buttons and switches would have made using them a difficult task. The Captain’s chair had been turned into a throne, with strands of crystal lattice hovering around it. It hadn’t been damaged or destroyed by the explosions, no matter how weak it looked. Dacron examined it carefully and realised why it looked vaguely familiar. It was something comparable to the advanced neural network that had been used to download him into his body. Close examination revealed that there were microscopically thin strands of crystal lattice surrounding where the Captain’s head would have been, ready to force their way into his brain. Maybe that explained the odd behaviour of the humans in the mystery group; they were puppets, worked by an unseen hand that operated at one remove.

An outbreak of shooting caused him to look up, alarmed. “They’re trying to break back into the bridge,” the bookseller snapped. “I think they’re trying to flank us!”

Dacron recalled the ship’s plans and scowled. Unlike a warship, which always had sealed bridges, the colony ship had no fewer than four entrances to the bridge. The airlocks were made of solid metal, but the enemy had magic. Dacron could imagine a dozen spells that would break the airlocks down to dust and allow the enemy to race inside, intent on destroying the intruders. And he didn’t have enough people to cover all of the entrances.

“It looks that way,” he agreed, mildly. The bookseller shot him an angry glance, no doubt wondering if Dacron had led them into a trap. “Hold them off for as long as you can.”

The bookseller rounded on him. “And what are you going to do?”

Dacron walked back to the Captain’s chair, hoping that he was right. “I’m going to talk to the power behind magic,” he said, and sat down. If he was wrong, they were all dead. “Just hold them back as long as you can.”

A moment later, the crystal lattice started to close in on his skull. Dacron felt it tickling at his hair, probing his skin. The technology didn’t seem to be as advanced as the monofilament strands the Confederation used, although the real question was why the crystal lattice worked at all in the Dead Zone. Maybe it was excluded specifically from its effects. Dacron felt tiny pinpricks of pain as it started to dig into his flesh, reaching through to cut into his skull and access his brain. His internal awareness was rapidly becoming a curse.

And then the real pain began.