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"Well, you're going to have to do something. I know you've got the lights way down in here, but I can't even keep it open!"
"I know. Yet, as you point out, as long as no light reaches it you experience no discomfort. Rather than risk damaging your presently unscathed optic nerve, I would prefer simply to cover it."
"An eye patch?" Despite herself, her lips twitched at the absurdity of such an archaic approach. Sandy actually chuckled.
"Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum!" she murmured. Harriet gave her a one-eyed glare, but she only gri
"Indeed." Brashan gave Sandy a moderately severe glance, then looked back down at Harriet. "Given the unimpaired enhancement of your left eye, you should be able to adjust once the distraction is suppressed."
"An eye patch." Harriet sighed. "God, I hope you get holos of this, Sandy. I know you'll just die if you miss the opportunity!"
"Damn straight," Sandy said, and smoothed hair from Harry's forehead.
"But you must report it, Father!" Tibold Rarikson stared at the priest in disbelief, yet Stomald's smile was serene.
"Tibold, I will report it, but not yet." The Guard captain started to protest, but Stomald shushed him with a gesture. "I will," he repeated, "but only when I'm certain precisely what I'm to report."
"What you're to report?" Tibold's eyes bugged, but he gripped his i
"Indeed?" Stomald smiled and took a turn around the room, feeling the other's eyes on his back. If there was one man with whom he wished to share his wondering joy, Tibold was that man. Hard-bitten warrior that he was, he was a kindly man whose sense of pity not even war could quench. And despite his Guard rank and the traditional Malagoran resentment of outside control, he stood almost as high in Cragsend's estimation as Stomald himself. But for all his desire, how did Stomald bring the other to see what he himself now saw so clearly?
He drew a deep breath and turned back to the Guardsman.
"My friend," he said gently, "I want you to listen to me carefully. A great thing has happened here in our tiny town—a greater thing than you may believe possible. I know you're afraid, and I know why, but there are some points about the 'demons' you should consider. For example..."
Chapter Twenty-Three
Sean tried not to hover as Harriet walked unaided to the astrogator's couch. She was still shaky, and her missing memories refused to return, yet she had to smile at his expression. Tamman sat beside her and slipped an arm about her, and she leaned against him, wishing she knew how to thank them for her life.
But, of course, there was no need.
"Well!" Sean flopped into his couch with customary inelegance. "Looks like your body-and-fender shop does good work, Brashan."
"True," the Narhani replied with one of his clogged-drain chuckles. "And while I regret my inability to repair your implant, Harry, I must say your patch gives you a certain—" He paused, seeking the proper word.
"Raffishness?" Sean suggested, his smile almost back to normal.
"Thank you, kind sir." Harriet stroked the black patch and gri
"Who?" Brashan's crest perked, but she only shook her head.
"Look her up in the computer, Twinkle Hooves."
"I shall. You humans have such interesting historical figures," he said, and her laughter lifted the last shadow from Sean's heart.
"I'm really glad to see you up again, Harry, and I'm sorry you can't remember what happened. The rest of us'll put together a combined implant download later, but for now let's turn our attention to what we got out of it. Aside, of course, from the reincarnation of Captain Bo
His wave gave Sandy the floor, and she stood.
"Speaking for myself, Harry, I'm delighted you're back. Tam's been doing his best, but he'll never make an analyst." Tamman made a pained sound, and Harriet poked him in the ribs.
"However," Sandy went on with a grin, "our ham-handed Marine and I have recovered a fair amount from our purloined computer, and our original hypothesis was correct. It was a journal. This man's."
Sean gazed at the image in the command deck display, mentally turning the hair white and the skin to parchment, and recognized the lonely, mummified body from the tower bedroom.
"This is—or was—an engineer named Kahtar. Much of his journal's unrecoverable, and he didn't mention the planet's name in the portions we've been able to read, so we still don't know what it was called originally. But I've been able to piece together what happened."
She looked around, satisfied by the hush about her. Even Tamman knew only fragments of what she was about to say, and she wondered if the others would react as she had... and if they'd have the same nightmares.
"Apparently," she began, "the planetary governor closed down the mat-trans at the first hypercom warning, then began immediate construction of a quarantine system under the direction of his chief engineer. Who," she added wryly, "was obviously a real whiz.
"Things weren't too bad at the start. There was some panic, and a few disturbances from people afraid they hadn't gotten quarantined soon enough, but nothing they couldn't handle... at first." She paused, and her eyes darkened.
"They might have made it, if they'd just shut down their hypercom. Their defenses destroyed over a dozen incoming refugee ships, but I think they could have lived even with that... if the hypercom hadn't still been up.
"It was like a com link to Hell." Her voice was quiet. "It was such a slow, agonizing process. Other worlds thought they were safe, too, but they weren't, and, one by one, the plague killed them all. It took years—years of desperate, dwindling messages from infected planets while their entire universe died."
Icy silence hovered on the command deck, and she blinked misty eyes.
"It... got to them. Not at once. But when the last hypercom went silent, when there was no one else left—no one at all—the horror was too much. The whole planet went mad."
"Mad?" Brashan's voice was soft, and she nodded.
"They knew what had happened, you see. They knew they'd done it to themselves. That it had all been a mistake—a technological accident on a cosmic scale. So they decided to insure there would never be another one. Technology had killed the Empire... so they killed technology."
"They what?" Sean jerked up, and she nodded. "But... but they had a high-tech population. How did they expect to feed it without technology?"
"They didn't care," Sandy said sadly. "The psychic wounds were too deep. That's what happened to their tech base: they smashed it themselves."
"Surely not all of them agreed," Harriet half-whispered.
"No." Sandy was grim. "There were some sane ones left—like Kahtar—but not enough. They fought a war here like you wouldn't believe. A high-tech war intended to destroy its own culture... and anyone who tried to stop them. Harry, they threw people into bonfires for trying to hide books."
Harriet covered her mouth, trembling with a personal terror they all understood too well, and Tamman hugged her.
"Sorry," Sandy said gently, and Harriet nodded jerkily. "Anyway, they didn't quite get all of it. The Valley of the Damned was a sort of high-tech redoubt. There'd been others, but the mobs rolled over them—sometimes they used human wave attacks and literally ran the defenses out of ammunition with their own bodies. Only the valley held. Their energy guns didn't need ammo, and they threw back over thirty attacks in barely ten years. The last one was made by a mob on foot, in the middle of a mountain winter, armed with spears and a handful of surviving Imperial weapons."