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She fell silent once more, and they waited, sharing her horror, until she inhaled and went on in a flat voice.
"The attacks on the valley finally ended because the others had managed to destroy their technology, and, with it, their agriculture, their transport system, their medical structure—everything. Starvation, disease, exposure, even ca
"But—" her voice sharpened and she leaned forward "—there was, obviously, one other high-tech center left: the quarantine HQ. Even the most frenzied mob knew that was all that stood between them and any possible refugee ship, however slight the chance one might arrive, and the HQ staff rigged up a ground defense element in the quarantine system itself. It's nowhere near as powerful as the space defenses, but it's designed to smash anyone or anything using Imperial weapons within a hundred klicks of the HQ."
"Oh, crap," Sean breathed, and she smiled tightly.
"You got it. And there's worse. You see, the command staff may have set things up to keep the mobs from smashing the HQ, but they agreed with the need to destroy all other technology."
"I don't think I'm going to like this," Tamman muttered.
"You're not. They moved out of those ruins near the Temple, put the HQ computer on voice access, set the shipyard up to handle all maintenance on an automated basis, and manufactured a religion."
"Oh, Jesus!" Sean moaned.
"According to Kahtar, who was pretty much ru
"But if that's true," Brashan said, "why didn't they destroy the valley? If they had the capability to set up ground defenses, surely they had the capability to strike Kahtar's people."
"There was no need. There were never more than a hundred people in the valley, and it was a vacation resort before they forted up, without any real industrial base. They were trapped inside it, with too little genetic material to sustain a viable population, and the new religion had a use for them—one so important it didn't even pull the plug on their power supply."
"Demons," Harriet murmured.
"Or, more precisely, a nest of 'lesser demons' and their worshipers. The valley gave their religion a 'threat' that might last for centuries to help it get its feet under it. What we walked into was Hell itself as far as the Church is concerned, and that's why anyone who has anything to do with it must be exterminated."
"Merciful God." Sean looked as sick as he felt. The warped logic and cold-blooded calculation that left those poor, damned souls pe
"I think Kahtar went mad himself, at the end. Some of the others walked out of the valley when the despair finally got to be too much—walked out knowing what would happen. Others suicided. None of them were interested in having children. What future would children have had on a planet of homemade barbarians itching to torture them to death?
"But Kahtar had to find something to believe in, and he did—something that kept him alive to the very end, after all the others were gone. He decided, against all evidence and sanity, that at least one other world had to have survived. That's why he wired his journal into the main computers. He left it there for us, or someone like us, so we'd know what had happened. And that's why he included something very important for us to know."
"What?" Sean asked.
"The last of the original HQ crew didn't just put the computer on voice access, Sean. They knew there were still at least some enhanced people in the valley. People who could have ordered the Voice to denounce their precious religion if they'd been able to get close enough to access the computer, because they could have overridden voice commands through their implants once the last of the original 'priests' were gone. So they disengaged the neural feeds. The only way in is by voice, and they had an entire damned army sitting on top of it to keep everyone but the priesthood out of voice access range. With the quarantine system set up to wax anybody who tried to use Imperial weapons to shoot their way in, there was no way a handful of old, tired Imperials could get to them."
She paused and met their horrified gazes.
"Which means, of course, that we can't get to them, either."
Sean sat in the cutter bay hatch, high on Israel's flank, and gazed sightlessly out through the wavering distortion of her stealth field. They were still making progress on their linguistic programs, helped by the fact that they were no longer afraid to use their remotes at full range as long as they stayed outside the Temple's hundred-kilometer kill zone, yet two weeks had passed since Sandy's bombshell, and none of them had the least idea what to do next. The only good thing was that Harriet was completely back on her feet now—she was even jogging on Israel's treadmill again.
He sighed and tugged on his nose, looking very like an oversized, black-haired version of his father as he contemplated the problem. He'd expected difficulties getting into the Temple, but he'd never anticipated that they wouldn't even be able to use Imperial small arms! Hell, they might not even be able to use their own implants, so how did four humans—and one Narhani, who'd be mobbed on sight as an incontrovertible "demon"—break into the most strongly guarded fortress on the entire goddamned planet?
There was, of course, one very simple answer, but he couldn't do it. He couldn't even think of it without nausea. Kahtar's journal indicated "the Sanctum" was heavily armored and deeply dug in, but they could always take the place out with a gravitonic warhead, and Israel could launch hyper weapons from atmosphere. They could hit the Temple before the quarantine system even began to react, and if the computer went down, so did the entire system. Unfortunately, they also killed everyone in Pardal's largest city—almost two million people, by Sandy's estimate.
He squeezed his nose harder. His clever stratagem to get them down had worked, all right, and he'd poked their collective heads right into a trap. They couldn't take off—assuming they'd had anywhere to go—without the quarantine system killing them for trying to leave the planet, but there wasn't any way to shut the system off from the planet!
"Sean?" He looked up at Sandy's voice. She was standing at the far end of the bay, waving at him. "Come on! You've gotta see this!"
"See what?" he asked, climbing to his feet with a puzzled frown.
"It's too good to spoil by telling you." Her expression was strange, and she sounded amused, frightened, excited, and surprised, all in one.
"At least give me a clue!"
"All right." She eyed him with an odd, lurking smile. "I didn't have anything else to do, so I sent a remote back to take a peek at the village we pulled Harry out of, and you won't believe what's going on!"
"Well, Father," Tibold closed the spyglass with a click and grimaced at Stomald, "it seems His Grace was unimpressed."