Denner_s Wreck

Geste, of course, had been desperate. He had considered anchoring the pocket to the roof of his mouth, but had rejected that; he had needed to be able to talk. Instead, he had sacrificed the hearing in his right ear. He hoped that removing the pocket and rebuilding his i

His trick had worked, and Thaddeus was captured, and now Geste's programmed calm had run out. Adrenalin poured into his blood unregulated by his damaged and panicky symbiotes. He stood, shaking, as the realization sank in that he had done it, he had stopped Thaddeus.

A sliver of triumph worked its way through the numb relief, and then shattered into full-blown gloating. He had done it! Thaddeus was neatly boxed up and out of the way.

On the heels of exultation came doubt. Was Thaddeus boxed up? It seemed too easy, somehow.

Perhaps there were machines that were programmed to release Thaddeus. Perhaps there were creatures with orders to kill the prisoners. Geste stepped back and looked about warily.

“Not bad, Geste,” Thaddeus’ voice said, speaking from the wall behind him. “Not bad at all."

Geste turned, telling himself that it was just a machine, a recording or an artificial intelligence synthesizing its master's voice.

“A very nice effort,” the voice said. “But not enough. No, Geste, I'm not a recording, not a machine. I'm Thaddeus. The real Thaddeus."

Geste was trembling again, harder than ever.

“You see,” Thaddeus said, “you only got one of me."

Chapter Twenty-Three

“The Power called Leila of the Mountain of Fire lives inside a mountain, in the great jungles far to the southwest. The top of the mountain was blasted away long ago, and inside the hole that the blast left burn fires so hot that the rock itself melts and flows like water. Whether it was Leila who blasted the mountain and lit the fires, or whether that happened before she came to live there, no one now remembers.

"Whatever the cause, the mountain burns, but Leila lives in it unharmed. Her skin is darker in hue than any mortal's, even a southerner's-almost black. Some say this is due to the heat of the flames surrounding her home.

"There is a village at the foot of her mountain, a large and prosperous village, and Leila looks after the people there. When one falls ill she comes to his bedside and touches him, and five times out of six he is well again the next day. When the crops fail or the hunters return empty-handed, Leila's creatures bring baskets of strange food and leave them in the village square, for the Elders to distribute to those who need it most. Storms always pass by the village without harming it, yet there is never a drought.

"This might be paradise, save that Leila asks a price for her protection; once a year she chooses a handsome young man from the village who must come alone to her home atop the mountain. This man knows he has been chosen when a voice calls him by name, a voice that speaks from the air.

"If the chosen one refuses, then Leila's protection is withdrawn from the village; no baskets of food are brought when supplies run low, the ill are left to recover or die on their own, storms no longer pass by, and a thousand lesser evils go unhindered. Leila takes no vengeance, she merely withdraws her aid.

"But that is enough; in all the memories of the villagers, and in all the tales going back many generations, no chosen one has held out against the summons for more than a season.

"And what becomes of the chosen ones, the sacrifices? No one knows. Some have returned alive, after a season or a year or ten years, but these fortunate ones never remember anything that happened after they passed the rim of the crater. Most never return at all. None have ever been found dead-if they return, they return alive and well, and usually live long, happy lives, troubled only by their inability to recall what befell them…"

– from the tales of Atheron the Storyteller

Bredon paused, hesitantly glancing up and down the slick grey walls of the passage. He had counted four doors in the left-hand wall of this corridor, two of the regular large ones, and two wide, low ones intended for service machines, so that the next would be the fifth. Aulden had said to take the fifth door on the left.

The door, of course, was closed. That was not the problem. Getting through doors was easy. All he had to do was yell, “Emergency override! Human in danger!” and the doors would slide out of his way. That was a safety feature that Aulden said had been built into every hold on De

Of course, some of the Powers had removed safety features, or altered them, or tampered with them in various ways. Thaddeus certainly had. However, he had apparently not known about this one. At least so far, the command had worked on every door Bredon had shouted at in Fortress Holding, allowing him to roam freely.

No, the problem was not that the door was closed, nor even that he was unsure whether it was the right door.

He was unsure, he admitted to himself. The Fortress was a maze, with rooms and corridors criss-crossing apparently at random, almost all of them a dismal, uniform grey. It made the colorful and variform chambers of Arcade, which had utterly baffled Bredon at first, seem simple.

Aulden had given him instructions for reaching Thaddeus’ war room, which Aulden had provided unwilling assistance in building, but the directions were hard to follow in the face of the endless corridors and the frequent encounters with patrolling machines. He could easily have miscounted somewhere, or turned the wrong way.

But it was not the chance that he faced the wrong door that worried him. It was the patrolling machines that caused him to hesitate. What if one was just behind the door? What if this one was not as cooperative as the others? After all, this would be the very heart of the Fortress, and it might be more carefully guarded than the corridors.

The first patrol machine had terrified him. A low, boxlike silver affair with several jointed appendages, it had stopped suddenly, pointed something at him, and demanded, “State your business."

Bredon had mouthed the meaningless syllables Aulden had taught him, hoping he pronounced them correctly.

“Acknowledged,” the machine replied.

“Abort all programming and await orders,” Bredon told it, his voice unsteady.

“Acknowledged,” the machine said again. It stood, silently waiting, completely harmless, while Bredon walked on.

That was no standard safety feature, of course; the universal password was something Aulden had done his best to infiltrate into every system in the fortress when he first began to distrust Thaddeus, decades earlier. He was unsure how successful he had been.

Bredon knew that it had not worked everywhere; the doors, for example, were too simple to be tampered with subtly, but those still had the original safety overrides. Other machines Thaddeus had programmed entirely by himself, in careful isolation, so Aulden had never gotten a chance at those. Those would be the most dangerous, should Bredon encounter any, even though they were generally stupid.

Even with the ones Aulden had tampered with, there were ways Thaddeus could overrule Aulden's gimmick, without necessarily even realizing the password existed. He had hit on one quite by accident. Thaddeus had programmed his machines to literally not hear Aulden's voice, either spoken or transmitted.

It was a simple enough procedure, really, but not something Aulden had ever thought of. He grudgingly admired Thaddeus for coming up with it.