The Price of Glory

Lori had trouble finding her voice. She had not followed the reasoning behind Graff's words as far as Grayson had, and the meaning was only now dawning in her. "They . . . ComStar . . . must want Helm very badly . . ."

Grayson looked at her. The dark circles under his eyes were alarming. "It makes me wonder how many other political pies they've had their fingers in during the last few centuries. I have this . . . this picture ... of ComStar as the sixth Great House, unseen, invisible, but working behind the scenes, manipulating the other Houses toward its own ends."

"What ends?"

"God, but I wish I knew. Or maybe I don't! If they can order the deaths of twelve million i

Lori stepped across to a point behind Grayson's chair and circled his neck with her arms. He leaned his head back against her breasts, his eyes closed.

"It's possible," he said at last, "that this Rachan that Graff kept talking about is operating outside of ComStar authority.''

"A renegade? An outlaw?"

"Something like that. But it's also possible we've stumbled across something much larger than the scheming of one man."

Lori heard the certainty in Grayson's voice, and knew he had already arrived at a decision. "What are you going to do?" she asked.

"The first thing we have to do is guarantee the security of the regiment. But after that . . .I'm begi

She caught the excitement in his voice. He swiveled the chair around so that he could face her. There was a fire behind those cool, gray eyes that she had never seen in all the time she had known him.

"Lori! I think I know where the Star League cache is!"

She looked into his eyes for a long moment. Their feverishness worried her. Is he grasping at any hope ?she thought. He's desperate to save the Legion . . . and so tired! He can't so quickly have found what others have been seeking for so long!

It was impossible that he, working for a few hours, and without sleep, should solve a puzzle that had apparently been occupying ComStar scholars for years.

"Gray ..."

His exhaustion made him vulnerable. She could clearly read the disappointment in his face.

"You don't believe me, do you?"

"Gray, you're wiped out . . . exhausted."

And then she realized he was laughing at her.

"Think I've punched out, do you? Well, so did I, when I first saw it. Look."

He swung his chair back to face the terminal and began pecking at the keyboard. Both map displays shifted slightly, expanding to show the broad sweep of plain from the Nagayan Mountains to the shores of the Yehudan Sea. On the left, the Yehudan Sea was green and blue-green, the gray sprawl of the city on its shore an obviously live and growing entity. The faintly red-tinged Vermillion curled across the landscape toward the mountains. The thin, black streaks of ferrocrete roads and skimmer pathways crisscrossed the land.

On the right, the Yehudan was dry and mineral-encrusted. The city was still an untidy grey sprawl, but it had been rearranged, with a distinctly circular pattern where Kurita's weapons had vaporized the central area and reduced everything beyond the crater to rubble. Sections of roads were still visible, but broken by stretches where dirt had covered the pavement and grass had covered the dirt. The river was visible as a faint ocher track winding west from the ruined city, as dry and empty as the dead sea bottom itself.

"Now . . . see the difference?"

She studied the maps, her eyes shifting from one to the other and back again. "The Yehudan Sea is gone."

"Of course. What else?"

"Freeport is in ruins."

"What else?"

Lori started to say she was too tired to play guessing games, but the words froze in her mouth. "The river," she managed at last. "The river east of the mountains is dried up.”

“Exactly."

She stepped over next to Grayson, leaning forward to study the map more closely. "When Freeport was nuked, perhaps the river was blocked off.”

"Possibly. There is evidence here of some sort of massive construction across the mouth of the river right on Freeport's waterfront, but the blast destroyed whatever it was. But look. The Vermillion River used to flow out of the Yehudan Sea, here." He traced the course with a display pointer on the screen. "The Yehudan is quite a distance above sea level, up here on the North Highland Plains. It flowed toward the Nagayan Mountains and vanished underground, probably into a subterranean cave system. It re-emerges here, on the western face of the mountains and drops—here—nearly 2500 meters to the West Equatorial Sea.

"What first caught my eye was that if the sea had dried up, then the river would dry up, too." He shifted his pointer to the right-hand map, which showed the area as it was in the present.

"But right here, we see the Vermillion emerging from underground on the west wide of the mountains. It's not nearly as big as it used to be. You can see that it's only a trickle compared to what it was 300 years ago."

"Well, the river could have dried up between Freeport and the mountains," Lori said uncertainly, "but the western half is still being fed by melting glaciers or underground springs."

"Agreed." Grayson nodded vigorously. "Still, it was unusual enough to make me curious. I started examining the old Helmfast map carefully, using full magnification to explore the valley, here where the Vermillion flows off the North Highland Plains and underground." He typed rapidly, and the left-hand map expanded sharply. The red-tinged waters of the river could be seen flowing through a shallow valley. After winding through a kilometer or so of wild and rocky terrain, the river turned sharply right and vanished under a slab of granite the size of a large building.

Grayson kept typing, and the right-hand map expanded to the same scale, centered on the same area. "And I started examining the map we took from the mobile headquarters, the one made five days ago. The hardest part was using the computer to reconcile two different coordinate systems, so that I can punch one set of coordinates into the terminal and have the same spot displayed at the same magnification on both maps, new and old."

Lori looked from one display to the other, feeling more and more confused. It was hard to believe that the two were centered on the same coordinate system, as Grayson claimed. The outline of the Vermillion River Valley was clearly the same on both displays. The one on the left had water in it, the one on the right did not, but the general lay of the surrounding land, the shape of the banks, were all clearly the same. The vegetation was different, of course, sparser in the modern view. There was also a building in the modern view that was not on the older one, a low, structure of metal and ferrocrete, set into the side of a hill overlooking the bank.

Such changes were to be expected in three centuries, and so were easily discounted. What was confusing was the shape of the land where the river vanished under the rock. In the one view, the river flowed into what might be a cave mouth under a vast slab of stone. In the other, the empty river valley ran up to that same slab of stone-only now, the slab of stone was standing on end, a sheer, polished granite cliff face thirty meters tall. It was as though the river had flowed straight up to the foot of a cliff—and vanished, passing into solid rock. The land around was largely unchanged, except for places where the formerly gentle slopes of the valley walls had become steeper, almost vertical, in the area immediately around the slab. It looks like it's been dug out deliberately,Lori thought.