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They had worry enough in the "vurra large force" spotted by McCall. Those 'Mechs would be here by nightfall, long before Grayson could hope for help from Ricol's incoming DropShips. Their one hope now was to get inside the cache.
He stared across the river bed toward the Wall. He could barely make out the forms of DeVillar and the two Techs working with him atop the wall as they searched for the best places to lay their satchel-charge explosives.
Their basic strategic problem at this point was the approach of the heavy Marik forces. If DeVillar could blow down the wall, Grayson would be able to move the Legion inside the shelter of the cache itself. A small force of 'Mechs would be sufficient to hold the opening against whatever forces Marik was able to bring to bear.
Unfortunately, if Marik forces were encamped outside the entrance to the cache when the DropShips arrived, how would the Legion be able to even approach and board Ricol's fleet, much less load it with treasure from the cache? Various possible alternatives flashed through his mind. He could lead his eight 'Mechs north and meet the Marik 'Mechs halfway. A Company would be destroyed, but it might buy time for the rest to make their escape.
Or would it? Eight 'Mechs could be destroyed easily by a fraction of the army being brought to bear on them. Garth could afford to deploy enough 'Mechs against Grayson's command to keep them busy, while marching the rest on the cache gate. Another possibility was to pull out now, while there was time. They could slip north and west across one of the passes that breached the wall of the Nagayan Mountains, and emerge on the Vermillion Plains to the west. Perhaps a small 'Mech force could stop the Marik army long enough by holding them at the passes. The problem, of course, was that there were three passes to defend. While Grayson was holding one, Garth could slip a large force past his position and into the rear. Besides, to run now would mean giving up all hope of raiding the cache, and Grayson was not sure what Ricol's reaction would be when he found himself with a plain full of refugees, and no treasure. He had agreed to pick up the Gray Death Legion, even if the treasure were lost somehow, but Grayson would still feel he had cheated on his end of the bargain. There had to be a way to salvage at least something of the cache for Ricol, as well as to keep it from the ComStar and Marik forces marching south on their position now.
The key, Grayson realized, as he stared at that blank, impenetrable wall, lay in the doorway to the cache itself . . . and to the cache's nature. There had been a door there, and so there had to be a way of making it open.
One possibility was that it might require a radio command, modulated a certain way, or on a certain frequency. A spoken code word, an "open sesame" from the pages of ancient Terran mythology was another. So, too, was a literal key, a device hidden somewhere that, when manipulated, would trigger the mechanism of the gate and cause it to open.
The Gray Death Legion could camp on this plain for a year trying various combinations of code words and electronic modulations in an attempt to reach the door's mechanical guardians. They could search the entire Helmfast district for a century and never find a hidden key, which could be anything—disguised as a piece of machinery, or a decoration on a mantle piece, or . . .
Grayson froze where he was, eyes riveted to the Wall, paralyzed momentarily by a bolt of inspiration. The engineers who worked here would have needed to open the door, both when they were setting it in place, and later, when they were transferring the stock of weapons from Freeport to the cache site. They would have needed a convenient way of opening the door, and an equally convenient way of keeping the door's secret safe. They would have created the key in such a way that it could be passed on, from one of the district's military guardians to another, for generation after generation, if need be. Presumably, whoever was in command of the military district would have the key. It might be that the key's purpose, even the knowledge of its existence, had been lost during Helm's struggles to survive, centuries ago. It would take the death of only one man before he could pass the secret on to his successor for the secret to be forgotten, lost forever.
Or the secret could be rediscovered, now!
Grayson turned and began to sprint for the vehicles that carried what had been salvaged from Helmhold. He, Grayson Carlyle, was the modern-day military governor of the district. As Lord of Helmfast, he was the heir to the lost Star League cache and all it contained. No wonder Rachan and Garth had wanted to get him out of the way. He, Grayson, had had the key to the Star League cache the whole time!
He found what he wanted among the headquarters supplies in one of the trucks, then sprinted back toward the truncated pyramid resting on the gravel banks of the dry river. Lori saw his pounding run and followed. She burst into the engine shack moments after Grayson had plunged inside.
"Grayson! What is it?"
"Maybe ..." Grayson was gasping for air, making speech nearly impossible, but he was working now, bent above the ancient Star League computer on its table in the half-lit shack. He keyed the initiate sequence and watched colored bars of light chase one another across the display. "Maybe the key . . . we've been . . . been looking for!"
He held up what he had recovered from the headquarters transport vehicle—the map program from Helmfast. That memory clip had been given to him as part of the investment ceremony in Helmdown months ago, a Star League-era map of his domains on the world of Helm. Presumably, that clip had been handed down, Helmfast lord to Helmfast lord, for three centuries. How many of those lords had known the secret it might hold? None, possibly, save for those who had written the program in the days of Minoru Kurita.
Grayson inserted the map program clip into the slot on the side of the engineering computer terminal.
He didn't realize he was holding his breath.
A computer program, whatever its purpose, however it is designed, written, and stored, is a collection of information arranged in electronic form, a systematic and complete list of instructions that a computer can interpret and act upon, step by step. The map program contained instructions and stored data based on old orbital photographs, which could be displayed as a photographic map that allowed the viewer to examine the mapped area at varying levels of clarity and detail, according to his manipulations on the keyboard.
The list of instructions in a program could be designed to be very flexible and subtle. A very long program, or a piece of a program, could be written and stored on the memory clip in such a way that no one would ever suspect it was there. So far as any casual user of the program was concerned, this new section of the program did not even exist. There was no way to get at it, unless the program were instructed to reveal the hidden information. That code could be a series of letters or numbers entered through the keyboard ... or by uttered voice into computers that responded to voice command.
One particularly elegant solution, though, in cases when the code word might be lost or forgotten, was to build the code into the computer itself. The program might be designed to work perfectly in anycomputer that would accept it. No one would ever suspect the existence of the hidden program section unless the program were run in one particularcomputer, the one that held the secret code. In that computer, the code, set into the computer's own working memory, would be applied against any program run in it. When the program with the hidden program section was run, the code would unlock the electronic door, and . . .