Glory Season

The long, tubelike chamber spanned forty meters, lined all the way with adamant red-metal and triple- braced buttresses. Presumably to resist even a direct hit … though a hit of what Maia still couldn’t imagine. She did recognize computer consoles, many times larger than the little comm units manufactured and distributed by Caria City, but clearly relatives. It all had the look of having been used just yesterday, instead of over a thousand years ago. In her mind’s eye, she saw ghostly operators working at the stations, speaking in hushed, anxious voices, unleashing horrific forces at a button’s touch.

“Maia, look at this!”

She turned around. Brod was standing before another placard.

Property of the Reigning Council

If you are here, you risk summary execution for trespass.

Your entry was noted. Your sole option is to call Planetary Equilibrium Authority at once.

Use the comm unit below.

Remember — Confession brings mercy. Obstinacy, death!

“Your entry was noted,” Brod read aloud. “Do you think they’ve wired all the doors? Hey, maybe they’re listening to us, watching us right now!” His eyes widened, turning and peering, as if to see in all directions at once. But Maia felt oddly detached.

So, the Council knows about this place. It was naive to think they didn’t. After all, this was the heart of the Great Defense. They wouldn’t have left such power lying around, unsupervised. It might be needed again, someday.

But then, what about my idea—that old Bennett said what he did because he had inherited some mysterious secret?

Perhaps there had been a secret, left over from the glory days of Jellicoe. Something that survived the shame and ignominy following the brief episode of the Kings. Or perhaps it was only the stuff of legend, a yearning for lost home and stature, something carried on by a small coterie of men through the centuries of their banishment, losing meaning though gaining ritual gravity as it passed on to new men and boys, recruited from their mother-clans.

“We could follow the antenna to the entrance they normally use.” Brod motioned to the comm unit mentioned in the announcement, a completely standard unit, attached to cables crudely stapled to the walls. Those cables would be severed if the great door ever sealed. “You know, I’ll bet they don’t even know about the route we took! Maybe they don’t know we’re here, after all.”

Good point, Maia thought. Next to the comm unit, another item caught her interest. A thick black notebook. She picked it up, scanned several pages, and sighed.

“What is it, Maia?”

She flipped more pages. “They not only know about this place, they train here … every ten years or so, it seems. Look at the dates and signatures. I see three, no four, clan names. Must be military specialist hives, subsidized in their niches by council security funds. They come out here once a generation and hold exercises. Brod, this place is still in business!”

The young man blinked twice in thought, then exhaled heavily. Resigned resentment colored his voice. “It makes sense. After the Enemy was beaten, the tech types who lived here must’ve gotten uppity—both men and women—and demanded changes. The priestesses and savants and high clans got scared. Maybe they even concocted the Kings’ Rebellion, to have an excuse to kick out all the folk who used to live here!”

Brod was doing it again, reaching beyond the evidence. Yet he spun a convincing scenario. “But it would be stupid to forget the place, or dismantle it,” he went on. “So they chose women warriors suited to the job and gave them permanent sinecures, to keep trained and available in case of another visit by the Enemy.”

Or by unwelcome relatives? Maia wondered. The most recent entry in the logbook was off-schedule, dated about the time Renna’s ship would have been seen entering the system. That drill had lasted five times normal duration. Until, she noted, his lander departed the peripatetic vessel to alight at Caria Spaceport. Nor was there any guarantee the fighting clans would stay away. With the Council in an uproar over Renna’s kidnapping, they could return at any time.

It might have been a cheering thought—offering a surefire way to overwhelm the reavers with a single longdistance call—if only Maia hadn’t grown wary. Renna might be even worse off in the clutches of certain clans.

The comm unit lay there, presumably ready for use. The quandary was no different than it had been before, however. Whom to call? Only Renna knew who his friends were and who had betrayed him in Caria, a quarter of one long Stratoin year ago.

Every time it seems I’ve gotten myself in as deep as anyone can, don’t I always seem to find a hole that goes down twice as far? Compared to this, Tizbe’s blue powder is a joke, a misdemeanor!

Maia knew what she had to do.

* * *

It proved simple to trace the path used by the warrior clans. Maia did not even have to follow the antenna cable. The main entrance could be in only one place.

From the control room, she and Brod followed the main corridor as it climbed several more ramps and stairs, passing through a series of heavy, cylindrical hatches, each propped open with thick wedges to prevent accidental closure. At one point, the youths paused before a shattered wall that appeared once to have carried a map. A portion was still legible in the lower left, showing a corner of the convoluted outline of Jellicoe Island. The rest of the chart was burned so deeply that not only the plaster was gone, but the first centimeter or so of rock.

“That’s okay,” Maia told Brod. “Come on. This must be the way.”

There followed more stairs, more wedged blast shields, before the hallway terminated at a closed set of rather-ordinary-looking steel doors. A button to one side came alight when Maia pressed it. Soon, the aperture spread open with a faint rumble, revealing a tiny room without furniture, displaying an array of indicator lights on one wall.

“Well, I’m tied down an’ Wengeled,” Brod exhaled. “It’s a lift! Some big holds in Joannaborg had ’em. I rode one at the library. Went up thirty meters.”

“I suppose they’re safe,” Maia said, not stating it as a question, since there was no point. She did not like there being only one entrance or exit, but the two of them must use the conveyance, safe or no. “I’ll leave it to your vastly greater experience to pilot the smuggy thing.”

Brod stepped inside gingerly. Maia followed, watching carefully to see how it was done. “All the way to the top?” the boy asked. She nodded, and he reached out, extending one finger till it touched the uppermost button. It glowed. After a beat, the doors rumbled shut.

“Is that all there is to it? Shouldn’t we—”

Maia cut off as her stomach did a somersault. Gravity yanked her downward, as if either she or Stratos had suddenly gained mass. There are advantages to not having eaten, Maia thought. Yet, after the first few seconds, she found perverse pleasure in the sensation. Indicators flickered, changing an alphanumeric display that Maia couldn’t read because the bottom half had gone dead. What if another, more critical part fails while we’re in motion?

She quashed the thought. Anyway, who was she to question something that still worked after millennia? The passenger, that’s who I am!

There came another disconcerting-exciting sensation. The pressure beneath her feet abruptly eased, and now she felt a lessening of weight. An experience not unlike falling or riding a pitching