“See the conquering hero comes,” he said smugly. Tamman chuckled, yet he, too, reached out and cupped the back of Sean’s head, and the four of them clung together.
“Well!” Sean said at last. “The last step was a lulu, but at least we’re here. Let’s see what we’ve found. You still reading anything, Sandy?”
Sandy gave him a last little hug and returned her attention to her scanpack—the only one they had after Harriet’s tumbling descent. She turned in a complete circle, then sighed.
“I think you were right about the power receptor, Tam. Most of the power sources’re gone, and the ones that’re left are fading fast. Looks like we finally killed the Valley of the Damned.”
“Pardon me if I don’t cry,” Tamman replied dryly.
“True, true.” She pivoted back to the ruins at mid-valley and nodded. “Looks like at least one of them had some reserve, but the others are gone.”
“Let’s go see the one that’s still up,” Sean decided, “but cautiously.
“You got it,” Tamman agreed, and swung out to take the lead towards the ancient, half-buried buildings.
Sean studied their surroundings as they moved up the valley. Waist-high waves of grass rippled between clumps of dense thicket and tangled trees, slashed with moonlight and hard-edged shadow under the cold night wind. It was a wild and desolate place, still more haunted somehow after the thunder and lightning of their battle. Yet that very desolation, coupled with the effectiveness the automated weapons had displayed even in their senescence, brightened his eyes, for it was clear no one had gotten through to disturb whatever of pre-bio-weapon Pardal might have survived.
They reached the ruined buildings at last. Centuries of windblown dirt had buried their lower stories, but the worn walls were intact, and tough, transparent Imperial plastic, cloudy with age, still filled most of the window frames. Others gaped like open wounds in the dark, and he felt himself shiver as they stopped outside the ancient tower which contained the single remaining power source, for those age-sick walls had brooded over this lonely valley for nine times the life of Egypt’s Sphinx.
The tower stood in the center of the long-dead settlement. Faint swirls of decoration still clung to its ceramacrete facade, and the roots of a tree in its lee—a stubby, thick-trunked thing with peeling, hairy bark—had invaded a window frame. Their inexorable intrusion had pried and twisted at the plastic, and the entire pane fell inward with a clatter when Tamman tapped it.
Sean swallowed. That tree grew on almost level earth heaped twenty meters high against the tower, and he expected to
Tamman dug into his knapsack (which, unlike Sean’s, had survived the trip down the valley wall) for a hand lamp far more powerful than the smaller, individual lights clipped to their gun belts, and all of them gazed into the building as he trained its diamond-bright spear through the opening. A drift of dirt fanned down from the sprung window, but the bare, stained floor beyond it looked sound, and Tamman picked his way cautiously down the dirt ramp, then turned in a circle, flashing his lamp over the walls.
“Seems pretty stout, Sean. We’ve got water damage to the floor, but it looks like it all came through the window; no sign of seepage on the walls. Want me to try the door?”
“Sounds like the next logical step.” Sean tried to hide how much his left side hurt as he limped down after his friend, but Sandy and Harriet were there instantly, offering him support with such obvious tact he chuckled. Sandy grinned up at him, and he shook his head and abandoned his attempted machismo to lean gratefully on her small, sturdy shoulder.
Harriet crossed to help Tamman with the door, but it refused to move, and he finally dipped back into his pack for a cutter. Brilliant glare chiseled his intent face from the darkness, and Harriet coughed on the stench of burning plastic as a line of fire knifed through the ancient barrier.
Tamman sliced clear around the door frame, then kicked sharply. The cut-out panel toppled away from him, and it was his turn to sneeze as pyramid-dry dust billowed. He flashed his lamp through the opening and grinned.
“No sign of water damage in here, people! And there’s something else to be grateful for.” His light settled on a spiral-shaped well. “Good old-fashioned stairs. I was afraid we’d have to rappel down dead transit shafts!”
“That’s because you have a poor, limited Marine’s brain,” Sean said. “If that receptor was their only power source, they couldn’t have had the juice to spare for things like transit shafts.” He smiled pityingly. “Obviously.”
“Go ahead—pretend you figured that out ahead of time. In the meantime, smartass, do we go up or down?”
“Sandy?”
She consulted her scanpack, then pointed at the floor.
“We go down, Tam,” Sean said, stooping to clear the edge of door still filling the top of the frame.
They inched downward, unwilling to trust the stairs’ stability until they’d tested it, yet the building’s interior was remarkably intact. One or two of the dust-encrusted rooms they passed still contained furniture, but not even Imperial materials had been intended to last this long, and Sandy touched one chair only to snatch her hand back with a soft sound of distress as the upholstery crumbled. She shivered, and Sean tucked his arm about her and pretended to lean on her only for support.
It took half an hour to reach the tower’s basement, for it was buried deep in bedrock and they had to deal with several more frozen doors along the way. Yet the stair finally ended, and Tamman’s lamp showed half a dozen sealed doors circling the central access core. He raised an eyebrow at Sandy.
“That one.” She pointed, and he gave it a shove. To their collective surprise, it moved a centimeter sideways, and he set down his lamp as Harriet joined him. They locked their fingers through the opening and heaved, grunting with effort, until the stubborn panel groaned open, and Tamman bit off a surprised expletive as a tiny glow leaked back out at them through it.
“Well,
The wan light came from a computer console, and Harriet and Tamman scurried over to it, all caution forgotten. It was a civilian model, with more visual telltales than military equipment, but very few were green. Most burned amber or red—those that weren’t entirely dark—but they bent over it like a pair of mother hens and probed delicately for a live neural interface.
Sean and Sandy stayed out of their way, and Sean sighed as he found a counter sturdy enough to support him. He sank down on it gratefully and watched Sandy explore with her beltlight while the others fussed over the computer.
Clearly this had been a control center, for the one live console was flanked by a dozen more that were completely dead. But it had been more, as well, for it was cluttered with an incongruous mix of utilitarian equipment and personal furnishings. Someone had lived here, and he wondered if whoever it was had moved in to baby the computers as the settlement began to die.
“Sean?” He looked up at Sandy’s hushed voice. She stood in a doorway across the room, and her shadowed expression was strange. He rose at her gesture and hobbled across the room to peer through it beside her, and his own face tightened. It was a bedroom, as time-conquered as the rest of the building, and the bed was occupied.
He limped further into the room, staring down at the dust-covered body. The bone-dry air had mummified him, and his parchment face showed the unmistakable features of a full Imperial framed in tangled white hair. He must, Sean thought, have been the oldest human being any of them had ever seen, and the fact that he lay here still was chilling.
Sean turned away from the sunken eye sockets with a shudder. What must it have been like, he wondered, to be the last? To lie here in the emptiness of the ruins, knowing he would die as he had lived—alone?
He slipped an arm around Sandy, urging her away, and they crossed silently to stand behind Harriet as she and Tamman concentrated obliviously on the computer.
Forty minutes passed before the two of them straightened, and their expressions were a curious blend of delight and disappointment.
