Ascending - James Alan Gardner [138]
That was my vow. That was what I solemnly promised to the universe: to every glass elder lying comatose in a tower, to my original flesh-and-blood ancestors, and even to alien races like the foolish Cashlings whose brains were crumbling wrecks. Somehow, I thought, this must all be avenged.
Therefore, in my most secret inner soul, I swore a terrible oath to do so.
“Come now,” I said to my friends, “we are wasting time, and perhaps I have little time left. Let us perform at least one great deed in our lives before we vanish forever.”
I did not wait for them to answer—I strode down the dirt-caked tunnel, trusting that somehow I would find the Shaddill. My friends hesitated a moment, then followed close behind me.
24
WHEREIN I EXPLORE THE ENEMY’S LAIR
In The Tunnels
The entire stick-ship seemed filled with tunnels: some narrow with little head-room, some wide and reaching up into darkness. Darkness was indeed the most salient feature of these tunnels; there were occasional lights—dim orangey plates the size of my palm, set into the wall at waist level—but I counted a full twenty-two paces from one plate to the next, and considering the lights were scarcely as bright as a single candle, they did not provide substantive illumination. Their sole function must have been to prevent one from getting lost in total blackness.
Festina still had her glow-wand, but she used it sparingly: she only activated it when we came to an intersection. Since the floor was dirt, one could see which tunnels were more frequently used than others—the ones where the soil was tamped down more solidly, with the occasional discernible footprint. (The footprints were always from human boots, their tread identical to those worn by the robot admirals.) We always chose to follow the direction of greatest traffic, on the theory that this was most likely to lead us to Shaddill.13
Of course, the stick-ship did not merely consist of earth-lined tunnels—there were also multitudinous rooms opening off the tunnels. Many of these rooms did not have doors, just open entranceways…but the rooms were even darker than the tunnels, so peeking inside only showed bulks of anonymous machinery enclosed in metal shells. From time to time, we saw robots scurrying in the darkness, things that were no more than wheeled boxes with arms sprouting out of their tops. The robots took no notice of us; they were too busy with their programmed tasks to worry their mechanical brains about strangers.
As for the rooms with closed doors, we did not attempt to open them. I had no time to waste on side trips, since I did not know how much longer my brain would stay active. Besides, as Festina pointed out, doors are often closed to protect passers-by from dangerous things on the other side, whether those things were wild beasts, aggressive nano, or machines that produced incinerative quantities of heat. (Nimbus assured us he was keeping watch for high concentrations of nano; according to him, there were light sprinklings everywhere we went, but the nanites showed no more interest in us than the boxy robots.)
Minutes slipped by and still we did not see anything that might have been a living Shaddill. Of course, the stick-ship was huge; there might be millions of Shaddill in some other part of the craft, a residential section that was kept separate from the place where they imprisoned captives. But as time went on with no sightings, I wondered where the great poop-heads were. Was the entire stick-ship run by robots and nanites? Did the machines need no supervision at all? And if the ship could run itself, what about other Shaddill projects?
I knew the Shaddill had changed Melaquin from whatever it once was into a near-duplicate of Earth, with terrestrial weather and plants and animals…not to mention all the cities built underground and at the bottom of lakes. Was it possible such construction had been accomplished entirely by unsupervised machines? Perhaps so—aliens of advanced technical abilities might do everything