Immortal Coil - Jeffrey Lang [87]
“Yes,” Soong agreed slowly, reluctantly following Vaslovik’s reasoning. “But hatred for whom? And why?”
“And what happened to them?” Graves added. “To all of them, the pursuers?”
“I have a feeling,” Vaslovik said, his tone reasonable and assured, “that there’s only one person—and I use the term advisedly—who might be able to tell us.” He jabbed his finger at the inert form on the platform. “Anyone found the ‘on’ switch on those machines yet?”
Graves laughed nervously and pointed at a control surface. “In fact,” he said, “yes. I think this is it. Would you care to press the button?”
Vaslovik smiled. “I wouldn’t think of it, Ira. The man who spent the most time with the crowbar deserves the honor.”
Graves grinned, obviously embarrassed, but also flattered, and Soong noted once again how Vaslovik could charm even the most recalcitrant and wary individuals. Graves pressed a series of controls and something far beneath the planet’s surface began to move more quickly. The floor vibrated with a subsonic dub that Soong felt in his back molars.
The platform began to spin, slowly at first, but with rapidly increasing speed. Soong felt a vortex begin to form over the spinning wheel, and, simultaneously, both he and Graves took a step back. The golden-skinned form was already a blur.
“What did you program it to do?” Vaslovik asked.
“Nothing,” Graves replied. “I couldn’t translate everything, so I’m letting it do whatever he … it … programmed it to do.”
“Do either of you see anything happening?”
Graves and Soong shook their heads. “Nothing obvious,” Graves said. “Why in the world would the platform need to spin? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s almost like … a lot of hand waving. Idle motion.”
“Any technology,” Soong said, “sufficiently advanced, would seem like magic to a primitive culture. Or something like that.”
“What?” Graves asked. Vaslovik chuckled appreciatively.
“Clarke,” Soong said, having to raise his voice above the hum of the spinning disc.
“Should be required reading for anyone studying artificial intelligence,” Vaslovik said. “Stop showing off, Noonien, and use your tricorder.”
Soong snapped open the display and attempted to focus the scan on the whizzing turntable. Nothing registered. He walked around to the other side of the machine and tried again. Still nothing.
His mystification must have registered on his face because Graves asked, “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” Soong replied and ran a quick diagnostic. “Nothing that I can see. I’m just not getting any readings.”
“A dampening field?” Vaslovik wondered aloud. “Widen the scan.”
“What?”
“Just do it.”
Soong did. Scanning ten meters on all sides brought up nothing anomalous: rock walls, their life signs, doors, furnishings, everything but the machine and the body that lay on it. The whirring table seemed to have reached some kind of crescendo because even as Soong was widening his scan to twenty meters, the pitch became subtly lower.
Still nothing. It was as if the machine weren’t there. Might as well be magic, he thought, trying to comprehend why anyone would want to conceal its existence.
Fifty meters …
“Uh-oh,” Soong said, then instantly regretted it, assuming he had made a mistake. An EM signature. Then another. Now four. He checked the search parameters and did a refresh. Damn. Now seven. They weren’t moving … much. Not yet. Vaslovik wrenched the tricorder from Soong’s hand, waved it in a semicircle, then quickly paced the length of the room, scanning from side to side.
“We have to go,” Vaslovik said, tossing the tricorder back to Soong.
“What?” Graves asked. “Why? The table’s just beginning to …” Soong held up the tricorder so Graves could see the readout. The EM signatures were moving toward them. “It’s a mistake. Recalibrate the—”
“No,” Vaslovik said. “It’s not a mistake. We have to go. Now.”
The blood drained from Graves’s face and his lips looked almost blue to Soong. He handed the tricorder back. “All right,” Graves said hoarsely. “We can always come