Jack Chalker: Priam's Lens

“Yes to both, I suppose. At the point of broadcast, I could shift whatever remaining power I had to the plate. It should charge it for a short period. But why?”

“Then let’s send those codes with a command to target this one first,” he suggested. “Let’s shoot the bastards from right here if we can!”

It was no easier getting out than it had been getting in, but at least in daylight the activity of the Titan base was far less and there weren’t those energy tendrils to deal with.

Harker, Kat, and Spotty said almost nothing while making their getaway. There wasn’t anything else to say. It was good to be able to stop at a depression filled with water and at least fill that need.

There was still traffic in and out of the base; the ships didn’t stop coming and going day or night, and in place of the strings they could see what appeared to be large numbers of humans or humanlike creatures wandering, apparently aimlessly, across the expanse of the old city, never straying too far from the front of the crystalline base.

“Hunters?” Kat wondered when they reached some cover.

“Doubtful. Not that passive or that many together. Other kinds of experiments, probably. The people they use to determine what to do with the rest of us, or what they can do. Even so, I wouldn’t like to meet up with any. At the very least, what they see, the Titans see, too.”

The jungle area didn’t provide a lot of food, but Spotty was able to round up some squashlike growths and an acidic but spongy leaf that she insisted was edible.

“Nightfall, after the storm, we should try and make the hills,” Kat told them. “I don’t think the mentat’s going to give us a whole lot of grace time, and if anybody or any-thing, even by accident, wanders down that culvert, it won’t wait ”

Harker frowned and nodded slowly. “If I know Krill, she’s had them drilled and checked and double-checked again and again up there and somebody sitting in the command chair on shifts at all times. Yes, the moment those codes come in, whoever is in that chair is going to take a few seconds to react, a few more to realize what they’ve got is a live system, maybe another minute or two to notify the others, and then it’s shoot time. The targets will be at least one base on each continent just to collapse the grid, then the rest before the Titans can regroup and move. If it’s done right, then there could be just enough shock and confusion as those nets go down to allow for a whole series of positioning shoots before the Titans even realize where they’ve been hit from. By that time there could be enough impulse energy bouncing around, along with God knows what other bizarre effects from both the Lens energies and the collapse of the Titan nets, that they may be unable to get a fix on Hector. Remember, the commands to shoot will be short numerical commands sent in nano-seconds through the orbiting genholes’ out-systems. Titan ships will go after those gates first, and probably be even more confused when they see only gates. Krill knows she needs a fast clean sweep. I expect her to do her job.”

Spotty stared at the two of them. “They will do this— thing as soon as they can?” She didn’t understand anything about the weapon, but the idea of throwing lightninglike spears into the hearts of demons was good enough.

“Yes, they will, dear,” Kat replied.

“Then we cannot wait for nightfall. We must go now or we will not be able to make it to the top. The demons are most active at night, and they must expect something. No matter how we feel, we must go now or remain right here until it finishes.”

She was right and they knew it. All those survivor’s instincts and upbringing in a world of constant threat made her the expert. Both offworlders suddenly realized that they had been treating the girl like some poor native guide in a bad play. They were in her world now, and she was the expert, the natural leader, among the three of them.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Harker said, and they rose to go.

They had to move as much as possible through the overgrown sections, and they had to keep down in what appeared to be slowly increasing activity at the Titan base, so it was nearing sunset when they reached the point where the Grand Highway rose gently to reach the low pass between the hills.

Even before darkness fell, there were loud noises coming from the Titan base, and lights and energy tendrils were everywhere. Harker was nervous about climbing up in the face of it, but he saw no choice. “If that thing explodes or whatever, it’s going to at least take most of this coastal plain with it. We have to be over the summit!”

“I don’t understand why a race that sophisticated didn’t pick us up when we came in,” Kat commented. It had been bothering her from the first. “We can set up defenses even i cockroach can’t get through.”

“Not true,” Harker told her. “Otherwise there would be no more cockroaches. They would have gone extinct when Earth became uninhabitable. We can set up a general roach barrier that works most of the time, but not if we’re targeting individual roaches. In this case, we’re the roaches, and I don’t think they can comprehend total individualized behavior. No, they’ve been waiting for us to reappear all right, but what tips them off is the roach with the electronic implant. Its the only reason Jastrow got in and out, the only reason we got in and out.”

“Yeah, but if somebody’s getting nervous down there, they might be looking for another candidate,” Kat suggested nervously. All she wanted to do was get out of there.

Using the windswept trees as cover and the light reflecting from the great Titan base, they managed to get almost halfway up before the rains rumbled in, the low hills being no barrier to them.

Even knowing that the rains were more than mere rains, and noting their altered behavior, Kat and Harker couldn’t help themselves. When the rains rumbled, they broke cover and went out nearer the road and sat, exposed, so that they could be fully bathed. It wasn’t something they thought about or something they could fight. It was an irresistible impulse even as their minds told them it was not the thing to do.

From the Titan base below, the electronic thumping noise that they’d heard before, with a varying pace that rose and fell but still seemed to go right through them, was particularly loud and active. There was no question that their position could be detected; it probably could be detected at any time via the grid. The problem for the Titans was that they could not tell humans apart unless they had been selected and marked in the data stream. And if you weren’t theirs, you were just one of the mass.

After the storm passed, there was always a feeling of wellness accompanied by lethargy; the trained guards were always able to overcome this, but most never fought it. Now, though, it was taking all the willpower of the exhausted trio to keep going, to keep from settling in, from finding a spot for the night and sleeping.

“Is it particularly strong because we’re so close or because they just did something?” Kat wondered.

“It doesn’t matter,” Harker told her. “We have to push on if we can, we have to fight it. And if they did anything extra, or if two baths this close to the source of the programs did an extra job on us, we’ll have to live with it, too. It’s done. Right now we just need to run.”

Nobody was up to running through that brush up the rest of the hill, but walking was something they could force themselves to do.

Something down there was more excited than usual, and the energy tendrils from the various facets on the base seemed hyperactive. They would sweep not only the plain but also up the hills as well, and it was getting difficult to dodge them.