Jack Chalker - Priam's Lens

There was a sudden buzzing and then the entire ancient charged genhole plate, still on the crane above them, crackled with sudden life.

“C’mon, Krill, you beautiful bitch!” N’ Gana screamed. “ SHOOT!”

Although within seconds Krill was quite confused at having not two but three shoot orders in her sequence, something not in the plan, the important thing was that it all happened.

They shot.

The plate suspended above cracked like thin ice. The jagged rupture spread through the side of the underground complex, and up into the left side of the Titan base itself. The one shot was too much for the small plate, which was never intended to be used in any way, much less like this, and it fell and shattered on the factory floor below.

The crack continued to spread. Where it struck the Titan base, the crystals shattered like so many thin glass bulbs under pressure.

From high on the hillside, two women, mouths open in awe, forgot their unconscious charge and watched as an indescribable sliver of something shot out of the very earth and shattered a large segment of the base. It was followed by a sonic boom the likes of which not even most space pilots had felt before—a boom that deafened them, flattened some trees on the plain below, and knocked both women down.

The base itself was in serious trouble. It flickered and shimmered as popping and crackling sounds were heard inside, and the whole center structure, all twenty-plus stories of it, began to collapse in on the already ruined left section, which could no longer provide structural support.

Two more Titan craft flew out as it collapsed, but they were unsteady, wobbling, and both crashed to the ground in front of the disintegrating base.

The towers anchoring the grid fell in as the structure imploded in dramatic slow motion. For a brief moment the grid shone brightly in the sky in spite of the glow, as if it had suddenly received more power than it ever had carried before, and then, just as suddenly, but completely, it winked out.

“They did it!” Spotty cried, still not sure she could hear after that big explosion but too excited to remain scared. “ They killed the demon city!”

The plain was slowly dimming, going dark, as the base continued to collapse. A multitude of tiny figures were moving like excited insects all around in front of it, but from this distance it was impossible to tell who or what or how many they were.

A good dozen ships, however, had already left before the shot was taken or had managed to break out before the impending collapse; these now hovered over the area, save only the two finishing off the transmitter and the two others now turning to molten rock an area between the old spaceport and the base.

Spotty watched, and her joy was suddenly muted. “Littlefeet,” she muttered, an agonized expression replacing the jubilant one.

Harker groaned in back of them, then opened his eyes and cried out, “No! I—”

He suddenly realized he was on his back and in the trees and that the two women were there and paying no attention to him whatsoever.

He tried to get up, failed the first time, then managed to sit up and feel his jaw and the back of his head. He tried to remember what had happened but it was all a confusing blur.

“Kat! Spotty!” he called.

Spotty continued to look at the spectacle, which was now becoming harder and harder to see as most of the illumination faded, leaving only that from the surviving ships and the areas they had transformed to magma. Kat, however, turned and bent down. “You okay?” she asked him.

“What—what happened?”

“Oh, they took the shot,” she told him. “The base is no longer.”

He tried to get to his feet in a hurry and, with her help, he managed it. “You mean I missed the damned show? After all that?”

“You got caught in one of their beams. The only way not to have you turned into one of their spies was obvious, so I knocked you out.”

“You knocked me out?”

“Well, you were kind of spaced-out, you know. Easy target.”

He felt his jaw and then the back of his head once again. “I think you got lucky. Feels like my head hit a rock or something when I fell. Damn! Was it worth seeing? Help me to where I can at least look at the rubble!”

“C’mon, helpless! Not much to see anymore, though. And stay out of the way of those ships. They’re reeling but they’re not finished yet!”

But, they were finished, at least at Ephesus. The ships patrolled the area, back and forth, and occasionally one of them sent out a searchlight of some kind, checking on something below, but there was little more they could do. They seemed aimless, confused, unable to accept that they’d just suffered a tremendous blow and that something was definitely out there hunting them for a change.

Harker watched it, and something in the back of his mind understood.

“They don’t have any connection with the rest of the network,” he commented. “They can’t consult, they can’t get orders, they can’t make collective decisions at the speed of light. One thing’s sure—they didn’t trace the shots to space. They’re not going up in a hurry to take on Hector, Krill, and her gates.”

She shook her head. “It didn’t look like it came from there,” she told him. “For some reason, sheer luck, I was staring down at it when it happened. It was like it came out of the ground. I expected a bolt from the blackness, and it came from out of the ground. Go figure.”

He looked up at the night sky. “No grid. No giant continental neural net. Now it’s the flowers that’ll be going mad.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. I’m not even positive myself what it means, but I can tell you that they are hurt bad.”

Spotty turned and looked at him. “Will they build it again? Will it come back?”

He sighed. “I don’t know, Spotty. I honestly don’t. I hope not. If they don’t, at least we’ll know that Krill reclaimed this system. How they do this in places where they’re not orbited by a peanut moon like that I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter to us anymore.”

Kat looked back at the now darkened scene. “Now what?” she asked.

“Now we’re out of the battle and out of the war,” he told her. “Now we get to go someplace where I can sleep off this pounding headache, where we can all eat and drink and relax. Maybe, when we get back to the Styx, we’ll take some time and teach Spotty how to swim. She’s already got an oversized flotation collar on her chest. Two of ’em. Shouldn’t be too hard for somebody who walked into a demon city and walked back out leaving it a pile of rubble.”

“Okay, then what?”

“Well, we find a really pretty place near the coast with a nice view of the ocean and no monsters under the sand and with lots of food and water and good wood, and we work up some tools. We live there and we do the best we can and see about building a boat. We defend the place and protect it. If they find us before I finish the boat, well and good, or if I finish the boat first, well, maybe we’ll go find out who won the war. There’s nothing but time now, and there’s no hurry at all.

The shuttle craft circled the area and studied the settlement below. It was quite typical of small communities on Eden, although those on the other continent had not developed as smoothly, and those who lived there were still primarily nomadic hunter-gatherers.

Not that Eden’s small villages were any wonders of technology, but the people did tend to stay put and trade a bit with their near neighbors.

Like the others they had surveyed, this one had shelters but no totally enclosed structures; rather, the “houses” were basically earthworks with roofs of woven straw held up by bamboolike poles. They had no sides, and were open to the elements.