Jack Chalker - Charon - A Dragon at the Gate

•What’s the matter?”

“That old bastard! Outside of people directly under my control, Dumonia was the only one who knew precisely how to determine this base’s location. He had to—his people stocked it. Why, I ought to…” He was turning so red I feared his rage, but he soon calmed down.

“Oh, hell,” he said, “I guess he had a right. Without him I wouldn’t have all this.”

“You mean the Cerberan betrayed you?”

He nodded. “Had to be.”

“But why?”

“Just to get me to move. Damn it, Park, I’m ready. I’ve been ready for over a year. You saw Bourget—just a little test. That’s why Dumonia was here. We talked and talked and talked, and I gave him a hundred excuses, but hell, the man’s a psych. He knew I would have to be pushed, and so he pushed.”

I frowned. “Who is that man, anyway? Where does he get the resources and power he uses?”

“He’s probably the most dangerous man in the Diamond, and that’s saying something,” Korfl replied. “He could be Lord if he wanted, or just about anything else, I think. He’s absolutely brilliant, particularly at making other powerful people do what he wants. Right now he has the Confederacy and who knows how much of the Diamond doing his bidding. What his motives are I can’t say—but I know it’s not power for its own sake. If he wanted to run things, he would. I asked him once why he was helping me and you know what he said? He said it was a relief from boredom! But, enough of him. He’s kicked me hard now—and I have no choice but to act.”

“You’re going to try and retake control then?”

He nodded. “Now, I don’t want to minimize anything. You’re still new here—a little over a year total, I think. You still don’t really appreciate what we’re up against.”

I waved my hands around. “This place is equipped to take the whole system, and your planet wide underground is effective. I can’t see why you’d have a problem at this stage.”

He smiled grimly. “Ah, but you see only the surface. First of all, we can’t depend on the weapons here. Didn’t you ever wonder why those troopers in Bourget had projectile weapons? I took a great risk with the laser stuff there. One small tabarwind and we’d have been blown to kingdom come.”

“You know, ever since I’ve been on Charon I’ve heard about tabarwinds,” I told him. “And yet they have to be rare. I never saw one, or met anyone who did.”

“It only takes one to scare hell out of you. It’s, a whirling electrical storm that reaches from the ground to the ion layer surrounding the planet. Nobody knows what causes them, but they look like something out of the most fanatical of religious hells. There’s even a religion based on them, if you can believe it. They just appear—i-no cause, no real reason we’ve ever found. They can be anywhere—except here, in the center of Gamush, for some reason. They follow no set path and no logic, and they vanish as quickly as they come. It can be a year between them—and then there can be dozens, even hundreds. Aside from the direct fury of the storm, almost anything electrical within a dozen or more kilometers of the storm just goes crazy. Overloads and explodes, often with a force beyond anything inherent in the exploding device. No sorcery, no force of will can stand against them. And electrical energy attracts them like a magnet.”

“Sounds like an experience I can gladly skip,” I told him truthfully.

“And they’re more common than you think,” Koril went on. “There are three right now in the north, and that’s where we have to go.”

I sighed. “I see. But reduced to those primitive weapons, numbers mean even more—and I think you have them. If Bourget is any indication, the masses of people here really don’t give a damn who runs things.”

“As usual anywhere,” Koril agreed. “Oh, it’s certain that we could take as much as seventy percent of the north and the few settlements on Gamush without problems. Tukyan’s hardly worth worrying about it’s so primitive. I have enough powerful sores, trained and developed here, to carry the day, force the government to a few strongholds like Monttay and Cubera. But it makes no difference. As long as they hold the Castle they hold one of only two spaceports on the planet, and they hold the power really. The trade, the records—the whole economy. Holding that, they can disrupt the business of the planet. Things don’t work right, people get hungry, or angry. And while we deteriorate sitting on our seven-tenths, they wait for reinforcements either from the other three Lords or, maybe, directly from the aliens. Basically, we take the countryside without the Castle and we take nothing we can hold. Take the Castle and the rest falls automatically into line.”

“Then we must take the Castle.”

Tulio Koril laughed. “Easier said than done, my rash young assassin. Far easier said than done.”

We sat in a small briefing room, eight of us and Koril. I looked around at the faces there, but aside from two I didn’t recognize any of them. The two I knew were Darva, of course, and Zala Embuay whose presence was unexplained. It was definitely Zala we were seeing, not Kira, but we all knew that Kira was present too.

The room was darkened, and a picture appeared on the screen of a huge, black circular stone building set atop a commanding mountain. Pagodalike, there were a series of stone porches around it at regular intervals almost all the way to the not quite fiat top of the building.

“This is the Castle,” Koril told us. “It is eighty meters high from ground level, but there are an additional forty meters below ground. The building is divided into fifteen levels, and has excellent drainage. Its walls are solid stone, a meter thick, reinforced with steel plating and mesh. Beneath it, inside the mountain, is a network of tunnels leading to remote, below-ground armories. You could probably blow a nice hole in it with a laser canon, but you’d never get a second chance at it. Even so, you would have to be a genius to make that first hole, since the outer rock surface is chemically coated with a clever armorite compound developed on Cerberus. It will deflect a laser and, if you’re not careful, reflect it back at you. Because of the coating, the wa of the Castle is inert to us. It acts like a true physical barrier to the best wa sense. You can’t throw a spell to disperse anything or anybody behind it. Of course, they can’t do it to you either—but, remember, they don’t have to. They can hold on until reinforced either from other areas or from space. That topmost area is a shuttle cradle.”

I had to admit the place was most impressive, although I knew of two dozen weapons that could bring it down. Of course, none were available in the Warden Diamond—and two would also destroy the planet.

“The top level is shuttle receiving,” Koril continued, “and there is a series of lifts around the exterior for moving people and goods up and down, mostly by a clever counterweight system. The fourteenth floor is the living quarters of the Lord of the Diamond, her servants and whatever entourage she might permit. On the next eight floors below are special troopers and a defense force, living quarters for the rest of the top government and their staffs, and central records. The bottom five floors, all below ground level, include a supply level and warehouse with tunnel access, a special prison known as the dungeon, a reception level and general offices, and more defensive and trooper personnel. Additionally, on many of the upper levels there are governmental and experimental offices, labs, and the like. All in all, quite a complex.”

Koril flipped a switch, and a schematic of the building came on.