Far Frontiers Part 19

Lillianara feels her mind begin to clear with each sticky swallow. Once again she marvels at her luck, but this time her wonder is mixed with a certain degree of suspicion. She rigs a piece of wire to hold a second concentrate tube over the heat, freeing herself to investigate the contents of this fortuitous haven.

A camp stove, itself almost empty but with a partial container of fuel nearby. Food concentrates stacked in a box. A plasteel jug for liquids, with a built-in micro filter. A battered atomic torch. Various odds and sods heaped in a pile. Even without digging into the pile, Lillianara can identify a shovel, a broken shifter, a couple of pulleys, some rope. There even seem to be a couple of ancient relics: a block scratched with what she vaguely recalls as the aliens' ideographic writing, the base from a small statue.

None of the stuff in and of itself is out of place. Indeed, all of it belongs there, part of the expected gear treasure hunters would have brought with them. Still, there's something wrong about it, something that doesn't fit....

She's finished her third tube of concentrate and is rummaging through the food box looking for the flavor packets when she figures out what's wrong. Although everything here is reasonable in and of itself, it doesn't belong together. The food concentrates alone were manufactured over a century's span. The stove is comparatively modem, but the fuel tin is date- stamped at least forty years before the stove could have been manufactured.

Because of Jofar's research, Lillianara is more aware of time than most people. What is gathered in this little cave must be the remnants of several expeditions, not just, as she had thought originally, a cache left by one. That either means that someone survived up here long enough to scavenge the goods and set up housekeeping in this spot or...

She considers.

Or someone put this cache together precisely for her.

The latter explanation makes more sense. Although the cache contains food and heat, there is no evidence of bedding or clothing. The tools are a jumble of junk and useful gear. True, it could have been something of an intermediary cache-a stopover meant to shelter the unknownscavenger in an emergency or to hold overflow from some other hiding place.

Lillianara shakes her head. She simply can't believe it. Maybe it's egocentrism, but her gut tells her that this cache was meant for her. Why?

That stumps her. Why should the mountain try to save her life after presumably killing so many others? Puzzled, she begins to sort through the cache with deliberate care. Somewhere between moving a shovel and shifting a coil of rope, she drifts off to sleep. The little stove burns on, warming her rest.

When Lillianara awakens, dawn has come and gone. The sun is already high over the mountain.

"I've missed my third extension," she says to the chill air. "No matter what I do, no matter what I find, I'm doomed."

Alastar is fascinated by the treasure hunter's behavior. When the woman awakens, she ignores the tantalizing hints of ancient relics that Alastar had so carefully planted. She pa.s.ses over the broken statuette with a noncommittal grunt. She glances at the tablet inscribed with runes and then ignores it.

Mere human trash holds the treasure hunter's attention and even that she handles with great care, checking all sides of each piece in the light of the torch before lifting it, inspecting it, then sorting it by some arcane system of her own. In this way she finds two of the lesser lraps and disarms them. Alastar wonders if she recognized them for what they were. The android can't be certain; she'd been careful to use explosives brought by earlier treasure hunters.

By late in the day, the treasure hunter has rearranged the cave to her satisfaction. Only then does she venture out into the open air. Seeing her flinch from the cold, Alastar chides herself for not providing a subst.i.tute for the ragged jumpsuit. Almost immediately, her imperative to eliminate the intruder rages in indignant response. She can no longer wait to see if the human will set off one of her traps. She must do something more.

Rising, the android steps over the tray that had slipped from her polished knees. The skulls wink at her as she goes by or perhaps the gems set in their eye sockets merely vibrate in response to the now omnipresent rumbling from below.Obsession and curiosity. Lillianara finds, provide almost as good a distraction from her own problems as the climb had done. By midday she had become certain that the cache had been constructed as a trap. Twice she had discovered explosives connected to a piece of gear, set to go off if the tool-a shovel in one case, a crowbar in another-was picked up.

After that she'd taken a closer look at the statuette base and the rune plaque she had ignored in her more immediate search for food and warmth. These, too, were b.o.o.by-trapped.

Why go about trying to kill her in such a clumsy fashion? Certainly there are easier ways. Local legend is full of tales of would-be treasure hunters blasted by lightning from the sky or shaken off the face of the mountain by localized tremors.

True, any one of the four explosive packs she had unhooked would have gone up with sufficient force to shatter stone and turn her into a b.l.o.o.d.y smear, but there had to be more efficient ways of killing her, even if the means to create lightning bolts and earthquakes no longer exists. Why not just rig a trip line over the entry to the cache or wire something to the "on" b.u.t.ton of the stove?

Feeling like the girl who had slid down the tube worm's hole and found herself in a land where everything was reversed and logic no longer applied, Lillianara decides to use the last few hours of daylight to begin exploring the rest of the ruins of Vorbottan's crest. Returning to the cities on the plains means ignominious slavery; therefore, she is exiled here. If she needs to accept insanity to survive, then she is quite ready to do so. It beats sitting in the cave watching her fuel dwindle to nothing.

When nightfall comes, the enshrouding mist reflects back a slight natural phosph.o.r.escence clinging to the fallen building stones. The reflected light clothes the ruins in a dim, bluish glow that seems to diminish the light of the atomic torch by which Lillianara picks her way across the frozen mountaintop toward the cache.

During her questing about the ruins, she has found very little of interest, but what she has found confirms her impression that the cache was a deliberate creation. Nowhere else are there any remnants of the treasure hunters. The only visible reminders of their presence are the sliced- apart stones, the ma.s.ses of rubble. Everything else has been effaced, even the monument put upby the Second Wave to commemorate the First. Nor are there any portable alien artifacts. That makes the two she found in the cave not only anomalous, but downright unlikely.

When she sees the soft, silvery glow blossoming against the darkness, she doesn't need to check her direction to confirm that the light is coming from the cache.

Where else would it be?

"Down the tube worm hole, Lillianara," she mutters to herself and hurries toward the light. Where else can she go? Her other choices would end in freezing to death.

An angel all of silver stands before the door, a flaming sword held within her hands.

That's Lillianara's first impression. The second is hardly more rea.s.suring.

Tall and slender, a figure stands in the entry to the cave. Although feminine, what stands there is definitely not a woman, but a creature whose form weds aspects of woman and wasp.

The creature's elongated ovoid upper body pinches down to a tiny waist before swelling out again into a matching lower ovoid. Various sets of appendages sprout from both ovoids. The upper possesses two long, slim "arms." A set of wings, very like those of a wasp or bee fan gently behind the upper torso. The lower torso possesses two sets of "legs." Looking at the joints, Lillianara would bet that the creature can become bipedal or quadntpedal depending upon need.

Immediately, Lillianara is reminded of an artist's reconstruction of one of the alien races that may have built the ruins: slim, insectoid creatures, much like the one before her.

However, this creature's head differs from the usual representations of those aliens; it is also what lends the impression that this creature is somehow a "she." The features are nearly human, all but the eyes which are great violet mirrors set slantwise below a pale brow. These have neither whites nor pupils, but are faceted Like those of an insect. A wispy mane of white hair, as fine as niillcweed down, falls to the creature's wasp-waist, somehow failing to entangle the wings.

As Lillianara halts, an involuntary scream rising to her lips, the creature raises what Lillianara had taken for a flaming sword. This proves neither flaming nor sword, even as the creature has proved itself to be no angel. It is a rifle of some sort, the barrel made of transparent gla.s.steel through which rioting eddies of red and yellow energy course like contained volcanicfwes.

As the alien aims the rifle with ready a.s.surance, Lillianara is caught by the expression of sorrow and pain on the creature's delicate features. The full, womanly lips pout as if holding back a sob, and the violet eyes shed silver tears.

"Your name," the creature says, and her voice is like a quartet of alto flutes. "Your name!"

"Lillianara," the woman replies, too astonished to do otherwise. "Lillianara of Klee."

A bolt of copper light jags forth from the rifle barrel, but Lillianara has not stood placidly waiting for the creature to shoot. She has leaped-forward, not back-rolling into the creature's legs, hoping to knock her off balance.

It is like crashing against two steel fence posts. The shock makes Lillianara gasp in pain.

She hears another shot, rolls again, this time into the cave, hoping that the insect-woman will not fife within and risk setting off the explosives.

Of course, they could have been removed.

Groping for a weapon, Lillianara's hand falls on the shovel. She wheels, panting in the thin, cold air, expecting to find the creature coming in behind her or perhaps the barrel of the rifle pointing into the cave.

Instead, the creature stands outside the cave, leaning on the rifle. Her perfect lips are smiling now. In a voice that sounds oddly familiar-only later will Lillianara realize that it is a variation on her own-she says: "My name is Alastar. For this moment, at least, I do not need to kill you."

Lillianara swallows a sarcastic reply, but she doesn't lower the shovel.

'Thanks. Just out of curiosity, why do you need to kill me at all?"

The lovely alien face again expresses almost human sorrow.

"It is my imperative. I am created to protect this installation."

Lillianara wonders if she is seeing things. She has heard that alt.i.tude sickness or starvation can cause hallucinations. She gropes for one of the concentrate tubes. Alastar makes no move to stop her.

"Your imperative?" Lillianara asks, trying to match the alien's casualness, wondering if this is the being who set up the cache in the first place.

"I am an android," Alastar replies. "An intelligent ent.i.ty created for a purpose. Mypurpose was to protect this place and to serve those who dwelt here. I. slept. . . for a long time until the digging of one of your people freed me. Then I resumed my duties."

"Your creators built this place?" Lillianara gestures vaguely toward the ruins. As long as Alastar is talking, she isn't shooting. That has to be an advantage.

"My creators, no...

Alastar pauses. Lillianara has the impression of vast amounts of data long unused being retrieved, sorted, evaluated, translated, and all in the time it takes her to swallow a few inches of concentrate.

"My creators and others," Alastar says. "Allies. Trade partners. This place was built as a suppiy dump for various goods. This world would someday have been colonized, but colonization was not a priority."

"Oh." Lillianara bends and switches on the stove. Welcome heat wells up. "How long ago?"

"Your race was considering farming as a new and exciting concept."

"Oh." Lillianara doesn't bother to ask how Alastar knows so much about humanity.

Apparently, the android has had little enough to do in the century or so since some treasure hunter had inadvertently awakened her. Doubtless she's tapped various communications transmissions.

"One return time," Alastar volunteers, "they did not. I was left alone. Eventually, something must have happened, some terrible disaster. I can only surmise what this may have been, but it was severe enough that my body went into repair shutdown. For some reason- perhaps damaged sensors perceived that the danger persisted-I did not awaken when repair was effected. Not until the treasure hunter found me and the danger of his appearance was a.s.sessed as greater than the danger that had kept me in shutdown did I awaken."

"So you've been waiting for your makers to come back."

"I have been guarding the ruins of this installation. It is my imperative."

"I haven't," Lillianara offers hesitantly. "done anything to hurt your city. I haven't taken anything but the items in this cache-and they're all of human manufacture."

Alastar nods agreement, but a frown now wars with her gentle smile. Her arms jerk as if attempting to raise the rifle into firing position.

'True. But you are an intruder.""I'm a refugee," Liilianara says, thinking fast: Explosives wired to clumsy traps. A cache that is both lure and refuge. Alastar doesn't want to kill me. Give her an excuse to let me live. "A refugee is not the same as an intruder."

"Explain."

"A refugee is someone seeking safety from enemies." Knowing she is pleading for her life, Lillianara tells how Jofar had discovered a drug that would prolong human life. In the process, he had made enemies of those who would reserve such things for a select few. These enemies had conspired to get him into debt, a debt from which his only release would be to trade them the secret of longevity.

Jofar had refused. Telling Lillianara nothing of his plans until it was too late to change them, he had arranged to destroy all his records and research, along with their limited supplies of the drug. His final act- perhaps heroic, perhaps merely cowardly-had been to destroy himself along with his work.

Lillianara relates the entire hateful, painful story. moving from Jofar's achievements to her own futile struggle against the debt that Jofar had somehow overlooked she would inherit.

She omits only that she had fled to Vorbottan Mountain out of some vague hope that she might find there something of value she could sell to settle her debts.

The android stands perfectly still as Lillianara talks, soaking in every word, every inflection, but Lillianara can't tell if she is convincing Alastar. She thinks that maybe, just maybe, the listening is a good thing, but to her infinite humiliation, the woman realizes that her body isn't convinced, that she's trembling under that calm, insectoid gaze. Only when the ground vomits upward thirty meters away does Lillianara realize that the trembling is not her own.

When the enforcer erupts from below, scattering chunks of rock as large as houses to all sides, Alastar can no longer ignore the fact of its existence. She had been doing a fairly good job to that point, though the vibrations from beneath and her own security routines had warned her of its presence.

She hears Lillianara shout in fear and surprise. What would the human see?A great mechanical monster shaped something like a crab, though its antennae are countless and possess a disturbing tendency to telescope up and down through the enforcer's sh.e.l.l as they collect data, then retreat to safety. The two main claws hold missile launchers at their joints. The spiked protrusions along the edge of the sh.e.l.l are lasers. The legs-eight in all, and lacking a crab's rear swim fins-can be detached for independent action or swivel to fire.

The enforcer had not been created by the same race that had created Alastar, but by an allied race with a simpler view toward matters of security. These had been willing to entrust the administration of the supply base to Alastar as long as one of their own creations remained to keep her focused on her task. Androids like Alastar had a capacity to adapt. This was viewed as one of the androids' greatest strengths by their creators and one of their greatest weaknesses by everyone else.

Indeed, without that capacity to adapt, Alastar might have deteriorated from inanition.

Neural nets, whether artificial or natural, tend to decay if they are not used. Alastar has kept her mind alive through conversations with her collection of skulls, through learning about humanity.

In the process, she has become something the enforcer views as a threat to the installation.

Alastar knows all of this, feels also the stiffness in her joints that means an override program has been activated. The override prohibits her from physically acting unless the enforcer can be convinced she has not gone renegade. There is only one way she can do that. Given what she had just learned about Lillianara, the android feels sadness and regret.

As from a great distance, she hears Lillianara shout again, realizes that she is being addressed, sets up a split access program so that she can deal with the enforcer and the human roughly simultaneously.

In her mind, via tight-beam communication she hears the enforcer growl: "wHAT ARE YOU DOING, ALAS-.

TAR?".

"Investigating the situation."

And Lillianara repeats. "What is that!"

"An enforcer, a robotic killing machine set to keep me faithful to my duties.""Skit!"

The enforcer says, "THE SITUATION DOES NOT NEED INVESTIGATION. THIS IS NOT A MEMBER OF THE ALLIED RACES. IT DOES NOT BELONG HERE. IT MUST BE.

REMOVED.

Alastar replies calmly, "This is a human. It claims to be a refugee-to need sanctuary from its enemies."

The enforcer's claws rise, open, missiles protrude slightly. Dust falls from its joints. Like a row of eyes opening, the lasers come on-line. Alastar notes with some interest that not all of them are as brilliant as they should be.

Lillianara waves her shovel nervously. "Is it after you or me?"

Alastar replies, "Me, but you will not survive me by more than microseconds."

The enforcer states, "SYSTEMS CHECK IN PROGRESS. THE HUMANS ARE THE ENEMY. LOOK WHAT ThEY HAVE DONE TO THIS INSTALLATION!"

"Did they do this to the installation? 1 was in repair stasis. Since I have returned, no human has done any such damage."

A claw waves vaguely to indicate the sliced apart stones. "THEY DID! I SAW THEM!"

"And took no action?"

"THAT IS NOT MY ROLE. MY ROLE IS TO ENFORCE YOUR ACTIONS ~Alastar smiles slightly, recognizing the irony in that she is talking now to preserve her existence much as Lillianara had been talking to preserve her own. There is one major difference, however. Alastar was inclined to be convinced. The enforcer cannot be. As soon as it has completed its systems check and selected which of its many weapons are most effective, it will destroy her.

"Alastar," Lillianara is saying, "do something!"

"I cannot. It is against my programming. If you ran, you might hide. I shall endeavor to point out to the enforcer that it cannot hunt you out and kill you without causing further damage to the remnants of this installation."

Lillianara wavers.

"Hurry," Alastar says. "I do not rate my chances of success as very high, and the enforcer has only delayed this long to check its systems."

"Why didn't you say so before!"

Alastar cannot understand this last exclamation. Simultaneously, she says to the enforcer: "What is your role when Jam destroyed?"

"TO PROThCT THE INSTALLATION."

"And you will then destroy the human?"