The Ship Who Won (41 page)

cloudy whiteness of snowbanks under icefalls. The two

chairs ran along the moraine until it dropped abruptly out

from underneath. Keff had a momentary surge of vertigo

as he glanced back at the cliff.

"How high is that thing, Cari?" he asked.

"Eight hundred meters. You wonder how the original

humans got here, let alone the globe-frogs who built it."

At his signal, Plenna dropped into the dark, cold valley.

Keff shivered in the blackness and hugged himself for

warmth. He glanced up at Plenna, who was staring straight

ahead in wonder.

"What do you see?" he asked.

"I see a great skein of lines coming together," she said.

"I will try to show you." She waved her hands, and the

faintest limning of blue fire a fingertip wide started above

their heads and ran down before them like a burning fuse.

A moment later, a network of similar lines appeared

coming over the mountain ridges all around them,

converging on a point still ahead. Her glowing gaze met

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Keffs eyes. "It is the most amazing thing I have seen in my

life."

"Your point of convergence is roughly in the center of

your five high mages' regions," Carialle pointed out. "Everyone shares equal access to the Core."

"Has anyone else ever come here?" Keff asked

Chaumel.

"It is considered a No-Mages'-Land," the silver magiman said. "Rumors are that things go out of control within

these mountains. I could not come this far in my youth. I

became confused by the overabundance of power, lost my

way, and nearly lost my life trying to fly away. Here is the

path, all marked out before us, as if it was meant to be,"

"We should never have lost sight of the source of our

power," Plenna said. "Nor the aims of our ancestors." Her

own tragedy, Keff guessed, was never far from the surface

of her thoughts.

The two chariots began to throw tips of shadows as they

ran over the broken ground. Soot-rimmed holes ten

meters and more across punctuated the snow-field. Keff

followed the indicator on his compass as the numbers

came closer and closer to the target coordinates.

All at once, Chaumel, Carialle, and the Frog Prince

said, 'That one."

"And down!" Keff cried.

The tunnel mouth was larger than most of the others in

the snow-covered plain. Keff felt a chill creep along his

skin as they dropped into the hole, shuttingroff even the

feeble predawn sunlight. Plennas chariots soft light kept

him from becoming blind as soon as they were underground. Chaumel dropped back to fly alongside them.

They traveled six hundred meters in nearly total darkness. Plennas hand settled on Keffs shoulder and he

squeezed it. Abruptly the way opened out, and they

emerged into a huge hemispherical cavern lit by a dull

blue luminescence and filled with a soft humming like the

purr of a cat.

"You could fit Chaumels mountain in here," Carialle

said, taking a sounding through Keffs implants.

The ceiling of this cavern had been scalloped smooth at

some time in the distant past so that it bore only new, tiny

stalactites like cilia at the edges of each sound-deadening

bubble. Here and there a vast, textured, onyx pillar

stretched from floor to roof, glowing with an internal light.

The globe-frogs began to bounce up and down in their

cases, pointing excitedly. Keff felt like dancing, too. Ahead,

minute in proportion, lay a platform situated on top of a

complex array of machinery. It wasn't until he identified it

that he realized they had been flying over an expanse of

machinery that nearly covered the floor of the entire

cavern.

"I have never seen anything like it in my life," Chaumel

whispered, the first to break the silence. His voice was captured and tossed about like a ball by the scalloped stone

walls.

"Nor has anyone else living," Keff said. "No one has

been here in this cavern for at least five hundred years."

"Stepped field generators," Carialle said at once. "Will

you look at that beautiful setup? They are huge! This could

light a space station for a thousand years."

"It is amazing," Plennafrey breathed.

She and Chaumel leaned forward, urging speed from

their chariots, each eager to be the first to land on the platform. Keff clenched his hands on the chair back under his

hips until he thought his fingers would indent the wood,

but he was laughing. The others were laughing and hooting, and in the frogs' cases, jumping up and down for pure

delight.

'The manual says ..." Keff said, piling off the chair,

pushed by Plenna who wanted to dismount right away and

see the wonders up close. 'The manual says the system

draws from the core below and the surface above to service power demands. It mentions lightning-Can, this is

too cracked to read. I must have lost a piece of it while we

were flying."

Carialle found me copy in her memory bank. "It looks

like the generators are made to absorb energy from the

surface as well to take advantage of natural electrical

surges like lightning. Sensible, but I think it got out of

hand when the power demands grew beyond its stated

capacity. It started drawing from living matter."

Plenna surrendered her belt buckle to the Frog Prince.

He left his shell and joined Keff and Chaumel at the lowlying console at the edge of the platform. The brawn, on

his knees, displayed the indicator fields to Carialle through

the implants while signing with the amphibioids. Stopping

frequently to compare notes with his companions, the

Frog Prince read the fine scrawl on the face of each, then

tried to tell the humans through sign language what they

were.

"So that says internal temperature of the Core, eh,

Tall?" Keff asked, marking the gauge in Standard with an

indelible pen. "And by the way, its hot in here, did you

notice?"

"Residual heat from years of overuse," Carialle said. T

calculate that it would take over two years to heat that cavern to forty degrees centigrade."

"WeU, we knew the overuse didn't occur overnight,"

Keff said. "Ah, he says that one is the power output?

Thanks, Chaumel." He made another note' on a glass-fronted display as the magiman gesticulated with the

amphibioid. "Pity your ancestor didn't have any documentation on the mechanism itself, Plenna."

"Isn't that level rising?" Plennafrey asked, pointing over

Keffs shoulder. Keff looked up from the circuit he was

examining.

"You're right, it is," he said. Subtly, under their feet, the

hum of the engines changed, speeding up slightly. "What's

happening? I didn't touch anything. None of us did."

"I'm getting blips in the power grid outside your location," Carialle replied. "I'd say that some of the mages have

gotten tired of the truce and are raising their defenses

again."

Keff relayed the suggestion to Chaumel, who nodded

sadly. "Distrust is too strong for any respite to hold for

long," he said. "I am surprised we had this much time to

examine the Core while it was quiescent."

Swiftly, more and more of the power cells kicked on,

some of them groaning mightily as their turbines began

once again to spin. The gauge crept upward until the indicator was pinned against the right edge, but the

generators' roar increased in volume and pitch beyond that

until it was painful to hear.

"It's redlining," Keff shouted, tapping the glass with a

fingernail. The indicator didn't budge. "Listen to those

hesitations! These generators sound like they could go at

any moment. We didn't get here any too soon."

'The sound is still rising," Plenna said, her voice con-stricted to a squeak. She put out her hands and

concentrated, then recoiled horrified as the turbines

increased their speed slightly in response. "My power

comes from here," she said, alarmed. T'm just making it

worse.

The frogs became very excited, bumping their cases

against the humans' knees.

"Shut it down," Tall commanded, sweeping his big

hands emphatically at Keff. "Shut it down!"

"I would if I could," he said, then repeated it in sign language. "Where is the OFF switch?"

"Is it that?" Chaumel asked, pointing to a large, heavy

switch close to the floor.

Keff followed the circuit back to where it joined the rest

of the mechanism. "Its a breaker," he said. "If I cut this,

it'll stop everything at once. It might destroy the generators altogether. We have to slow it down gradually, not

stop it. This is impossible without a technical manual!" he

shouted, frustrated, pounding his fist on his knee. "We

could be at ground zero for a planet-shattering explosion.

And there's nothing we could do about it. Why isn't there a

fail-safe? Engineers who were advanced enough to invent

something like this must have built one in to keep it from

running in the red."

"Perhaps the Old Ones turned it off?" Chaumel suggested. "Or even our poor, deceived ancestors?"

"Off?" Plennafrey tapped him on the shoulder and

shouted above the din. "Couldn't Carialle turn off every

item of power?"

"Good idea, Plenna! Cari, implement!"

"Yes, sir!" the efficient voice crackled in his ear. "Now,

watch the circuits as I lock them out one at a time. The

magifolk won't notice-they'll think it's another power failure. You and the globe-frogs should be able to trace down

where the transformer steps kick in. See if you can make a

permanent lower level adjustment."

The turbines began to slow down gradually as the

power demands lessened. The Frog Prince and his

assistants were already at the consoles. As the only one

with his hands outside a plastic globe, the leader had to

monitor the shut-downs and incorporate the readings his

assistants took through the controls. His long fingers

flicked switches one after another and poked recessed

buttons in a sequence that seemed to have meaning to

him. The whining of the turbos died down slowly. In a

while, the amphibioid raised his big hand over his head

with his fingers forming a circle and blinked at Keff in a

self-satisfied manner.

"You're in control of it now," Keff signed.

"I am now understanding the lessons handed down,"

the alien replied, his small face showing pleasure as he

signed. "To the right, on; to the left, off,' it was said. 'The

big down is for peril, the small downs like stairs, to your

hands comes the power.' Now I control it like this." He

held up Plennafrey s belt buckle. His long fingers slid into

the depressions. 'This one is in much better condition than

the single we have, which has done sendee for our whole

population for all these many years."

Tall glanced toward the controls. The switches pressed

themselves, dials and levers moved without a hand touching them. The great engines stilled to a barely perceptible

hum.

"At last," he gestured, "after five hundred generations

we have our property back. We can come forward once

again."

He seemed less enthusiastic once the extent of the

damage began to emerge. Series of lights showed that

several of the turbines were running at half efficiency or less.

Some were not functioning at all. At one time, some

unknown engineer had tied together a handful of the

generators under a single control, but the generators in

question were nowhere near one another on die cave floor.

"It'll take a lot of fixing," Keff said, examining the

mechanism with the frogs crowded in around him. The

indicators in some of the dials hadn't moved in so long they

had corroded to their pins. He snapped his fingernail at

one of them, trying to jar it loose. "We'll have to figure out

if any of the repair parts can be made out of components I

have on hand. If they're too esoteric, you might need to

send off for them, providing they're still making them on

your home planet."

"Home?" one of the globe-frogs signed back, with the

fillip that meant an interrogative.

"If you have the coordinates, we have your transporta-tion," Keff offered happily, signing away to the oops, eeps,

and ops of ITs shorthand dictation. "Our job is to make

contact with other races, and we're very pleased to meet

you. My government would be delighted to open communications with yours."

'That is all well, Keff," Chaumel asked, "but do not

forget about us. What of the mages? They will be

wondering what happened to their items of power.

Blackouts normally last only a few moments. There will be

pandemonium."

"And what for the future?" Plenna asked.

"Your folk will have to realize that you now coexist with

the globe-frogs," Keff said thoughtfully "And, Tall, she's

right. You are going to have to do something about the

mages. They're dependent upon the system to a certain

extent. Can we negotiate some land of share agreement?"

'They can have it all," Tall said, with a scornful gesture

toward the jury-rigged control board. "All this is ruined.