The battle within the mountain went on for three more days, though it soon became less a battle and more an exercise in mopping-up. The few remaining Salv retreated to barricaded holdfasts scattered throughout the lower complex, where they fought on without leadership or coordination. Their ammunition dwindled until they were reduced to fighting with knives and batons and bare fists. A small number surrendered. The rest died fighting, taking with them as many loyalists as they could; the last victims of the People’s Salvation.
Rann learned all this later, second-hand. For him, the battle ended the moment his squad reached the top of the stairwell.
The four of them were met in the blood-pooled loading bay by a unit of army regulars, whose chinless commanding lieutenant ordered them to report for immediate debriefing. “Orders from above,” the lieutenant said curtly, when Rann objected. “Anyone returning from the deep levels is relieved from duty and subject to mandatory debrief. And it looks like you beggars have been deeper than anyone else. Aren’t you the lucky ones.”
“What do you mean, relieved?” Iva said combatively, though exhaustion weighed down her every word, and the regulars had them outnumbered three-to-one.
“I mean, you can come with us nicely, or in shackles.” The lieutenant shrugged. “Either way, choose quick, bluecoats. We’ve better things to do.”
“Sergeant?” Wace queried. His tall lean body was tensed from calf to shoulder, as though he was preparing to run. Or charge.
“Stand down, Wace,” Rann said flatly. His heart was still pounding from the climb. They’d rested on the landings, as they had during the descent, but he could feel fatigue burning in every sinew. He had no energy left for an argument. Even this abrupt indignity felt utterly trivial, after all they’d seen.
Wace obeyed, giving the sneering regulars a glare of pure, honest hatred.
They were escorted through the immense labyrinth of the complex, past bomb-disposal teams flagging the Salv booby-traps and corpse details collecting the dead. The surviving marines and paratroopers of the incursion force had almost all been withdrawn, replaced by fresh regulars and a detachment of black-capped commissaries.
Rann had never seen commissaries on the front line before. They were policemen, not soldiers, operating under an entirely separate chain of command. He had a feeling these ones were not here for police work.
At last, they emerged through the blasted-open fortress doors onto the cratered mountaintop. The sudden sunlight made Rann’s eyes water. It was late afternoon by now; they’d spent even longer inside the complex than he had realised. The calm sea glittered to the west, dotted with the dark shapes of the royal fleet. Rotorcraft thrummed overhead like gargantuan mosquitoes, ferrying in supplies for the occupation units.
There was hardly time to take a breath of smoke-laden mountain air before a pair of senior commissaries took Rann aside into a cleared outer bunker. They disarmed him, rather more roughly than was necessary, and sat him down unceremoniously on a camp stool. Like a misbehaving child, he thought, fuming with bewildered anger.
They made him speak into a heavy-duty field phonograph, while they sat scribbling notes with furrowed brows. Occasionally, they stopped the recording to make him repeat a sentence. Other than that, they hardly spoke.
Their veneer of professionalism only faltered once. When he described the things he’d found in Chamber One, they gave him a momentary stare of disbelief.
After he had given his statement, Rann asked the commissaries if he could return to his squad. They looked at him like he had run mad. “Your unit has been remanded in custody,” one said. “They will be held for further questioning. As will you.”
“I’ve told you everything I saw,” he protested, trying to mask his growing fear and confusion.
“Tell Dauman.”
The journey back to the encampment passed in a haze of anxiety and exhaustion. A burly commissary-sergeant practically dragged him down the mountainside, along a thin pathway the minesweepers had marked as safe, to a clearing where an open-topped staff car was waiting for him. The bombardment had ended, though fires still burned hungrily in the ravaged forest, and there were places where the smoke was so thick it blotted out the sun. They drove past corpses without number, loyalist and Salv alike, in various states of dismemberment. Maybe it was just fatigue, but when Rann let his gaze linger, every dead face seemed to turn into Lidaro’s.
Rann hadn’t known the encampment even had a brig, but of course it did – a block of prefabricated wooden cells cordoned off behind a guarded wire fence. After a very brief medical check by a stony-faced corpsman, he was locked into a cell that smelled sourly of its previous occupant. There was a bucket for a toilet, a folding bunk much too small for a man his height, and a weakly flickering lamp. Nothing else, not even a window. Nobody answered his shouted questions, although the man in the neighbouring cell did yell at him to shut up.
After he’d been in there for two or three hours – they’d taken his wristwatch, so he couldn’t be sure – a meal tray was pushed through a slot in the door. It bore a pewter cup of water and a plate of stale black bread.
“What’s going on?” he called frantically through the slot. “Where’s my squad?”
There was no answer. Through the thin wooden walls, he could hear the mutters of the other prisoners, the growl of motors from the encampment outside, the constant buzz of aircraft overhead. He sat on the hard little bunk for a very long time, listening. He didn’t know whether it was day or night. Eventually, curling up as best he could in his filthy combat gear, he drifted into a restless and broken sleep.
In his dreams, Lidaro died before his eyes over and over again, while towering, faceless shapes stalked the blackened horizon.
*
They kept him in there for a day and a half, though he was only able to calculate that later on. His joints and muscles cramped appallingly from the tiny bunk, and the stink of his unwashed uniform grew close to unbearable. The numberless cuts and bruises he’d suffered during the battle made every movement sting. There was nothing to do but count off the passing moments like slow-dripping water. He tried not to imagine a gallows being erected, a firing squad oiling their rifles.
I’ve committed no crime, he told himself repeatedly, as if that made any difference.
When at last the door clicked open, he was seated on the bunk leaning against the wall, dozing fitfully. He flinched upright, reflexively reaching for a pistol that was no longer there. A young petty officer in plainclothes stood in the doorway, one hand on her hip. She wrinkled her nose, probably at the smell.
“You’re to come with me,” she said.
“To where?” Visions of eyelet nooses and shallow graves chased each other giddily inside Rann’s head.
“You have an interview with Commander Dauman.” The petty officer gestured for him to follow her. “Don’t worry. You’ll be permitted to wash first.”
She led him across the encampment under the hot noonday sun. The place seemed half-empty; Rann guessed most of the troops were still up on the blasted mountain. Those that were alive and uninjured, at any rate. The hospital tents were overflowing, rows of wounded being triaged out in the open air. Their unending cries of pain were nightmarish. Fresh casualties were unloaded from tracked ambulances and rushed along the muddy avenues on bloodsoaked stretchers, along with the bagged-up dead.
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All the same, there was very much the sense of a battle won. Beyond the triage area, there was little urgency in the movements of men and machinery. The thunder of distant artillery fire was almost gone now, reduced to a sporadic crack and rumble, and the swarming bombers had given way to sparse, slow-flying patrols. When Rann passed units of marines traipsing between the tents, he scanned their faces, in the futile hope of spotting Wace or Geddan or Iva among them.
At the command section, the petty officer bustled him inside one of the low huts that were used as offices by the senior personnel. There was a shower cubicle in a curtained-off annexe, where he was able to rinse himself off for the first time since he’d left the battleship. The lukewarm water sluiced off his bruised body, going down the drain black with dirt and congealed blood. He soaped and scrubbed himself until he felt raw as a flayed man. Some of the stains still didn’t come out.
The petty officer stood outside the cubicle smoking a pungent cigarette while Rann showered. When he came out, she gave him a towel and a fresh uniform, pointedly averting her eyes from his nakedness. The uniform was a poor fit, not that Rann complained. At least the boots were comfortable. He dressed himself hastily, trying to reassure himself that they wouldn’t give decent boots to a man about to be executed.
Or did they merely want him to look presentable on the scaffold?
“Come on. He doesn’t like to be kept waiting,” the petty officer said, stubbing out her cigarette.
The debriefing room was a tiny windowless office in which a crook-legged wooden table had been set with two battered steel chairs. A single naked lightbulb cast a harsh white glow that made Rann’s eyes water. An electric fan turned lazily on a stand in the corner, stirring the muggy air to little effect.
Dauman sat at the table in his shirtsleeves, his epauletted jacket hung on the seatback, leafing through a slender file of papers. He didn’t look up when the petty officer ushered Rann in. “Sergeant, please be seated,” he said distractedly, in that toneless High Kauln accent of his.
“Sir.” Rann obeyed.
“My apologies for your rather brusque treatment over the last few days. I had intended for you to be held somewhere more salubrious, together with your squad, but it wasn’t possible to arrange at such short notice. You’d been too deep, and we had to maintain complete confidentiality. I’m sure you understand.”
“Yes, sir. I do.” Rann hoped the resentment in his voice wasn’t obvious. If it was, Dauman didn’t seem to notice, or care.
“I’ve read the transcript of your initial statement. Your interactions with the Salvator captive sound most edifying. It is a shame he couldn’t be brought in alive.” Dauman glanced up from his papers and smirked. “Though I don’t suppose anyone will particularly miss him. In any case, I’m more interested in what you found inside that chamber. I’ve been shown some photographs of the...constructs. They match your descriptions quite closely. Impressive things, don’t you think?”
“I don’t much like thinking of them, sir,” Rann replied tersely.
“Of course. We don’t pay you marines to think.” Dauman said it without a trace of humour. “These are the facts as I see them, sergeant. Those devices represent a technology substantially in advance of the kingdom’s state of the art. And I can tell you the Salv were, fundamentally, no more advanced than we are. They may have beaten us to atomics, but only by a hair, and too late to prevent their defeat. Which leaves us with the question of who, exactly, constructed those chambers and the machines inside them.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I saw in your statement that the enemy officer made some rather outlandish claims about that very subject. Ancients from offworld, ships travelling the stars...entertaining stuff, though I don’t remember it featuring in any of Nilen’s sermons. Perhaps I wasn’t listening closely enough. I never could stand his voice, could you?”
Rann said nothing, meeting the commander’s gaze with wariness. He had a queasy sense that, if he said the wrong thing, he might never leave Delan’s Rock alive.
“As it happens, I have heard similar theories from other quarters,” Dauman continued. “There have been numerous natural historians in recent decades who have investigated humanity’s origins on Aede. I’m no palaeontologist, but I understand a few radicals among them claim that we originated somewhere else in the universe, and were brought to this world by technological means, conveniently long forgotten. They claim that this explains the sudden and – geologically speaking – recent appearance of human remains in the fossil record. It is a thoroughly atheistic theory, with no room in it for the Almighty.”
“I think I read something like that in the papers, sir. Before the war,” Rann said cautiously. “They said it was a crank idea. There was no evidence for it.”
“Indeed. The greatest flaw in this theory, aside from its irreligion, has always been the utter lack of hard evidence. Where are the traces of these human precursors? The signs of ancient habitation? City ruins, fragments of machinery? If they were ever there, they must have been deliberately wiped away. Nobody has ever unearthed anything truly anomalous. Until now.”
There was a cool satisfaction in Dauman’s tone that set Rann’s teeth on edge. It was the tone of a man who’d just been proved right.
A short silence followed, as Dauman flicked a few pages forward in his file. “I won’t keep you long, sergeant. There’s just one thing I’d like to ask you about, if I may,” he said at last. “Something you said in your statement. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you said the constructs are still...the word you used was alive?”
Rann breathed in a lungful of stagnant air, and nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Our geological surveys indicate that the chamber has been buried for tens of thousands of years. Possibly longer,” Dauman said matter-of-factly, as if this was common knowledge. “It seems improbable that any machine could remain functional after such a time. No matter how advanced.”
“They’re old, yes. But they’re not dead, sir.”
“Machines do not live or die, sergeant. They either function, or they do not,” Dauman said. He had the air of someone speaking to a perfect idiot.
“I don’t know how to describe it, sir. It was as though they were waiting. Sleeping.”
“Might I ask what gave you that impression?”
“I-” Rann hesitated. “I put my hand on one of them. It felt warm. Like there was something...burning inside it.”
“I see,” Dauman said. He reclined back in his chair, folding his hands. If he was troubled by what he’d heard, he didn’t show it. “I would like to thank you personally, sergeant. You’ve achieved something very important for the Kingdom of Greater Kauln.”
“Sir?”
“You and your squad have provided the first proof of active paraterrestrial technology on Aede. And you’ve guided us to more than that. Early this morning we found and secured two more anomalous chambers elsewhere on the island, one of them with enemy researchers hiding inside. Our specialists are beginning their preliminary interrogations as we speak.” Dauman pronounced the word interrogations with a relish that made Rann shiver inwardly. He doubted those Salv researchers would ever see daylight again.
“Obviously, our own effort is at a very early stage,” Dauman went on. “It will be months before we have a full investigative base established here. But preparations are already well underway, and some of the finest minds on Aede are being set to work. We are in the process of verifying your prisoner’s claim that there are still larger hollows in the deep bedrock, containing even more complex machinery. I imagine some of my personal theories will now be put to the test.”
Rann frowned at Dauman in confusion, before realisation hit him like a cold wave. This was why there had been such a hurry to storm the mountain fortress, and why Dauman’s lackeys had been waiting at the top of the stairwell. His teeth clenched involuntarily. “You knew. You knew what was down there.”
The commander smiled. “We had our suspicions. After all, we broke the Salvator communication codes years ago. Nilen had some very colourful arguments with his underlings about their failure to bring these...quiescent machines into his war effort. But until your discovery of that chamber, many of my esteemed friends on the general staff were convinced that I had fallen for a Salv misdirection. They thought I was being led astray by a fantasy of buried wonder-weapons. I staked my reputation on the success of this expedition. So you’ve done me a great favour, sergeant. I’ll see to it that you are commended. Off the record, of course.”
An expedition, Rann thought numbly. A pet project to retrieve an army of relics that Dauman already knew posed no threat. That was what Lidaro and Chasck and thousands more had died for. A heavy, wordless anger built up inside him, and he clamped down on it as best he could, biting his tongue almost hard enough to draw blood. The anger brought with it an awful sense of insignificance. This was a battle he could never hope to win, an injustice that would never be made right.
Dauman stood up from the table, and gestured for Rann to do the same. “Now, be aware, your findings in that chamber are a Category One state secret, effective immediately. Any unauthorised disclosure will swiftly result in your imprisonment. Possibly your execution, if one of my more zealous colleagues gets involved. Your squad has been fully debriefed and informed of the same. Once you leave this room, as far as you are concerned, Delan’s Rock is just an island in the sea, full of dead Salv and nothing else. Understand?”
Rann hesitated for a moment, studying Dauman’s eyes, finding no emotion in them. He nodded stiffly, and headed for the door. He tried to ignore his heart jackhammering in his chest with futile rage.
“Commander,” he said, pausing as he reached for the curved steel handle. He licked his suddenly dry lips and looked round at Dauman. He supposed he would never have another chance to ask. “It’s true, then? We came to Aede from...somewhere else?”
Dauman looked back, his expression blank. “That is enemy propaganda, Sergeant Rann, not to mention blasphemy. The Sacramental Faith teaches us that humanity was created on this world in the divine light of the Almighty. Praised be His name.” Then his mouth twitched into a thin smile. “But I’ve never been an especially religious man, myself.”