Without any warning, the hold bars began to run along the rail, sweeping us through the tunnel faster and faster. Instead of running straight, the route described a broad spiral. Somebody had modified the hell out of what had originally been a short reinforced passageway on a destroyer, making it at least a hundred times longer. Holding onto the bar was no problem for me, but judging by the tension in Vasily’s neck and shoulder muscles this jungleland express couldn’t have been easy even for someone who was used to it. After a couple of seconds we hit an acceleration of nearly 4 g, and only then did we begin braking, coming at last to a complete stop. The weightlessness told me we’d returned to the center of the great wheel, taking less than five seconds to undo all the work we’d done to get to the door. Start at the center, take a million detours, end up in the same place.
The Old Man was very concerned about security, that much was obvious. But I was surprised to discover that he also knew something about history. The ancient Mycenaean labyrinth-fortresses were built on the same principle, largely forgotten in the later history of fortifications on Earth, but neatly adapted here to space.
We emerged from the tunnel and swam in the air through another diaphragm hatch, this one unguarded. When it closed behind us we found ourselves floating in an enormous, bare, hemispherical chamber. The curved wall seemed to be made of composite ceramic armor, but I couldn’t see any furnishings or anything special in it except for a circular mirror, almost thirty feet across, which covered the entire flat side opposite the entrance.
“Slovoban didn’t get to be his age by being careless,” Vasily snorted, wiping the sweat from his brow. “Hell, I’ve made this trip at least a hundred times, but he keeps making me go through all this shit. If I didn’t think the Old Man was the only one who could help us find the damn Cetian, I would have saved myself the trouble. When he understands that keeping this space dump in one piece depends on how cooperative he is, I hope he’ll tell us everything. If not, the frigates we left back there can use the Estrella Rom for target practice.”
“What makes you think that this senile gypsy, even if his home depends on it, can tell us where—” I was beginning to splutter, spinning in midair to face Vasily, when a third voice stopped me cold.
“We’ve been friends a long time, Vasily. You don’t have to threaten me with the ridiculous pair of frigates you left behind if you want to ask for a favor. Asteroid G 7834 XC. It doesn’t even have a name. The orbital data are in the old registers of the Asteroidal Republic of Ceres Mining Company—though they never got around to settling there. And rightly so: there’s no mineral wealth on that asteroid; it’s just a ball of dust and ice, too dirty for even the water to be usable. But that’s where Weekman kept his smuggling base, ten years ago. If you hurry you might still find him holed up there with Makrow 34 and their overgrown reptilian friend, counting their loot.”
The voice was soft but booming, with an indescribable, almost liquid quality to it. I spun about so abruptly that, forgetting the weightlessness, I crashed into the wall.
The mirror had turned transparent. Two-way: an old but always effective trick. Looking through it, I saw another hemispherical room, the twin of the one we were in. But that room was crowded with things.
Its decor was… striking. The walls were entirely covered with two basic motifs.
The first: complex, advanced, modern-looking electronic devices that ten minutes earlier I would have thought entirely out of place in a junkheap orbital like the Estrella Rom. I can’t call myself anything like an expert on the subject, but to me they appeared to be highly sophisticated life-support systems. I should have been surprised to see them there, but after the two Grendel-class Storm Trooper outfits, the armored diaphragm hatch, and the spiral tunnel, I felt ready not to be shocked if I found out that one of those contrivances was capable of generating a hyperspace portal.
In any case, I found the second decor element even more intriguing.
Suits of armor.
Not just titanic composite Grendels and other modern, sophisticated, super-costly servo-assisted combat systems, but also genuine historical relics. I’m not an expert on armor either, but photo-recall does have its uses. I recognized an armored samurai suit, probably fifteenth-century, and medieval European armor that I thought might be of Burgundian make. The others I could only speculate about with the boldness of a dilettante: one might have been Mongol, or perhaps Burmese; another Roman legionnaire or maybe Scythian; the next was either Celtic or Viking. A fine collection.
They all looked authentic, except for one detail suggesting that, though one or another of them may actually have been genuine antiques, most had to be mere reproductions (and splendid ones) made on order for the eccentric collector (I wondered that Vasily hadn’t mentioned this curious side of the Old Man to me).
The detail was their size. The medieval armor looked a bit large, and as far as I know Roman legionnaires weren’t known for their height, nor were most medieval Mongols six and a half feet tall. But even a Colossaur would have found the servo-assisted Grendel suit cumbersome. Nobody under eleven feet could have used it comfortably.
“Your friend Slovoban’s a funny sort of guy,” I said to Vasily, turning to him with my most ironic expression. “Setting aside his paranoia, did he have some of these suits of armor made for his collection in size XXL to impress his visitors? Doesn’t strike me as necessary, given the pair of gargantuan doorkeepers we passed back there.”
Vasily’s sudden silence, but above all the look of reverence that came over his face, told me that the Old Man must have entered his own reception room. I turned back, and indeed, there between the life-support systems and the enormous historical suits of armor, a man had just made his appearance.
Or something that had once, long ago, been a man. Because Adam wouldn’t have readily recognized this stick-thin cross between a spider and a snake as one of his descendants.
Okay, no need to exaggerate. He wasn’t all that ugly. I’ve seen mutant eel larvae that looked uglier and moved with less grace.
Not many, though.
One look at him and I understood that Vasily’s term, hypertrophic osteopathy, was right on the money. The largest suits of armor weren’t oversized, as I’d thought. Unbelievable as it was, they were the small ones that had sadly become too short.
In his heyday, Old Man Slovoban must have already been a fairly tall man, maybe six, even six and a half feet tall, judging from the oldest suits in his collection. Living in weightlessness for so many decades, the expansion of his intervertebral discs and articular stretching due to the weakening of his skeletal structure through calcium loss might have added another four inches. But this thing stood more than eleven and a half feet tall from head to toe.
He had not merely grown taller.
Many years of weightlessness could have made his muscles atrophy a little—but not to this extent. He was hardly more than skin and bones. His ribs, having lengthened and softened through some teratological process, seemed to have folded and interwoven themselves around his shrunken torso, within which his heart and lungs, freed from the struggle against gravity, also seemed to have shrunk. The intravenous feeding tube emerging from his neck gave me a clear idea of what had happened to his stomach.
Beyond this, he was pale to the point of translucence, and his arms, long and noodle-thin, were quietly folded into impossible angles, as if they had more joints than any normal human limbs—or were a veritable showcase of fractures. Perhaps osteoporosis and osteochondritis as well?