Glory Season

The sheltered harbor now thronged with other vessels. One, Maia saw clearly, bore at its pointed bow the figurehead of a sea lion. Rowboats set forth even as they watched, carrying stern-visaged men toward the sanctuary entrance. Perhaps, she hoped, one of them was Brod, having somehow managed to escape and call his guild-mates. "Look!" The cabin boy pointed much higher. Maia craned her head and was able to make out the tops of the sleek, stony monoliths opposite. She gasped at a vision of power and loveliness. A zep'lin, far bigger and more powerful than the mail couriers she had known, hovered above one scarred, flat-topped peak, tethered to a straining cable. Your presence has been noted . . . She recalled the placard, within the Defense Center. It might have been wise to take the Council at its word.

Meanwhile, the thrumming sound was growing louder, causing vibrations to be felt through the soles of their feet. "We must go," intoned the big sailor. Despite fascination with the view outside, Maia nodded. "Yeah, let's hurry."

They hastened with the light now on their backs, striving to reach the far end before the desperate reavers, with their long rifles, came into sight behind them. Yet it took some will to approach the growling sounds ahead. There were now two tones, one a grumbling, urgent, bone-shaking basso; and another climbing in pitch and penetration with each passing second.

The cabin boy banged through the far set of doors and light spilled around him. More sunlight, this time pouring down from above. They stared across a vast, cylindrical volume, its stone walls lined with machinery. Overhead, the source of the rumbling grew apparent — an iris made of crimson metal was widening with each passing second.

But what had the four fugitives transfixed was an object filling the center of the room — a vertical multi-twined spiral coil of translucent crystalline material, which started high overhead and plunged downward into a central cavity. The coil throbbed with imprisoned lightning. Inside those windings, they glimpsed a slender, pointed shape, burnished gold, which had already begun descending slowly down the tube. In moments, its tip vanished from sight. "Come on!" Maia called to the others, and rushed, limping, ahead.

They reached the coil but were held back by a force they could not see, which palpably resisted all efforts to approach closer. Their hair-stood on end. Maia could now see that the pit plunged vertiginously some indeterminable distance, girdled all the way by spiral coil. Within that tight embrace, the slender javelin-shape continued its descent.

"Wait!" she screamed. "Oh, wait for us!"

It was almost impossible to hear her own voice over the rising keen. Someone yanked her arm. She resisted, then blinked in surprise as a strange, tiny object entered view. A tapered cylinder of metal, no larger than her smallest toe, had arrived from her left, pushing forward into the unyielding field, decelerating rapidly. It came to rest, then reversed course, accelerating swiftly the way it came, to be expelled with a report of riven air.

The same thing happened again. This time, Maia's brief glance recognized a bullet, before it, too, was ejected backward toward its source. She stopped fighting the tug on her arm. Accompanied by a roar and swarming vertigo, the four of them ran tangentially to the coils and the surrounding, impenetrable field. To her left, Maia glimpsed kneeling markswomen, firing at them, while others, armed with trepps and knives, approached cautiously, their flushed faces alive with conflicting emotions — wrath versus frightened astonishment.

"Uh!" the big sailor cried, and foundered, clutching his thigh. Maia and the cabin boy took his arms and helped him stumble toward another set of doors at the far end of the chamber. While more bullets pinged around them, they could feel awesome power building nearby, intensifying toward some titanic climax.

The doors were still thirty meters distant when the big sailor collapsed again. "Gowon!" he cried hoarsely. "Get 'er outta here!" he urged the other males. But already bullets were striking the metal doors. Maia pointed. "Over there!"

They towed the wounded man toward what appeared to be a junk pile. A midden of boxes, crates, broken and discarded machines. Detritus of whatever project had created this incredible, mysterious edifice. As they, were about to dive behind the nearest hulking mound of debris, Maia cried out. A searing stroke of pain had brushed the back of her right calf, like a hot poker.

The doctor dragged her the rest of the way. A bullet had grazed her skin, plowing a long red trail. "Never mind that!" she urged the physician. "Take care of him!" The sailor was clearly much worse off.