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Up. Way up, far above all the other levels.
The disk hissed to a pneumatic stop, and Salvo opened the door, striding quickly across the ramp and
down into the baron's suite. All the strings of power in the ville extended down from this level.
The foyer was magnificent, as was every room in the suite that Salvo had ever visited. Glittering light cast
from many crystal chandeliers flooded every corner of the entrance hall.
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He couldn't help but smile wryly at the lavish evidence of power, especially when he occasionally
received memos that the Intel section was fast using up its allotted monthly quota of electricity.
At the far end of the foyer, flanking huge, ivory-and-gold-inlaid double doors, were two members of the
elite Baronial Guard. Their polished black boots had walked no other surface than these equally polished
floors; their white uniform jackets and red trousers had never been exposed to the elements of the
outlands, let alone a hellzone. They gazed at him impassively, in his drab gray bodysuit, and inwardly he
cursed them and Baron Cobalt for contriving such a situation to instill a sense of uncertainty and
inferiority.
The guards opened the doors, and as Salvo walked between them he saw their faces twist, for the merest
fraction of an instant, into sardonic smiles of superiority. Salvo ignored them. He had long ago filed their
likenesses in the termination-pending section of his memory. If there should ever come a day. when they
found themselves within reach of his power, he would take great satisfaction in stripping them of their
immaculate uniforms and dropping them naked from a Deathbird into a hellzone.
The doors shut behind him, and as he expected, he saw nothing but a deep, almost primal dark. Not black,
because he could still make out dim shapes, but a dark that seemed soul deep, extending into an infinite
void. Salvo kept walking forward, knowing where he was going. The baron's level was the only one in the
monolith without windows, and though he burned a great deal of electricity in the foyer, he always kept
his living quarters a few shades lighter than obsidian.
One room led to another, through a wide, low arch. The succession of rooms went on, and Salvo always
started to feel as though the rooms would never end, with yet one more lying beyond, then another, all
illuminated by the gray glow from an unseen light source. But in the fifth and final room, Salvo stopped.
Eight men stood in a formal semicircle in the center of the enormous Persian carpet that covered the floor.
Several of the group were administrative members of the Magistrate Division, one was a high-ranking
archivist and four were of Baron Cobalt's personal staff. Though he knew all of their names, he didn't
know them personally.
Salvo managed to keep the surprise he felt from showing on his face. At most, he had expected two,
maybe three of the baron's staff to be present. He had no idea that the entire membership of the Trust had
been summoned. Suddenly the reason for his audience with the baron was much more important than
simply delivering a report about the Mesa Verde penetration.
None of the men spoke to him, nor did he speak to them. A meeting of the Trust was neither the time nor
the place for social niceties. Every ville had its own version of the Trust. The organization, if it could be
called that, was the only face-to-face contact allowed with the barons, and the barons were the only
contacts permitted by the Archon Directorate.
The mission of the Trust revolved around a single themethe presence of the Directorate must not be
revealed to humanity. If their presence became known, if the technological marvels they had designed
became accessible, if the Directorate's history filtered down to the people, then potentially the Directorate
would be forced to visit another holocaust upon the face of the earth, simply as a measure of self-
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preservation.
And that capability was there, Salvo had been told upon his induction into the Trust. To prevent another
apocalypse, maintaining the secrecy of the Directorate and their work was a sacred trust. It was a sworn
and solemn duty, offered to very few.
Unfortunately, no secret as complex and as wide-ranging as this one could be completely hidden. Rumors
abounded about the Directorate and the Totality Concept even before the nukecaust, though they were
relegated to the status of urban legends or contagious paranoia. During the century and a half following
the skydark, some of the secrets were discovered. Humanity, what was left of it, was too scattered even
for the Directorate to control. The near annihilation of the race hadn't diminished the race's inborn sense
of curiosity, the drive to search in strange places for strange things.
Many of those strange places were penetrated, the strange things uncovered, but humankind was too
concerned with day-to-day survival to reason out the why's and wherefore's behind them. It required only
a generation to reduce the knowledge of strange places and things to mere rumors, and another generation
to fanciful legends.
Salvo recalled that some thirty years before, a junior archivist in Ragnarville had found an old computer
disk purporting to contain the journal of one Mildred Wyeth, a scientist. According to the journal, she had
been in suspended animation during the nuking and she had survived the skydark and the long nuclear
winter to be revived a century later.
Sometime during her wanderings, she recorded her thoughts, observations and speculations regarding the
post-nukecaust world, the redoubts and the wonders they contained.
Although she had no inkling of the true nature of the redoubts or even the presence of the Directorate, a
number of her extrapolations came too close to the truth.
The Trust suspected the Wyeth Codex had been downloaded, copied and disseminated like a virus
through the Historical Divisions of the entire ville network. There was no solid proof of this, of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]