Straight ahead, though, the barren ruins of the ancient city stopped dead. They had not merely been dissolved or burned or swept away but replaced by a city of the new masters.
You could see pictures, you could see orbital shots, you could see it as a bizarre shimmering shape over a great distance, but now, this close, it was like nothing they had ever seen or even imagined.
“How would you describe that to a blind man?” N’Gana wondered.
It was a series of interlocking geometric structures, but virtually every possible shape was represented. It was a city of shimmering, twinkling light, predominantly yellow but with an odd pale green afterglow. It stretched for at least twenty kilometers, probably the entire old center city. Its beauty and symmetry, even to their eyes, was nothing short of breathtaking, but at the same time it was clearly built by and for minds so totally alien that Hamille seemed like a brother. At the very top were spires, actually trapezoids, not balanced or uniform but clearly serving the same function. Each of these protruded into the sky perhaps eight or nine hundred meters, and beams of energy ran into and out of them.
Kat Socolov shivered, though it was even hotter than usual. “It gives me the creeps,” she muttered, as much to herself as to the others. “I feel like I’m looking into the minds of beings that I can never understand.”
“Don’t keep looking at it!” Littlefeet hissed. “If the demons sense you looking, they steal a little of your mind. They got part of mine when I saw this place from the farthest high mountains. They aren’t looking now, but I think they will be!”
He was certainly serious, and none of the others quite knew how to take his comments. He did seem to have an abnormal sensitivity to, and fear of, the Titans, which he called the demons, but there wasn’t that pull that he’d reported, at least not now.
“Littlefeet how high up were you?” Harker asked, trying to reconcile the two visions.
“Way up. Up to the snow line.”
“Above the grid?”
“Not exactly. But it was like right there. I could almost touch it. It actually went to ground not much farther up, I remember that much.”
Harker nodded. “I think that’s it. We don’t know what those beams are, but they seem to have a lot of different uses. It’s almost as if those energy strings are living things. That city looks like it was grown from some crystalline structure, maybe artificial but certainly brought here with the invasion ships. But those pulses, that glow, that sense of strangeness you get when you look at it, the shimmering effect—that’s more of this energy. They live in it. They work it, mold it, like a sculptor with clay. It’s entirely possible that they are always connected using it as well. If you got close enough to that kind of beam, your brain would be overwhelmed by the alien information it was carrying. If it’s some kind of life, even artificial life, it might have sensed you in the stream and tried to incorporate your mind into it.”
“Huh?” Littlefeet responded.
“Never mind. Let’s just say that, if I’m right, we’ll be okay so long as we don’t get close to that stuff or intersect an energy stream. We’ll have to watch it, though. Swing wide around over to the east and in to the spaceport highway. Let’s give them no reason to take a close look at us.”
That they could all agree upon.
The offworlders were more than impressed by the two natives, who were clearly scared out of their wits by the sight of the alien city, which they understood even less than the other members of the group, but they stuck it out.
Littlefeet was surprised at how little he was affected by the sight even this close. He couldn’t understand it, but when he thought about it, he remembered that he’d had very few episodes in the daytime. It was at night, and particularly when he was tired and trying to sleep, that the visions came.
The great alien base city continued to dominate everything as they descended. It was no automated station, either. At least a dozen times they were forced to dive for cover in the bush as one or another of the fuzzy egg-shaped craft sped by overhead, either going toward the structure or leaving it. They made an odd sound, like the drone of a giant insect, as they went over; some headed out over the ocean beyond, vanishing over the horizon. The only place they didn’t seem to go was straight up, but Harker and N’Gana knew full well that they’d be in orbit in a shot if they suspected what was inside that oddly shaped tumbling little second moon.
One of the craft flew almost over them, fortunately not stopping nor slowing down, but in that brief passage all of them, not just Littlefeet, could feel and sense a power and control, some kind of dominating energy that could affect them as well as the Titans.
“Discovery at any stage right now could be disastrous,” N’Gana warned them. “That is surely the place where they breed and create the creatures like the Hunters and who knows what else, and there is no way we could escape if they decided to hunt us down on this coastal plain.”
It was a restatement of the obvious, but it showed just how nervous even the iron colonel had become.
Although their descent was fairly rapid, the old city had been huge and spread out as well. They realized that they would not make their goal before sundown. That required an immediate decision.
“That place shines,” the colonel noted. “There will be light to see by, but not enough to be comfortable in this strange and dangerous region. We can either push on and try and make it through the night, chancing that we’ll be more vulnerable than they in doing it, or we can halt and spend the night in that thick growth down there.”
“I would rather move than cower in the dark,” Littlefeet told them. “I am afraid that once darkness comes, I may be drawn to them or they to me and I might betray us anyway. There is also water here but little food, and foraging would be terribly risky. I say we push on and do what you must do.”
“I think so, too,” Spotty agreed. “I am very tired, but I can see no rest if we wait and much risk.”
Harker shrugged and looked at Kat. “I’m not going toget a wink of sleep so long as I’m near that anyway,” she told them. “I say let’s do it and get the hell out of here.”
“Agreed,” N’Gana said. “We get to the jungle there and take a rest until dark. Then we move out. I keep wondering if they let the inmates out of the asylum at closing, and I’d rather not know the answer.”
The destination had been programmed into the minds of N’Gana, Kat Socolov, and even Hamille; it was only the others who didn’t have confidence in where they were headed. Even with that mental map, though, it wasn’t easy to figure where you were and where you were going at ground level, and from the reclaiming jungle, even in daylight. In darkness, it was even harder.
They had underestimated the glow from the Titan base. Although things were distorted and shadows were menacing, there was enough light emanating from it for them to see pretty well, as much as the brightest full moon. It didn’t help, though, that the place seemed to be far more active in the night than in the day; odd sounds came from it, echoing against the hills and seeming to go right through the interlopers. These were deep bass thumps and penetrating, electroniclike sounds and pulses that would stop, start, speed up, slow down, or just throb with monotonous regularity. It was impossible to know what those sounds meant, but there was a fair amount of traffic of the egg-shaped vehicles, more than in the day, and, in the semidarkness of the glowing structures, various beams of pastel-colored light played this way and that, both into space and out to sea and across and through the grid.