I would have enjoyed leaving that area as fast as possible, but we walked for a good ten minutes before we came to the end of it. By that time we also came to something else, a group of our own people who had turned from the wall they’d been examining when they’d heard us coming. One of the group was Ashton, and I could have felt the relief in her mind a mile away.
“Tammad-bless you for finding her!” she called as soon as we were near enough, stepping away from the others to meet us part way. “We were all sick with worry, but when you disappeared too, we began feeling some hope. You’d better get her back above to let the others know you rescued her.”
“It would be far more accurate to say the rescue was accomplished through the efforts of us both,” Tammad answered, his arm briefly tightening around me as he grinned. “I find myself filled with great pride over the doings of my l’lenda wenda, and also over that which she fails to do.”
“I figured out how to reach the mind of a null, but didn’t step in when it came to finishing him off,” I explained with a shrug in answer to Ashton’s questioning look, inwardly very satisfied with the arrangement Tam-: mad and I had come up with. I took care of the mental fighting while he took care of the physical, each of us doing what he or she did best and using it to protect the other. Then Ashton’s look changed from questioning to sly, so I thought it best to change the subject.
“How can you people take standing around down here sightseeing?” I demanded, muffling a shiver. “Looking at the null’s body wasn’t as hard to do.”
“So you feel it too,” Ashton said with something of a smile, gesturing to the others in her party. “So far only two of us have gotten the creepies, but that could be because we know what it is. Have you ever seen this much stasis equipment before?”
“What’s stasis equipment doing way down here?” I asked, finding no relief in having the machinery identified. “It’s usually set up a lot closer to food distribution points, and why would they need so much of it? Even with the number of people needing to be fed in this place, they must have enough here to hold three times their number for a thousand years.”
“This equipment has nothing to do with food,” she answered, then hesitated very briefly before adding, “Terry, do you remember saying the male Primes here weren’t able to think about what happened to a First Prime when a newcomer defeated him? Well, did it ever occur to you to ask why they would train Primes as far as they could, only to put them out of the way when they were finally defeated? It wouldn’t make much sense, would it?”
“No, it wou—” I started, intending to agree, and then I felt a shudder run completely through me. “Oh, Ashton, you don’t mean- They couldn’t have—”
“Wiped out the final defeat from their minds, then put them in stasis?” she said, the faint smile on her face doing a bad job of hiding the sickness she felt. “That’s exactly what they did, we’re told, and they’ve been doing it for many years. If wed waited much longer to hit them, we would have been badly outnumbered. Our-reluctant-informant told us they were just about to start bringing them all out of it, the first step in their active plan of conquest. Now we have to figure out how to do it, and in a way that will hurt them the least. Need a job when we get back to Rimilia?”
I shivered again and didn’t answer, just looked for and found the way out of there. No wonder that place was so awful, all those living minds stopped virtually in midthought! They were living dead men who would know nothing of the passage of time when they were brought out of it, who would still think they were the best ever made, who would still be spoiling to face challenges. Work with that? I knew I’d rather be back working for Aesnil in Grelana.
It took us a while to trudge up the ramps that led aboveground, but once we made it the peace and quiet were over. The fighting had long since stopped from the initial attack, but bodies were still being cleared away, wounded were being treated, and the resident Primes without ringing heads were making absolute pains of themselves. I called up my curtain to filter out as much of the mental noise as I could, then sent my mind searching for Rissim and Irin. I made contact long before I saw them, which meant they were both grinning by the time they were in view. Irin hugged me while Rissim thanked Tammad with slaps to the back that should have knocked him down, then Rissim hugged me while Irin got up on tiptoe and kissed Tammad’s cheek. They’d sent someone to tell Murdock I was all right they said, and then they had to leave to go back to what they’d been doing. We arranged to meet again after things had quieted down a little, and then Tammad and I went searching for a calm corner where we could sit down and talk.
When I looked into the lounge I was hoping it was empty, but the answer turned out to be, no such luck. Instead of being empty the room held quite a few w’wendaa guarding a number of prisoners, and as soon as they saw me a cheer went up.
“Chama, we knew you could not have been slain!” one of the women said for all of them, coming forward with pleasure in her mind. “These darayse are naught, and far from the ability required to best you. We feared only that they had harmed you with unfair means.”
“They tried, but happily they didn’t make it,” I answered, speaking in Centran as I stepped farther into the room because the w’wendaa had. Apparently all of our force had been equipped with both languages, and—
“Hey, sweet thing, how about putting in a word for me?” a voice called, startling me into looking around to see Kel-Ten getting to his feet. His gold outfit was dirty and sweat-stained, and a small line of dried blood showed at the corner of his mouth. “After all these hours, I think I’m getting tired of being patient.”
“It’s all right,” I said to the w’wenda nearest him who was reaching for her sword, then moved a few steps closer. “I’m sure the First Prime will prove to be no enemy-once the drugs and conditioning are removed from him.”
“And there’s probably more of it to remove than even I thought,” he said with a grimace, relief showing in his mind when the w’wenda took her hand from her hilt. “I spent hours asking myself why you’d left without me—and then got around to wondering why you’d found it possible to go alone when I hadn’t. I didn’t know then what sort of mind you really had, but the question was enough to start me thinking. When I faced you across the training room and felt you ordering me to have patience instead of begging me to forgive you, I knew something was going on. I thought starting a riot was the least I could do, especially after you’d gotten them ready for it by shaking them up. We were so far into it we almost got cut down by these people of yours, but they seemed to know it wasn’t them we were after.”
“They’re good at knowing things like that,” I agreed with a nod. “When they finally get things straightened out enough to turn you loose, check with one of the technicians before you use a chef to get anything to eat or drink. I know they intend getting rid of the drug programming, but I don’t know when they’ll have time for it. If they haven’t gotten around to it, use someone not in the memory to order for you.”
I started to turn away from him, relieved to have gotten through the conversation so easily, but he wasn’t through. He put a hand on my arm to stop me, and when I looked up at him he grinned.