Landfall: Tales From the Flood/Ark Universe by Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online Page B

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    ‘Open up? Nest ?’ Lange spoke shrilly. He was visibly angry, his face red, a vein pulsing in his forehead.  
    Manda and the warriors of the guard touched their weapons.  
    Lange backed away, fumbling for something under his grandfather’s black shirt. He ranted, ‘I knew this day would come! Some rapacious predator like you, Lady Xaia, would come and take away my family’s birthright – and without due academic credit, no doubt -’  
    Xaia sighed. ‘Generations in this wilderness have bequeathed an addled brain. He’s not armed, is he, Manda?’
    ‘Not as far as I could see.’
    ‘Then restrain him.’
    But as Manda stepped forward Lange produced a white box from beneath his coat. ‘Recognise this? More Founder technology, scavenged from the Shuttle like the solar cells and brought here by my grandfather …’
    Manda paused, uncertain.  
    Xaia called, ‘What are you doing, Lange? What is that box?’
    ‘I always knew this day would come!’ Tears were streaming from the socket which contained his steel eye. ‘And I planned for it, even as a young man I planned, and prepared. I dug those holes in the cave roof – I planted the charges – go, all of you, just go now to your ships, or I will destroy it all!’
    Manda lunged forward - but even she wasn’t fast enough to stop Lange closing a switch on the box. She threw him to the ground.
    And a dull crump echoed from the cliff face.
    Xaia turned. Dust billowed out of the cave over the city stratum, and chunks of the black rock wheeled almost gracefully in the air. Above the collapsed cave a small landslip was starting, burying what had been there before. The charges Lange had evidently set in the cave roof had gone off.
    Teif growled, ‘What a crime! To destroy a relic a billion years old, all out of selfish pique.’
    Chan laughed.
    Teif turned on him. ‘Have you gone mad?’
    ‘No!’ Chan quailed back. ‘It’s just – this man has shown what a fool he is, how much less of a man than his grandfather. Yes, he’s destroyed that one dig site. But I’ll wager the city itself, the black stratum, goes on for kilometres, deeper into the rock. Sealed in the dark as it has been since the day it submerged, safe in the sandstone. All we have to do is bring the resources here to dig it out.’
    Teif looked as if he was struggling to understand. ‘I’ll take your word for it.’ He turned to Xaia. ‘So you found your treasure. Black rock and bits of discoloured glass. Is that enough for your vanity? Can we go home now?’
    Manda was sitting on Lange, pinning his arms. He struggled, and turned his head to spit at Xaia. ‘Yes, go home, Lady, you glory-seeking buffoon with your pack of thug-bitches. Go home in failure!’ He began to hawk, trying to spit again.
    Manda grabbed his jaw, turned his head towards her, and dug her fingers into his damaged eye socket. Thick blood spurted, and the man howled. When she held up her fist it contained a bloody sphere, and his face was left a ruin.  
    Chan retched.  
    Teif yelled, ‘What are you doing, woman?’
    ‘Proving he’s a liar,’ Manda said.  
    Xaia hurried over and, mindless of the blood and mucus, took the eye and examined it in the sunlight. ‘ It is an Orb . Teif, look! A globe of the world in the Founders’ steel – here is the Belt, here the Scatter. Just like the others.’
    Manda grinned. ‘I thought I recognised the profile of Zeeland, printed on his fake eyeball.’
    Xaia said, ‘I always wondered why there were only fourteen Orbs, when every tradition has it there were fifteen Founders.’ She glanced at her companions. ‘You realise what this means.’
    Teif said, awed, ‘You hold an Orb. You hold the authority of the Founders – as much as your husband.’
    ‘And it proves that Lange was lying ,’ Manda said, still sitting on the whimpering man. ‘Nobody would have brought an artefact as precious as an Orb out of Ararat. Everybody knows it took generations before the Zeeland