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what he did was never made clear to me."
In truth, the problem had vexed Lakesh for a long time. He could only
speculate that once Sindri grasped the fundamental principles of the quantum
inducer operations, he approached the problem from a direction Lakesh had yet
to figure out.
"There are many reasons why we're not receiving the transponders' telemetry at
the moment," he went on in a reasonable tone. "It doesn't necessarily mean the
jump team's life functions have ceased."
She nodded. "I know."
"Besides, there are other matters to occupy me. Your intriguing account of the
so-called night-gaunts for one. You weren't very precise about them."
"I told you all I know," DeFore replied defensively. "Domi was the one who
called them that."
His lips quirked in a patronizing smile. "Yes, I'm aware of the Ouflands
superstitions of faceless soul stealers. But inasmuch as you said they spoke,
it's apparent they have mouths and therefore faces, even if you couldn't see
them."
She frowned. "I don't know if it was an actual language or not. It sounded
like gibberish to me.
Linguistics isn't my field."
"Can you reproduce some of the sounds you heard? If I hear the phonetics, I
might be able the identify the root and therefore where the creatures came
from."
Lines of concentration furrowed on her smooth brow. After a thoughtful moment,
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she said, "Di-ku.
That's what I heard most of all.
Di-ku."
Lakesh's eyes widened then narrowed. "You're sure?"
"Of course I'm not sure," she answered gruffly. "It was chaos in there."
Slowly, as if he were dredging
through his memory, he said, "During my investigations into the mythological
origins of the Archons, I
had occasion to read translations of Su-merian legend and lore."
"So?"
"Theirs was an agglutinative tongue, its vocabulary, grammar and syntax are
unrelated to any other language, living or dead. If it was Sumerian you heard,
then no wonder it sounded like gibberish to you."
Suspiciously, she asked, "I hope you're not get-
ting ready to theorize that we ran into a bunch of time-trawled Sumerians."
"Hardly. However, the word di-ku means 'to judge' or 'judgment determiner.' I
find it very significant, particularly since we know that the Sume-rian
civilization was influenced by the Annunaki."
DeFore put out a hand, palm outward. "Stop," she said sternly. "Don't go
there, all right? Not now. You know how I hate all that ancient astronaut
crap."
Amused in spite of the situation, Lakesh inquired innocently, "Even if it's
the truth?"
"We don't know if it's the truth," she shot back. "It's only what Brigid
claimed she was told."
Lakesh didn't deny it or argue with the woman. Even Kane had pointed out that
all the history they knew of the barons, the nukecaust and even the Archons
derived from secondhand and dubious sources, with very little empirical
evidence to back it up. All they really had as a foundation was myth, often
distorted and disguised out of all reasonable proportion.
DeFore passed a hand over her face and said wearily, "Sorry, Lakesh. I'm worn
and wrung out."
"Why don't you go the cafeteria?" he suggested gently. "You haven't eaten
since your return, and I can tell you're exhausted. I'll apprise you of any
change."
She sighed heavily, loath to leave the control complex. "It never gets any
easier, does it? The waiting and wondering?"
"No," he answered bluntly. "I wish I could say it did, but it never does."
DeFore left the ready room, walking around the long table that served as its
only furniture. Lakesh watched her go, once again thanking whatever mysterious
fates had brought the woman to his attention.
But at the same time he thanked them, he also feared them. If Reba DeFore ever
learned the true circumstances of her exile from her ville, he would earn her
undying hatred, and he knew he deserved every atom of it. Despite all the
rationalizations and justifications he employed, guilt still consumed him,
more so now that he was an exile himself.
Lakesh's usual method of recruitment was to select likely candidates from the
personnel records of all the villes, then set them up, frame them for crimes
against their respective barons. He had used the ploy to recruit Brigid
Baptiste, Reba DeFore, Benjamin Farrell, Donald Bry and Robert Weg-mann,
knowing all the while that the cruel, heartless plan had a barely acceptable
risk factor.
It was the only way to spirit them out of their villes, turn them against the
barons and make them feel
indebted to him. This bit of explosive and potentially fatal knowledge had not
been shared with the exiles other than Kane, Grant and Brigid, and they had
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occasionally held it over his head, as both a means of persuasion and outright
blackmail.
It wasn't as if Lakesh hadn't undertaken enormous risks himself in his covert
war against the barons.
Before, as a member of the Cobaltville Trust, he straddled the fence between
collaborator and conspirator. Unfortunately, the suspicions of Salvo, a fellow
Trust member and Magistrate Division commander, had been aroused by his
activities. He pulled Lakesh off the fence and onto the side of a conspirator
because he suspected him of not only being a Preservationist, but of arranging
Kane, Bri-gid and Grant's escape from the ville.
Part of this suspicion was true, but the other part was a deliberately
constructed falsehood. Salvo had bought into a piece of mole data that Lakesh
himself had sent burrowing through the nine-ville network some twenty years
before. Salvo was convinced of the existence of an underground resistance
movement called the Preservationists, a group that allegedly followed a set of
idealistic precepts to free humanity from the bondage of the barons by
revealing the hidden history of Earth.
The Preservationists were an utter fiction, a straw adversary crafted for the
barons to fear and chase after while Lakesh's true insurrectionist work
proceeded elsewhere.
Salvo believed Lakesh to be a Preservationist, and that he had recruited Kane
into their traitorous rank and file. When Baron Cobalt had charged Salvo with
the responsibility of apprehending Kane by any means necessary, the man
presumed those means included the abduction and torture of Lakesh, one of the
baron's favorites.
Lakesh had been rescued and taken back to Cerberus, but the retrieval
increased the odds the redoubt would be found. Although the installation was
listed on all ville records as utterly inoperable, Lakesh extrapolated that
Baron Cobalt would leave no redoubt unopened in his search for him.
After all, the baron had witnessed a group of se-ditionists using his own
personal gateway to transport elsewhere, so logically, his quarry had to have
a destination. The matter stream modulations of the
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