way through the debris on the elevator and then headed off down the tunnel.
For a long second, Kas hesitated. It was possible she could find the controls for the elevator—everything on Earth had to have a manual control, didn’t it? If it wasn’t locked, she might be able to get back up. Right back to a bunch of armored gunmen who seem to want to shoot first and ask questions later.
On the other hand, if she stayed put, Zhi would quickly be out of sight, and then her only other option would be to become hopelessly lost, starve, and die. On the third hand, which Kas had occasionally contemplated having installed, she was no longer eager to confront Zhi herself. If people were actually shooting at each other, she was so far out of her depth she could no longer see the surface. Better to take her chances with the Archscholar.
Considering all of this, Kas pushed herself to her feet, finding her legs rubbery and uncooperative. Zhi was still visible, but far enough ahead that she probably wouldn’t notice Kas unless she looked backward, and she didn’t seem inclined to do that. Kas followed her at a careful pace, keeping a generous distance between them, enough to run for it if it came to that.
Zhi made a few turns down apparently identical side tunnels, enough to confirm Kas’s assumption that she would be hopelessly lost if she struck out on her own. Eventually she came to a large doorway, warbot-sized like the tunnel itself. There was some kind of terminal on one side, and Zhi went to it, while Kas flattened herself against the wall and waited. After a moment, the doors slid open from the center, grinding and groaning, and Zhi slipped through as soon as they were wide enough to admit her.
Kas gave it a little longer, while the door continued to open, then followed. Beyond was a big, mostly empty room, the walls raw monocrete, a few brighter lights on stands supplementing the gray glow from the ceiling strip. Machinery of various sorts was arranged around the periphery, but Kas gave it only a cursory look, because in the center of the room—
It was a warbot. But it bore the same resemblance to the DreadCarl that a monomolecular-edged ceramic thermocutter did to a crude stone axe or prehistoric steel bayonet. Where the DreadCarl had been all blocky brushed metal, painted with red stripes, this machine was smooth, organic-looking, sleek and black. The surrounding lights reflected off its curved surfaces in smeared streaks. It knelt on one knee, arms crossed, as though in the act of taking an oath. Its head, slightly bent, was a featureless black oval.
That’s . . . old. Kas’s mind was buzzing, cross-referencing and gathering evidence, barely leaving room for conscious thought. Third Empire, maybe. The legendary height of mankind’s technological prowess, before the Fracture, the wars, and the long slide downward. It’s beautiful. She had never seen anything remotely like it in twenty years of study.
Barely aware of what she was doing, Kas moved into the room, walking with the same reverent silence she would have in an ancient, marble-floored library. She stood in front of the bot, and saw her own face reflected in its sleek black armor, distorted like in a funhouse mirror. Reaching out to touch it, she realized she was holding her breath. Her fingers slid, dreamily, over a nearly frictionless surface, as though it was slick with grease.
It looks intact. The number of still-functional Third-Empire relics could be counted on the fingers of one hand, even if you’d had an unfortunate encounter with berserk autochef. The most famous was the battleship Megachiron, which even crippled made the Volstrian fleet an unmatched power amongst the worlds. And that was why there were so few relics left—they were so effective that they got used, over and over, until they finally gave out. What time could not accomplish, the weapons of man did.
If it was Third Empire, the warbot was well over three thousand years old.
I need to see inside. Processors were more likely to have degraded than armor, but if there was anything left it would be the find of a lifetime. The scraps of archeocode in this machine could be the basis of the rest of her career.
The cockpit was open, she saw, a hatch on the bot’s back, not into the chest like the DreadCarl. Moving as if in a dream, Kas found a rickety metal gantry that