“I may have a suggestion,” she said.
He continued to pack, stuffing the last few items into the bulging rucksack. “What’s that?”
“A fortress.”
He looked up as he strapped the flap of the sack down, not quite grasping what she was trying to tell him. “What?”
“A fortress. Remember my telling you about them, about how they were supposed to be the thing that would turn the course of the war in the favor of my people?”
The word clicked into place then, and all the notes he had taken on the subject and studied in detail appeared before his mind with the almost total recall he possessed. According to Leah, the Demosian government had constructed, during the tail end of the war when the sterilizing gases had had their effect and there was a grave shortage of fighters, four fortresses deep within the earth, scattered, over this one large continent on which most of the winged people had made their homes. The fortresses were deep, impregnable shelters against every sort of attack and were equipped with, according to rumors, experimental laboratories for the development of new weapons—and experimental genetics labs which were to find some method of producing more Demosians without the need of fertile men and women. The great push by the Alliance forces had come just as the fortresses were completed, and the men who would have staffed them were needed in the last desperate attempt to stave off the Earthmen—which, of course, failed. The fortresses, if they ever had existed, were never discovered. Leah’s grandfather had been an engineer in charge of the heavy construction workers in the building of the nearest of these fortresses and had been assigned, with his family, to occupy quarters there to take charge of the maintenance once the structure was in operation. But he died in the last battle.
“Could these fortresses be myths?” he asked. “A desperate people will evolve all sorts of ethereal fantasies to give them hope.”
“My grandfather was a realist,” she said. “It was no myth.”
“And you know the location?”
“Not exactly. But from listening to my grandfather and analyzing what I can remember, I’ve since decided it has to be inside the mountain we call Tooth, which is a good ways from here, but not so far that we cannot make it on these provisions.”
He thought a moment, then stood, grabbed the rucksacks. “It’s worth a try. We don’t have anything better in mind. Don’t get your hopes up, love. Even if there is a fortress, it might very well be crumbling and uninhabitable.”
“They were not built to crumble.”
“Perhaps,” he said, smiling. “I’ll take these out to the car and come back for the suitcase. You think you can wear that coat without hurting your wings?”
She looked at the two coats he had laid out for them, picked up a huge, furry Alaskan survival coat that would come down below his knees an inch or two but which came to her toes. “It’ll be all right.”
He loaded the car, helped her down the rickety stairs since she could not fly while wearing the survival coat, and got her in the car. He wore the fall coat he had, plus several shirts, and he was not too cold—though he wondered whether a day or two spent in the open would have him as warm.
“Trouble,” he said as he pulled the grav car out onto the lane which the snow had obscured.
“What?” she asked.
He pointed to the radio. “The bulb has stopped blinking. Which means they may have decided their rep is in trouble.”
The snow whooshed up around them, obliterating the forest on either side as the grav plates’ field disturbed the powdery stuff. Davis drove the car back the lane, toward the Sanctuary, until Leah directed him to the best point of entrance into the woods for the journey to the mountain called Tooth and the fortress that might or might not be there. He angled across open fields at her insistence, which meant the speed of the grav car had to be reduced. He kept anxiously studying the road in the rearview mirror, certain the dark shapes of police vans would glide into view at any moment. It was a good four miles through the rising, sparsely vegetated foothills, always rising, disappearing from the highway for short moments, then reappearing again as they started up the slope of the next hill which was higher than the last. In ten minutes, they arrived at the edge of the woods where he drove the car between the trees, scraping the paint from it, tearing off a strip of chrome, but effectively concealing it from anyone down there on the lane who might chance to look up and see the dark gleam of metal.