Xelu stepped aside to let the beams of light show a dark opening leading on through what had been an impassible barrier. He ran a finger of his gauntlet over the end of a piece of metal ribbing. The edge was rounded by melting, showing that it had been cut by heat, not broken in the impact. His flashlight beam picked out spatterings of melted metal on the floor below, and beneath more severed members beyond. “It wasn’t like this when you last saw it, Mr. Caton?’ Xelu asked. “Either at the time of the accident, or in any of your visits subsequently.”
“No!” Caton was bemused. “There was no way through there. As I told you, all that we had reason to believe existed there was a closed door leading into a sealed storage area.”
“That was where the weapons were,” Xelu said. “The door has been cut open.”
A gasp sounded from Norburn. “And the weapons?”
“What’s left are old or of inferior quality. Whoever took them knew what they were doing. We made a circuit of the area before calling you. The ground in the immediate vicinity was churned up by the activity going on here up to the final evacuation. But there are traces of a ground track leading away toward the east that cuts through the other markings, meaning it was made more recently. It gets lost farther out among the general impact gardening. What it looks like is that whoever pulled this off landed some distance away in the opposite direction from Omsk, below the radar horizon, and came overland.”
“How long ago did this happen?” Caton asked. The question was mechanical. He was still grappling with the implications.
“Impossible to say,” Xelu answered. “From the degree of erosion of the tracks, given the current conditions, I’d say six months at least. . . . It could have been anytime in the last year.” He paused for a moment, then went on, “It seems there are those among us who would try to impose their wills by methods that are not the Kronian way. We hoped it would never come to this. But if we are left with no choice but to defend against force with force, then that is how it will be.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The impression that had registered most forcibly with Keene was the frightening thoroughness with which practically all traces of a civilization that had taken such pride in its global extent and achievements appeared to have been wiped out. Without Kronia, by the time a new order rose again of its own accord, just about all memory of what had gone before would have been lost.
Europe was a wilderness of volcanic desolation and cooling lava sheets, with a two-hundred-mile-long canyon gouged across the center, carved during one of the titanic electrical exchanges that had occurred when Earth’s and Athena’s magnetospheres intersected. Everything that was once Southeast Asia had disappeared, subducted miles deep beneath crustal plates overthrusting from the south, and from what could be made of the acoustic patterns being sent back from seismic packs scattered about the surface, it was still sinking.
Currently, he was looking down from a height of about three thousand feet over a landscape of marshy valleys and mud flats winding among ridges of sand and gravel below a gray overcast. As far as could be judged, it was where New York City had been. Yet not a brick nor a girder was to be seen, not a sign of turnpike or a piece of dockside wall. Not even the lines of the Hudson or the East rivers, Long Island Sound, or the New Jersey shore could be found. The entire former seaboard from Maine to the Carolinas lay buried beneath a thousand feet of sediments deposited by immense walls of water surging up the continental slope, leaving the new coastline meandering a hundred to three hundred miles farther east.
Keene banked into a slow turn and began following an expanse of black, oily pools and yellow sulfur sludge extending away into a haze of sullen hydrocarbon vapors. A data set superposed itself on the view, showing the updated bearing, speed, and rate of climb. A zoom-in on one of the pools showed it to be bubbling torpidly. A forlorn tatter of reeds had somehow managed to appear along its edge.