Journey of Rick Heiden Ch. 35-36

"Why would anyone here do that?" he asked.

"I admit, I don't know that either. I'm just speculating."

"We need more than speculation."

"I understand that," I said, "and now I have an important question of you. With our defenses, if the Trust remains a last resort, what else do we have?"

"I will tell you," he said, "but not here. We will sit inside your ship."

I led him to the ship, and for some reason, which I thought could be a matter of how blasé such a vessel might seem to him, he didn't react at all. We sat inside, and he got down to business as he always does.

"For defense, we have underground fortifications and the catacombs with a secret exit into the rainforest where enough food and shelter exist to protect us, although we will feel a bit squeezed with our current population. We have stacked our offense with more than a million robots. Many you have seen, but most you haven't. We are protecting the people of the city with an intelligent flying robot pestilence the size of a bee, three-quarters of a million strong. With their armor-piercing needles, they will sting and kill anyone we haven't put in the protected database. We have enormous hidden energy weapons on the top of the ridge that we provide with extra power by attracting the lightning this planet generates. We also have an assortment of handheld energy weapons, and finally, we have the Trust."

"Okay," I said, nodding, "I'm impressed. That's excellent. How many ships do we have?"

He paused a moment and took a breath. "This one."

"That's what I thought."

He looked at me like the father figure I wished I'd had growing up and said, "I know that David has told you that necessity is the mother of an endeavor. I have said that to him enough over the jears that he will have repeated it. No matter how much planning, no matter what a society does to protect itself, it will always result in a point where one must stop. You cannot cover every contingency. You must weigh the possibilities and act on the ones of greatest imperative. As far as we knew, no other portal existed until two days ago. We could not include it in any equation. If we knew, we would have ships defending it, or us against it. So, don't judge us for acting boneheaded because I know that's what you're thinking. You're not the only one with intuition.

"Now," he continued, "Venn tells me he cannot complete the next of these ships for some time yet. So, my question to you, as the one who can pilot this-" he took a breath looking around, "this breathtaking craft. What plan do you have to find the other portal?"

I sat there red-faced and angry at myself in utter chagrin. "I deserved that, and in all humility, I apologize."

"Apology accepted," he said. "You're new, and you have many things to learn. I have every confidence you will learn them. David wouldn't have picked you as his mate if you lacked intelligence."

I nodded a little. "Aiden gave me the frequency of the tracking tag fastened to the hull of the second drone," I said. "I'm going to use it to locate its position by circumnavigating the planet a few times at high altitude. That's our best option."

"A sound plan," Magnar said, "providing it hasn't already reached them, and they haven't destroyed it, but I see little alternative. I urge you to take someone with you."

"I thought of that, but of the people I trust, either they're busy or too new."

"Cadmar isn't busy. I spoke to him this morning."

"I thought I would ask him to protect Neal in case someone tries to ensure he remains silent. If the possibility exists that Neal knows who caused it, I want him kept alive."

"Agreed but leave that to me. We must find out who did it and compromised Iris. We won't recover our communication system without it."

I told Magnar of my idea to use the drone, and how David wanted us to utilize it in tandem with the original, so we could communicate without alerting anyone. He said that might prove difficult to accomplish.

I had so many questions. If Meridia took journal number eight because of the information about Aurum's secret, and not some other reason, what was the secret? Its value seemed precious beyond measure for how they treated it.