Free The Overlords of War by Gérard Klein Page B

stopped. They pierced through the clouds as though through a ceiling and discovered a plain of mown grass that seemed to go on for ever. A roadway glistening with rain striped across it. It began beyond the horizon and led to a colossal building: a parallelopiped of stone or concrete whose top was lost in mist. No trace of windows. Corson guessed that its narrowest face must be more than a kilometer along the base. It was bare, smooth, and gray.
    The pegasone landed. Corson unhitched his straps. He went around the beast and helped Antonella to clamber down. Apparently satisfied, the pegasone started to graze with its tendrils, swallowing the grass in noisy gulps.
    That grass was as neat as a lawn. The plain was so flat, indeed, that it seemed to Corson out of the question for it to be other than artificial. The roadway was of some brilliant blue substance. A kilometer away at most, the building reared up like a dizzying cliff.
    “Ever seen this place before?” he asked.
    Antonella shook her head.
    “Does the layout suggest anything to you?” he pressed. “This plain, this grass, that building?”
    Since she did not answer, he asked on the spur of the moment, “Well, then, what’s going to happen right now?”
    “We’re going to the building. We’ll enter it. Up to then we won’t see anybody. Afterward, I don’t know.”
    “There’s no danger?”
    “None that I can cog.”
    He stared at her. “Antonella, what do you make of all this?”
    “I’m with you. That will do for the time being.”
    He nearly snapped at her with annoyance, but controlled himself, and merely said, “Okay, let’s go!”
    He started off with long strides, and she almost had to run to keep level with him. After a moment he regretted his anger and slowed down. Antonella was probably his only ally in the universe. Maybe that was why her company upset him.
    The roadway ended at the foot of a huge door, hermetically sealed and matching the scale of the building, which practically merged with the wall. But when they arrived in front of it, it slid soundlessly upward. Corson strained his ears for any noise from within, but heard nothing. The whole setup made him think of a mousetrap.
    For giant mice.
    “If we go in, will the door shut behind us?”
    Antonella closed her eyes.
    “Yes. But nothing will threaten us inside, at least not for the first few minutes.”
    They crossed the threshold. The door started to come down again. Corson stepped back. The door stopped, then rose again, indicating a simple automatic detector. He was much relieved. He had no special wish to explore the building without knowing more about it, but they could hardly stand around forever on that lawn. Sooner or later they would get hungry, and they couldn’t eat grass. And eventually night would fall. It might be cold; it might be inhabited by enemies. They had to find shelter. Above all they had to abide by that oldest of all the military principles embodied in the Briefings: keep on the move, never stay put, try to take the enemy by surprise . . .
    Not that it was so easy to surprise an opponent when you knew nothing about him.
    Their eyes adjusted to the gloom in here. On both sides of an aisle which extended out of sight down a vast hall, geometrically exact structures reared up like the webs of a mathematically inclined spider, forming cells like those of a honeycomb. Those too continued to infinity, lost at last in a bluish mist.
    The nearest cell contained ten girls’ bodies, completely nude, and shrouded by a faintly violet gas that stayed put although nothing seemed to be confining it. Motionless, as rigid as corpses, they were all very beautiful and might be aged eighteen to twenty-five. They bore a vague family resemblance to one another. Drawing a deep breath, Corson made a rough estimate: if every cell was filled the same way, then even in the small section of this monstrous hall that he could make guesses about there must be a good million