Yngve, AR - Darc Ages Read online

  DARC AGES

  A.R. YNGVE

  PROLOGUE TO BOOK 1

  IN THE YEAR 940 AFTER MONRO A DISCOVERY WAS MADE, THAT WOULD SHAKE OUR WAR-TORN, BATTERED EARTH.

  The trustworthy servants of Lord Bor Damon of Damon City, North Castilia, were searching the ancient Wasteland Ruins at night. Their lord, a curious man, hoped they would bring his people some valuable discoveries - though many of his peers and subjects feared such excursions might bring the Plague, or the Ones Whose Very Name Brings Disease, inside the walls of Damon City.

  To temper such fears, Lord Bor Damon kept these nightly expeditions secret. The time and date of the earth-shaking discovery were recorded by his servants' memory wheels. At exactly 3 hours 47 minutes in the morning of the 8th of March, the servant expedition unearthed the undead corpse of Darc. Little did these humble metal figures realize their discovery would alter the course of history...

  Excerpt from Librian's "Chronicles" (translated from the original language)

  Chapter 1

  The four robot servants entered the lichen-covered ruins of what had once been the cathedral of a large city, many centuries ago. The remaining walls reached up at the sky like the half-buried hand of some submerged giant, trying to claw itself up from the rubble of time.

  The moon was out of sight this night, but the sensors of the robots registered infra-red heat from living beings as well as ultra-violet light; they needed no daylight to search the ruins. The red glimmer of their visorplates moved about the place as they scanned the dark earth and rocks for any sign of metal - anything unusual that might interest their owner, Lord Bor Damon.

  A muffled whirring of servomotors, the occasional clicks and low hisses of their hydraulic systems, was all the noise they made. They did not communicate; their objectives were clear. Find something of interest and return to Damon City before dawn. Should the Lepers find you, you and the aircraft must self-destruct immediately. It is not easy to say whether these machines could feel genuine fear; their richly ornamented, helmet-shaped metal heads were incapable of expression. Nevertheless, they treaded about as silently and carefully as a man-sized, two-legged robot could.

  After a few minutes of searching across the huge church ruin, something happened. The robot bearing the name Vhustank - engraved on its forehead below the crest of the Damons - stepped on a wide, grass-covered slab of stone. Unexpectedly, the slab yielded to its steel-and-lead foot. With a sucking sigh of inrushing air from below, Vhustank fell. He did not say a word.

  The sound of his fall alerted the three other robots: Surabot, Avton, and Lachtfot . They marched forth to help their fallen comrade - perhaps not so much out of compassion, as because their directives ordered them to protect their owner's property; but who knows? As they looked down the square hole where the ground had caved in, they saw what no human eye would have discerned in the darkness: Vhustank was undamaged.

  He and the slab upon which he rested had fallen a few meters, landing on a heap of old rotten coffins, which had crumpled like soft paper under their weight.

  "Are you still functioning, Vhustank?" Surabot asked in a very low, metallic tone - constructed to be understood by humans as well as machines.

  "I have no severe damage," Vhustank answered immediately. He was already rotating his head to scan the new surroundings. "I appear to have reached a lower chamber. Please prepare to help me up with the ropes. Just a moment -"

  His red visorplate halted, pointing to some inner recess of the crypt.

  "I am registering a large metal object nearby. I will examine it closer. Just a moment - weak radioactivity is emanating from the object."

  Lachtfot stated in a calm tone: "Vhustank: if you find any sign of resemblance to the historical descriptions of Radioactive Weapons, please avoid the object until our master is informed."

  It was a robot's way of saying "Be careful". Ignoring Lachtfot, Vhustank crawled to his feet and walked over to the sarcophagus at the corner of the abandoned chamber. Rats, snakes, bats, and insects scurried away as he lit the flashlight of his visorplate to get a clear view of the artefact. The sarcophagus was very old, and covered with a thick layer of dust and dirt. Vhustank picked a small brush-head from his round waist, unscrewed his left hand, and fitted the brush to his wrist-socket. With a low whine, the brush-head began to spin very quickly. Starting from the top, Vhustank neatly polished the dust off the surface of the sarcophagus.

  When he was finished, Vhustank stepped back to scan the uncovered object. The outside of the cleaned coffin turned out not to be made of metal - but some kind of composite material, covered with a very thin coating of diamond-hard material. In fact, it was diamond: ionized carbon atoms sprayed over a concrete and plastic shell. The metal object registered by Vhustank was hidden deep inside the shell.

  The robot noticed an inscription on a metal plate on the side of the sarcophagus. The style of the lettering was archaic but recognizable: Old Juro. The plate had been scraped badly centuries ago - when some long-forgotten thief had removed most of its thin coating of gold. To the robot, the sign read:

  D

  ARC

  In an instant, Vhustank searched his memory for the word "D. ARC" or "DARC", and found nothing of importance. Vhustank made a quick decision.

  "The object is named 'DARC' and appears to be harmless," he told his comrades. "Please help me lift myself and DARC up to ground level."

  As he spoke, Vhustank picked up the ropes that the others were hauling down the hole. He tied them to some holes in the outer shell of the sarcophagus.

  Surabot said: "I agree. Move quickly, dawn comes soon."

  With no further objections, Avton and Lachtfot threw down another rope and lifted up Vhustank, who was holding the ropes connected to the sarcophagus. Then, all four of them began hauling up the heavy coffin. The strain on their motors and battery-cells was considerable, but within their limits; the sarcophagus weighed much less than half a ton. When the sarcophagus had been lifted to the ground, the robots positioned themselves along its sides.

  Surabot said: "Commence collective lifting procedure... now."

  In a smooth, mechanical parody of a funeral train, the four metal figures kneeled down and lifted the sarcophagus onto their shoulders, then stood up. They walked slowly to the edge of the ruin, down the shallow grass slope that covered the entrance steps of the former cathedral. Silently, the procession marched along the grassy, desolate streets of the ancient city - towards the waiting, unmanned aircraft that bore the insignia of Bor Damon.

  They marched up the loading-ramp, which folded up after them. The robots shackled the sarcophagus to the floor of the cargo room, while Surabot took the pilot seat. He started up the vessel's jet engines. The keel thrusters of the jet tubes screamed into life, pushing the streamlined aircraft slowly up, up - rising above the maze of ruined city blocks. The vessel turned its nose toward the glittering lights of Damon City at the dark horizon, and roared off. The noise echoed and rolled along the ruins, waking up animals. Night beasts howled and screeched in fearful response.

  The craft reached the city well before dawn.

  Chapter 2

  "My lord!" Librian called out, knocking on his master's bedroom door.

  Bor Damon groaned something unintelligible from his huge, gilt four-poster bed, and fell asleep again. The anxious old man thumped on the door.

  "My lord, please wake up! This is most urgent!"

  Bor Damon groaned again, sitting up among the thick sheets.

  "What is it?" he growled, squinting.

  In his younger days, Bor had once broken the neck of a nightly assassin who tried to murder him in his sleep - broken it with his bare hands - an event which had given Bor a reputation for terrible mo
rning tempers. If someone dared to disturb his sleep now, he knew it had to be important; yet he still felt like killing when it happened.

  "The expedition, my lord!"

  Librian glanced about the castle corridor for unwanted listeners. He was not allowed to utter a word about the night excursions to anyone but Bor Damon.

  "Wait," his lord commanded.

  Bor rose up from bed. He was a squarely built, heavyset man with the large belly and short, gray hair of a middle-aged nobleman. Like most men of his caste, he wore no beard - but the stubble was showing now. Bor groped for his black wool dressing-gown with golden brocades, put it on on top of his nightshirt, and slipped into a pair of shoes. His wife, lying in an adjacent chamber, remained asleep. When he opened the thick steel-and-oak door, Bor found Librian standing outside, accompanied by the servant robot Surabot. He immediately took command of the situation.

  "Come with me," Bor said calmly.

  He strode off into an elevator, pressing the DOWN button - and descended from the castle's top-floor residence, ten levels down, to the underground chambers. The other two took another elevator.

  When Bor, Librian, and Surabot arrived in the cellar chambers, the other robots had already put the sarcophagus to rest on a stone table, in a corner of the large catacombs. The party walked closer to the table. Electric lamps lit up the quarters, and illuminated Bor's huge collection of bought and found curiosities...

  Rusted and cracked helmets from forgotten wars...

  The carcass of a four-wheeled vehicle found in an underground room full of the same artefacts...

  Remains of all kinds of ancient robots and appliances...

  Crumbling books in forgotten languages, such as "ZYNAPSTOUCH 2100 INSTRUCTION MANUAL"...

  Plastic commodes with rows of buttons, melted together by some incredible heat...

  Heaps of shiny plastic discs with holes in the middle, with no machinery accurate enough to read their damaged surfaces...

  A green bronze sculpture of a man who might have been a king six hundred years ago, his name now gone...

  And scores of withered pictures, paintings, and small plastic and metal tools; some recognizable, such as forks, knives, and spoons; others more puzzling.

  Some of the old pictures were early representations of familiar religious icons, such as the Goddess, the Singing King, and their various incarnations. There were also pictures of heathen deities, forbidden by the church - Koban-Jem, Kristos, or the red demon Setan-Klaws. But the sarcophagus was unlike anything Bor had ever come across during his years as a collector. It seemed almost undamaged by the passage of time - as if made to last forever. Bor approached it warily, then halted.

  "You have sterilized it, of course?" he asked Surabot.

  The robot's head swivelled toward its master with an oily click.

  "The artefact named 'DARC', the aircraft, and everything on it have been treated with the standard decontamination procedure, my lord. Just a moment - " Surabot's head turned to the sarcophagus. "The inside of the artefact named 'DARC' is shielded by some radiation-proof metal. If the artefact is opened, the risk of contamination increases, my lord."

  Bor stood there scowling, thinking hard for a few moments, while Librian and the robots awaited his decision.

  He said: "Librian, could that thing be an undetonated explosive charge, of the kind which the lord of Barcel dug up once? The one that went off and incinerated his entire city?"

  Librian looked uncertain. He took off his round glasses and polished them with a cloth he took from his robe, then shook his white-haired, balding head.

  "It does not appear so, my lord. The inscription says nothing about radiation, though a few units of gamma are leaking from inside. But the amount is so small, it cannot possibly be an infernal device... it is more likely to be a coffin. I have read about these in the old manuscripts..."

  Librian put his glasses back on his nose, and extracted a small, leather-bound volume from one of his many pockets. He opened a page marked by a bookmark. Inside the volume were bound together some ancient, brown fragments of print in Old Juro, the dialect called Aenglich or Ingles . And he began quoting the text with an unsteady accent, gathered from years of research among those Northern city-dwellers who still recalled the pronounciation.

  " 'Why pay more? The Kryotek Company offers the chance of immortality at a price YOU can afford!' "The Kryotek Manuscript, which is at least eight hundred years old, promises a way of preserving the dead or dying until they would be reanimated and made immortal in the future." The old librarian assumed a more certain, lecturing tone: "Now, my lord, most scholars at our university hold this to be just another myth or heathen superstition. The Priestesses have demanded that such unholy books be burned - may the Goddess have mercy - but I always suspected that there might be some truth to it... that ancient peoples not only believed in preserving their bodies, but also had devised some practical method. The Doctors' Guild might be interested in this..."

  Bor gave him a dark stare; Librian shrank in fear.

  "The Doctors' Guild," Bor said in a menacing voice, "would hardly applaud me for taking an old coffin into the city, with the risk of bringing the Plague here."

  He walked up to the table and tapped on the sarcophagus' hard, shiny surface.

  "And if it should contain some medical discovery, they would loathe me the worse - they are a zealous lot, those plaster-mongers." He added, in a less hard voice: "You have spent too much time with your books, my friend - forgotten about politics."

  Bor looked down at the scratched plate, reading the worn letters to himself - Librian had taught him some Old Juro: " 'D... Ars... Dars... Darc...' Still, the possibilities..."

  The promise of immortality burned in his mind. The possibility to escape from the shackles of time - all too visible in this room filled with the marks of decay and oblivion. If the corpse in the coffin might still be alive... Bor was too cynical, too educated to be a pious man; life had taught him attention to harsh, practical matters. As ruler and chief protector of 11,000 subjects and his family, he ought not let personal wishes put their lives at risk. He should return the coffin to the Wastelands, leave it be. But if there was a way to keep this discovery safe and secret, until...

  His curiosity fought his fear for a long moment; curiosity won. He put on a pair of gloves and bent down at the side plate, surveying it closely with a magnifying glass. The large letters were too scraped to make out anything more than D... ARC...; probably the name of the corpse. But Bor had an inkling the plate lacked something: why was there no date of birth or other information, as there used to be on old graves and coffins? Struck with sudden inspiration, Bor started feeling around and behind the edges of the wide nameplate. His fingers found a notch, two notches under the plate - two buttons! He tried pressing inwards, but they were stuck.

  He urged forward the waiting metal servant Surabot - Vhustank, Avton, and Lachtfot had already jacked into some wall sockets to recharge their batteries.

  "Surabot, push in the buttons down here," he ordered, and backed off as the robot calmly obeyed.

  Librian warned him: "But my lord, be careful! Opening the chest could..."

  Too late; the robot's steel fingers had already found the buttons and pressed hard enough to budge the dusty mechanism. There came a creaking, metallic twang; the plate shot out an inch from the sarcophagus' side, then slid aside on two railings. The two men stared.

  Librian gasped; Bor Damon mumbled: "Great Goddess..."

  Now they could see that the gilt plate had been covering a second plate, made of white metal - perhaps the first plate was a false lead, meant to be vandalized by grave-robbers. The second plate bore a much more detailed message, written in three old languages. Librian bent forward to read the fine Aenglich print:

  CRYONIC FREEZE CAPSULE

  CAUTION! CONTAINS LIQUID NITROGEN (N2), OXYGEN (O2), AND URANIUM (U235). FOLLOW OPENING INSTRUCTIONS CLOSELY. THIS CONTAINER HOLDS A LIVING HUMAN (NAME: DAVID ARCHIBAL
D; GENDER: MALE; AGE: 36 YEARS) FROZEN IN SUSPENSION. HE SUFFERS FROM A NON-INFECTIOUS DISEASE (SPINAL CANCER, MALIGNANT FORM) AND WILL NEED MEDICAL TREATMENT AS SOON AS HE IS REVIVED. SUCCESSFUL REANIMATION OF THIS PERSON WILL BE RICHLY REWARDED, AS HE IS VERY WEALTHY AND KNOWLEDGEABLE. PLEASE REPORT THE FINDING OF THIS CAPSULE TO ALL REMAINING RELATIVES. THE MAP SHOWS THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE PERSON INSIDE.

  SIGNED BY DR. PERCIVAL TAKENAKA OF THE ROCKE FOUNDATION, LONDON, GREAT BRITAIN, NORTHERN EUROPE, DECEMBER 3, 1999 AD.

  OPENING AND REVIVAL PROCEDURE

  1. PLACE THE WHOLE CONTAINER IN A STERILE (GERM-FREE) ROOM AT A TEMPERATURE OF AT LEAST -30 DEGREES CELSIUS (=50 POINTS BELOW THE FREEZING-POINT OF MERCURY, 30 POINTS BELOW THE FREEZING-POINT OF WATER) 2. OPEN THE OUTER SHELL LOCK, LOCATED UNDER THIS PLATE (TURN THE HANDLE LEFT UNTIL IT STOPS, THEN TURN RIGHT AND PULL), AND THE VACUUM SEAL WILL OPEN ITSELF FROM THE INSIDE.

  3. THE INNER CYLINDER CONTAINS THE BODY. DO NOT LIFT THE INNER CYLINDER FROM THE SHOCK-PROOF SUSPENSION. CHECK THE POWER SUPPLY BY PRESSING THE INSPECTION BUTTONS NEXT TO THE URANIUM BATTERY (MARKED WITH RED LETTERS). IF FEWER THAN 2 OF THE 5 CONTROL LIGHTS LIGHT UP, THEN IMMEDIATELY CONTINUE THE REVIVAL PROCEDURE. (WARNING! THE BATTERY CONTAINS RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL. DO NOT TRY TO OPEN THE BATTERY CASING!) 4. UNSCREW THE INSPECTION PLATE (MARKED WITH WHITE LETTERS) AND CHECK THE METER READINGS. IF THE READINGS ARE 2 OR MORE POINTS OFF THE FOLLOWING VALUES

  N2: STABLE

  O2: STABLE

  THEN SLOWLY REFILL THE LIQUID NITROGEN AND OXYGEN SUPPLIES THROUGH THE VALVES MARKED WITH GREEN LETTERS (NITROGEN) AND BLUE LETTERS (OXYGEN), UNTIL THE READINGS BECOME "STABLE". ONLY THEN YOU MAY CONTINUE THE REVIVAL PROCEDURE.

  5. UNSCREW AND OPEN THE TOP LID OF THE INNER CYLINDER. THE BODY IS WRAPPED IN METAL FOIL, AND VERY BRITTLE. CAREFULLY ROLL OUT THE BODY ON THE WHEELED TRAY INSIDE. (DANGER! THE TEMPERATURE INSIDE THE INNER CYLINDER MAY BE BELOW -180 CELSIUS DEGREES! USE PROTECTIVE CLOTHING!) WHEN THE BODY IS OUT OF THE CYLINDER, SEAL THE INNER CYLINDER TO KEEP THE COLD GASES INSIDE.