Crown of the Serpent by Allen Wold

Author:Allen Wold [Wold, Allen]
Format: epub
Published: 2009-11-06T09:00:00+00:00

As Raebuck spoke they continued to descend, level by level, along one wall on balconies, then along the second wall to the main deck. By the time they came to the second corner they could see that there was a door where she had said it would be, and they hurried to it. Rikard was the first one there and pressed the latch-plate. The iris opened and, sure enough, there was the head of a broad ramp, at right angles to the wall, descending into the darkness.

Falyn reached around the edge of the iris to turn on the lights. The ceiling illumined only the first fifty meters of the ramp. The noncoms formed up the goons and they started to descend.

"Why didn't you tell us about mis before?" Sukiro asked Raebuck.

"I wasn't sure until now that I was right, and I didn't want to say anything out of place."

They got to the bottom of the ramp, which ended in an iris door, which in turn opened onto a balcony. Falyn palmed the ridges of the light switch beside the iris, and parts—not all—of the ceiling glowed amber. They were halfway up the wall of another huge chamber, again overlooking self-contained rooms like an irregular chess board, or a huge set of children's blocks.

Raebuck looked around from the railing. She pointed to an arch in a balcony one level lower on the other side of the huge chamber. 'That looks right," she said.

"Where are we going?" Sukiro asked as they all went along the balcony to the nearest ramp down to the next level.

"There's a kind of well," Raebuck said, "where we can go down as far as we want. It should be through that arch."

"Was this place just abandoned?" Rikard asked.

"Not 'just.' Something over ten thousand years ago the people of the League finally got tired of being

intimidated, and a race called the Vengatti, pretty much black sheep themselves, led an uprising. All the

Tschagan establishments in the League were destroyed—

many by the Tschagan themselves when the 'rebels'

pressed too close—and their home system was invaded."

"I've never heard of the Vengatti," Sukiro said.

"They died out about two thousand years later, about the time the first Federation was being formed." They reached the arch, which opened onto a broad

corridor, which penetrated deeply into the space beyond, with no surface features of any kind. There were no lights here so they had to switch on their headlamps which, bright as they were, did not reach the far end of the corridor. "This is right," Raebuck said.

"So what happened to the Tschagan home worlds?" Sukiro asked as they started down the corridor.

"Destroyed, the home world itself and three or four others, and every base on the other thirty or so worlds they controlled. They were slavers, genocides, and there wasn't much left of the sentient species who had grown up on the worlds under their direct dominion." »

"And yet this place still exists," Rikard said as their headlamps at last showed another arch at the far end of the corridor.

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