The Merchant’s War полностью

up against it, roots scrabbling for purchase in the poor soil. It took Huw a quarter of an hour to realize that none Of them had actually levered their way into the concrete or stone or whatever the dome was made of. "It's not quite a flawless finish," he reported, "but I've got a hunch it's been here a very long time." He rubbed his gloved hands together to warm them: there was a distinct bite in the air, and the gusts were growing more frequent.

In the end, the hole in the dome came as a surprise to Huw. He'd been expecting some sort of opening, low down on the slope: or perhaps a gatehouse of some sort. But one moment he was walking around the huge, curving Hank of the thing, and the next moment the curved edge of the dome disappeared, as if a giant the size of the Goodyear blimp had taken a huge bite out of it. Huw slopped for a minute, inspecting the edge of the hole with his binoculars. "The opening starts at ground level and extends two thirds of the way to the top of the dome. Must be at least fifty meters wide. I'm going closer... the edge looks almost melted." He looked down. The trees were thinner on the ground, shorter, and the ground itself fell away in front of the opening, forming a shallow howl. Like a crater, he realized. Hey -a trickle of water emerged from the shadowy interior of the dome, feeding down a muddy, overgrown channel into a pond in the depression. The pond was almost circular. Something cracked the dome open. Something from -he walked away from the opening, trying to get a perspective on it- something firing downwards, from above.

He shook his head, and suddenly the whole scene dropped into perspective. The dark shadows inside the dome, looming: piles of debris. The melted edges: either the dome is self-healing, or it's made of something a whole lot more resilient than concrete. It hadn't shattered like masonry-it had melted like wax. He keyed his walkie-talkie again: "The dome's split open here. Some-thing energetic, punching down out of the sky. A long time ago." The way the crater had filled with water, the way the trees were so much shorter than their neighbors, almost as if-

Huw fumbled with his telemetry belt, then slipped one hand free of its glove in order to pull out the Geiger tube. "Got you," he muttered, holding it out in front of him. "Let's see." He flicked the switch on the counter pack, then advanced on the depression. The counter clicked a few times, then gave a warning crackle, like a loose connection. Huw paused, swinging around. It popped and crackled, then as he took a step forward it buzzed angrily. "Hmm." He turned around and walked back towards the dome. The buzzing subsided, back down to a low crackle. He moved towards the edge of the dome. As he approached the meltcd-looking edges the counter began to buzz-then rose to an angry whine as he brought the tube to within a couple of centimeters of the edge. "Shit!" He jumped back. "Yul, Elena, listen up-the edge of the hole is radioactive. Lots of beta and maybe alpha activity, not much gamma. I don't think-"he swallowed"-I don't think we're going to find anyone alive in here. And I don't want you touching the edge of the dome, or walking through the stream running out of it."

He swallowed again. What am I going to tell the duke this time? He wondered.

A hypothesis took root and refused to shake free: Imagine a nuclear installation or a missile command site or a magic wand factory. Or something. There'd been a war. It all happened a long time ago of course-hundreds of years ago. Everyone was dead, nobody lived here anymore. During the war, someone took a shot at the dome with a high energy weapon. Not an ordinary H-bomb, but something exotic-a shaped nuclear charge, perhaps, designed to punch almost all of its energy out into a beam of radiation going straight down. Or a gamma-ray laser powered by a couple of grams of isomeric hafnium. Maybe they used an intercontinental ballistic magic wand. Whatever it was, not much blast energy reached the ground-but the dome had been zapped by a stabbing knife of plasma like Lightning Child's fiercest punch, followed by a storm of secondary radiation.