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"But why track the vehicle instead of the people?"
"Because Shar is better than I at cloaking spells, and I do not know Tannim." Lady Ako held the
scarlet-painted door open for them, and they all filed through except for Chinthliss, who took the
brass handle from her and bowed her inside. It seemed to Joe that she smiled faintly at the
gallantry. "I knew that Shar would bring Tannim to his vehicle if she found a way to free him,
because it represents a powerful weapon of defense," she continued. "And I know that Madoc Skean
has no allies other than Shar who could do anything with so great a concentration of Death Metal.
Further, I suspected that only Tannim would have whatever other devices were needed to make it
work, such as a key. So it followed that no one but Shar or Tannim would be able to move it. Not
long ago, my intuition bore fruit; the car moved, and as soon as it moved, Shar's cloaking-spells
destabilized, making it easier to track. Since we saw no motive-spells working, it must have moved
under its own power."
Chinthliss stopped right in the middle of the white-paneled room. "It did? Where? And where is it
now?"
Lady Ako beckoned them to follow, past a room full of flat cushions on the floor, through a
sliding paper screen instead of a door, and into the kind of room Joe had not expected to find
here.
It was a room full of computer equipment, mostly deep blue and bright red, with huge screens.
There were at least a dozen SPARC stations and Silicon Graphics computers that they could see,
with about half of them being used by creatures that were more or less foxlike. Some only had fox
tails, some fox tails and feet, and some were humanized foxes as Lady Ako had been when they had
first seen her.
They were all dressed in varying costumes, from futuristic jumpsuits to the full kimono-kit that
Lady Ako wore. The lady bent over the shoulder of one of the silver foxes in a pearl-gray
jumpsuit; this one had long, flowing white hair crowning her fox-mask and cascading down her back.
"It isn't that easy, Chinthliss," Ako said at last. "We know that the vehicle is moving, and we
know in general where it is, but we can't tell specifically." She shrugged helplessly. "You simply
cannot map Underhill; I have tried, with no success. You can go north, then east, then south, and
find yourself facing north again. You can go up several levels only to find yourself four levels
below the place you had started. The Gates do not connect domains in any kind of logical fashion.
This room holds the closest thing anyone has to a map of Underhill."
"They're somewhere in the predominantly Unseleighe region, my lady," said the silver fox, tapping
the screen with one furry forefinger. "If they can just get into one of the larger domains, one
where we can pinpoint them by what Gates they are near, I can give you coordinates. But now well,
the sensors and programs we are using only show that they've used Gates to make domain-jumps, but
since we don't have those specific Gates in our lists, it can't locate them precisely." The silver
fox looked at everyone assembled. "We have magical sonar, and there's a lot of noise. We don't get
a ping on them until they do something."
"You see?" Ako held up her hands helplessly. "We can track the perturbation and know that they are
moving. Once they reach and use a Gate that we have in the computer, we know where they truly are.
But until then, we'd be jumping blind."
Joe nudged Chinthliss. "Sir," he said hesitantly, "what about the trim-ring? Tannim used it to
find the Mustang. Couldn't we do the same thing?"
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"I wouldn't do that if I were you, sir," the silver fox replied respectfully, before Lady Ako
could say anything. She turned around to look Chinthliss right in the eyes. "That much iron and
steel is warping the magic fields down there in ways I can't predict, and neither can the
computers. We just can't model chaos that well. If you tried to use that artifact to create a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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