Read Harmony 03 After Glow for Free Online Page B

presumed dead.
    Eventually he had emerged, no longer a scruffy, half-daft amber man, but a visionary megalomaniac whose goal was nothing less than the conquest of all of the city-states. He claimed that he had discovered a great treasure house of ancient Harmonic secrets that would enable him to institute an ideal society. He promised that those who fought on his side would be rewarded with enormous power and wealth.
    Life had been hard in the colonial cities a hundred years ago. The appeal of a utopian world was strong.
    Vance had gathered an army of disaffected followers before anyone even started to take him seriously. He also acquired a lover named Helen Chandler, an extremely talented ephemeral-energy para-resonator who, it was said, could untangle any illusion trap that had ever been discovered.
    From his secret headquarters somewhere in the complex of tunnels beneath Old Frequency City, Vance had drawn up detailed plans of conquest. His strategy had worked well at first because the colonial cities had never established standing armies. There had been no need for a military on Harmony. All of the city-states had been closely connected and had cooperated from the start in the effort to survive.
    There were also no large arsenals on Harmony. The high-tech hunting rifles and handguns that had been brought from Earth by some of the colonists had ceased to function after the first few years because there had been no way to maintain them or reproduce the ammunition. In Vance’s era there were only a couple of small, privately owned munitions manufacturing firms turning out revolvers and some rifles for the use of the cities’ police departments and for farmers and hunters. The weapons were notoriously unreliable because the technique of making an amber-resonating trigger had not yet been perfected. In any event, none of those firms had possessed the capability of supplying arms in large numbers to Vance’s recruits, even if they could have been made to do so.
    But Harmony had provided its own weaponry: the dangerous and powerful energy ghosts in the catacombs.
    Vance had fought a guerilla war in the maze of tunnels beneath the city-states. His hunters had summoned and manipulated great numbers of powerful energy ghosts. His tanglers had cleared the traps out of miles of uncharted underground corridors, enabling Vance’s forces to strike swiftly and then disappear into the catacombs.
    In a series of fast strikes, Vance’s army produced early, devastating results. Old Frequency had fallen within days. Old Crystal had followed less than a month later. But the hunters in the two cities had put up more of a fight than Vance had expected and in doing so they had bought valuable time for Old Resonance and Old Cadence.
    Under the leadership of a powerful hunter named Jerrett Knox, whose arcane, scholarly hobby happened to be the study of the history of ancient warfare on Earth, Resonance and Cadence had quickly brought their hunters together. The Guilds had been established to organize the fighting forces.
    Knox had proved to be a gifted leader and a shrewd tactician. He also knew the catacombs extraordinarily well because he had spent years mapping them.
    It had taken nearly a year to defeat Vance and his followers but in the end his minions had been crushed. After the final battle of Old Cadence, Vincent Lee Vance and his tangler-lover, Helen Chandler, had fled into an uncharted sector underground. They had vanished somewhere in the miles of unmapped catacombs, never to be heard from again.
    “I’ve seen some accidents while working underground but I’ve never known a hunter to try to use a ghost to stop bleeding,” Lydia said.
    “It’s an old-fashioned, low-tech procedure that is almost never needed these days,” Emmett explained patiently. “Underground emergency teams carry modern medical kits that contain safer, more efficient equipment.”
    “But the Guilds still teach the old methods?”
    “They teach them,”