Some time later, the tramp freighter Moulins maneuvered out of the rear cargo hold under its own power. The ship had been hurriedly resupplied with water, food, and other perishables. Reaction mass for the engines had been topped off and Prince Xochitl, his remaining Jaguar Knight, Doctor Anderssen, and a handful of marines borrowed from the Naniwa were on board. In the cramped Command space, Captain Locke and his pilot were watching the external cameras and docking control status with a weather eye. The Prince and his bodyguard had appropriated the Navigator and Comm officer’s seats and were glowering at the backs of the Europeans during the delicate maneuver.
Gretchen watched them all from the hatchway while the ship was decoupling, then left them all to stew and banged downdeck to the cargo area where all of their luggage had been piled by the middies from the Naniwa. Her duffle had disappeared, to her disgust, under an enormous quantity of marine gear.
And, she thought, rather morosely, here I am again on this damned tiny ship with these fanatics.
Locke had accepted this new commission without protest, having apparently spent his time in the brig playing cards and smoking a succession of foul Novo French cigarettes. Now free of the battle-cruiser and at the helm of his own ship again, his hostility towards the Prince and the Fleet marines cluttering up his decks was banked, but simmering. Lojtnant Piet was doing less well at hiding his antipathy, but Xochitl apparently did not care, showing not the slightest awareness of their anger.
They’ll find a way to get along, Anderssen thought cheerfully, dragging olive-gray duffels aside. “There’s my- oh, what the hell are you doing in there?”
Beneath the pile of luggage, with his head resting on Gretchen’s field pack, Green Hummingbird had made himself a bit of a nest using a pair of folding kitchen tables. As she moved aside the last of the ammunition crates with a grunt, his lips fluttered with a soft snore.
“Does the Prince know you’ve come along, Crow?” Anderssen pinched his brown old ear as hard as she could. The old Nahuatl opened one eye, squinting at her, then sat up carefully and eased out of the tiny space under the tables.
Briskly chafing his wrists and ankles, he observed: “ Tlatocapilli Xochitl is noted for his admirable qualities in battle, not for his legendary acumen. Chu-sa Kosho, on the other hand, is beginning to understand how to operate in the wide world, as befits a gifted student with an excellent master.”
Gretchen shook her head, retrieving her pack. She began digging through the compartments, confirming that everything she’d stowed was still in place and undamaged. “Why did they send him then? They knew what was out here, right?”
Hummingbird shrugged. “I believe he was judged the most expendable of the Emperor’s sons.”
“More so than the one that’s always on the 3-v? Tezozomoc the Glorious?” Anderssen was appalled.
“Not all stone flakes the right way,” the old man replied, pulling on a pair of boots he’d lifted from one of the other duffels. “What use is a pretty piece of flint if it cannot take an edge?”
“And Tezozomoc can?”
Hummingbird did not reply, instead he dug around in the bottom of his gear and came up with a plastic container filled with cheesecloth. Holding the jar up, the old Nahuatl turned it this way and that, checking the contents. Then he turned back the lid, smelling the small egg-sized rounds inside.
“Lady of Light!” Gretchen coughed, eyes smarting. “Those are strong! Is that opium? What the devil are you doing with a basket of knuckles?”
He smiled serenely at her, tucking the container inside a field jacket he’d stolen from someone, somewhere. “My traveling companion needs a little coaxing to leave his shipping container.”
Anderssen shook her head in dismay. “You know, Crow, I had a friend who had a fascination for doing archaeology in the ancient home of the Chichimecas. It was always dangerous, uncomfortable work. The land is harsh, the people were poor, running contraband was the only way to make money. All social hierarchies began and ended with some pilli in his fortified house surrounded by an army of goons. Not the kind of lord who likes strangers-particularly inquisitive ones-to come knocking around.
“But Harriet especially liked taking a gaggle of impressionable students out to do big ground surveys and to excavate just enough of an old city to intrigue the historical agencies, who would then give her more money and permits to do whatever she wanted so they could learn the next bit of the story she was telling. I think the reason she did it was because the challenge of facing sudden death and coming home with the bacon got her out of bed in the morning.
“As long as I knew her, she specialized in visiting the resident gang lord with a gift bottle of uisge-beatha. By the time she’d spent an hour chatting with him in an entirely charming manner, the fearsome and despicable toad had been transformed into her special, professional chum. I never knew her to break any laws, and somehow she always brought her crew home with all their fingers and toes.”
Green Hummingbird raised an eyebrow. “An enviable record, Doctor Anderssen.” He stood up, patting his pockets. “I believe you are going to need all of your equipment in a very short time.”
Six hours later, the Moulins had reached the edge of the Chimalacatl.
Gretchen had appropriated the Comm station from the Jaguar Knight and now watched her v-displays eagerly. Endless ranks of jagged architectural forms glided past as the freighter plowed along at right-angles to the surface of the artifact. The structure was apparently composed entirely of triangular sections, each holding a second inverted triangle recessed within. The bronze block was tucked into a pocket of her equipment rig, now strapped on over her z-suit. Her field comp and secondary equipment were tacked to the console, all components recording at maximum fidelity. Just for good measure, her interface to the Moulin ’s shipskin, cameras, and the single sensor boom was running bidirectional-which allowed her to offload some processing to the shipnet itself when needed.
For the moment, she had not connected the bronze block to anything. Despite this measure, it seemed heavy against her chest, and warm to the touch, as though some internal process was underway.
Even without node 3^3 3 in operation, however, enough data was flowing into her conceptual models and analysis matrices to leave her feeling slightly drunk. Fingers trembling, she unwrapped an oliohuiqui packet and pressed the acidic tablet beneath her tongue. Her skin was singing with the tension congealing in the Command compartment, but the promise of so many wonders to come pushed all of her concerns away.
“Radiation levels are rising,” Piet reported, tapping a winking glyph on his display to expand the warning message. “Captain?”
“Reconfigure the shipskin for maximum protection,” Locke replied without bothering to consult with the Prince. “Let’s try not to fry!”
Anderssen paid them little attention, though part of her mind wondered what had happened to the shipskin, for the flow of data into her analysis array did not diminish at all. The exterior configuration of the ship had changed however, shifting into an unfamiliar alignment.
But for the moment, Gretchen didn’t care about the crew’s machinations. As long as we’re capturing clean data… wait a moment. A subtle change had occurred in the visual flow of the artifact. Nothing obvious-the intersecting triangles had a vertiginous effect on the eye-but the consistency of the shadows pooling in their depths had begun to thicken. “There!” Anderssen suddenly spoke, half-rising from her seat. “Quadrant six by sixteen-that’s a lock entrance.”
“How can you tell?” Xochitl glared over her shoulder in disgust at the flurry of bizarre glyphs and patterns dancing across her v-displays. “What is all of this static?”
“Our eyes in the darkness, Lord Prince,” she replied distantly. “Lojtnant-slow a bit…” Her stylus danced across a v-pane cross-connected to the comm system. A burst of indecipherable noise flooded from the ship’s tachyon array. “Now, wait… wait… there!”
One of the triliths moved-its motion obvious even to the naked eye-receding into sudden darkness. The constellation of other triliths around the missing triangle followed, sliding backward into shadow without evident mechanism. An opening emerged with fluid suddenness-a channel or corridor leading into the interior of the
