“ I doubt you ever did.”
He grimaced, apparently not in the mood for praise, and she wished she had never brought up the subject. Except, she reminded herself, that bringing it up meant disavowing him of the notion that he could send her home a mother. Which actually was not a horrifying concept, though he was right in that it would be easier to deal with further down the line. Still, a smile curled her lips at the thought of a passel of precocious toddlers scurrying around the house, getting into mischief and cutting down heirloom fruit trees to build play forts.
“ What are you thinking of?” Rias’s muscles relaxed as he watched her.
“ Furniture research.” She rose on her tiptoes, marveling that her eyes still weren’t level with his, and kissed him.
Her explanations resulted in one pleasant outcome: he did not hesitate to return it.
The moment ended abruptly. Rias pulled away, annoyance flickering across his face. Before she could ask why, she heard the clomp of boots. One of the squads of marines had returned.
“ What, by the emperor’s eternal warts, is this mess?” Bocrest bellowed as soon as he entered the cavern and spotted the fledgling frame and the heaps of wood surrounding it.
Rias sighed and dropped his head on Tikaya’s shoulder.
“ Tonight?” she suggested.
He released her with a hand squeeze and a promise in his eyes. Please don’t let monsters, machines, or annoying marines ruin the night, she thought.
“ We need help, boys,” Rias called. “Grab a hammer.”
“ About this catapult…” Tikaya said, a question occurring to her as her gaze skimmed the chasm.
“ Counterweight trebuchet,” Rias said.
“ Yes, of course. How will one land without breaking every bone in her body?”
“ Parachutes, naturally.” Rias help up a finger. “That reminds me.” He turned to holler at the approaching men. “Anyone who isn’t able to find a hammer and work on this is on sewing duty.”
Without glancing at the captain, the marines hustled over, prepared to dive into the construction work to avoid a stitching task. Chuckling, Tikaya returned to the second-story retreat to examine the sphere that had piqued her interest earlier.
CHAPTER 18
The sphere proved amazing. With the journal’s help, she deciphered the runes on the outside, which were a proclamation of ownership and instructions for firing it up. Once she did that, a hole smaller than a grain of sand projected a display above the sphere. It appeared solid but she could wave her fingers through it as with an illusion. Plenty of practitioners who studied optics could make them, but she could not fathom how it was done with technology. She did not care either. It was the images and runes within the three-dimensional display that enraptured her. She found herself reading someone’s diary, and she could look up symbols and terms she did not understand, as if a dictionary and encyclopedia underlaid the journal. This was the type of artifact every philologist dreamed of finding, something that held the keys to unlocking an entire language. She marveled that the other team had left it. Maybe they had not been up here, or maybe they had not realized what they passed up.
“ How do you turn the water on?”
Rias’s voice startled Tikaya so much she dropped the sphere. It slipped from her fingers and clunked on the high table where she sat. She caught it before it rolled off the edge, though she almost dropped it again when she spotted Rias.
He stood by the tub, his weapons, boots, and shirt already on the floor next to his rucksack, and a towel and bar of soap on the ledge. She stared at his muscled chest. If he had been on the gaunt side when she first met him, that was not the case now. Hard to imagine someone filling out on that abysmal military food, but perhaps it suited him. Scar tissue scored his torso and arms: several old gashes and two dense knots where he must have been shot. Some of those wounds had been life-threatening and represented a lot of pain. As with Krychek, he never spoke of it, never complained.
“ Should I be feeling self-conscious under this scrutiny?” Rias asked. “Or are you only looking this way while thinking about translating runes?”
Heat flushed her face. She decided his first question was safest to answer. “Push on that symbol and slide it up, then rotate it for hot or cold.”
“ Hot? Excellent.” He turned on the water and hopped up to sit on the edge facing her. “You’re engrossed there. You must have found something good.”
She brightened, taking this for an invitation to share her findings. “Yes! It’s a journal someone kept. You must be wondering about this place, these people. It’s all explained in here, though if I wasn’t sitting here I’d think it the stuff of a storyteller’s imagination. These people-they called themselves the Orenki-they came from another planet. A group was persecuted for their scientific research methods and driven out of their homeland. They came here and experimented-this is chilling by the way-experimented on primitive humans because we were biologically similar to their people. They wanted to come up with devastating weapons so they could return to their home world, use them on their own kind, and take over.”
Rias opened his mouth to speak, but she barely noticed. She still had to tell him the best part.
“ You’re going to love these instructional, uhm, illusions-sorry, no better word for it in my language or yours. The first one I found shows how to repair and maintain this pumping facility. It looks like there are thousands of sets of instructions on all sorts of mechanical things, though I haven’t quite figured out how to search through them. They’re organized by codes. But I will figure it out. It’s just a matter of…”
Rias turned off the water, and Tikaya realized she had been talking for a long time. And that she had cut him off. She smiled sheepishly. “Sorry, did you want to speak?”
Rias chuckled. “From another planet, you say?”
Tikaya, deciding she should let him talk for a while, offered an encouraging, “Mmhmm.”
“ I’m too ignorant of astronomy to even ask how that’d be possible, but given what I’ve seen here, I can’t claim to be utterly surprised. I’m hoping they weren’t ultimately successful, because I’d not be comfortable knowing beings capable of making such weapons were still out there.”
Yes, that was an unsettling idea, but Tikaya was more concerned about human beings learning how to use those weapons. She could not allow the Turgonian emperor to have this technology. Or a disaffected marine colonel. Or anyone.
“ Rias?”
“ Yes?”
Tikaya wanted to tell him, ask him for his help going forward. But when she gazed at him, at the scar on his eyebrow and the war wounds on his torso, she stopped herself. He might share her passion for academics, but she could not forget he was a soldier. He had been loyal to a totalitarian government his entire life, and his one disloyal act had cost him more suffering than anyone should have to endure. Would he truly choose such a road again? “You should bathe before the water gets cold.”
He watched her with sad eyes, and she wondered how much of her thoughts he read.
“ After all,” she said, “you’ve seen me naked. It’s only fair I get to see just how much of a Turgonian legend you are.”
That drew a self-deprecating chuckle, but not the repartee she expected. He slid his trousers off and climbed into the tub. Despite her words, she dropped her gaze to the sphere to give him privacy. She glanced up a few times, but Rias seemed lost in thought. He was considering Sicarius’s offer, she knew it. Probably trying to figure out if he could work her into his life once he had everything back together. She supposed, in some less than ideal scenario, she could see living in Turgonia with him, but slaving for the emperor, creating ciphers her own people would never crack if there was another war? That was not going to happen. And even the rest made her grimace. He would be off at sea most of the year, and she would be alone amongst strangers, thousands of miles from her friends and family.
“ That bad of a show, huh?” Rias leaned against the tub wall, arms folded on the ledge, chin resting on them.
