Tikaya stood near the spot where the bat had been disintegrated. From there, the door to the weapons chamber was visible, and the runes glowed beside it. No ropes bound her hands-Lancecrest had decided she needed them for writing-but she had a guard. Gali. The woman huffed and sighed as she paced about, fiddling with a pistol. Her telepathy worried Tikaya more than the weapon. She wanted to copy the cube schematic on the chance Rias could do something with it. And she could escape the raiders long enough to meet up with him.
“ You’re not looking at them,” Gali snapped. “I imagine that’ll make the translation difficult.”
“ I’m ruminating,” Tikaya said.
“ On how to escape, I know.” Gali slapped the pistol across her palm. “Ruminate on getting through that door.”
Tikaya held the goggles before her spectacles and peered through the magnifying lenses. The symbols grew crisper, the nuances easier to make out. They were numbers. Four rows of four, each different. She only recognized a few, but she could look up the others with the sphere if she could find a private place to take it out.
She pushed the tool from her mind. Better these people did not know about it.
With the enhanced vision, she examined the rest of the weapons chamber. A cuboid contraption hung from a ceiling and was attached to a large pipe disappearing into the cavern depths far above. Some kind of fan or ventilation system to suck away fumes if there was a break or accident? Probably not fast enough to save the life of the person inside, but if the door shut and that fan activated perhaps destroying the weapons would not prove deadly for everyone down here.
“ What does one do with the symbols?” Tikaya asked. “Push them?”
“ I wasn’t there,” Gali said, “but I heard Atner stood down here and moved them around with telekinetics.”
Gali stretched a hand toward the butte. One of the numbers indented and glowed red. She twitched her fingers, and it slid one place to the right. The number on the right edge disappeared and reappeared on the left.
“ How’d you do that?” Tikaya asked.
“ A bit of sideways pressure. The runes glide around naturally, as if they’ve been greased. Atner fiddled around for days and finally got lucky. But he only got in once and the symbols changed after that.”
“ But he got a rocket out. How was he able to get it down without the web destroying it in midair?”
Gali shrugged. “The web didn’t attack it.”
“ So, the defense system won’t attack what it’s supposed to defend?” Tikaya wondered if there was anything else it would not attack.
The symbol winked off, though it did not return to its original slot. Three red beams lanced out of the clear door. Tikaya jumped, nearly dropping the goggles. The beams scoured the air in front of the door. After a moment, they cut off.
“ I guess if you don’t punch in the correct code while you’re standing up there, you get incinerated.” She chewed on the side of her mouth. “Your telekinesis does offer a workaround the original builders probably didn’t consider. If they were here as long ago as I suspect, humans wouldn’t have had the skill yet. Relatively speaking, our command of the mental sciences is a recent development in civilization. It’s not something that started appearing until after we developed agriculture and became more agrarian rather than hunter-gatherer. More free time, creation of a leisure class, and-”
“ We didn’t bring you here for a lecture,” Gali snapped. “Figure out how to get in before your cursed Turgonian lover gets her.”
Tikaya turned her attention back to the numbers. The ones she recognized were prime: three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen, nineteen. Could the whole series just be the first sixteen primes? She had not learned numbers beyond twenty yet, so she would have to look them up. Presumably, the sixteen digits had to be arranged in a specific order to open the door. If Atner Lancecrest had pushed them randomly, he truly had gotten ‘lucky.’ Rias could no doubt give her the exact odds of guessing correctly, but what she remembered of studying permutations in school suggested a ridiculously high number of combinations.
She did not have time for guessing. If the code changed regularly, it was probably a puzzle of some sort. If one knew the goal, one had a better chance of solving it. Could it be as simple as placing them in order? No, too obvious to someone who spoke the language, and the scientists who had built this place had surely had their own people in mind as potential trespassers, not the cave-dwelling humans who had occupied the world at the time.
There had to be more to it. Tikaya dug a sheet of paper out and copied the numbers for later perusal.
A distant clanking started up. She cocked an ear, trying to identify it. The noise had a muffled quality and did not sound like it came from within the cavern. A few men ran out of the camp and into a tunnel.
“ I want to take rubbings of the panels too,” Tikaya said.
“ Whatever,” Gali said.
Relieved, Tikaya pretended no more than vague scientific curiosity as she copied the panels-and the schematic on the inside of the cube cabinet.
“ Can you work those?” Gali asked suspiciously.
“ No.” Tikaya closed the cabinet and tucked the rubbings into her pocket along with the numbers.
“ Tikaya?”
She turned to find Parkonis standing a few feet away. The remaining marines and relic raiders carried bows or firearms. Parkonis had nothing more offensive than a utility knife. The last year had apparently not turned him into a fighter.
Gali backed away a few paces, giving them a semblance of privacy.
“ Parkonis,” Tikaya said, not sure what else to say.
He pushed a tangle of curly hair out of his eyes. “I’m sorry I ran off.”
“ Earlier today?” she asked. “Or a year ago?”
He grimaced.
“ What happened out there, Par? You obviously got off your ship, but why couldn’t you come home?”
“ The Turgonians sunk us, just as you heard, but Atner Lancecrest happened by and rescued those left alive. There were only four of us. He showed us the runes from this place, and I was intrigued, of course. He swore us to secrecy before telling us anything about them, then asked if we wanted to join his team, to travel to the source and work on translating a previously undiscovered language. He was leaving right away to recruit others from Nuria and the islands. There was no time to come home. It was a dream opportunity, Tikaya. I couldn’t refuse.”
“ You don’t find it suspicious that he just ‘happened by’ right after the Turgonians attacked you? He was Turgonian himself. Maybe he wanted to appear a benevolent rescuer, but actually set up the whole thing. Maybe he had a deal with the captain of the ship that sank yours. All so he could get his hands on a handful of grateful archaeologists. Are you sure you had a choice about coming?”
“ That’s far-fetched, Tikaya. Atner wasn’t a bad fellow.”
“ Wasn’t a-he killed everyone in that fort out there. In a ghastly way. And those were his countrymen!”
Parkonis winced. “He was desperate at that point. We didn’t… I didn’t have anything to do with that. I swear. I didn’t know about the weapons when I agreed to come. We were just looking for relics, and in truth I only cared about the language.”
Yes, Tikaya could understand that temptation. She stepped toward him and softened her voice. “Even if you joined voluntarily- especially if you joined voluntarily-why didn’t you write, Par? How could you let us believe, for a whole year… We had your funeral. I stood next to your weeping sister and parents. This devastated them. And me too. I spent months trying to get over…” Her voice broke. She was still struggling to resolve this new reality with her memories.
Parkonis avoided her eyes. The distant clanking continued, like metal beating against rock.
“ I should have written,” he said. “I just didn’t know how to without explaining everything. I was heading off to Turgonian territory, and I knew it’d be dangerous. I didn’t want you to worry.”
“ Worry! I thought you were dead. How could worrying for your safety be worse than believing you dead?”
“ I know, I realize that now. I was a fool. You were always the smart one. You weren’t going to marry me for my brains, were you?” He grinned, a disarmingly boyish grin that she knew well. And she knew when he was using
