The guide glares at him.
“My father was on the recovery team.”
“They got the archeologists out?” I ask. We’ve had to abandon a corpse to stealth tech before we knew that I could brave it and survive.
“No,” the medic says. “But it was clear they were dead.”
“They were mummified, right?” I ask.
The medic nods. “He says he’s never seen anything like it.”
“Have you?” Mikk asks.
The medic closes his eyes. “Four times,” he says softly.
I put my hands on the side of the cart and ease out. The floor is slippery here too. I have to hold onto the hovering cart to get my balance.
I hate that part of gravity. I want to float to my destination, not walk toward it on unsafe surfaces.
The guide grabs my wrist. “I can’t let you do this.”
“I’m only going to the entrance,” I say.
His grip remains tight. “No,” he says. There’s real fear in his voice. “I told you, the areas change. If we’re wrong about where it begins, it will kill you.”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Mikk says. “It can’t kill her.”
The guide stares at him for a moment, then looks back at me. “It kills everyone.”
“I’ll be careful,” I say.
He shakes his head. “I cannot be responsible for your death. If something happens, I will blame your recklessness. I will say you were warned and you ran away from us and we couldn’t catch you.”
“Cover your ass as best you can,” I say. “I have nothing against that. And if I’m dead, my reputation won’t matter at all.”
Mikk grins. The medic has gone pale. The guide looks ill, but he lets go of my wrist. His fingers have left red marks on my skin.
I resist the urge to rub it as I walk cautiously down the slick corridor. It feels even colder closer to the ground. The lights come on as I move—thin, white things that somehow manage to cover every centimeter of the place.
I am listening as much as observing. The active stealth tech that I have been near makes a series of sounds that my brain interprets as music—usually choral voices singing in harmony. The weaker stealth tech sounds like humming, and the tiny stealth tech I’ve encountered—my father had a working bottle experiment—had a sound so faint that I had to strain to hear it.
But I did hear it.
At the moment, I hear nothing except my own ragged breathing.
It takes longer than I thought it would to reach the branching corridor. I stop at the opening. There are no lights, and it is so dark down there that the hair rises on the back of my neck.
At least in space there is an ambient light. Nothing is ever completely black. Not like this. If I walk into that darkness, I will effectively disappear.
I try to remember. Did the lights come on as the cart approached an area or when the cart was already inside? I have a hunch the cart’s lights covered a lot. Maybe it was a motion sensor that made the lights come on.
I take a deep breath of that wonderfully cool air, then stick my hand into that corridor.
Behind me, I can hear the guide shouting. He doesn’t want me to do that much.
I wave my arm around, and after a moment, rows and rows of lights flicker on. When one is triggered, the others get triggered as well. I wager they get triggered at some set distance.
These lights have a rose tint to them. The area looks less black than a deep red, thanks to the lighting. That redness is oddly welcoming. I have a hunch we’re getting closer to the heart of these caves.
I keep my arm in the corridor and make a point of moving it so that I can continue to see. Deep in the corridor—maybe seven meters ahead, maybe farther—I can see shapes. I’m not sure what exactly. They might simply be reflections on the shiny walls, although my mind reassembles those shapes into furniture or boxes or tables. All seem plausible. But for what I know, those shapes could also be debris—
Or other bodies.
I pull my arm out before I have a chance to reflect on what I’ve done. The lights remain on for several seconds before they flicker off. The farthest away disappear first—a nifty design that won’t leave anyone in darkness too long.
My heart is pounding. It takes me a moment to catch my breath. I feel like I sometimes do when I stumble on a very important wreck.
I wait until I make it back to the cart to say what I’m thinking.
“We’re diving this.”
Carmak nods. The guide looks scared. Mikk grins.
“You saw something,” he says.
“Oh, yeah,” I say. “I saw a lot of somethings—and I want to know what they are.”
SIX
The problem is that of the people with the markers, I’m the only experienced diver. The others have had training, of course, or they wouldn’t have gone into the Room of Lost Souls when my father begged them to. But the Room is an empty place, without a lot of obvious dangers.
None of the Six have the ability to dive a dangerous area. None of them know how to do an excavation, and I wouldn’t trust any of them—no matter how smart—to attempt one even in full gravity.
By the time we have our nightly meeting, my mind is full of half-completed plans. I don’t tell the others what I’m thinking; it’s too early. But I have a hunch we’ll be here quite a while, excavating the areas where the archeologists died.
I also have to set up an emergency evacuation plan. The longer we’re here, the more risk we run of getting discovered by the Empire. I talk to Ilona before we start the meeting. I have her lay out plans for a quick escape.
Essentially everyone must head for the ships in the spaceport as quickly as possible. We’ll decide at the time (if there’s time) which equipment to take and which we trash. And Ilona and I must drum it into everyone’s brains that if an emergency evacuation gets called, we all leave immediately, no matter what we’re doing.
“You think it’s stealth tech now, don’t you?” Ilona says as we finish moving chairs in the conference room.
The hotel staff has covered the table with specialty dishes as well as fresh fruit, vegetables, and crudites. We are going to eat a Vaycehnese feast, something the city is famous for. Glasses of sparkling water line the sideboard behind me.
I had the staff remove the wine the moment I arrived. I left all the beverages with caffeine and a single jug of local ale for the team members who cannot survive without their evening alcohol. But I make sure there isn’t enough for anyone to get drunk on.
I wanted to limit the food, too—overeating is just as bad when you’re trying to do something athletic—but I couldn’t do that without mining the feast. I have to trust my team to have some sense.
Ilona grabs one of the yellow-and-brown spotted apples that Vaycehn is known for, then sits on a chair near the head of the table.
“Well?” she says to me. “Are you convinced?”
“Let’s say I’m more convinced than I was,” I say. “There are a lot of strange things in those caves.”
“Not all strange things in the universe come from stealth tech.” Roderick has just come in the door. He stops when he sees the food spread as if he hasn’t eaten in weeks.
“I know that,” Ilona says with irritation. “But these are probably caused by it.”
“Probably not,” I say.
They both turn toward me.
I smile and grab one of the spotted apples for myself. “But we are going to wait for the others before I tell you what we found.”
The remaining members of the team straggle in. To my surprise, my team arrives before all the other teams are complete. My team looks tired— Carmak in particular, even though she didn’t do much physical work—and a few have wet hair from showers.