Rias stopped, knelt, and picked up something. Bocrest and the others scrambled over, and Tikaya floundered up in time to hear the red-faced, scowling Bocrest speak.
“ What are you doing, Five? Are you trying to get yourself shot? Prisoners don’t get to take unannounced side trips.”
Rias lifted his goggles to peer at his find.
“ What is it?” Tikaya asked.
She attempted to slip past the other marines to join him, but one of them took a step at the same time and landed on the edge of her snowshoe. She sprawled, face heading toward the powder. Rias lunged, caught her, and even managed to keep from jarring her shoulder.
“ Slagging librarians,” Bocrest grumbled.
Face red from more than the cold, Tikaya got her snowshoes beneath her. “Thank you. It seems I’m always tumbling into your arms.” She sighed, appreciative but a little envious too. Neither shackles nor snowshoes made him ungainly.
“ I don’t mind,” Rias said. “Makes me feel useful.”
Bocrest snorted. “Any excuse to grab a tit.”
The two marines sniggered, and Tikaya stepped out of Rias’s arms, her cheeks warm. Rias merely shook his head at Bocrest, like a father disappointed in a wayward child.
Bocrest scowled. “What did you find, Five?”
Rias held an empty, one-inch cube of glass, or what appeared to be glass, on the palm of his gloved hand. One corner was broken, though the evenness of the cut suggested the hole planned rather than accidental. He flexed his fingers upon the cube. Though the thin sides appeared fragile, they did not bend or crack under pressure.
“ It glinted in the sun and caught my eye,” Rias said.
“ It looks like someone’s trash,” Bocrest said.
A dark shape loped across the tundra, and the two marines lifted rifles. A black wolf, so gaunt its ribs showed even at a distance. After her encounter with the berserk animals in town, Tikaya hoped the men shot it quickly, before it could attack.
“ Hold,” Bocrest said. “Why’s it so scrawny when there are dead birds everywhere?”
She glanced at him, surprised by the perspicacious comment. He was right, though. It was odd. And this wolf, unlike the ones in town, gave no indication of aggressive behavior. Indeed, it did not seem concerned about the humans at all.
“ It is the end of winter, sir,” a marine said. “Maybe it was a rough one for the animals.”
“ That wouldn’t explain why it’s not eating those free meals,” Bocrest said.
The wolf loped parallel to the squad, then paused at the corpse of a jaeger. It sniffed and pawed at the bird, and Tikaya expect it to take a chomp. Instead it lifted its muzzle and howled. The oscillating mournful sound made her shiver. Another wolf answered from the foothills, its howl just as forlorn.
“ He seems to find the fowl unpalatable,” Rias mused.
He turned his attention back to the cube, lifting it so the sun shone through the glass. Tikaya sucked in a startled breath. A familiar symbol etched one side.
She took it from Rias. “I recognize that. “It’s one of the symbols repeated often in the rubbings the captain gave me.” She nodded toward Bocrest. “Know anything?”
“ Shit,” he said.
“ Very elucidating, thank you,” Tikaya said.
“ Where’d those runes come from, Bocrest?” Rias asked in a tone of command.
“ That’s top secret.”
“ If you want Tikaya to translate this for you, she needs to know everything about the symbols.”
Bocrest ground his jaw. Tikaya had made that argument before, and the captain had ignored it, but he waved the marines to go back to the squad. When he, Rias, and Tikaya were alone, he spoke.
“ Last month, a black box covered with those runes was delivered to the research department of the biggest university in the capital. No name, no identification. They should have buried it somewhere and forgotten about it, but scientists being scientists…they fiddled with it, let out some kind of airborne poison. It killed everybody on campus. It was late in the evening, so not as bad as it could have been, but hundreds still died.”
Tikaya dropped the cube and stepped back. In her haste, she almost tripped over her snowshoes again. Rias’s lips flattened, and he rubbed the fingers of his glove together, as if he could wipe off any taint from the cube.
“ It’s not the same thing, though,” Bocrest said. “The bodies on campus were horribly mutilated, and these birds barely look dead. Maybe our people at the fort are fine.”
“ Those are carrion birds,” Rias said.
Tikaya swallowed with grim understanding. “Not as bright as the wolves then, eh?”
“ It seems not.”
“ What are you talking about?” Bocrest asked.
“ We’re just guessing at this point,” Rias said, “but it’s possible our people are dead by the means you’re familiar with, and the poison was toxic enough that even the carrion beasts that tried to feed off them died.”
Bocrest scowled at the dead bird. “Oh.”
“ Will it still be toxic if we get close?” Tikaya asked. “That cube wasn’t covered by snow, so this couldn’t have happened that many days ago.”
“ I don’t know,” Rias said. “It depends on whether we’re looking at an area denial weapon or something short-lived, designed simply to kill.” He faced Bocrest. “The scouting party. How far ahead are they?”
Bocrest’s face froze, and a long moment passed before he said, “They’ll be there by now.”
Tikaya’s gut twisted. Agarik. She had not even had a chance to apologize to him. She prayed it wasn’t too late.
CHAPTER 11
The walled army fort squatted in the foothills, small and insignificant compared to the towering white mountains plunging it into shadow. Tikaya stamped her feet to keep warm and wondered if she was crazy for wanting to travel the last half mile to the gate. No soldiers manned the massive guns perched atop the ramparts, nor did any smoke waft from the chimneys inside. Rias’s guess that everyone was dead seemed likely, but perhaps whatever weapon had done it waited within those walls. And such a weapon might be inscribed with language clues like those on the Wolfhump artifact. Now that she had made a little progress, the prospect of more tantalized her.
Rias meandered across the foothills, pausing to pick up something here and there. More of those cubes, she feared, not sure whether they were safe to touch or not. He carried a small notepad and scribbled something in it whenever he found one. He still wore his shackles, and two guards trailed dutifully behind him. Did Bocrest not know they were superfluous at this point? Rias had shown no interest in escaping since he learned what was at stake.
She hoped that loyalty to the empire would not result in his death. Or hers. She would much prefer to see him strolling on one of her island’s beaches, picking up agates and sand dollars instead of vials that might have housed lethal poison. And in this vision, she saw him with less clothing on. She grinned. Or none. She thought of the scar that bisected his eyebrow and wondered what other battle wounds stamped his olive skin. He had filled out since she first saw him in rags in his cell, and she imagined broad shoulders and powerful muscles beneath that parka.
A guilty pang ended her thoughts. She believed Parkonis would have wanted her to go on and find love again-though not with a Turgonian, no matter how academically inclined-so it was not that. It was that she had never daydreamed about him with his shirt off. Parkonis had been boyishly cute with freckles and a mop of red-blond curls, but not the type to inspire women’s fantasies. Of course, she was hardly the type to inspire men’s fantasies. She hated to dwell on it, but feared she would not be able to compete with others if she and Rias survived to return to a world where she was no longer the only woman for hundreds of miles.