But not today. The tension in the carriage, among everyone going to the site, was tight enough to feel confining to Kira. She would much rather have ridden a horse, alone with her thoughts, able to see everything around her instead of only those slim views visible between the armor. The carriage felt only a little like protection this morning, and much more like a cage.
Her mood troubled Kira. She should still be elated to have been qualified as a Mechanic, and to know she had truly earned that qualification. But something weighed on her even though she couldn’t remember much of her dreams from last night. Her only strong sense was that the female Mage had been there again, watching her, face hidden in the cowl of her robes.
Maybe her tension was because of everyone’s worries about whatever was buried under Pacta Servanda. The crew of the great ship that had brought people to this world, along with the animals and the plants and fish and birds they knew, had constructed that buried facility. Was what lay beneath Pacta as dangerous as the vague warnings passed down by the librarians claimed it to be?
Kira blinked in surprise as she abruptly seemed to see it before her, that entry to the buried place. The image just suddenly appeared, she standing a little back beside Jason, her mother talking to Queen Sien to Kira’s right, Calu and Alli and Dav in a small group, and to Kira’s left her father and Mage Asha. Master Mechanic Lukas stood farthest back, watching everything. The Mechanics all wore their usual dark jackets, Alain and Asha were in Mage robes, and Sien wore a Lancer uniform as she did sometimes. From their postures, Kira could tell that either Alain or Asha was preparing a spell. Perhaps both of them, if one was readying to deal with whatever the other might stir up.
She “saw" all that in a moment, an instant that ended as an opening appeared in the wall of the buried structure. One of the Mages must have made that, overlain the illusion of that hole on the illusion of the extremely tough material the crew had used.
She jerked, startled, as the image vanished in a flare of white light. What had happened? Not an explosion. There hadn’t been any sense of force, just the light. But nothing remained of the odd picture she’d imagined seeing.
Kira bent her head a bit to peer between the armored louvers, searching for a large window or other shiny object that might have flashed the light of the rising sun into her eyes as the carriage passed. She didn’t see anything that might have done so, but it wasn’t as if she had a good view of the street.
Could that have been a foresight vision such as Mages like her father had talked about? But there hadn’t been any sense of warning to it, no feeling of danger such as she was used to feeling when her foresight went active. It had just felt like watching an anticipated event taking place. That must have been what it was, an exceptionally vivid image of something she was anticipating. No matter what else was wrong with her, her imagination seemed to be in great shape.
The site, in the basement of a building about as old as any human structure on Dematr, had guards all about. Kira, still troubled by the odd vision, felt her spirits lift at seeing the others already there.
Calu grinned at her. “Hey, Mechanic Kira. When’s the wedding?”
“We haven’t decided,” Kira told him.
“Get married on a ship and you can honeymoon at sea,” Alli said, smiling. “I highly recommend it, especially if you can work in a little piracy along the way.”
Kira looked about the basement they were in, well lit by electric lights set up when the discovery had been made. The original basement had been expanded down and to one side as the digging exposed what it could reach, a wall of the incredibly hard and durable substance that Jason called permacrete. The room felt a little crowded, a little musty and earthy in that manner of somewhere underground where digging had been going on. Queen Sien and Kira’s mother were talking. Mage Asha had gone over to speak with Kira’s father, while Dav joined Alli and Calu. Master Mechanic Lukas was talking to Mari, their expressions serious as they regarded what could be seen of the permacrete.
Alli shook her head at the once-buried wall. “I know as much about weapons as anyone on this planet, but I really doubt that will help much if Jason is right about what could be inside there.”
Calu put his arm around her shoulders. “Whatever you know is probably going to be more useful than the theory I know. Jason, you’re the expert here.”
Jason shrugged, nervous. “The real information about weapons like that is secret. All I know is what got put into games, which might be pretty close or might be totally wrong, and a few things from history.”
“That still makes you our expert,” Kira said. “So go solve this problem,” she added with an encouraging smile.
“Okay.” Jason walked to where a sheet of heavy cloth covered part of the permacrete, tugging the cloth aside and then staring in surprise. “Do you know what this is?” he asked Kira in a voice full of awe.
“Uh, no,” Kira replied, feeling a growing sense of worry. Why did so much of this resemble the imagined vision that she’d seen in the carriage?
He pointed to three apparently identical panels set about a lance apart from each other. “It’s a triple simul-cipher. Wow. I’ve seen these in games, but this is a real one!”
“What’s a triple simul-cipher?” Mari asked, her businesslike voice snapping Jason out of his reverie.
Jason gestured toward the panels again. “A normal cipher lock has a panel where you enter the code to unlock it, right? Those can be broken, given enough time and enough tries, though good ones lock you out after several unsuccessful tries. But this is a triple.” He pointed to each panel in turn. “You need three people, each one standing at one panel, each one entering their code at the same time as the other two. And all three codes have to be entered right the first time, or the lock doesn’t open. You can’t use ‘bots to enter any of the codes, because of the sense pad above each panel. The person entering the code has to put one hand there. You need three humans.”
Mari nodded, her eyes intent. “What’s the purpose of that?”
“You need three people,” Jason repeated. “Each person knows one of the codes. Unless all three are here and agree to open the door, it doesn’t open. Hey. Pacta Servanda. It means agreements must be honored. So there was some agreement that required three different people to, um, agree to open this door, or it would stay locked.”
Mechanic Dav gave a startled exclamation. “Mari, Alli, do you guys remember that I did some research into old Mechanics Guild records available at the Guild Hall in Altis? Back just before I met you, Mari?”
“What about that?” Alli asked.
“The oldest documents I saw described the Guild as having three grand masters, not one the way we were used to. Then after one of the gaps in the records that we figured indicated one of the purges, there was only one grand master. I didn’t think that mattered much anymore, but… ”
“Three grand masters,” Queen Sien said. “Three panels. Three codes. As Jason says, once it would have required all three to agree to open this. What could require such extreme measures? It seems increasingly clear that the weapons Jason fears are indeed inside there.”
“But we can get in, using the Mages,” Calu said.
“The librarians were warned never to tamper with this structure,” Mage Asha said, her eyes on the smooth gray surface. “That terrible things would occur if they did.”
“Some sort of alarm system?” Mari speculated. “The librarians were also warned never to activate the Feynman unit, but as far as we can tell the Mechanics Guild wouldn’t actually have been able to tell if they’d done that. That was a bluff.”
“But we don’t know this is a bluff. Should we risk trying to get in using Mages?” Dav asked.
Kira saw everyone turning to look at her mother. As they always did when such hard decisions needed to be made. When she was younger, Kira had thought that Mari enjoyed that attention, that deference to her opinions, but now she understood what a burden it was for her mother.
Mari sighed. “We can’t disarm those weapons if we can’t get at them, and they might already be dangerously unstable after centuries unattended. Does anyone disagree?”
Now eyes went to Queen Sien, because this was Tiae and the final decision had to be hers. Sien’s mouth tightened as she gazed at the wall of the buried structure. Then she nodded. “We should try to get inside. It would be irresponsible to let the sort of dangers Jason says may exist in there go unexamined.”
Kira watched Asha and her father move slightly farther to her left, facing the permacrete wall. She was standing with Jason, to their right her mother and Queen Sien. Then Alli, Calu, and Dav. Lukas back a little, watching everything. .An odd feeling came over Kira, a sense of having been here at this moment before this. What had Jason called it? Deshavu?
She could see her father and Asha concentrating, preparing their spells. Just like-
“Stop!”
Chapter Three
Everyone turned to look at Kira, who realized she was shaking. “Don’t,” she gasped in a lower voice, grasping Jason’s hand tightly.
Mari, Alain, and Asha came close to her, watching with concern and curiosity. “Why not?” her father asked, his dispassionate Mage voice calming amid the tension.
“On the way here,” Kira explained, the words tumbling out, “I saw… I don’t know what it was. I saw us. All of us. Just like this.”
“You saw us? Including yourself? As clearly as if viewing the scene from not far away?”
“Yes!”
“That has never happened to you before?” Alain asked.
“No! Was that a foresight vision? Is that what they’re like? But there wasn’t any sense of warning to it!”
“The sensation is different for every Mage,” Asha told her in a similarly Mage calm voice. “What did you see that frightens you now?”
“It only lasted a couple of seconds. You and Father were getting ready to do spells, and a hole appeared in that wall when you or Father did the spell, and then… just this light.”
“Light?” Mari questioned.
“Yes. A bright white light everywhere. I thought the sun might have been reflected into my eyes.” Kira looked over at Jason, startled to see his eyes wide with fear.
The others noticed as well, waiting as Jason swallowed and took a deep breath. “A bright, white light?” he asked Kira, his voice strained. “Not an explosion?”
“No. That’s why I thought it was some sun glare. There wasn’t any feeling of… of violence. Just the white light.”
Jason drew in another shaky breath. “When a beta field generator dissolves atomic bonds, there is some energy released. A lot of it takes the form of visible light. Bright, white light.”
No one said anything for a long moment.
“A trap,” Lukas finally said. “They linked one of those beta fields to an alarm system that senses any breaks in the wall. If anyone breaks in, it goes off.”
“And we’d just be gone,” Jason said, his voice trembling. “Dissolved into component atoms. Us and who knows how much of the city.”
“I don’t understand,” Kira said. “If that was foresight I experienced, why was I able to change things? Why didn’t it happen?”
“You saw yourself, you said,” Alain told her. “That meant you were seeing something that could happen, not something that would happen.”
“How fortunate for us,” Queen Sien said, running a hand across her forehead. “Jason, how much of the city would been destroyed?”
“I don’t know, Your Majesty,” Jason said. “That’s not something they tell kids like I was when I left Earth. It’s secret. But in games, the radius is usually up to fifty kilometers. That’d be, uh, twenty-five thousand lances.”
“What would have been left?” Calu asked.
“Nothing,” Jason said. “There’d be a bowl in the surface here, like something had scooped out a big, perfect sphere above and below the surface. Everything, and everyone, inside that sphere would just be gone.”
Mari pressed both palms against her eyes. “All right. We know not to try to break into that place. How do we keep someone else from trying?”
Mage Asha answered. “A Mage must be able to touch or see a surface to overlay the illusion of an opening. Cover it again, and Mages would have to dig.”
“I’ll give orders for that to be done immediately,” Sien said. “And here, I’ll have two, no, three walls built before this section, each wall with a locked door. And guards. But how do we explain this in a way that neither causes panic nor undue curiosity?”
Kira’s mother ran one hand through her hair. “Lukas? What’s a good Mechanic explanation?”
The old master mechanic frowned as he considered the problem. “If you don’t want anybody trying to get in, you tell them there’s something toxic in there. Chemicals of some sort. Safe as long as it’s confined, but if you open that up it’ll kill anyone exposed.”
Dav nodded. “We could say we opened a tiny hole to sample the inside and discovered that.”
“Mages will see the lie,” his wife Asha cautioned.
“We need to say it right enough that it’s not a lie,” Mari said. “We learned there’s something inside that is confined safely, but if anyone opens this they’ll die. That’s completely true. We can say that and Mages will see we’re not lying.”
“Other Mages may see that we are not saying some of what we know,” Alain cautioned. “But if it is described as a Mechanic thing, they will believe you are withholding Mechanic secrets of some kind.”
“Why didn’t your foresight warn us?” Mari said. “I admit I’ve come to depend on that.”
“I do not know. Perhaps Kira received the warning because her Mechanic knowledge helped her grasp the danger. Perhaps it was because of her ties to Jason.”
“We don’t know how it works.” Kira snapped. “Didn’t we go over this?” She flinched. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound like that. I’m still really freaked out.”
Her mother came closer, peering at her. “You are. You’re still trembling.”
“Sorry!” Kira saw them all staring at her. “What’s the matter with everyone? Don’t I ever get to be afraid?”
Sien came close, nodding, her expression solemn rather than concerned. “Yes, Kira. You experienced something you could only describe to the rest of us. We all know how that feels.”
Kira nodded, biting her lip and not trusting herself to speak. Why was she so scared? It didn’t feel right. An overreaction. But why?
She abruptly realized that she was sensing the Mage presence of both her Father and Asha. Startled, Kira concentrated on completely controlling her own Mage powers again.
At least she hadn’t blacked out.
“So what do we do now?” Alli asked the group. “Besides burying this again? That stuff is still there.”
“A pair of Mages apparently tried to kidnap Jason and kill Kira a week ago,” Mari told the others. “We know why they might have been after Kira. But why someone would want to kidnap Jason is another story.”
Calu’s gaze went from Jason to the gray wall of permacrete and back to Jason. “Someone who thinks he can help them get at something or use something?”
Jason made an angry gesture. “You know, sometimes in games there’s like a signal you can send to deactivate something remotely. I mean, over distance, like, um, using a far talker signal to turn off something. Sort of a fail-safe. I heard that might be real, because if something goes wrong you don’t want it to be impossible to deactivate your own bomb. Or some sort of energy pulse, an electro-magnetic pulse or something, that could fry the circuitry safely from a distance. Even permacrete shouldn’t be able to stop a strong enough pulse. Earth might know how to do something like that!”
“But they won’t tell us,” Mari said. “They refuse to tell us anything.” Her gaze on Jason sharpened. “Every time we’ve asked, it’s been the librarians relaying a message from me. Maybe the librarians aren’t saying it ri
ght. Jason, do you think there’s any chance that Urth would respond differently if you asked them?”
“You mean if I wrote the next message for the librarians to send?”
“No. I mean if you spoke to Urth. Able to listen to their reply and make the appropriate response and ask the right questions for this level of technology.”
Alli nodded approvingly. “That’s a good idea.”
“I agree as well,” Queen Sien said. “If there might be a means to stop the threat of those weapons, and Jason can convince Urth to provide it, it would be a great service to the entire world.”
“Hold on,” Jason said, looking alarmed. “Why should Earth listen to me?”
“You’re one of them,” Calu pointed out. “You speak their language, not just in a technical sense but because you’ve got the same sort of accent. And you’ve been to Altis before. I forget, did you use the Feynman unit to talk to Urth then?”
“No,” Jason said. “I didn’t really want to. That’s… another life, you know? I wanted to focus on my life here.”
“Here needs you,” Alli told him.
Jason nodded. “Yeah. If you guys want me to, I’ll go.”
“Wait!” Kira tightened her grip on Jason’s hand. “Didn’t we just talk about people wanting to kidnap Jason? And you want to send him to Altis?”
“He’ll have a strong guard,” Sien told her.
“Yes, he will, because he’s not going alone. I’m going with him!”
“Kira,” her mother began, “there are people trying to kill you. There’s no need to expose yourself-”
“He’s my man. My partner in life!”
“You’re not married yet.”
“What difference does that make? My man will not go to Altis unless I’m with him to help him and help protect him.”
“Kira,” her father started to say.
“Would you have let Mother go to Marandur alone? Mother, would you have let Father go to the Northern Ramparts alone? Oh, wait, you did! And look what almost happened! But you went to him and you saved him. Just like I’ll go with Jason and keep him safe.”