Maldynado sighed and walked down the corridor at her side. He did not, she was glad, point out that they had exactly no effective weapons to help balance the equation. “Just promise me you won’t hurl yourself in front of any cannons. At least not when I’m standing close to you.”
“I’ll try to sublimate any urges to do so.”
They continued down the tunnel, watching the walls for scars. In some spots, there was a clump of them. In others, often around bends where their comrades must have gained ground, there weren’t any. Amaranthe grew nervous in those blank-walled areas, especially when they crossed an intersection and other tunnels branched off. They had to double back twice to find the trail again.
“I hope random cubes aren’t roaming through the corridors, shooting up the walls for their own amusement,” Maldynado said.
“Our people wouldn’t have run off for no reason,” Amaranthe said firmly.
“I’m not so sure. Did you see the way the professor’s eyes lit up when she saw this thing? She couldn’t wait to get inside. Those other two soldiers are probably at the docks right now, wondering where she is.”
Amaranthe stopped walking and lifted a hand. She’d heard something.
A clank sounded in the distance, somewhere ahead of them and… above them? Could that be right?
“Is that—”
“Sh.” Amaranthe held a finger to her lips, then jogged down the tunnel. Listening as she went, she tried to keep her footfalls soft and stop the clatter of her gear, though her rucksack thumped annoyingly on her back.
Maldynado ran beside her, stealing glances at her. Hadn’t he heard anything? Maybe she’d imagined it.
A blocky shape came into sight in the tunnel ahead. Another destroyed cube. Good. They were on the right track. They ran past it without stopping to examine it.
“Look out,” someone yelled ahead of them. Mahliki.
“I see it,” came Tikaya’s response, calm but harried.
A sickly smoke scent, something between burning rubber and scorched metal, reached Amaranthe’s nose. Maldynado picked up speed, outpacing her. Lantern light came into view ahead.
His broad back blocked her line of sight, so she didn’t see why he yanked out his rapier, but she trusted he had a good reason. She pulled out her pistol. Neither of their weapons would be effective, but maybe they could distract the cubes.
Maldynado bellowed and took a swing at something in front of him, wielding the blade as if it were an axe instead of a slender rapier. Hugging the wall, Amaranthe went down on one knee and lifted her pistol, expecting a cube to hover in the air ahead of them. She was in time to see his blade clang against something else, something larger but also floating. The blow caused it to bump against the wall and wobble before righting itself. Whatever it was, it didn’t retaliate.
Four feet tall and reminiscent of two big snowballs one atop the other, the black object hovered a few inches above the floor. Two thick white beams shot from its body, painting the wall next to it. Maldynado twitched, almost leaping back, but when he saw that the beams weren’t aimed at him, he swung again. Again, the contraption hit the side of the tunnel, bounced off, and wobbled, but again righted itself and refocused its beam on the wall, a smoldering patch of wall.
Amaranthe raised a hand to stop him. “I don’t think—”
“Not those,” came Tikaya’s voice from ahead.
Amaranthe and Maldynado were at the end of a tunnel that opened into a strange chamber with a spiky floor plan—she didn’t know what else to call it. Long angular alcoves thrust outward in all directions from an open center area, the walls coming together at the shadowy ends of those alcoves like the tips of a triangle with a column of lights at each point. Control stations?
“They’re repairing the damage,” Tikaya went on. Her head was sticking out from one of those alcoves. “They won’t hurt you, but—”
“Look out,” her daughter barked again.
“—the cubes will!” Tikaya finished, ducking back into the alcove before a splash of crimson struck the wall. The sturdy metal didn’t explode or even sheer off in great shards, but flakes did rain to the floor as the beam bore in.
“Where’s Basilard?” Maldynado called.
“Where’s your bow? And that royal gunk?” Amaranthe asked. Now that she’d been told it wouldn’t hurt her, she scooted past the large hovering device, ducking to avoid its white beam, though she paused, startled as a putty-like substance floated through the light and affixed itself to the wall.
Not important, she decided and slipped out of the tunnel. From there, she could see the full room, including two cubes floating toward the alcove Tikaya and Mahliki shared. The two of them were out of sight, but if their alcove was like the others she could see down, it dead-ended at one of those columns. Unless those columns housed secret weapons, the women were in trouble. Where was Basilard?
She’d no more than thought the question when he sprinted out of an alcove—no, that was a tunnel—on the opposite side of the chamber. Five arrows were clenched in his fist, and he ran toward the women’s hiding spot, but he halted, almost skidding on the smooth floor when he spotted the cubes. One stopped advancing toward the alcove and rotated toward him. He only had the arrows and a dagger, nothing that would help him against it.
“Get out of there, Bas,” Maldynado barked, jumping out of the tunnel with his rapier.
Basilard hesitated, but didn’t backpedal. He glanced toward the women’s alcove, then, jaw set with determination, sprinted toward it.
Maldynado charged at the cube targeting Basilard. Amaranthe fired before the men drew too close. Her ball clipped its back corner, but didn’t make it so much as twitch.
A red beam speared the air, aiming straight for Basilard’s heart. He anticipated it and dove, rolling toward the alcove, arrows held away from his body so he wouldn’t impale himself. He came up zigging and zagging, then dove again, this time disappearing from Amaranthe’s sight.
Maldynado skidded to a stop a few feet behind the cube.
“Get out of there,” Amaranthe shouted. “You can’t do anything.”
She couldn’t either. She dropped her useless pistol and spun about, eyeing the repair device. It had sealed the hole in the wall and was drifting off up the tunnel.
“Oh, no you don’t.” Amaranthe chased after it and grabbed it around the middle, figuring it couldn’t be that heavy—Maldynado had moved it by beating on it with a rapier, after all. She was right, and she was able to pull it back into the chamber.
She came out of the tunnel, lugging the thing behind her, in time to see Maldynado run off down the opposite passage with a cube chasing him. The other one floated at the head of the women’s alcove and was firing inside. Amaranthe gulped. It couldn’t have hit anyone yet—there would have been screams, surely. But there weren’t any arrows coming out either.
Like a sled dog straining into the leads, Amaranthe hauled the repair device after her, hoping the cube wouldn’t notice her until she was ready. She didn’t know if she could replicate Basilard’s acrobatic beam dodging.
She passed a smoldering section of the floor, and her captured device whirred and pulled against her. Yes, it wanted to do its job, and she was stopping it. Intruders were so rude.
Watching the cube every step of the way, she managed to haul the device to within a few feet of the alcove. She shifted her grip, coming around the thing, and started pushing instead of pulling.
“There, you go, a nice chipped corner to work on,” she panted and gave it a great shove.
The double snowball jerked and trembled, but the momentum sent it floating in front of the alcove. It crossed into the path of the crimson beam. Amaranthe skittered back, fearing an explosion, but the cube’s attack merely bit in slightly, as it did with the walls. The repair device didn’t seem to notice. It rotated until its opening faced the damaged corner, and one of the white beams shot out, bathing the black wall in light.
Maybe the machines were
talking to each other—as in, stop firing at me, you idiot box—for the crimson beam winked out. Unfortunately, the cube only turned toward the next target—Amaranthe.
She started to spin, intending to sprint back to the tunnel, but a flash of green streaked out of the alcove, just missing the repair device. It whizzed past to lodge in the cube’s orifice. An arrow, Amaranthe realized, noting the green fletching even as she kept scrambling back. If the strike didn’t work…
The hole flashed red, and a short, angry beam devoured the arrow.
Not good. Amaranthe tried to resume her sprint for the tunnel, but her changes of direction had thrown her off balance, and she tripped over her feet. She landed hard on her hip.
She scrambled back up immediately, risking a glance as she ran. The cube had stopped rotating to follow her. It hung there, motionless and soundless. Halfway back to the tunnel, Amaranthe paused. A slender wisp of smoke wafted from the cube’s hole.
“Ah?” she murmured.
Had it worked after all?
More smoke followed, then the cube clunked to the floor, unmoving.
“Thank you, Corporal Lokdon,” Tikaya said. She, her daughter, and Basilard had slipped past the repair device, which was still working on the corner, and stood at the front of the alcove. “That gave us the seconds we needed.”
Basilard still held four arrows while Mahliki gripped the jar in both hands, the lid having been removed at some point.
“You’re welcome,” Amaranthe said.
Tikaya touched the top of her head, as if to ensure her scalp was indeed still attached. In her other hand, she held the longbow. Somewhere along the way, she’d lost her quiver and rucksack.
Basilard handed her another arrow and signed, Maldynado.
“He went down that tunnel.” Even as Amaranthe pointed, footfalls sounded from that direction.
“Need a little help!” Maldynado called, though they couldn’t see him yet.
Tikaya dipped the tip of the arrow into the jar and nocked it. Maldynado dove out of the tunnel, tumbling more than rolling as he clawed his way to cover. A red beam cut through the air where his head had been. Missing its target, it streaked out into the chamber.
Amaranthe sidled closer to Tikaya and the others. She wouldn’t be above hiding behind that repair device again. The metal tip of Tikaya’s arrow was smoking. That gunk would eat through it as surely as it ate through anything else here.
The cube floated out of the tunnel. It angled toward Maldynado, who had found his feet, but didn’t look like he knew where to run. In turning in his direction the cube also turned its deadly orifice toward Tikaya.
Without hesitation, she loosed the arrow. The chamber was a good twenty-five meters across, but her aim was true. The arrow clinked into the hole. As with the last cube, it burned away the wooden shaft, but its defiance ended a few heartbeats later.
“Good shot,” Amaranthe said, impressed that a scholar from an island of pacifists had such skill.
The cube clunked to the floor.
“Thank you.” Tikaya lowered the bow.
Mahliki put a hand on her mother’s shoulder. “The answer to the question you asked, oh, about fifteen minutes ago, is, yes, it could hurt to stop and try and figure out how to turn on the lights.”
“Thank you, dear,” Tikaya said. “Why don’t you find the lid to that jar? In case we need it again?”
Mahliki disappeared into the alcove.
“Thank you, too, for your help.” Tikaya waved at Basilard, Amaranthe, and Maldynado. “What happened to the rest of our burly soldiers?”
Rest of…? Did the professor lump Amaranthe and her team into that category? Amaranthe supposed they hadn’t done anything to convince her they were brighter than privates fresh out of their initial training. “Outside. We ran into trouble with relic raiders. One of the soldiers was injured and the other had to carry him away. I’m not sure where the other pair went.”
“So, we’re on our own? All right, give me a moment, please. I was close to figuring out how to turn on the lights.” Tikaya returned to the alcove and added, “If they’re working,” under her breath.
Maldynado shambled over to join Amaranthe and Basilard, taking a wide route around the cube on the floor, though it’d been desiccated, eaten from the inside out by the acidic compound.
“I’d like to take this moment,” Amaranthe said, “to point out that you two are as crazy as I am at times.”
“Me?” Maldynado splayed a hand across his chest.
“Running up to those cubes and hacking at them with a sword isn’t any brighter than drawing fire from a cannon.”
Basilard’s eyebrows rose. You tried to get a cannon to shoot at you?
“No,” Amaranthe said, “it just happened that way. I thought those men would use their rifles.”
Oh. So you tried to get rifles to shoot at you. Eyebrows still elevated, Basilard met Maldynado’s eyes and slowly shook his head.
Amaranthe scowled at them.
Over the next few seconds, the light level grew in the room, eliminating the shadows the lanterns had struggled to pierce. If not for the white and red beams flying around during that skirmish, Amaranthe didn’t know how they would have seen anything.
Amaranthe peeked into the alcove. Tikaya’s rucksack sat on the floor at the end, and she stood before the column, fingers dancing over tiny illuminated symbols while she held a black sphere with her free hand. Amaranthe recognized the object from the desk back at the factory, but she hadn’t seen it doing anything. Now, glowing images hovered in the air above it, projected from some tiny hold. It reminded her of the floating interactive pictures in the control room.
“I’m seeing if this station can call up a map as well,” Tikaya said. “We’re in the… I guess you’d call it the bowels of the ship. This area handles the infrastructure—lighting, life support, routing of water and internal power, sewage.”
“Sewage?” Maldynado asked.
“Everybody goes,” Tikaya murmured.
“Fortunately, that’s a part of the craft that nobody showed me on my various tours,” Amaranthe said.
“Oh, no?” Tikaya asked, her back to them as she continued to work. “I would have found it fascinating.”
I’m telling you, Amaranthe signed to her men, there’s no way I’m the craziest person in this room.
Possibly true, Basilard allowed.
“You went on tours?” Mahliki asked Amaranthe. “Does that mean you can find your way to engineering or the control area from here?”
“Sorry, no. This isn’t the way I came when I was here before.”
“Ah.”
Amaranthe didn’t think there was condemnation in that soft syllable, but she wished she could take the lead and walk them straight to the control room nonetheless. Right now, she did feel like little more than the hired grunts.
“This should be it.” Tikaya twisted a final rune and turned around, facing the center of the chamber.
The air shimmered, then a large, three-dimensional image formed two meters above the floor. Retta had created something similar when she’d showed Amaranthe and Books how to reach her assistant’s room, though this was much larger with level upon level on display, along with massive open areas. In a steamer, she would have guessed they represented boiler and engine rooms. Who knew with this craft?
“Hm.” Tikaya turned back to the column, manipulating a few more symbols.
Amaranthe tried to decide if the way she knew exactly what she was doing was comforting or disturbing. Retta had been obsessed with the ship. She hadn’t had any interest in destroying it or burying it at the bottom of the ocean. What if Tikaya grew equally intrigued and didn’t want to let it go? What did Amaranthe truly know about the woman, after all?
“There we go.” Tikaya turned again, extending a hand toward the schematic.
A blue line had formed, weaving down one level, up several others, and into the core of the craft. The spiky medium-sized chamber it started
in appeared to be their own.
“Who’s memorizing the route?” Amaranthe asked, daunted by all the intersections the line passed through.
“I’ve got it,” Tikaya and her daughter said at the same time.
They shared smiles, Tikaya’s fond, and Mahliki’s more of a wry smirk.
“I don’t think I could even find my way back to the door where we came in,” Maldynado muttered.
Me either, Basilard signed. This place is… I wish to complete our work here as quickly as possible.
From the eager way mother and daughter gathered their gear and led the way out of the chamber, Amaranthe wasn’t certain they would agree.
Chapter 8
Sicarius did not want to kill Fleet Admiral Starcrest. He wasn’t certain whether he cared one way or another about his own life, but, as he lay on the carpet in the dark tent, like a hound at the foot of Kor Nas’s cot, he was certain of that one fact. If Starcrest was in the city, it was because Sicarius’s letter had brought him. To turn that letter into a trap, as if he’d planned to assassinate the legendary admiral all along, the man he’d dreamed of emulating as a boy, it was unthinkable.
He still remembered the day when Hollowcrest had dropped Fleet Admiral Starcrest’s Mathematical Probabilities Applied to Military Strategies into his hands. He’d been nine. At that age, he’d already read Starcrest’s simpler and more useful, at least for Sicarius’s future career, Applications of the Kinetic Chain Principle in Close Combat, along with numerous other books on tactics and strategies from other authors—though Hollowcrest hadn’t anticipated that Sicarius would need a thorough military education for his work, he hadn’t discouraged the interest. Sicarius had also studied the careers of the important Turgonian admirals and generals from the empire’s history, so he’d been aware of Starcrest beforehand, but this had been the first thing he’d read that had been written in first person by the admiral himself. Probabilities had been too advanced for him to understand at that age—some of the math was still too advanced for him, he admitted dryly, and with a little sadness for an education that Hollowcrest had deemed finished once he was completing missions for the throne—but he’d devoured the real world examples from Starcrest’s own victories, and from the rare losses. In that book, a hint of the man’s self-effacing personality had shown through, and something about it had drawn Sicarius to want to learn more about him.