“Yes,” Retta said.
Books and Akstyr shrugged when Amaranthe looked their way, wondering which of her questions Retta had been responding to. So long as she didn’t lead them back to the room with that crate and operating table. Pike might have left some of his salves in there, but Amaranthe shuddered at the idea of going in there to retrieve them.
Something floated out of an intersecting aisle ahead of them, a black cube. It rotated in their direction, a glowing red hole on the front, burning into one’s soul like a hot iron. Amaranthe flattened herself to the wall.
“Hairy donkey dung,” Akstyr whispered, and he and Books did the same.
“Not again,” Books said. “Run?”
The cube floated toward them.
“Just step aside,” Retta said.
“It’ll try to flambe us,” Akstyr blurted.
“No, I reworked their operating instructions early on.” Retta stepped out of its way, and the cube drifted past without pausing. “They don’t vaporize humans any more.”
“One we met in your underwater base did,” Amaranthe said.
“Those weren’t from the Ortarh Ortak.”
“Just how many stashes of advanced technology does Forge have?”
“Enough,” Retta said.
“How comforting.” Books still sucked in his gut and pressed every inch of his back to the wall as the cube passed.
It paused, and Amaranthe tensed. A fine red beam shot out of the orifice, angling toward the floor. Something flashed, and smoke wafted up, then the cube moved on.
“What’s it doing?” Akstyr asked.
“Cleaning up my blood.” Retta grimaced.
“We should have brought more weapons.” Amaranthe flicked a finger at the dagger on her belt, lamenting the pile of crossbows and rifles they’d left in front of the submarine-not that they’d do anything against that cube. “Real spies would have figured out how to sneak aboard with more than dinner knives.”
“I assumed you had the explosives in your purse.” Books waved at the satchel she had managed to retain throughout the night.
“I thought someone might search it. I only brought things a normal woman from the well-to-do business class might carry around.”
“Such as pens, ledgers, and abacuses?”
“Cosmetics, lotions, and breath mints,” Amaranthe said. “And adhesive for my fake nose.”
“Well-to-do businesswomen sound much like regular women,” Books said. “Regular women with prostheses anyway.”
“Maldynado may have thrown some… additional items in there too. I couldn’t figure out why it was so heavy this morning until I located a cedar candle inside.” She’d left it on the desk in her office, wondering if Sicarius would find the supposedly “stamina enhancing” scent amusing when they finally got to stand guard together. “Maldynado believes a woman should always be prepared in case she stumbles into some handsome stranger’s bed.”
“That dolt has a singular mind. A good-hearted one though.” Books sighed. “I suppose I should tell him that someday.”
“Yes, you should.”
“Does your team always talk this much in enemy territory?” Retta led them up a ramp.
“Only when it takes five hours to get from one side of that enemy territory to another,” Amaranthe said, then regretted the whining. She wasn’t the one with a bullet in her shoulder.
“That’s not true,” Akstyr said. “Maldynado talks all the time, no matter where we are.”
“We’re almost there.” Retta rounded a bend and stopped at a dead end.
Terse shouts sounded in the distance, orders being given.
“Wrong turn?” Books asked.
“No.” Retta lifted her uninjured arm and pressed her hand against the wall a foot above her head.
Runes similar to those at the other door flared into existence. Retta pressed three in a particular order. So smoothly Amaranthe didn’t realize it at first, the floor lifted. She turned, checking back the way they’d come, but a wall had formed out of nothing behind them. They were stuck-trapped-within a box.
Nothing inimical, Amaranthe told herself. It was just a steam lift. Without the steam.
Retta slumped against the wall and hissed, her face tired and pained. “You can’t die from a shoulder wound, can you?” So far she’d been brave, fearless in fact, but there was an uncertain quaver to her voice now.
“No,” Amaranthe said.
“Sure you can,” Akstyr said. “It can get infected and your arm can rot off and then you’d be climbing onto your own funeral logs.”
“Ssh.” Amaranthe elbowed him and told Retta, “That won’t happen.”
Retta stared bleakly at him.
Amaranthe didn’t sense the lift coming to a stop, but what had originally been the dead end wall disappeared, crimson runes and all, between one eye blink and the next. The wall behind them opened up as well.
They walked into… what had Retta called it? The core?
Glowing images floated in the air all over the chamber they entered, some globe-shaped, some squares and rectangles, and some shapes there was no name for, at least in Turgonian. They all hovered above head level. Amaranthe didn’t see any consoles, or levers, or gauges or anything else she would associate with a control room. In fact, there wasn’t anything except those glowing images. Some contained three-dimensional maps while others showed more of those strange runes and still others contained… schematics was the only word she could think of, though they were so complex that she didn’t know if her concept of the term applied.
“Magnificent,” Books whispered, stepping up to a globe-shaped image with blues, greens, tans, and whites. Even at his six-and-a-half feet, he had to tilt his head back to look at it. “Is this the world?”
“Our world, yes.” After poking at one of the images, Retta had shambled to a blank section of wall. She touched it with her blood-smeared palm. A rectangular structure the size of a train car slid out of it. She touched something on the side and a tall door opened. “There are thousands of worlds in there. I’ve looked at some. It’s hard to imagine they exist. Or existed. According to Professor Komitopis, the race that built the Ortarh Ortak was here more than fifty thousand years ago. Our ancestors were running around in spears and loincloths when this civilization came here to experiment on us.” Retta stood on her tiptoes to pull something off a shelf.
Amaranthe rushed over to help, figuring Retta meant to patch her wound.
“There are… other worlds?” Books cleared his throat. “I mean, I know there are other planets in our solar system and that some of them have moons and such, but would they actually be hospitable enough to visit if one could? I’ve read that Kyattese astronomers surmise that other planets are placed too close or too far from the sun to be habitable by any form of life as we know it.” He eyed the chamber about them.
“Later, Books.” Amaranthe made a cutting-off motion with her hand, though if there were some way to send this craft to another planet altogether… that’d be an excellent way to keep Forge from mucking around with it. “Retta, what can I do to help? Can that box heal you somehow?”
Retta was tapping a series of symbols on the side of an object she’d pulled out; these were ice blue and smaller than those from the lift. “Yes. I’m not sure what it’ll do with the bullet, but hold it against my wound. It should knit the hole.”
“I think the bullet went out the other side. There’s blood saturating the back of your shoulder too.”
“Joy.”
As directed, Amaranthe held the box to Retta’s wound. She nearly dropped it when the flat surface transformed before her eyes, curving to mold into the contours of Retta’s shoulder.
“Stop that.” Books swatted Akstyr on the arm.
Akstyr was poking and prodding at the floating images. “These are brilliant. I don’t sense them at all. They’re not Made, and they don’t even have a feeling about them like physical objects. If not for my eyes seeing them, I wouldn’t believe they existed.”
“This place is intriguing,” Books admitted, though he was keeping his hands clasped behind his back.