The Ruins of Karzelek (The Mandrake Company series Book 4) (24 page)

“
You don’t think your comics would be improved by the use of pretty phrases?” Tick asked.

“
Nah, nobody would read them if I used stuff like that.”

“
Does anyone read them now?”

“
Yes, of course.” Striker sounded stung.

“
More than ten people?”

“
Uhm. The captain reads them. And
you
read them. And a boy from Targos VII sent me a message, asking which flamethrower is the best to buy. I’m pretty sure he found me through the comics.”

“
So,” Tick said. “Three people read them.”

“
At least!”

“
Look,” Val said, and the other shuttle’s light beams lowered, sweeping away from the platform and down to one side of the rubble mountain. A compact oval-shaped craft with a large open bed in the back had fallen atop the ore it had presumably been delivering. It, too, was partially obscured by a layer of limestone that had formed over it, but its outline was clear. That had been a mining ship.

Tia bounced in her seat. “Kalish, is that going to be good enough for Comet—” She glanced at Sedge. “For the mission?”

Kalish looked back at Sedge, too, her stare still icy. “You can say what you mean, Tia. Our
spy
already knows everything.”

Sedge sagged against the bulkhead beside the hatch, wishing he could disappear. As he had suspected, they knew about his snooping. He had thought he had hidden his tracks better than that, but he
had
been in a hurry.

“
Well, is it enough?” Tia asked.

“
Scan it, but I don’t think so. It looks like a fancy version of a mining cart. I would be shocked if it was capable of breaking orbit, much less faster-than-light travel.”

Tia tapped at a few buttons.

“
Still, it may be worth dragging out of here,” Kalish said. “Especially if we can’t find something better. The few scraps of alien technology that people have uncovered over the years have always sold for a lot, and some have proven invaluable to scientists and engineers. We’ve made more than a few breakthroughs, thanks to the snippets we’ve glimpsed from their era.”

“
Lieutenant Calendula,” Thatcher said, “bring your shuttle to a stop while we more thoroughly assess the area.” His shuttle had already halted, disappearing to the side of the
Divining Rod
. “Ms. Blackwell, I suggest you stop as well.”

“
What kind of assessing are we doing?” Val asked at the same time as Tia looked to Kalish and said, “Are we stopping? I want to check it out. That place looks brilliant.”

“
There are millions of aurums worth of ore sitting there,” Thatcher said, “and this area is on the miners’ map, is it not, Thomlin?”

Shit, that was a good point. Sedge gripped the back of Tia’s seat. “Stop the ship.”

“
But—”

A distant metallic rasping sounded, something reminiscent of a knife being sharpened. It was loud enough that they heard it through the ship’s hull. Hundreds of spinning metal circles sliced across the cavern, gleaming as they zipped through the lights from the shuttles. An alarming crunch came from the cargo area of the ship, and Sedge jumped.

“
What the blast was that?” the mother demanded, her pistol in her hand.

“
Those are weapons,” Thatcher said, his voice calm. “Retreat now and raise shields.”

Tia hunkered over the helm, her hands flying as she reversed the thrusters.

Kalish’s mother ran down the corridor, and Sedge followed her, worried about that crunch. They pounded into the empty cargo area. If it had held more than a few crates tied to the walls, they might not have seen the foot-wide serrated disk that had lodged in the deck. Cursing, Ms. Blackwell aimed at the ceiling with a flashlight. Since it was dark outside, they couldn’t see any light shining through, but she spotted the entry point. A foot-wide missing slice stood out against the dark gray paint of the hull.

“
Unbelievable,” she muttered, then yelled, “This boat isn’t space worthy until I get this fixed.”

Sedge jogged back to the front to warn the others. The spinning disks were still zipping past the view screen, some horizontally, some diagonally, and some vertically.

“
Those cut right through the hull, sir,” Sedge said, assuming they were still tied in with Thatcher and the others.

“
I saw,” Thatcher said. “They’re an unfamiliar alloy, traveling almost as fast as lasers, and spinning at hundreds of thousands of revolutions per minute.”

“
Will our shields protect us?” Val asked.

“
I’m running some calculations, but I suggest we not risk it. They’re different from the energy weapons that the shields excel at absorbing and deflecting.”

“
Should have had that thought earlier,” Kalish grumbled, thumping her fist on the control panel. “Of course the miners would have looted this place as soon as they found it if it wasn’t protected. Mom, are you going to be able to repair that? The gas readings outside aren’t dangerous, so a hole doesn’t matter right now, but it would be nice to leave this planet someday.”

“
I’ll fix it,” came the terse response. “Just stop next time when the mercenaries stop.”

“
Sorry,” Tia said meekly.

“
At least you have a new ancient alien artifact,” Sedge said.

He smiled tentatively at her. Kalish gave him an annoyed who-said-you-could-talk look. He sighed. Maybe he should keep his mouth shut.

“
Can we go around?” Val asked.

“
Go
around
?” Striker asked. “With millions of aurums out there?”

“
It’s not as if we could carry it all out anyway,” Val said.

“
I bet I could fit a huge pile in my pockets.”

“
Probably true,” Tick said. “You don’t have much else down there taking up space.”

“
What? I got plenty down here.”

Sedge tried to ignore them, especially when Striker started bragging about the size of his stalagmite, though he was vaguely impressed that Striker knew what a stalagmite
was
. Instead, he focused on the view screen. If Kalish had any interest in that mining ship, he would like to find a way to get it for her. It might not be the find they sought, but who knew if they would chance across anything better?

He watched the disks zipping past the view screen, trying to spot gaps in their routes. Had he seen thousands of disks shooting across the cavern, or was he seeing the same hundred or two that were being reused in some cycle designed to keep anyone from approaching the platform? If the deadly ammo were spitting from the walls by the thousands, a ridiculous amount of storage space would be needed, and there should be disks sticking out of the rock all over the place.

“
Val,” Sedge said, guessing she might be the most likely to follow his suggestion. “Can you try to find the walls with your lights? See if you can figure out where those things are landing?
If
they’re landing.”

“
Uh, I can try. You’re fixing my hull if it gets breached, right?”

“
You’ve got Tick on your shuttle, don’t you?” Sedge asked. “He ought to be able to patch you up with all of that chewed gum of his.”

“
Ha ha.”

“
Commander Thatcher,” Sedge started, intending to ask him to try to find the source of some of those disks.

But Thatcher spoke first. “I believe I’ve traced the route of several of the weapons. They originally shot out of the ceiling, but now they’re on a course designed to provide a continuous fence around the platform. They’re either using amazingly compact and powerful batteries, or they’re employing some kind of perpetual motion technology. I would love to analyze one of those disks up close.”

“
Would you? I think we can arrange that,” Sedge said dryly. “From what I saw, it just looked like a metal disk. Kind of like a circular saw blade.”

“
Fascinating.”

Kalish was looking at the view screen, and she drummed her fingers on the console. “They’re not actually flying
that
closely together. The cavern is huge, and they’re spaced out to cover all of the entrance routes to the platform, it seems. I wonder if there’s a pattern that we could figure out. The aliens were supposed to be fond of patterns, usually mathematically based. I’ve encountered a few of their booby traps before. Last time I was fortunate enough to have an astrophysicist with me. He discovered that the trap had been programmed based on... oh, what was it? The Fibonacci sequence. He was quite delighted to find proof that the aliens employed some of the same mathematics that have been a part of humanity’s understanding of the universe for so long.”

“
Too bad we didn’t bring an astrophysicist,” Tia said.

“
Really.” Thatcher sniffed.

Sedge smiled at the offended tone. “Thatcher is our ship’s genius. I’ll wager he can solve any math problem that might be involved.”

“
A mercenary genius?” Tia asked skeptically.

“
I’ll send you my cryptography analyzer program, sir,” Sedge said. “There are hundreds of pattern sniffers on there. It would be an easy enough matter to feed some video of the disks into it and get an analysis.”

“
I will let you work with the program, Thomlin,” Thatcher said, his tone still a touch offended. Or perhaps the word was haughty. “
I
will attempt to solve this problem by hand.”

“
Oh?” Sedge took out his tablet. “Shall we see who can find the pattern first?”

“
Watch out, Sniffles,” Striker said. “Thatcher just took out a pad of paper and a pencil. You’re in trouble.”

“
Challenge accepted,” Thatcher said.

Sedge murmured a few commands into his tablet, brought up the display for the program as well as the keyboard so he could type. If the pattern was not too complex, Thatcher would have the advantage, since it would take a while for Sedge to enter the data and modify the sniffer. But if he wasn’t trying to break a code, the process to simply identify the pattern shouldn’t be too taxing.

He caught Kalish watching his hands blur over the holo-keys and hoped she wasn’t thinking that those were the fingers that had hacked into her communications files.

“
It’s nothing to do with Fibonacci,” Thatcher said after a few minutes. “Unless... let me try the prime-free sequence.”

Kalish leaned over Tia’s shoulder and murmured something. A moment later, Tia fired a laser. The beam lanced through the dark cavern, not hitting anything until it blasted into the far wall. She tried a couple more times, attempting to strike one of the disks, Sedge assumed.

“
Gregor already tried shooting a couple,” Val said. “He actually hit them, but they have some shielding or inborn protection. The laser didn’t even knock it off its path.”

Kalish jogged off the bridge and returned a moment later with a toolbox. She pulled open a panel under the controls and crawled into a tight space between the two seats. She grabbed a canister and a couple of tools from the box. Though Sedge wanted to beat Thatcher to figuring out the pattern, he couldn’t help but glance over, curious as to what she was doing.

A moment later, she knelt back. “Try now, Tia.”

“
It’s hard to hit them. Every time they zip through, they’re on a different line.”

“
I know. Here, watch the sensors instead of simply waiting for them to come into visual sight.”

The lasers fired a few more times. Then Tia emitted an excited, “Hah, got it.” Her face fell soon after. “It just zipped away.”

“
That’s what I expected,” Kalish said. “But I put enough phosphorescence into the laser banks that it should be tagged. Can you see that on the sensors? We should be able to track its route now.”