Trapped On Talonque: (A Sectors SF romance) (16 page)

Picking his way among the wreckage of the offerings, Nate ascended until he reached the narrow step in front of the vast metal door. The portal was literally covered in symbols, many incised into the metal, others displayed on slightly upraised tabs or buttonlike devices. He closed his eyes to visualize the first symbol he had to find to trigger the opening sequence. When he opened his eyes again, it was as if Bithia stood there, guiding him straight to it, to his left, close to the threshold.
 

“Not an obvious spot for the door handle.” Nate bent to press the tab. He swept his hands across the door, twisting a symbol there, depressing another next to it and finally, after hesitating a moment, brought his closed fist down with deceptive gentleness on one intricate turquoise, red and yellow whorl directly above his head.

The door slid smoothly into a hidden receptacle in the pyramid. Nate had to take a small, awkward hop back to keep his balance.
The panel must have curved into the roof somehow
. He extended his right arm to block the king’s rush forward.
 

“We must go together. This is only the first step of gaining access to the treasures you seek,” Nate said mildly. Searching for Atletl in the small crowd. Nate pointed at him. “Warrior, I charge you with the safety of the Lady’s priestess. Stay with her and wait.”

Their former teammate did a double take and exchanged a swift glance with Celixia, but saluted and drew her off to the side.

“Why may she not come?” Sarbordon was, as always, suspicious of anything he hadn’t decreed.

“The secrets of Fr’taray are not for a woman’s eyes, lord. Surely your reading of the old tablets has revealed this fact to you? And so they”—Nate gestured at the black-clad priestesses of Huitlani—“must remain outside as well.” He hated to exclude them from whatever potential knockout effect had been set in place for curious locals, but he felt duty-bound to protect Celixia, which meant protecting the other priestesses too.

For the moment.

“The decree is as you say.” The ruler shooed the disappointed women away. “If there are no further strictures or reasons for delay, let us proceed.” The ruler’s temper was plainly fraying at being so close to his heart’s desire but endlessly sidetracked by his companions.

Nate, Sarbordon, Thom, their old jailer Murrax and two of the guards entered the small space revealed behind the door. The five charioteers and other soldiers waited outside. Celixia strolled to the side of the plateau with Atletl, and the last view Nate had of her, she was seated on a low bench beside a small tree, clearly resigned to wait as ordered. She and Atletl were engaged in a low-voiced conversation, laughing from time to time as if no slightest worries disturbed their mood.

As soon as six men were inside the pyramid’s vestibule, Nate keyed a glowing red symbol embedded in solitary splendor on the far wall. The metal door slid shut, cutting off their access to the outer world, and the floor sank.

“What treachery is this?” The king drew his short sword, put his back to the wall and glared at Nate with escalating fury.

“My lord’s treasury lies below the ground,” Nate said as he leaned away from the sword, hoping his pronouncement was true. Bithia hadn’t had time to tell him much more than the sequence for gaining entry. What was coming next was anyone’s guess, other than the hoped-for unconscious state of the locals at some point. Nate was good at acting without advance planning when the situation called for it. His ability to react in a split second was one of the things making his Special Forces team so successful on missions behind enemy lines back in the Sectors—the Mawreg and their allies couldn’t predict where Nate’s team would be and what they’d do.
 

Drawing on a long-ago class in mythology, he embellished his lies as the platform continued its descent. “We stand on a device of magic that’s taking us effortlessly and unharmed past the guardian demons and spirits of the underworld to the level where Fr’taray left his most-precious and sacred possessions.”

“You’d better be speaking truth, or by Huitlani’s Knife, you’ll die.” Sarbordon slammed his sword back into the scabbard, and the soldiers followed suit.

“Patience, sir,” Thom said. “This magic is a common mode of transport for us, as common to us as your chariots are to you.” To Nate, he added in Basic, “Not exactly a lie, right?”

The platform continued its stately descent, noiseless and smooth. The lighting gradually became brighter, emanating from the walls as it did in Bithia’s chamber. With growing impatience, Nate waited for the device to render the uninvited unconscious. Was the mechanism going to discriminate successfully between him and Thom and the local men, the way Bithia told him it should? He was tense, ready to take action.

The platform came to a halt without so much as a bump.

Another bright metal door faced them. Nate stepped forward without hesitation and once again performed the sequence for opening closed doors. The panel slid upward, and light streamed in from the vast chamber revealed beyond.

In the space between one heartbeat and the next, the four Talonqueni crumpled bonelessly to the floor, falling with heavy thuds that echoed in the confined space.

Thom let out a gusty breath, obviously having held it in case a gas was being used, and both men laughed.

“Guess the old boy thought it would be fun to let the locals get to the edge of what they wanted to steal and then knock them flat,” Thom said between chuckles. Kind of have to admire his sense of humor.”

“Let’s see what we have here.” Nate took a step off the platform and through the open portal.

Thom hesitated. He craned his neck to peer up the long, featureless shaft to where a faint light indicated the entry door. “How do we keep the lift at this level? I don’t want to be stuck in here until the ancient sky pilots return, which—based on all available evidence—will be never.”

“Good point.” Nate frowned. “Bithia didn’t say anything about how this platform works.” He scanned the walls and pointed with relief at a complex, glowing red emblem. “I think this is the control. Unless the platform is summoned from above, we should be fine. No one on the planet but Bithia knows how to get in here. Come on.”

“Seemed worth mentioning.” Thom strode resolutely through the opening and stopped beside Nate. “Little thing I learned the hard way in basic training—be sure to keep your exits open.”

Nate didn’t bother responding to this running joke between them, because he was staring around the chamber they’d strolled into.
 

A high-ceilinged room stretched in all directions as far as he could see with his enhanced night vision. The place was lit only in the immediate vicinity, although Nate felt sure the lighting would follow them as they moved farther into the storehouse. There was a definite pattern to how the ancient explorers had run their operation, which was reassuring under the current conditions.
 

“Old man Fr’taray was quite a packrat,” Thom said, walking a few paces beyond where Nate stood. He did a slow three-sixty. “Or am I understating the situation?”

Containers vaguely resembling crates or barrels—objects with no human-equivalent name—were all piled in a messy heap of random stacks suggesting haste or panic, or both. It certainly wasn’t the orderly warehouse Nate had visualized.

“Wonder what actually happened, what her father was called back for?” Nate said, surveying the mess. He squatted by the nearest object, which was an orange cylinder. He touched the symbol he now recognized as shorthand for “open.” With a click, the container split neatly in two, spilling a dried substance onto the black stone floor.

“Food? Sample of the local spices?” Thom asked.

“Could be either or both. Or neither. We’ll never know. You try one.”

Thom eyed the assorted piles for a moment and plucked a tiny blue and green triangular object off of a perilously askew stack of squares and rectangles. He shook his selection slightly. “Good things come in small packages, as my gramma used to say. I push this, here?”

“Right—you got it.”

“Hey, we’re experts now.” Thom laughed. “Oops—damn!” His container had held dark green liquid that now splashed onto his sandaled feet and the floor, creating a massive puddle. Thom tossed the partially deflated triangle back onto its former resting place and stepped gingerly away from the liquid. “As much fun as this is, now what?”

“You see anything like a red box, about, oh, this big?” Nate mimicked the size with his hands, much as Celixia had shown him.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. We’re required to find one specific thing in all this mess?” Thom’s laugh broke off abruptly as he took a closer look at Nate’s expression. “Seriously? We need this box? For what?”

“Bithia didn’t mention it, but Celixia was adamant that freeing her from the healing device requires the contents of a red box.”

Hands on his hips, brow furrowed, Thom eyed the vast room with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. “I’m game. We have time while old Sarbordon sleeps. Bithia said they’ll be unconscious as long as they stay down here. For sure no one’s going anywhere before we report back. Any ideas where you’d like to start? Hints from Celixia?”

Nate shook his head and considered the challenge. “This aisle runs straight through the room. Let’s see if there are paths branching off. You watch to the right, and I’ll take the left. If this red box is so damn important, maybe Fr’taray left it, I don’t know, where somebody besides him could find it.”

“If he left it here at all. Working off intel thousands of years old doesn’t give me much confidence.”

The two soldiers advanced straight into the room, back to back for defense, warily eyeing the treasure horde of the ancients. The illumination source followed them, as Nate had expected. He found it eerie and disconcerting to be in the center of one pool of light in a vast darkness. The exposure was counter to all his training, as well as his well-honed instincts for self-preservation.

The light in the lift shaft stayed on even as they got farther and farther away. A reassuring beacon.

“I feel like a goddamn target out here in this spotlight,” Thom said after three or four moments of cautious pacing through the stockpile. “Like a pair of idiot cadets on their first war sim, walking right into an ambush.”

“Let’s finish the sweep and get the hell out of here. This is a waste of time, I’m afraid.”

But after only another five yards, Thom came to an abrupt halt, staring off to the right. “Nate.”
 

“What?” He pivoted and stopped, stunned by the sight that had caught Thom’s attention.

There was a side corridor that had been hidden by the piles of containers until Thom drew even with it, the charred remains of a body, skeleton showing through ashy black layers of burnt clothing, lay on the cold stone floor.

“Well, I’ll be moon-damned.” Nate walked toward the remains.
 

“These crates and things have burn marks,” Thom said, eyeing the black score marks. “Firefight?”

“Shows all the signs.” Nate knelt by the body of the long-dead alien explorer. “Burnt to a crisp. No way to tell if the victim was male or female. From the size, I’d guess male.” He rocked back on his heels, scanning the area in frustrated bewilderment. “Damn, what happened here? She swore to me her team had no deadly weapons, or at least not the type I was visualizing, like our blasters.”

Thom moved past him. “Maybe she didn’t know,” he said over his shoulder. “Command don’t confide in the lower ranks, even if she was his daughter. Here’s another guy.” Thom was about ten yards deeper in the warehouse. “Shot in the back. At least he—it—is facedown, which tells a tale. And Nate—”

“What?”

“I see a red box.”

Nate got to his feet and sprinted to join Thom. “Where?”

Thom pointed at the second corpse and the red box cradled in one arm, partially hidden underneath the body.

“I hate to have to tell her about this,” Nate said. “I wish I knew who these people were. Not her father, I hope.”

“Happened a
long
time ago.” Thom’s eyes narrowed. “Or did it? How are these bodies so well preserved?”

“This will be today’s news for Bithia, I’m afraid. She told me this warehouse has a version of a stasis field that keeps the contents fresh. I guess the effect covers corpses to some degree too. I think it’s safe to assume these bodies date back to her time or thereabouts. Help me get the box loose. At least we’ll have it to show for this expedition.”

Nate and Thom worked the singed but intact container out from under the person who’d died clutching it, whether to protect the contents or to steal them there was no way to know. The corpse further disintegrated, no matter how respectfully they tried to handle it. Nate set the box on top of a pile of flat square objects and wiped his hands on his sapiche uniform shirt. “Wish we had whatever weapon these beings used to kill each other. Wonder where those went? Sure would come in handy.”

“Or what was used to murder them both,” Thom said. “Can’t rule out a multiple homicide scenario either.” He stood up, a short, gleaming chain dangling from his hand. It was set with round multicolored gemstones in an intricate pattern. “ID, you think?”

“Might be. See if the other guy has one too, would you? Might have sentimental meaning to Bithia to have them.”