Trapped On Talonque: (A Sectors SF romance) (22 page)

“I’m impressed,” Thom said. “Even if it doesn’t do anything but open doors, the thing is amazing.”

Bithia laughed again, gently untangling her hand from Nate’s loose grip. “We use them for many purposes. I should have been able to open the healing chamber with it, but my father blocked the menu of commands, as I told you. I’d discovered the secret of stealing power from the healing device in dribs and drabs and stored my cache in the gilintrae, which is how I was able to use it to project myself to you the night you’d been beaten and help you, Nate,” she said, giving her attention to the door of her assigned room. Quickly, she tapped a sequence, her fingernails flashing between the tiny disks on the face of the device and the large gems on the rim. After a moment, she frowned and tapped again. “It’s not responding.”

“Could your father have left the door locked?” A reasonable enough precaution for a devoted parent to take, in Nate’s view.

Eyebrows raised, lips compressed, Bithia obviously didn’t agree. “Against me? My own door? Why?” Her musical voice held a note of annoyance.

“None of this makes much sense. How could it after all these centuries? You want us to blast it open?” Nate unholstered his Mark One and pointed the weapon at the recalcitrant door.

She pushed the blaster aside. “No! From what you described about how the weapon works, my possessions would be destroyed along with the door. Let me try one more time.”

The third time was the charm. The door slowly slid partially open. A blast of stale air gusted out, carrying dust and shreds of debris that could have been paper or fabric or some other perishable commodity. Nate grabbed Bithia and pulled her aside, out of the path of the mini storm. Thom threw himself to the far side of the open portal. Atletl and Celixia retreated toward the lab.
 

“This expedition to the Lady’s private chambers is perilous,” Atletl said. “Do we need to continue the quest?”

The inrush of air to the corridor stopped, leaving a pile of dusty gray debris piled untidily along the floor and into the open room opposite Bithia’s. Nate held her back and peered into the chamber assigned to her. He shook his head. “I’m sorry, sweetheart, whatever your father left for you didn’t stand the test of time.”

“But if he went to the trouble to seal off the room, he should have applied a stasis lock to keep the contents of my room intact for me,” she said. “To do otherwise makes no sense.”

Nate didn’t answer, choosing to silently stand aside and let her proceed. Bithia squeezed sideways through the stubborn portal and came to a standstill in the center of what had been her room. He prevented the others from following, blocking their view and shaking his head. “Leave her alone. Thom, see what’s at the other end of this corridor.”

After a few moments, Bithia left the room. Nate straightened from where he’d been leaning against the wall while she worked through her emotions about this new puzzle. He looked at her questioningly.

She tapped the gilintrae, closing the door to her chamber.

“You okay?”

She nodded, not glancing in his direction. With a visible effort, she straightened, squared her shoulders and then turned to Nate, summoning a smile that didn’t reach her stunning lavender-blue eyes. “I’m fine. I have to take this”—she waved at the now shut door—“as fair warning not to expect anything. Nothing at all will be as I left it. Or as I believed conditions would be whenever I was finally set free. Certainly not like my foolish dreams of finding myself in my own time, with my own people.”

“I’m sorry. Maybe we’ll find something elsewhere in this complex that you can—”

Holding up one hand, she shook her head decisively. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do for me, but I have to be in the present, not clinging to shreds of the past. You attempted to give me this advice in the healing chamber, but I didn’t want to hear it. Now I see you were right.”

He gathered her in for a hug, hoping the embrace would help. She was trembling and on the verge of hyperventilating. Her chaotic emotions roiled below the surface of their mental link, and Nate could only guess at the effort she was making to function. Offering what silent comfort he could, Nate stood with her in the circle of his arms for a moment.
 

Footsteps sounded at the far end of the hall. Thom was reporting back from his explorations of what lay beyond. Nate looked over Bithia’s head, raising one eyebrow in silent question as Thom came closer.

He shook his head. “Another empty room. Even less debris, or junk or whatever, than back in the lab. Nothing usable.”

“The room served as the hangar for our flyers, to commute back and forth to the main base on the mountain.” Bithia’s words were muffled as she rested her head on Nate’s chest. “There’s a tunnel to the surface.”

“We need to go back to the lab, regroup and figure out our next move,” Nate said.

A few moments later, the five were in a small cluster at one side of the ransacked lab, away from the doors as well as the entrance to the healing chamber. Nate and Thom gathered bins to use as seats, although Nate paced, not patient enough to sit. Thom chose to lean against the wall, arms folded.

“We have no food, no water, no transport,” Nate said, “but we can get out of the city using the flyer access tunnel. Am I right?”

Bithia made as if to rise, drawing a protest from Celixia, who was busily working to arrange her incredibly long, thick hair into an arrangement more convenient than its present loose state. Properly chastened by her handmaiden, Bithia held her head rigid and answered Nate’s question. “While reluctant to assume anything now, much less to promise, I think the tunnel should open for us.”

“Unless whoever deactivated this place,” Thom said, “decided to seal it off permanently.”

“Where does this tunnel open on the surface?” Nate asked.

“We flew out of bluffs at the edge of the ocean.” She used a meaningless unit of measure to describe how far away the exit point would be.

He shook his head. “How long to walk it? A day? Half a day?”

She had to mull over the question for a moment, apparently comparing her experience of racing through the tunnel in a flyer to the unknown concept of trudging the distance on foot. Estimating the relative times of the two modes of travel left her frowning. Finally, she shook her head, undoing Celixia’s work and drawing another protest from the priestess. “Not nearly so far. Maybe the span of a morning.”

“Could we descend to a beach, or climb to a cliff top, once we got there?” The last thing Nate wanted was to make the trip through the tunnel and find they were trapped and forced to retrace their journey. Once out of the palace complex at Nochen, he’d make every effort not to see the place ever again.

Bithia raised her elegant eyebrows. “I never considered making either attempt. I’m a pilot, not a mountain climber. I guess you could get to the beach.”
 

Nate scrutinized Atletl and Celixia. “Either of you have any idea where this beach might be? Any legends or myths about it? Could we get inland to our ship, to where we were captured, from there?”

Atletl shook his head. “I’m from the mountain territories. I know nothing of the coastline.”

“Celixia? I can tell you have an opinion,” Nate said.

“There’s a legend.” She restored her hair-brushing tools to the small beaded green pouch at her belt, finally having done as much as possible to bring Bithia’s hair under control.

Thom groaned. “Oh, great, another legend.”
 

Nate frowned at him. “We’ve done okay using myths and legends as our source briefing on this damn planet so far.”

“I’d just like, one time, to be dealing in hard facts. Is a map too much to ask for?”

“You require a map?” Bithia tapped one of the disks on the gilintrae. The room darkened a bit, causing her companions consternation.
 

“I’m not too keen on being stuck inside this abandoned facility in the dark,” Thom said.

Gleaming like miniature jewels hanging from a black velvet backdrop suspended in the air, an apparition appeared. It floated about a yard in front of Bithia and five feet off the floor.

“The view of this planetary system as we came in from the outer reaches,” she said. “The others laughed at me for capturing it in my personal library—arrival in new star systems was a familiar thing to them, but it was my first expedition and a special memory.”
 

The depiction swirled and twisted dizzyingly. The three moons came from nowhere and rushed past, going over her shoulder. The scope narrowed to a three-dimensional view of the planet they were standing on, which rapidly enlarged and became a high-level view of a continent, the next moment shrinking too fast for the visual cortex nerves to take it all in, becoming a perfect representation of the city of Nochen—as it had been when Bithia last saw it.

“Definitely more than ornamental jewelry, or a remote control for opening and closing doors.” Nate pointed at her bracelet. “We have devices able to do the same general kind of projection, but they’re not as pretty.”

“It also stores knowledge for retrieval.” Bithia bit her lip and frowned. “It’s hard to explain all the functions of the gilintrae properly. I’m not trying to withhold data from you. You don’t have the words for all the capabilities.”

“Guess we’ll find out as we go along.” Wondering how much capability the bracelet possessed, and how he could utilize it as an advantage in their escape, Nate walked to where the city hung, suspended in thin air.
Now’s not the time to ask for a full demo, but at some point I’ll need to know.
He motioned to Celixia to come examine it with him. “Can you expand the field of vision a bit, take in this coastline you referred to, where the tunnel exit is?”

Frowning, she clicked a nail lightly on the edge of her bracelet. The hologram expanded, now encompassing the coastal plain all the way from the city to the ocean’s edge, extending east to the foothills, backstopped by an imposing range of mountain peaks.

“Hard to control the fine detail, I gather? And the only speed is fast-forward?” Nate shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. This view will do for now.” He transferred his attention to Thom. “Can you tell me where our ship is? I was out of it for the landing and the first day of captivity.”

“No need to remind me. I basically had to carry you, convince those bastards with a lot of sign language and swearing not to kill you.” Thom studied the terrain. Finally, he traced a finger across it, going from the large white dot representing the city on this level of detail, back across the river and into the foothills. “About here, I’d say. Remember it was a good five days’ forced march, plus part of another day to reach the city after we got across the suspension bridge.”

“On the scale shown here, a trip to the coast adds a day, maybe two, to backtrack, then,” Nate calculated, eyeing the distances on the hologram.

Bithia came closer to the map her device had created. She poised one elegant finger above the loftiest mountain in the formidable range. “This peak is where my father has—had—our main facility.” She focused on it like a starving person, eyes shining, despite her earlier brave words to Nate about not living in the past.

Atletl appeared astonished at her choice. “The mountain of the Sleeping Goddess, home of T’naritza. I was born in a village at its foot. Here.” He showed them, a pleased smile lighting his face.

“A lot of coincidences. Not surprising the Nocheni were so ready to regard you as a goddess,” Nate said to Bithia.

“I’m happy and relieved not to embody the exalted position any longer. Should we risk the tunnel?”

He considered. “Are there any other exits from this place, besides going back through the healing chamber?”
 

“Sarbordon, Lolanta and a whole crew of their nasty helpers are waiting,” Thom said.

“Two exits exist.” A quick tap from Bithia’s fingers and the topographical map of the continent disappeared, to be replaced by the city again, an appealing collection of miniature buildings.

Celixia frowned as she scanned the new creation before her. “This doesn’t show the sapiche arena. Nor the sacrifice platform of Huitlani or the wells. And the palace is much larger now.”

“It’s been a few thousand years,” Nate said. “Change happens. Where did the other two exits take your people when they wanted out of the lab and into the field?”

“Here—”

“No good. The locals built their altars to Huitlani on that spot.” Nate wasn’t surprised. He hadn’t had much hope about the other exits, but it was worth exploring all available options. “Figures. The ruling class appears to have perfected the art of assimilating elements of the religion or beliefs of the subjugated people. There must have been all kinds of legends about the location too.”

“And the other back door?” Thom asked.

Bithia turned to him, eyebrows raised. “You won’t like this one.”

“Why not?”

“The main entrance to be used by the Nocheni who worked with us, or studied with us, was built into the east wing of the palace.” She pointed with one graceful hand. “I know you don’t want to try walking out there either. Am I right?”

Thom rolled his eyes and apparently lost interest in the whole discussion.

“Anyone could come and go in this complex?” Nate found the expedition leader’s attitude surprisingly lax.