by Dan Levinson
After a few minutes of walking, he found his office. It was larger than he expected, with tall windows that looked out onto a square courtyard. The place was furnished with a desk, a couple of chairs, some shelves, a couch, and nothing else.
It felt . . . empty.
He’d been used to the sparseness of his space back in Grisham and rather enjoyed the austere Kaitanese aesthetic, but the size of this room magnified the emptiness. He would need to fill it somehow.
He propped his luggage against the wall behind his desk and dug out a uniform, fitted with the insignia of his new grade—a sun with two vertical golden bars beneath it. He changed and then headed out to find the general.
The halls were nearly empty this time of night, only a stray soldier here or there scurrying about on errands. He came to Major General Matheson’s office at the end of a long hall, with wooden double doors inlaid with a concentric square pattern.
He took a breath, and knocked.
“Come in,” a voice said.
Nyne entered. He found himself not in the general’s office, but in an antechamber, with a short, dark-haired male secretary behind a desk. “Major Nyne Allen,” Nyne said.
“I’ll inform the general,” the man said. He knocked at a door at the back of the room, entered, then reemerged a few moments later. “She’ll see you now, sir.”
Nyne nodded. The secretary held the door for Nyne, then shut it after him.
Major General Matheson sat behind a dark, polished wooden desk that might have been mahogany. A computer monitor lit her lined face. She looked to be in her fifties, with sandy hair graying at the temples. The room was bigger than Nyne’s own office, though in a way it felt smaller, packed with shelves and displays. Photos and framed commendations adorned the walls. A hanging with Kaitanese calligraphy—similar to the one Nyne had seen at Ishimoto’s—was mounted in one corner. Various porcelain and pottery figurines populated one set of wall shelves. In a glass case lay a curved Kaitanese sword, its grip wrapped in green fabric, its scabbard beside it—jade enameled with gold. The room had a lived-in, cozy feel.
The general peered at Nyne over wire-framed glasses.
Nyne saluted. “Major Nyne Allen reporting, ma’am.”
“It’s late, Major, so let’s dispense with the formalities,” she said. She did not smile, but Nyne thought there was an edge of humor in her voice. She opened a drawer, pulled out a folder, and held it out to him.
Nyne stepped up to the desk and took it.
“You’ll report to Lieutenant Colonel Sanada, with Second Battalion, first thing in the morning,” she said. “In there you’ll find the duty roster and other relevant information. If you have any other questions, I’m certain the colonel will be more than happy to answer them tomorrow. Oh, and before I forget, you should talk to Charles out there about your basic allowance for housing. You can work out your living arrangements as you see fit. Feel free to bunk in the barracks for tonight.” She paused. “Welcome to the Orion First Ephyric Army Corps, Major. Now go ahead and get some sleep.”
Nyne left Matheson’s office feeling rather impressed.
The general was no-nonsense. He liked that.
He spent a few minutes discussing housing arrangements with Charles, the general’s secretary, who was quick to point out that such things were not usually under his purview. After Nyne decided on one of the on-base homes, he made sure to thank the man profusely. Charles promised he would see the paperwork to its proper place.
After leaving the general’s suite, Nyne returned to his office and discovered a man waiting for him, with dark eyes set over a beakish nose, thin lips, and short, wavy brown hair. “I’m Major Leon Kolver,” the man said, “with the Eastern Orion Intelligence Division.”
“Major Nyne Allen,” Nyne said. He shook Kolver’s hand. The man had an iron grip.
“I know who you are,” Kolver said. “I’ll be your liaison with OI. Your reports go directly to me. Here’s my card.”
Nyne accepted the white card from Kolver, suppressing a frown. Though they were of the same rank, Orion Intelligence trumped Army. Kolver clearly intended to take advantage of his marginally superior status. “What do you need me to do?” Nyne asked.
“Nothing yet, but eyes and ears open,” Kolver said. “You see a hint of psionic activity anywhere, I want to know about it. Immediately. Got it?”
Nyne thought of Ishimoto and his students. To reveal their presence would destroy any chance he had to learn. “You can count on me,” Nyne said.
“Good,” Kolver said. “I’ll be in touch with further orders. Until then, perform your regular duties.”
The man left without another word.
Nyne gritted his teeth. As if he needed someone like Kolver to tell him to perform his duties. The guy had already rubbed him the wrong way. Yet he had no choice but to work with the man. He also had to figure out how to visit Ishimoto without arousing suspicion. He didn’t like deceiving his own people, but he had no idea what OI would do with the information. Would they help the Kaitanese government start a psionics program and force more men and women to become soldiers against their will? The thought turned his stomach.
He would protect them. The cycle had to stop somewhere.
He settled on his couch to think and promptly fell asleep.
The only dreams he had were bad ones.
25
FAITH
For the second time that day, Faith was sure she was about to die. She kept waiting for the moment her life would flash before her eyes.
It never happened.
She didn’t know if that meant she would live, or if all the anecdotes had been lies, a compelling tale for the masses.
That Faith had time to think of all this was strange in itself. She knew that, in an instance of mortal peril, the brain accelerated its conscious processes, desperately squeezing every last second of life from what time was left. She felt she should be thinking of something more profound in her final moments, but as an anthropologist she couldn’t help but be fascinated by her own impending demise. Death had always mystified human beings, and now she would have her own firsthand experience.
She hoped it wouldn’t hurt.
Abruptly, she hit water.
And it did hurt. Like hell.
After all that expectation of one cold hard splat, the plunge into a steaming hot pool came as a shock. The slap of the water sent shockwaves through her system. Her bladder emptied. She nearly inhaled a mouthful of water as her momentum carried her down. Panic gripped her like a python, squeezing her chest, and for a time she clawed and thrashed. But, finally, her rational mind reasserted itself and she began to think fast.
Which way was up? Clawing at her belt, she found the waterproof flashlight and flicked it on. Then, fighting against every natural instinct, she blew out a short burst of bubbles. Shining in the beam of the flashlight like drewdrops in the sun, the bubbles rose away from her. Faith paddled furiously after them.
She broke the surface. She gasped for air, sucked it in greedily.
She was alive. Deliciously, wonderfully alive!
And when she found Durban, she was going to kill him!
Faith groped her way through the water to the edge of the pool, and hauled herself out. The stone edge dug into her palms.
She rolled onto her side. Her fingers ached furiously from where Durban had mashed them. She flexed them to make sure they weren’t broken. They moved, if stiffly. Her back felt sore and raw. She had found the hot springs, if not in the way she’d imagined. Thank goodness she’d remembered the flashlight—and that it hadn’t come unclipped from her belt in the fall. There was no telling how far down the pool went, and if it had fallen off she would’ve been stuck in the dark.
Getting to her feet was an effort. Her entire body hurt. The heat was sweltering, oppressive. Her sopping wet clothes hung on her like lead weights. But it could’ve been worse. There were any number of ways she could have died in that pool.
She
looked around, taking stock of her surroundings.
She was in an elliptical chamber, fairly large and without accoutrement, save more of the sconces that pervaded the upper floors of the pyramid. Insane as the thought had first seemed, she was beginning to believe they were for light bulbs—or rather, arc lights, to be more precise. She had heard the theory before in relation to the pyramids of Aygos, also built over water channels. The line of thought went that the water flowing through aquifers beneath the structure generated physio-electricity. The conductive granite-lined interior chambers—encasing limestone with metallic imperfections—created an ionization that was effectively contained by the pyramid’s outer layers of non-conductive limestone, transforming the structure into an enormous battery.
That was the gist of it, at least.
She didn’t know how accurate her recollection was, as she had never given the theory any credence. Presumably, these sconces tapped into the latent power charge in the walls of the pyramid, allowing for cable-free electric illumination.
Unfortunately, it was all conjecture.
Along the far wall, Faith noticed a series of carvings, four ovals in succession, each one containing a series of shapes. The fourth oval was blank, unfinished, and the third . . .
Faith gasped. Once again, the continents in their recognizable arrangement sat in perfect relief. If only she had something to document it with! The digital camera she had on her person was no doubt ruined beyond repair, as was her notepad. Everything else was up above in her pack.
Rather than worry over what could not be fixed, she moved on to scrutinize the first two carvings. What could they represent? They were full of shapes, presumably continents, like the third one.
A thought occurred to her—one so momentous and terrifying that it felt like a kick to the gut.
It couldn’t be true, could it? No, it couldn’t possibly.
Faith had often thought her name the ultimate irony. She put God in the same class as the tooth fairy—a fantasy used to ensnare children. Church had always been a chore, and she’d been banned from Sunday school at the tender age of twelve, much to the chagrin of her parents. She had argued so vehemently against the existence of a creator that even Father Dodson had been unable to refute her. The result had been half the class in tears, and the other half threatening to tear up their Bibles.
Now she wondered if she had been wrong all along—not about God, of course, but about a historical basis for religion. All cultures had flood and destruction myths, and she, like many others, had chalked up their origins to various natural disasters. But was it possible the earth had been struck by such catastrophes within the breadth of human existence that the very face of the planet had changed twice, as the Bible said?
“And God said unto El,” she whispered, “that He would spare the world.”
The fourth carving was blank. Had the world been spared after all?
Ridiculous!
Her fall must have shaken something loose; she could never buy into something so crazy! Surely there was another explanation—there had to be! Logic would prevail. Perhaps trade routes had been more widespread in this bygone era than anyone had imagined, and that was how these ancients had been able to draw up a reasonably accurate map of the world. The preceding carvings had to be fabrication; a speculative exercise; a work of pure imagination.
Reluctantly, Faith pulled herself away from the wall. None of her questions would matter if she didn’t make it out of here. She felt for her water bottle. Luckily, it still sat in her belt holster. She took only a few sips; no telling how long she would be stuck down here.
Faith turned her flashlight to the end of the chamber opposite the carvings. There was an entryway there, leading into utter darkness.
She weighed her options.
She had hoped her team would have breached the room behind the golden door by now, but there was no sign of that. Her grad student, George, must have seen what had happened to her via the pinhole cam on her hard hat, waiting up above next to her pack. Everyone had to know she’d fallen. If they called down to her from above, would she be able to hear them, or they her? And if she was able to contact them, was pulling her out that way even an option? With rope and wall spikes, it would be an arduous climb, and waiting for them to rig a harness and pulleys would take time. That was assuming they even found her. Waiting here might mean rescue could take days, or more. And there was Cha’a’ni to think of. Would he survive until she returned? Could he be gone already?
She resolved to stay put for a time.
She settled down against one of the stone walls. Time ticked slowly by. She listened for sounds that might indicate an attempt at rescue, but heard nothing. After a while she stood again, went to the lip of the pool, and shouted into the vast blackness above her.
There was no response.
The full reality of her situation began to take hold. She was stuck, with no way of knowing if help would ever come. A band of fear constricted around her middle.
Faith decided she couldn’t stand around any longer. There had to be another way out. Logic, always logic; it was the key to everything. Unless the pyramid’s builders had been entombed inside, there had to be a point of egress. She had seen no sign of human remains as yet, which meant the latter was most likely true.
There was an exit somewhere in the darkness.
She walked up to the doorway, shining her flashlight into the space beyond. A hallway led out of the elliptical chamber, angling upward—an encouraging find.
She needed some way to mark her path, she realized; getting lost in the pyramid would be worse than staying put. What she would have given for a piece of chalk! The only choice she had was to use one of the picks in her toolbelt to gouge signs in the granite. As appalling as the thought of deliberately defacing such a monument was, she didn’t see any other choice.
Self-preservation came first.
She began slowly, marking an X every ten yards or so—not that she needed it. The path was uninterrupted. If it kept on like that, she wouldn’t need to worry.
But things were never so simple.
After walking at a measured pace for twenty minutes—by her estimate—Faith emerged into another chamber. It was round, like every other she had encountered so far. Aside from more of those ubiquitous sconces, the room was empty. Three passages branched off from the chamber—one to the left, another to the right, and a third directly ahead. Based on the dimensions of the pyramid and the steep rate of incline of the corridors, moving straight forward would probably result in a dead end before she reached the surface, at least based on her guess of how far she had fallen.
She marked the doorway she had entered from with two Xs to differentiate it from the others, then took the right-hand path, marking that entryway only once. There was no telling whether any of these passages looped around into one another. If she emerged back where she had started, she wanted to be certain she could orient herself.
The right-hand passage had no slope to it, which didn’t bode well. Even so, she kept on for a time, wanting to be as thorough as possible. She had no real point of reference for this culture and its building techniques, no examples of previously documented sites she could compare the structure with. The least likely path could turn out to be the one that brought her to freedom, and the most likely could end with her tumbling into another pit.
Or worse.
In this instance, however, it turned out her instincts were correct.
The path finally terminated in what appeared to be a small repository. Wondrously, the room had not been emptied in the same fashion as the other areas of the complex she had seen. She found a number of clay urns, covered in painted designs too faded with age to make out. She also found copper vessels, some that might have been for drinking, others that were probably made for storage. There were long shelves cut directly into the stone of the wall, and on them she found an astounding collection of jewelry. Much of it was gold, including small earrings in the sh
ape of snakes, a fish brooch with an emerald eye, small statuettes of turtles, a pin that resembled a heron, and more. All the animals depicted indicated either a warmer climate, or far reaching trade, as she’d theorized. None of these creatures could have survived in the arctic.
Difficult as it was to tear herself away, Faith knew she had to return to her search for an exit.
She retraced her steps to the circular room and this time took the path directly in front of her, which had been on the left-hand side when she had first entered, again marking it with an X.
After five yards, the path began to slope steeply upward. Faith was soon out of breath, so she rested for a few minutes and drank some water. At the rate she was sweating, one bottle wouldn’t sustain her more than a couple of hours, certainly not if she continued to exert herself by climbing these steep passages. She didn’t have any food on her either.
She began to worry.
Perhaps she ought to turn back. Perhaps trying to find a way out herself was a fool’s errand. She could still return to where she had fallen; it wasn’t too late. But then she would be pinning her hopes on rescue, and she couldn’t even be sure anyone was looking for her, much less that they would find her.
A pall of hopelessness descended on her. She had already cheated death twice today. Could she manage it a third time, or did she finally have to pay up?
Faith resolved to continue her search, despite the frightening prospect of driving herself to exhaustion. In her life she had learned that, while she couldn’t always count on others, she could always count on herself. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust her team, excepting Durban, of course. The prick. But she would rather pin her hopes on her own two shoulders than anyone else’s.
She tried to remain optimistic. If she didn’t make it, at least she would spend her last moments doing what she loved: exploring an ancient structure and uncovering its secrets.