Griffiths felt humiliated, but Flynn had insisted that he wear the thing—and now Griffiths was beginning to wonder just why.
“Of course, I’ll come with you,” she said. “What about Flynn?”
“I think we can leave him out of this for the time being,” Griffiths said, glancing at the buccaneer. “He’s preoccupied for now. Let’s leave it that way.”
They both quickly moved off of the quarterdeck and crossed to the captain’s quarters—mistakenly believing that their movements had gone unnoticed.
“This is our current position, if I understand the chart right,” Griffiths said, pointing to the lined location on the gigantic map sheet spread over the table.
“Yes,” Merinda agreed, “that looks to be about right.”
“OK,” Griffiths said, straightening up from the table. “I was in here earlier, just looking at the map. There’s this big blank space in the middle—something that the cartographer couldn’t suck out of my head, I think. It is in my head, however. I can see it plain as day in my mind. Another thing—the symbols on the map. You’d think that the biolinks would eventually get around to translating for anyone looking at them. They don’t. I can read them just fine.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Merinda said, squinting her eyes slightly at Griffiths as she spoke. “Biolinks are not only linked to the individual but they are linked to each other. That’s how universal language is made so easy. When a biolink meets another species with a biolink, the two links transmit the coding for their own language to the nearby links.”
“Right,” Griffiths said. “My biolink is translating the ancient Lost Empire symbols for me just fine. So, why hasn’t my biolink broadcast the translation information to your biolink—or Flynn’s, for that matter, either?”
Merinda’s face was puzzled. “I don’t know. It’s the first time I’ve ever encountered a biolink that selectively transmitted translations.”
“Just follow me for a moment,” Griffiths said, the excitement in his voice obvious to the trained Vestis. “I was pondering this as I was looking at the chart. It suddenly occurred to me that we really didn’t know where this chart had come from. Who had created it? Who had put it together?”
“I think we all just assumed that the chart came from the Mantle of Kendis-dai,” Merinda said. “You asked where the Lokan Fleet had gone and the Mantle gave you the answer.”
“Yes, but don’t you see,” Griffiths said, his eyes afire. “Where did the Mantle get the answer?”
“What do you mean? The Mantle of Wisdom knows everything …”
“No,” Griffiths interrupted. “That’s wrong. The Mantle of Kendis-dai only knows that which it has experience with. It doesn’t look into the future. It isn’t omniscient. It’s true that there were other TFPs that were in communication with it—most notably the Nine Oracles, as you well know—but while it may have had a map of where Lokan intended to go—it didn’t actually know where Lokan had gone.”
“I’m not sure I’m following you.” Merinda looked skeptically at the cape-bedecked astronaut.
“Look,” Griffiths said, leaning over the chart once more and indicating the course line on the map. “This is the course that Lokan’s fleet took. Its course lines are clear, using standard map references, right up through this point here.”
Merinda moved up to Griffiths’s side, her eyes following the line of his pointing finger. “You’re pointing at the blank space, Griffiths.”
“Oh, sorry,” he said, pulling back his hand. “I see it in my mind. Notice how the last place the line crosses into is Bonefield Narrows. Well, just inside that is the last reference for the final course of the Lokan Fleet—at least as I look at it.”
“So, what’s your point?”
“The point is that this reference isn’t like all the others. It’s a vector.”
“What?” Merinda said. “You mean it just points direction?”
“Exactly,” Griffiths said, turning back to the map. “All the other coordinates reference external points: map grids, quasars, navigation beacons, you know. This last reference is just a direction pointing the way. Not only that, it’s a very specific direction. The figures themselves factor down to nearly a thousand decimal places in both heading and elevation.”
“Heading and elevation—of what?” Merinda said.
Griffiths turned to her and smiled. “In the last heading and elevation from the source of this map. Don’t you see it? The priests of Kendis-dai traveled with the Lokan Fleet. They had left the Mantle of Kendis-dai for the crusade. Only they could have given this map to the Mantle—who passed it down to us. At least one of the priests or priestesses must have survived long enough to transmit this information to the Mantle.”
Merinda shook her head. “Survived what?”
“Remember the story of Targ’s crashed Settlement Ship? It was the last known position of the Lokan Fleet. Someone, long ago, must have gotten a message from that ship back to the Mantle. That Settlement Ship and its dutiful, millennia-dead servant is the source of this map.”
“Then the current attitude and heading of that ruin …”
“… Coupled with the figures I can see in my head …”
Merinda smiled. “Point directly to the passage through the Maelstrom Wall!”
31
Ruins Vinculum
“Captain Griffiths, is this what you had in mind?” Flynn said grandly, standing easily on the forward spar, his right arm gripping one of the forward stays with seemingly casual ease.
Griffiths stepped carefully up on the foredeck grids, gripping the low rail. There were numerous possibilities for handholds here, rigging lines and stays extending upward from the forehull spar and various cleats to either side. Still, Griffiths also observed that there was plenty of space between the complex rigging lines to tumble over the railing and fall clear of the side of the ship. Normally this would have left him sucking vacuum in space behind the ship’s wake as she sped upward toward distant stars in the general direction her mast was pointing. Not now, however, as the ship’s direction of travel had shifted for landing. Now it seemed as though she were hanging from her main mast, a Christmas ornament dangling from a spindly top. A lake drifted far below their hull, the gentle waves of its surface forming a corrugation that gave away the measure of its distance. The curve of the shoreline closed on them as they continued their descent.
The beauty of it all was lost on Griffiths at the moment as he fought off panic. Interstellar distances were so meaningless to the human mind. For that matter, even altitudes in airplanes never bothered the man—he always just thought the world had somehow shrunk in scale rather than admit to his own distance from the ground. However, standing here on the exposed forecastle of the Venture Revenge, Griffiths suddenly had all too clear a perspective on the distance he could fall. He could look down the side of the prow and see the twin draglines dangling from the ship as too perfect an exercise in visual perspective.
The whole thing was making Griffiths decidedly dizzy and disoriented, despite his rakish hat and billowing cape. The ample breakfast that he had enjoyed earlier with Flynn in his cabin was threatening to make an encore appearance.
Flynn, on the other hand, seemed to revel in the obvious danger of the ship’s bow. He cut a dashing figure standing as he did so confidently in the native wind now that the ship’s atmospheric dome was not needed. His dark hair was blown back from his chiseled face. He wore an open shirt with bloused sleeves that rustled in the wind.
Merinda stood there with him, her black Vestis uniform and cape a perfect contrast to Flynn’s outfit. Her costume quickly suggested the strong beauty of her figure. Her honey-colored hair drifted back with the wind. The billowing clouds of the Bonefield Narrows formed a perfect backdrop for their pose, the island-worlds floating behind them in the perpetual opal twilight of the Narrows. With Merinda at his side, Flynn looked every bit the confident conqueror.
Griffiths hated the man all over again.
“I still don’t understand why you insist that we land here, Merinda,” Flynn said.
“Griffiths believes it essential,” Merinda replied smoothly. “He says we need to get something from the ruins here before we can go on.”
“Well, don’t go running off without me.” Flynn smiled at her. “Just remember that you are still my prisoner, Merinda—technically speaking, of course.”
“Thanks, Evon, you’re all heart.”
“Of course, that doesn’t apply to our shipmate Griffiths!” Flynn’s smile broadened noticeably. “He steers our course. Well, Griffiths? Is this not the place?”
Griffiths turned his face toward Flynn, unsure as to what color it was at the moment. “I think so.”
Merinda pointed with her free left hand. “Yes, this is it. The Bonefield Narrows may have thousands of island worlds but it is in the nature of this quantum zone that they all stay relatively in the same position. That bay below us there—that almost certainly is the same cove where the Knight Fortune dropped anchor. Those crags on either side of the cove’s entrance—they are the same as the yarnspinner described. Those yar trees … the white sand beach … it all fits. This is the place, Flynn. That’s the cove. Here is where the hunt begins.”
“You know,” Flynn said, turning his smiling face toward hers, “You still haven’t told me why we have to land on this miniature paradise.”
“Because I said so,” Griffiths piped in with an annoyance that Flynn promptly ignored.
Merinda glanced quizzically at Griffiths before answering. “I’ve already told you. We are here because we need something from the ruins—the first and last piece of the puzzle. This is the place where everything connects. This is the place that leads us to what we seek.”
Flynn smiled again radiantly into Merinda’s eyes.
“Then,” he said, “I suppose we had better get ourselves ashore.”
Merinda smiled back mildly.
Griffiths suddenly hated them all. Hated Flynn for taking Merinda away from him. Hated Merinda for never seeing Griffiths at all. Most of all he hated himself for not being able to do anything about it, and especially for the vertigo he was feeling at the moment that prevented him from doing much at all.
“Master Shindak!” Flynn cried out to the main deck behind him.
“Aye, Captain, and what is your pleasure?”
“Set her down in the bay, Master Shindak. Have Kheoghi form up a landing party. We make to go ashore.”
“By your word, Captain,” the elf called back at once.
Flynn swung suddenly around the stay line and dropped down to the forecastle deck. He turned and offered Merinda his hand in assistance. She took it as he helped her down to the deck as well.
“Come, Captain Griffiths,” Flynn said heartily. “We’ve a prize to win. You’ve got the key! What say we go find the lock, eh?”
Flynn slammed his broad hand against Griffiths’s back.
Griffiths suddenly had a new perspective on distance as he watched his breakfast tumble away from the ship toward the water far below.
Flynn floated about a foot above the white sands encircling the bay, but then so did everyone in the shore party, Griffiths noted. Even the minotaurs hovered like lightly tethered balloons, though occasionally their hooves scraped against the ground due either to their height or their great weight. Broad, golden belts had been broken out shortly after landing and distributed to those who were going ashore. Griffiths had been given his without comment by one of the gnomes. He had watched the others on deck put theirs on first before he finally committed himself to mounting the device around his own waist. Each had a massive orange stone mounted in a huge buckle. Two smaller gray stones were set to either side of the larger, central stone. These, Griffiths discovered through discrete observations, could be pulled out of the belt and fit easily in each of his hands. By moving the smaller stones relative to the larger one, he found he could drift upward, downward, spin, and move about. The control was quite intuitive. For Griffiths, whose position had been the remote piloted vehicle pilot on the Archilus expedition, the feel of controlling his own flight was quite natural and exhilarating. The belts had allowed them all to float over the side rails and leave the Venture Revenge anchored over the bay under command of a somewhat reduced crew.
Griffiths and Merinda had followed Flynn over the waters and to the shore. The Vestis hadn’t said a word to him during the entire process, somehow lost in her own thoughts. Griffiths desperately wanted to break the silence but couldn’t think of anything clever enough or germane enough to sound like casual conversation. Now that they were over dry land, he would have to wait longer: Flynn felt the need to give them all further instructions.
“The treeline extends, as you see, almost up to the shore itself. Beyond that is anyone’s guess. We know that this is the correct bay. According to the legend, our objective lies just above a waterfall, but I wouldn’t hold much store in that. The river feeding the fall may have changed its course several times since then. You won’t see it from the air; it’s cloaked, so stay as close to the ground as you can while searching.”
“Well, Cap’n,” the minotaur Kheoghi snorted, “now that you’ve got us clear on what we ain’t supposed to look for … just what is it that we is looking for?”
“Ruins, Kheoghi,” Flynn said through his smile. “The ruins of a Lokan Settlement Ship.”
A ripple of laughter passed through the assembled pirates as one of the gnomes chuckled through his words. “A Lokan ship? Three thousand years of rust and rot in this jungle? What are we supposed to use to find it? A magnifying glass?”
Griffiths watched Flynn for his reaction but the pirate captain had obviously dealt with such insolence before. He only smiled back at the group.
“You won’t need a magnifying glass, Ogrob,” Flynn said easily. “As of about thirty years ago it was very much intact. It’s about four miles across and about five to six thousand feet high. I don’t think you’ll have much trouble recognizing it once you come across it.”
Kheoghi scratched his left horn as if to stimulate some thought. “If this here Lokan ship be as big as you be telling it, Captain—then why ain’t we seen it from the Venture Revenge?”
Flynn shrugged. “The legends say it’s hidden—some sort of invisibility magic.”
Ogrob cocked his capped head to one side. “Magic? Still working after three millennia? You been eating the wild root again, Captain?”
Flynn turned toward the gnome. He was smiling, but now the smile was stiff and cold. There was a brightness in Flynn’s eyes. “No, Ogrob,” he said in a voice that was both quiet and carried to the listening ears of everyone assembled. “I have not been eating the wild root again.
What you do need to understand is that I know what it is we’re looking for here. Follow my orders and I’ll bring you to treasure and power beyond your wildest dreams. Ignore me, and you’ll cut yourself out of more than a share because I’ll gully you here and now.”
The gnome didn’t flinch. “Aye, Captain.”
Flynn turned back to the group. “Elami! You take your sisters and fan out towards the left. The Hishawei will move off to the right with the gnomes. Kheoghi! You and your brothers will follow me. I want everyone to stay within hearing of the beings next to you in the line. I don’t think it will be possible to keep a line of sight and cover enough area …”
Griffiths turned to Merinda, who was drifting next to him, and spoke quietly to her. “Merinda, I don’t understand. You’re the Vestis here. This guy was a Librae at best. Doesn’t that mean you outrank him or something?”
“Yes, Griffiths,” Merinda said, her eyes still focused on some distant thought. Her answers were coming automatically, as though she wasn’t really hearing his words. “Technically, I suppose you’re right.”
Flynn continued speaking but his words were lost under their conversation. Griffiths twisted the control globes in his hands and drifted slightly closer to the Vestis
. “Then why are we following him? You’re more capable than he is and a damn sight more reliable. I wouldn’t trust him any further than this so-called crew of his!”
Merinda turned suddenly toward Griffiths as though she had heard him for the first time. “You, of all people, should know better than to try and tell me how to do my job.”
“I’m not telling you how to do your job!” Griffiths shot back through his teeth. “I just think that it’s about time that you did your job, that’s all!”
“I am doing my job,” Merinda said, turning away from him and watching Flynn as she spoke. “Sometimes it isn’t a question of action, Griffiths, so much as knowing when it is the right time to act. The situation is fairly under control at the moment.”
“ ‘Fairly under control’?” Griffiths gawked. “If it hasn’t escaped your notice, we’re light-years from any inhabited worlds and we have fallen in with alien pirates who, I am sure, would just as soon eat our livers raw as smile at us. I’m not sure what kind of control you’re referring to but …”
“Griffiths!”
The prophet-astronaut turned suddenly at the sharp mention of his name.
“You and Merinda will come with Kheoghi and me. We don’t have a lot of time. I’d like to have you find what you need and get this little expedition over with before the Tsultak decide to join our little party and spoil everyone’s day. Let’s go!”
“Halloo, left,” came the distant cry, filtering through the massive wall of the jungle drifting all about him.
“Halloo, right,” Merinda called, her own voice sounding and feeling rather hoarse. They had been drifting forward and calling out in this same manner for what seemed like hours. The thick growth of the jungle had slowed their progress despite the levitation belts they were using. The ground itself was extremely rugged, filled with unexpected cliff faces rising precipitously from the jungle in some places or dropping into deep crevasses without warning. This was further complicated by the jungle growth, which made the ground nearly impassable. It was difficult enough flying through the thick foliage. Merinda would occasionally lower herself to avoid a solid block of the jungle canopy above, or shift left or right when the growth proved too thick to allow her to pass. It was like a three-dimensional maze through which she was drifting, unsure of her direction.
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