This particular expert, Jonas Zeigler, hid his disappointment well, but Navi could still feel it, as if she had caused it.
The double doors slid open and he stepped inside, stopping as he gazed on the map. His black bangs flopped over the left side of his narrow face. He wore faded jeans and a cotton top, even though Navi kept her ship at regulation temperature—which meant it was cool, even for her.
He was a full professor of antiquities and art history at a tiny college at the edge of the sector. His speeches, his dissertation, and his annual works brought him to Navi’s attention. Even though he didn’t have a prestige position, he was considered the sector’s foremost authority on the Spires—or he had been until Scholars had discovered the City of Denon in the hollow below them.
Zeigler had predicted that find in his now-famous dissertation, published nearly a decade before anyone thought to look for the city. But his tiny college couldn’t afford to buy into Scholars, and so he wasn’t qualified to lead an expedition into the area.
“You act like you’ve never seen the Spires.” She had to walk behind him and wave her hand at the door, closing it. He hadn’t moved since he stepped inside.
He shook himself, then took a deep breath. “Not like that,” he said. “My school doesn’t have the funds for such a sophisticated holounit.”
“But you’ve seen them up close,” she said. As a fifteen-year-old, he had hiked up Denon’s Secret with his family, long before any archeologists had taken interest in the Spires.
“Up close you can hardly take in a single branch. The entire thing is impossible to see.” He finally walked toward the map. “Although….”
“Although?” She hated the way he spoke, as if his thoughts raced ahead and he didn’t feel as if he had to articulate all of them.
“Although they’re much brighter in person. They are so white it actually hurts your eyes.” He sounded wistful.
Sometimes places got a hold on people, made them almost worshipful. She’d seen it countless times—people willing to defend a small patch of ground that looked like nothing to her, because it meant something to them.
She hadn’t suspected Zeigler of such an attitude, although someone else might have. It took her longer than most to recognize worshipful.
She had never worshipped anything. Her work was everything to her, had been since she left home at thirteen. She hadn’t even fallen in love. Someone would mention a new job, and she would take it, for the challenge mostly, since money and perks didn’t matter much to her.
“Last night,” she said to Zeigler, “you mentioned something. You said you didn’t think the security team would have been hired to protect the city. What did you mean?”
The words had echoed in her head since that moment. The security team had triggered her trip to Amnthra. Even though the Scholars had hired the security team, the request for security hadn’t originated with the Scholars.
The request had come directly from the surface itself.
Navi’s computer systems were set up to automatically flag actions like that. She’d been monitoring nearly two hundred Scholars projects and sites all over the sector, and whenever something unusual happened, she got flagged.
This one intrigued her, because the city had been discovered so recently and it was hard to reach.
Historic places that were hard to reach and relatively new to the academic community were often rich with treasures.
Zeigler was still looking at the Spires.
His silence exasperated her. She asked, “Do you think the team was hired to protect the Spires?”
He gave her a look of such panic that she actually regretted the question.
“They’re too beautiful to cut up,” he said, which wasn’t an answer to her question. The fact that he had thought of cutting them up meant someone else probably had as well.
“Could they be sold in parts?” she asked.
He let out a heavy sigh. It sounded almost mournful.
“Anything can be sold in parts,” he said.
“So that’s what you meant,” she said. “You think the team was hired to protect the Spires.”
He shook his head, but said no more.
“Then why do you think they hired the team?” she asked.
“The museum,” he said after a moment.
His tone implied that she knew what the museum was.
She knew of countless museums. Some were attached to the universities. Some were in the wealthier cities throughout the sector. The Scholars had been making noise for years about starting a universal museum, one in the center of the sector, like a space port, complete with restaurants, hotels, and condos. The entire thing could be expanded as the Scholars found more items to put into it.
“Which museum?” she asked when he became clear he wasn’t going to elaborate.
He whirled toward her, his face more animated than she had ever seen it.
“I thought you studied my work,” he snapped. “You said you were familiar with it.”
“I am,” she said. She hadn’t studied his work; that would have taken too much time. But she had scanned the précis and listened to his detractors as well as his supporters. She learned all she could about him as quickly as she could.
She simply hadn’t had time to familiarize herself with the work itself.
“Everything I’ve done in the past six years has been about the museum,” he said.
“The last six years, you talked about the history of Denonites,” she said. “I recall nothing about a museum.”
His face flushed. “You listened to the critics. You didn’t listen to me.”
She sighed, then extended her hands flat, in a gesture of peace. “Guilty,” she said. “I don’t have the patience for scholarship.”
He glared at her, then turned his back on her. He continued to study the Spires.
“So what did the critics miss?” she asked.
“A discovery equal to that of the city itself,” he said.
He answered her quicker than she had expected him to. She had thought he would nurse his anger a bit longer, but he hadn’t.
“Why would they ignore that?”
“Because I’m not on-site,” he said. “But I wasn’t on-site when I figured out the city’s location either.”
“So tell me about the museum,” she said.
He turned, his expression open. She didn’t like the mood swing. She kept her back straight, her face impassive. She wasn’t going to encourage this kind of emotionalism—although she would remember it.
He said, “The ancient texts all talked about the spoils of war. The Denonites went to war not for the conquest, but for the spoils.”
So did many communities, she almost said, but remembered: it was better not to have a dialogue with Zeigler. It would derail him.
“Most scholars,” he was saying, “believe the spoils are the standard ones—slaves, property, maybe extending the gene pool. But it always seemed to me to be more than that.”
She frowned.
Zeigler reached toward the Spires. He touched them. The hologram encased his fingers.
“I always thought that any people who could create something that beautiful would appreciate beauty. The city bears this out. The new documentation shows that it uses classical designs—ancient Earth designs—in its most prominent buildings.”
Then he closed his hand into a fist and pulled it away from the Spires.
Navi nodded, to encourage him to continue.
“The Denonites lived in a small community,” he said. “It’s a jewel. They sent their own undesirables away, let them run the conquered cities. Nothing in the texts talk about slaves or massive troops moving back toward Denon’s Secret. There is no mention of a place to keep prisoners or a place to ritually humiliate the losers of any war. So I spent the last few years asking myself this: If they didn’t want the traditional spoils, what did they want?”
She was going to be here all day while he explained how he came to
his conclusions. God, she hated academics.
“Then I discovered a mention of the caverns,” he said.
Suddenly he had her attention.
“Caverns honeycomb that mountain. I think that’s how the Denonites survived their many sieges. They weren’t in the city when it got attacked. They were below it or beside it or maybe not even in it, if the caverns led to places outside of the mountain.”
Her breath caught. Marvelous. The caverns would give her a way into the city, a way that could avoid the Spires entirely.
“Do you have proof of this?” she asked.
“Not exact proof,” he said.
And she felt her heart sink.
“But,” he added, “the texts mention the networks a lot, and then they mention the honeycombs. Only one of those references is in connection with cavern, but that’s enough. Because if you look at the Spires, what could they be, but a giant map?”
She frowned, and looked at the Spires. They seemed like artwork to her—a way of marking the city long before anyone arrived at it.
A monument, something that a culture built because it could.
“A map?” she asked, letting the disbelief into her voice.
“Surround it, not with air, but with dirt,” he said. “Then what does it look like?”
She had to squint to imagine that. Then she shook her head.
“It’s a network of caves,” he said, “with exit points.”
She wanted him to be right. She needed him to be right. But she didn’t believe he was right. Everything he told her was too disjointed.
“But how does that tie to a museum?” she asked.
“It is the museum,” he said.
He shoved his hand back into the middle of the hologram.
“This part,” he said. “This maze-like network in the center, would be the best place to store artifacts stolen from other cultures. And if the caves look like the Spires, then they’re white. Anything with color would jump off the walls, and stand out, even in a large space. Imagine it. It would be the best museum in the sector. Better even than that thing the Scholars are proposing because everything in this place would be ancient, and from cultures long gone.”
That was the problem. She could imagine it. The wealth would be beyond measure.
Immediately her mind turned to the task at hand. “They would need more than fifteen people and some tech to guard this place.”
“If they know what they have which I don’t think they do,” he said. “They stumbled onto the city. They weren’t looking at my work. It was an accident.”
“You think they have no idea how far these things extend.
He nodded. “And, since scans from above are limited by law, they have no way to find out.”
She turned to the Spires, squinting, trying to see what he saw.
A map.
Navi smiled.
If Zeigler was right, he had just given her a way in.
5
They activated their tents on a flat part of the mountainside half a kilometer above the city.
From this vantage, they could see the city itself—all parts of it—and they would remember that they were here to guard it. Meklos still hadn’t figured out how he was going to deploy his people and his equipment. He needed better maps for that. He also needed to know what exactly he’d been hired to protect.
If it was a single building, then he’d send his people there in shifts as well as keep a few stationed near the Spires. If it was the entire city itself, he might need reinforcements.
This area was vast, something that he hadn’t realized when he took the job. It wasn’t vast in area, so much as in sprawl. And it would be difficult to guard against a motivated invader, someone who wanted inside, someone to whom the rules about the Spires of Denon meant nothing.
He had one other problem as well. No one had warned him about how bright it was here. Even with proper equipment, the whiteness of the Spires, combined with the white shale on the mountainside and the white buildings below, created a kind of bleary-eyed exhaustion that he hadn’t experienced outside of snow countries.
If he kept his people on shift too long or if they were stationed in the wrong spot, they might experience a kind of snow blindness.
And he hadn’t checked the planet’s cycle in relation to its sun. He had no idea if they would move closer while he was stationed here.
If so, the sun would grow brighter, and so would the light.
Even if he sent for better equipment, he still would have to station his people at their posts for half a normal shift. Which meant he would be understaffed.
He wished he’d been able to inspect the site before he arrived, just like he had asked to do. But Scholars Exploration, which had hired him, had said the site was too remote to justify the expense.
Then they had tripled his fee.
He’d noted the contradiction, and he understood the reason for it. They didn’t want anyone who wasn’t on their payroll near the site.
And that had peaked his curiosity.
This whole job had—partly because of the Spires themselves.
6
Gabrielle stepped backwards, toward the open doorway, and stuck her hands in her back pockets. The temple’s main floor extended away from her, fading away into darkness.
Except for the front entrance, which had no door—and hadn’t been designed for one, the temple had sealable doors and no windows. Perfect for storage.
It was the largest building in the ancient city, a giant rectangle that stood in the exact center. All the main roads (the ones that the archeologists could clearly define as roads) led to this one spot.
She called it a temple, but there was no evidence that the Denonites were particularly religious. It was just that in previous ancient societies, buildings with this general shape and focus always ended up being the center of the religion.
Yusef believed it was some kind of government building, but he couldn’t suggest what kind.
The main floor was one long open space. There wasn’t even an altar or a place with a rise so that someone could stand above a crowd and make speeches.
The walls were plain white, like the exterior walls, but the floor was a marvel all by itself.
It was an inlaid replica of the Spires of Denon. As the careful cleaning commenced, she realized that the floor’s design wasn’t white against blue like she had initially thought. The Spires went from a warm reddish color to lighter shades of rose finally becoming a faint white. Only near the top, where the Spires supposedly touched the sun, did the drawing itself become a spectacular white.
She had initially planned on covering the floor, but she wasn’t sure whether or not it would ruin the artwork. Her specialists thought that even a raised floor could scratch the image below.
So she had to be careful. On the areas where there was no artwork, she had installed a raised floor. She would put up half walls around those areas. She needed them for the final cleaning, sorting and classification. Then the artifact, whatever it was, would get moved to the correct part of the floor until it could go to its assigned destination.
The problem, of course, would be the larger items. She wasn’t even sure where to store them, let alone how to work with them.
And if she had to remove any of them from the city…
She shook her head. She had already commandeered a couple of buildings near the temple, but none were as sturdy.
One of the post-docs suggested leaving the larger artifacts where she found them, which sounded well and good, until they tried to deal with the artifacts in the flooded part of the caverns.
Not that she knew for certain there were artifacts in that part of the cavern. Even though the guards had shown up, the special cave-divers she sent for were delayed on some other job.
Someone touched her arm, and she jumped.
She turned. Yusef stood next to her, his eyes twinkling.
She had been so deep in thought, she hadn’t even heard him a
pproach.
“What?” she asked.
“The guards you hired,” he said, “they want to talk to you.”
She suppressed a sigh. The last thing she wanted to do was talk to a group of guards.
She hadn’t given them much thought. She had asked the Scholars to hire some security guards and to make sure they weren’t thugs. She didn’t want careless people blundering their way through the delicate parts of the city.
If she had been able to afford it, she would have hired them herself. But she’d had her hands full with hiring the cave divers. She didn’t want the Scholars to know she had even found caves, until she knew exactly what those caves were and what treasures they contained.
She sighed. She didn’t want to deal with the guards, but she was clearly going to have to.
“Where are they?” she asked.
“He,” said a voice behind her. “And he’s right here.”
She turned. The man who stood behind her wasn’t as large as she would have expected a guard to be. He was not much taller than she was, and his muscles looked real, not the enhanced kind that made him seem like he had inserted cotton under his skin. His hair was a little too long, and his dark eyes were wary.
“I’m Meklos Verr,” he said. “I’m in charge of the security team.”
She didn’t have to ask where the rest of the team was. That was obvious. She had seen the automated tents blossom on the inside of the crater. They weren’t too far from her initial base camp.
“Gabrielle Reese,” she said. “I’m the person in charge of this mess.”
He glanced at the entrance behind him. “It’s much less of a mess than I expected.”
“We’ve had years on the upper layer of the city, but there’s so much more work to be done.”
He nodded, then looked at Yusef. The look held dismissal, and just a little contempt.
She put her hand on Yusef’s arm. If she hadn’t, he would have left without Meklos saying a word.
That was power. Amazing that such a slight man in such an unimportant position had it.
“I need to talk with you about the security arrangements,” Meklos said.
She nodded, but didn’t let go of Yusef’s arm.
The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack Page 5
