“Yes, but if someone helps me to my feet, I’ll come anyway. This story will have to be in the paper as soon as possible.”
“I could have one of my men write up a report with the pertinent details,” Dak said.
“I’ve read your men’s reports,” Tikaya said. “You’re offering him a punishment, not a good turn.”
“That’s... probably a fair assessment.”
Dak and Tikaya helped Mancrest up, and the soldiers led them past the gate and through the front door where a final young man was being shoved out, his wrists tied behind his back. He glowered sullenly at Tikaya’s group. Dak glowered back, and the young man lost some of his menace, shrinking away from the big colonel.
“You should have tried that glare on Sauda,” Tikaya murmured as they continued inside.
“I did. She either wasn’t paying attention or didn’t find me intimidating.”
“I assure you you’re quite intimidating.”
“I’d take that as a compliment coming from a man, but I’m not sure I want women to find me intimidating.”
Tikaya and Dak jogged through a living area, up a set of wooden stairs, and into a hallway with floorboards that creaked beneath their boots.
“In that case,” Tikaya said, “you might want to get a nice eye patch to wear. That scar gives you a sinister cast.”
“I tried eye patches. They made my hollow sweat and itch. Besides, having a sinister mien isn’t a bad idea if you’re the chief of intelligence. It intimidates the enemy. And helps keep your own men in line, right, Sergeant?”
“Yes, sir,” the man leading them said before stopping at the end of the hall. A secret panel was propped open, revealing the silvery metal of a very modern vault door.
Dak touched a splintered hole near the edge of the panel.
“Bullet?” Tikaya asked.
“Yes.” Their soldier guide pointed to a tiny dent in the metal vault door, then walked back down the hall to a place where wallpaper had been gouged free. A cartridge was lodged in the wood paneling underneath. “It ricocheted. It looks like they shot a couple of times before realizing they were more likely to hurt themselves than the vault door. Judging by the reactions of a couple of the people we dragged out of bedrooms, they didn’t even know there was a vault door here.”
The soft scrapes of a pencil on paper drifted into the thoughtful silence that followed. Somewhere, Mancrest had acquired a notepad. He had already filled up the first page.
“Your threat to offer him a report seems to have inspired him to write,” Tikaya said. “Copiously.”
“Impressive since he didn’t even have a notepad before.” Dak plucked up a lamp that had been lit and left on a narrow hallway table, and walked to the vault door.
“I did have one, but it fell out in the tank,” Deret said, his pencil never slowing. “Just as well. It would have been too soggy to use.”
Tikaya noticed symbols etched around the wheel in the center of the metal door and moved closer as well.
“Those aren’t the usual numbers one expects,” Dak observed.
“No, they’re symbols from the Kriskrusian language. Old symbols used in religious ceremonies. Later on, by the time your ancestors came, they had switched to an alphabet.” Tikaya spread her hand to cover five of the symbols. “Those are the names for the gods. That one represents a house or one’s homeland. That one is the sun. There’s the moon.”
“You know them all?” Dak asked.
“Yes, I believe so.”
“Does that give you any insight into how to open the lock? Because I’m guessing we want to get in there.” Dak touched one of the dents the bullets had left.
“Er, no,” Tikaya said. “I don’t think so.”
“Sergeant, grab a couple of men and start searching the rooms. Edgecrest’s room first, then Sauda’s, and anyone else’s that looks promises. See if you can find the combination.”
“Ah, shouldn’t we just...” The sergeant cleared his throat and studied his commanding officer’s boots.
“What?” Dak asked.
“The woman may know the combination, sir. We could question her more forcefully.”
“I doubt she knows it,” Dak said. “Besides, the president might not be happy about having his first wife questioned forcefully.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll get my team searching.”
“You should also have them search for signs that someone has been making poisons,” Tikaya said. If the antidote to Rias’s illness wasn’t here in this compound somewhere... This would all have been a waste of time, leaving her farther away from helping Rias than ever.
Dak nodded. “As she said, Sergeant.”
The soldier jogged off, and doors and cabinets were soon banging up and down the hallway.
Dak removed his cap and pushed a hand through his short black hair. “Was that the right decision?”
“What?” Tikaya asked.
“Not interrogating Sauda.”
“I don’t think Rias would care to have any woman interrogated in the Turgonian way.” Tikaya shrugged. “If we don’t have any luck, we can always try later. I think you’re right, though, in that she wouldn’t know. I don’t get the impression she’s... bright enough to have masterminded all of this. Serpitivich is probably using her.”
“Yes. Good.”
Good that he was using her? Or good that Dak wouldn’t be expected to torture a woman for information? The latter, Tikaya suspected. It pleased her that the notion bothered him. With Turgonians... one never knew. She supposed he wouldn’t blink at the idea of interrogating a man. Such a strange people.
Mancrest shuffled forward to examine the symbols. “In the meantime, we could try guessing the combination.”
“There are more than thirty symbols,” Dak said. “That makes for thousands of permutations.”
Rias would have given the exact number of permutations. He liked solving quick puzzles like that in his head—and showing off that he could do so, or so Tikaya had always thought. He never admitted to such vanities of course.
“I’m going to see what tools we have in the lorry. Maybe something can open this, lock notwithstanding.” Dak waved for them to stay and jogged for the stairs.
“May I borrow your pencil and a piece of paper?” Tikaya asked Mancrest. “If I write everything down and play with them a bit, maybe I can guess a logical combination.”
“Without trying thousands of permutations?” Mancrest handed her the pencil and tore off a sheet from the back of his pad. The first page had someone’s grocery list on it; he must have pillaged it from the homeowner.
“Thousands supposes it’s a random combination. Humans are rarely random.”
“My night has certainly felt random.” Mancrest leaned against the wall and closed his eyes.
Tikaya felt sympathetic, but she soon forgot about him, her focus consumed by the symbols. She doubted opening the vault would reveal rows of poisons—and antidotes—lining the insides, but she worked on cracking the code as if that were the case.
• • • • •
Sespian sat beside President Starcrest, watching him steer the submarine while Mahliki operated the drill from the science station. He alternated between feeling useless, because he didn’t know what any of the switches did or what any of the gauges meant, and feeling guilty, because Mahliki had kissed him, and he was fairly certain her father had seen. Every time Starcrest looked in his direction, Sespian anticipated a glower and a stern my-daughter-is-not-to-be-pawed-over-by-the-likes-of-you lecture. But every time, Starcrest only moved a lever or pressed a switch, then returned his attention to the lake floor creeping along ahead of them.
Every ten or twenty meters, they had to stop, drill down to a root, and electrocute the surrounding swath of plants before they could travel forward again. So far it was working, but recent reports—they were more expletives than reports—from Mahliki said the vines were snaking in and trying to break off the dagger. If they lost that, Sespian didn’t
think they had anything else on board that would cut through to the roots. At least the rhizome structure was working in their favor and blasting one root with electricity sent deadly energy through to the neighboring ones. He began to have faith that the Starcrests’ plan to electrocute the original root mass in the harbor might work, especially if they delivered a larger charge. The equipment stacked high in the sleeping cabin was presumably for that.
“I pulled in a sample from the last root we zapped,” Mahliki called. “It doesn’t have the symbols and structure of that original one I cut. These later generations are less sophisticated.”
“Let’s hope the same tactic works on the original generation,” Starcrest said. “At present speed, we should reach the harbor in twenty minutes.”
Maldynado shuffled up behind Sespian’s seat. “Sounds promising. Maybe we won’t need to suit up.”
“You wouldn’t mind if you came along and ended up simply being decorative?” Sespian asked.
“Nah, I specialize in being decorative. It’s hard not to when you’re this handsome.”
Starcrest glanced at him, but didn’t say anything.
Maldynado chewed on his lip. Sespian wondered if he would ever figure out that saying such things tended to make people take him less seriously. If he truly wanted a career working for Starcrest, he ought to forego the dandy act, at least around the president.
“It’s a bit of a curse, I’ll admit,” Maldynado added. “People don’t think you have a brain or any thoughts in your head. But that can be advantageous at times. Those same people will say things around you that they wouldn’t around a keen-eyed military intelligence officer.”
“Maldynado?” Starcrest said.
“Yes, My Lord?”
“Are you truly lobbying for a job while we’re in the middle of all this?”
A call came up from the engineer. “We’re running low on oxygen, My Lord. We better go up for a few minutes before heading into the harbor.”
“Understood,” Starcrest responded.
“Not lobbying exactly,” Maldynado said. “Just... trying to fill the air with something besides tension.”
Sespian’s ears popped as they rose toward the surface. Faint light drifted down from above. Dawn must have come while they had been plodding along the lake bottom. They plopped up, and rivulets of water ran down the viewport.
A slender tendril drifted into view from the side, a green one, not one of the many charred ones that were clogging the water.
“Is the dagger back in?” Starcrest asked.
“Yes,” Mahliki said.
“Let me know when we can descend again,” Starcrest called back to the engine room.
“Yes, My Lord President.”
“I don’t like giving it time to think,” Starcrest said. “Now that I’m convinced it does so.”
“I agree.” Sespian watched that tendril veer in close, not close enough to touch the hull and get shocked, but close, as if it were some enemy periscope, sent to survey them.
“Me too,” Maldynado said.
“Ready, My Lord,” the engineer called.
Starcrest took them down again, back into darkness pierced only by the running lamp. The ground that had been cleared of plants a moment before was covered with green now. Not tall new stalks that had grown up, but some sort of carpet formed from existing plants sending vines in from the sides.
“Uh,” Maldynado said.
“Landing on it,” Starcrest said.
Mahliki jogged up and leaned on the back of his chair. “How thick is that? I wonder if they’re trying to protect their roots the same way they smothered us earlier—sacrificing the top layer.”
The submarine settled on the bottom again, the lakebed pillowed by those cushions of vines. The blue energy crackled outside of the hull, and charred bits of plant flesh floated away, but the greenery didn’t move away from the craft.
“It looks like it,” Starcrest said. “I’ll take us up again. In lying down, these have cleared a path for us. The ones in the harbor are our priority.”
“Won’t we have to deal with the same thing there?” Sespian asked. “If we can even get there?”
“Yes, but we have more weapons to deploy, weapons the plant hasn’t seen yet.”
Nobody pointed out that the vines didn’t have eyes.
The submarine rose to the surface again, pushing through stalks that remained upright. For the moment, they were parting to avoid being singed. Maybe they felt they had won a victory by denying the sub access to the roots and they needn’t sacrifice as much up here. Maybe they just hadn’t collectively figured out what the sub was up to yet. Maybe Sespian needed to stop thinking about this plant like it was a human enemy. Or... maybe not. It had certainly proven itself crafty.
Maldynado whistled as they sailed farther, the stalks rising up from the lake bottom now stretching twenty feet into the sky and blotting out the promise of dawn. “Those things are almost as big as my—” he glanced at Mahliki, “—backyard trees.”
She wrinkled her nose at him.
“Aren’t you living in a flat?” Sespian asked, knowing full well that trees hadn’t been what Maldynado had intended to mention.
“Yes, but as a boy on my parents’ estate, we had lots of trees,” Maldynado said. “Many well-endowed.”
Trees actually were what came to Sespian’s mind when looking at the towering forest. Before the stalks had been as thick as arms and legs. Some of these were broader than hundred-year-old cedars. Sespian would hate to have to try and cut one away from him with nothing but a knife, however sharp the edge.
“We’re almost to the harbor,” Starcrest said. “Another thirty, forty meters, and we’ll dive again. We may not need the suits.”
“That’ll be a shame,” Maldynado said.
Though Sespian didn’t comment, he couldn’t help but feel relieved as well.
“The sooner and more effectively we get this done, the better,” Mahliki said. “Mother will be worrying about us.”
“Yes, I should send a message,” Rias said. “As soon as—”
“Look out,” came a cry from engineering. “To the port. It’s falling!”
Nothing was visible through the navigation viewport, but Rias pushed on the main lever. The submarine surged forward. Something slapped the surface of the water behind them, the sound almost deafening, as if a mountain had fallen. Or a towering tree.
Water sprayed, and a huge wave swept the Explorer into the air. The deck lurched, and Sespian was almost thrown from his seat. He caught himself on the control panel. Someone else—Maldynado?—was less lucky, tumbling to the deck behind him.
The submarine landed with a jolt and massive green stalks filled the viewport. The vessel crashed into the side of one. Like a tree, it didn’t yield at all. Though streaks of blue lightning bit into anything that touched the hull, that didn’t keep the craft from ricocheting around, slamming into two more unyielding stalks, before settling back down.
“Remarkable,” Mahliki said. “I knew the vines were flexible, but I wouldn’t have guessed these huge trunks could change physical properties so quickly. To go from a tree-like structure to a flaccid...” She must have noticed Maldynado gaping at her from the deck, for she cleared her throat and said, “Never mind. That’s not important now.”
Starcrest’s hands were flying across the controls. “Any damage, Major?” he called back to the engineer.
“Nothing showing up yet, My Lord.”
“What happens when one lands on us?” Maldynado asked.
Another trunk went limp, this time directly in front of them. Rias veered the craft to the left, but the stalks in that direction didn’t yield as the earlier ones had. The submarine might as well have crashed into dock pilings.
“Brace yourselves,” Starcrest ordered.
Sespian still had a death grip on the control panel. It didn’t help much when the massive stalk struck with the force of a falling redwood. He was thrown upward, even
as the submarine plunged downward. He flung an arm up to protect his head from hitting the ceiling. When gravity caught up, pitching him in the other direction, he missed the chair. His butt struck the control panel, then he tumbled into Maldynado. Mahliki had fallen to the deck as well. She sat crumpled against the bulkhead, rubbing the back of her head.
“Who’s driving up there?” the engineer cried, the “My Lord President” address forgotten.
“I’m taking us down again,” Starcrest said. “We’ll be safer down there. From that attack anyway.”
“Comforting,” Maldynado grumbled.
“Judging by the rapidity with which we descended and the water displaced, I judge them about half the density of a typical hardwood tree.” Rias left his chair to help Mahliki up—apparently this random information was for her. Sespian certainly wasn’t in the mood to find it interesting.
“Yes,” Mahliki said, “when I examined the cell makeup of the stalks, they reminded me more of cane than wood.”
“I hope that means it didn’t do as much damage as it could have,” Maldynado said.
“This craft was designed to be sturdy,” Starcrest said. “To weather storms and enemy attacks if necessary.”
“What about irate giant plants?”
“That was, alas, not anticipated by the designer.”
“A shame,” Maldynado said.
Starcrest returned to his seat. “Let’s see if we can navigate through these last twenty meters underwater.”
Sespian waved for Mahliki to take the other seat. She could do more good there than he.
“Sespian, Maldynado,” Starcrest said, “get those batteries out of the cabin, please. We’ll prepare to deploy them.”
“Yes, sir,” Sespian said.
They walked back to the only cabin in the place, one usually reserved for sleeping. The bunk was buried beneath unrecognizable mechanical paraphernalia, gray metal boxes, and crates of tools and spare parts. Spare parts for what, Sespian didn’t know. He was being generous with his identification—his first thought was to consider the contents scrap metal.
“Do you know which of these things are batteries?” Maldynado asked.