Rusch, Kristine Kathryn - Diving Universe SS3 Read online

  Chavo climbed ahead of them, waiting near the arch, which barely reached the top of his head. When Meklos joined him, Chavo pointed up. “Your pack gonna hit that?”

  “Of course not,” Meklos said, but he paused anyway, not because he was uncertain, but because he wanted to get a good look at the Spires up close.

  The arch wasn't a true arch. Instead, it was part of the weave. Several branches came together at this point. Two twisted above Meklos to form an even larger patten. Two more branched in from the sides, giving the arch itself a four-point base. The trail went below that base.

  “I'm going to make sure the others won't hit it,” Chavo said. “So go ahead.”

  “They'll be fine,” Meklos said.

  Chavo looked nervously at the rest of the team, climbing single-file behind Meklos, then back at Meklos.

  Meklos raised his eyebrows. “After you,” he said.

  Chavo swallowed, then nodded. He clearly didn't want to go first, but he didn't see any choice.

  Meklos smiled to himself. The kid was finally becoming intimidated.

  Chavo walked under the arch, then eased himself down the side of the mountain. The trail had to have gotten steep there. Meklos made a mental note of that. He followed, going slowly, so that he could look at the arch as he passed. Chavo wasn't kidding—the Spires had etchings. So far as Meklos could see, each etching was different. Some appeared to be characters, like letters or numbers, and others were drawings. He noted one as he passed, a woman standing beneath this very arch, or something quite similar to it.

  He only had to hunch slightly as he walked under the arch. He had plenty of clearance. Even if he hadn't, his pack would have flattened itself against his back to avoid touching anything. It was a design feature he'd neglected to tell Chavo.

  The kid didn't need to know everything.

  Once Meklos got through the arch, the path turned sharply to the right. That was why Chavo had braced himself as he'd come through. There were more parts to the arch, some actually flattened before Meklos, like a floor.

  The path swerved to avoid all of that.

  The floor had etchings as well, but he couldn't see them clearly from the path.

  What surprised him was that they weren't covered with dust or dirt. Just one day on this mountaintop should have covered that floor in the whitish material that surrounded it.

  He swerved with the path, then walked down four steps. Chavo was waiting for him on a stone platform, one that was not part of the Spires. Meklos stopped beside Chavo, then looked up the mountainside. His team was coming through, one at a time, each examining the Spires as they walked, each showing the same amount of curiosity he had.

  “The city's just down there,” Chavo said, with no small amount of pride.

  Meklos looked. The city sprawled below them as if it had always been exposed to the sun, as if teams of archeologists hadn't uncovered it in the past five years.

  Some of the dirt remained along the edges—more, it seemed to Meklos, to prevent climbers from going through the Spires the wrong way than as any integral part of the dig. But the dirt did show how deeply the city had once been buried.

  It filled the hollow in the mountain. White buildings, some small, and several quite large, scattered before him. They glimmered in the sunlight.

  He realized then that some of the brightness had come from the reflected light off the white substance on the side of the mountain. Add to that the city itself, and his eyes actually hurt.

  “Lovely, isn't it?” Chavo asked.

  “Astonishing,” Meklos said, and meant it. He had seen a lot of amazing things in his career, but never anything like this.

  “Wait until you see it up close,” Chavo said.

  Meklos frowned. He had heard about the ancient city of Denon in school—everyone had. So many of this sector's myths and stories had come from here. The city itself had survived several sieges.

  As he looked at it now, though, the idea of surviving a siege here made him shudder. With a more powerful enemy on the mountainside, the inhabitants of the city would not stand a chance.

  “Ready?” Chavo asked, leading Meklos to yet another set of stairs.

  Meklos nodded. Places usually didn't make him uncomfortable, but this one did. And he wasn't entirely sure why.

  * * * *

  4

  Navi Salvino clasped her hands behind her back and studied the holographic map floating above the table. She had walked around it now a dozen times, zooming in, zooming out, and still she couldn't decide what to do.

  The Naramzin Mountain Range looked formidable all by itself, but the strictures on landing anywhere near the Spires of Denon made this job almost impossible.

  She wouldn't be able to get her people into the city of Denon without being seen. She certainly couldn't use weapons, and the newest strictures, made by the Monuments Protection Arm of the Unified Governments of Amnthra, restricted most forms of scanning equipment as well.

  The Unified Governments had been suing Scholars Exploration for ownership of the mountaintop itself. Scholars Exploration had used a loophole in some of the local laws to claim ownership of the mountaintop. Apparently the Unified Governments had never designated the Spires a protected area, which was a major mistake.

  The Scholars took advantage of major mistakes. They'd become the bully in the sector, at least when it came to research sites.

  In the beginning, the Scholars had simply been a way for sector universities to protect their research. A dozen universities had founded Scholars Exploration to give them some clout with the various sector governments. A variety of donors, many wealthy alumni, had provided startup funding for the company decades ago. That start-up money had become a large fortune, thanks to the funds generated by patents, copyrights, sales of land and items made and/or found by the various scholars.

  Most people saw the Scholars as a boon to knowledge throughout the sector. Navi saw them as a pain in the ass. She walked around the table yet again. The mountaintop rose as if it had been carved there.

  The Spires rose above the white mountaintop, hopelessly delicate. On one of her passes, she had counted sixteen spires, but it was hard to gauge, since they twisted and twined into each other. One branch would rise into a point, while another part of it forked away, wrapping itself around a different spire.

  The highest spire stood alone for several meters, white and shining in the simulation, as if lit from within.

  If this holographic map was even half as impressive as the Spires themselves, then they were something to behold.

  She pressed a button on her wristband, summoning this job's expert. She hated the experts. They were self-important little people who often felt slighted by not being included in some Scholars Exploration expedition.

  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.

  Zeigler 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 had 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'd stepped inside.

  He shook himself, then took a deep b
reath. “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 they actually hurt 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'd 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 it 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 precis and listened to his detractors as well as his supporters. She'd 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.

  “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 talks 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 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 caverns, 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 hi
m 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, he might need reinforcements.

  This area was vast, something he hadn't realized when he'd taken 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 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.