Encrypted (3 page)

A hatch thudded open, catching her trying
yet another greeting. Boots rang on the ladder, and a pair of
marines strode toward her.

“
Don’t poke the grimbal,
girl.” The tall man in the lead jerked a nose sharper than
Herdoctan potsherds at the opposite cell.

“
Grimbal?” Tikaya
frowned.

“
Giant shaggy predators up
on our northern frontier. They’re probably the most irritable
beasts in the empire, and they’ll sink their teeth into you if you
get anywhere near their territory.”

Tikaya stopped herself from saying she had
heard of the creature and the expression—if she hoped to deny she
was their cryptomancer, she ought not appear too worldly. It was
curiosity about the other prisoner that had prompted her query. Her
shoulders, and her hope of denying anything, slumped when the
second marine drew close enough for her to identify without her
spectacles: the man from the cane fields. No doubt he had arranged
her capture when she failed to convince him she was no one of
consequence.

She squinted to read the name sewn on his
jacket: Agarik. He stood, hands clasped behind his back, watching
the other marine, his superior, she assumed, though she did not
know what ranks the pins on their collars denoted.

“
How’re the
accommodations, Five?” The speaker—his jacket read Ottotark—rapped
a baton against the mystery prisoner’s gate. “A lot better than
what you’re used to of late, eh?”

There was no response, not even a tinkle of
chains rattling. Despite the silence, Ottotark chuckled at his own
wit. He turned his attention to Tikaya and when his gaze lingered
on her breasts, she forced herself not to step back.

“
Where is my brother?” she
asked. “Is he...”

“
We left him in the
distillery,” Agarik said. “He’s alive.”

“
Thank you,” she murmured,
hoping she could trust his word.

“
So, the source of so many
of our troubles. A woman.” Ottotark shook his head. “Seems strange
you’d be involved in military matters.”

Tikaya bit back a response about how it was
hard to remain uninvolved when invaders were trying to take over
one’s whole island chain.

“
I reckon you just sat in
an office on a beach,” Ottotark continued, “and someone brought our
messages to you. Is that how it worked?” The lamplight glinting off
Ottotark’s dark eyes did nothing to warm them, and a challenge
hardened his voice. He resented her. Every Turgonian she
encountered probably would.

She lifted her chin. “What are you going to
do with me?”

“
For the trouble you
caused us? We’re going to kill you, of course.”

Tikaya swallowed, or tried to. Her throat
constricted, and her mouth was too dry.

“
Sergeant...” Agarik
frowned at the other man.

Ottotark bent over, hands on his knees, and
laughed. The raucous noise echoed from the metal bulkheads. “I
jest—we’re not killing you. Not now anyway. We need you to
translate something for us first.”

Tikaya barely kept from
snorting. After what the Turgonians had done to her
people—to
her
—she
would not even help them tie their shoes.

Ottotark fished a keychain out of his
pocket. “Time for you to visit the captain.”

While Ottotark unlocked the door, Agarik
slipped Tikaya’s spectacles through the gate. She blinked in
surprise and met his gaze as she accepted them. Nothing so friendly
as a wink or a smile suggested she had a secret ally, but he seemed
someone who treated people, even prisoners, with respect.

She had barely hooked the spectacles over
her ears when Ottotark grabbed her upper arm and jerked her into
the corridor so she fell against him. The amusement on his face,
however crude, was gone now. He grabbed her breast, even as his
other arm snaked around her waist to keep her jammed against
him.

Tikaya shoved a hand against his chest and
tried to thrust a knee into his groin, but his strong embrace left
no space to maneuver.

His lips curled into a snarl. “We may need
you, but you deserve a lot of pain for the deaths you caused.”

Ottotark’s fingers gouged her breast, and
she gritted her teeth at the pain, determined not to gasp or cry
out, though fear surged through her body. She craned her neck
toward Agarik, hoping he might step in. Though his clenched jaw
made tendons bulge on his neck, he made no move against his
superior.

“
What’s the matter with
your sergeant, Corporal Agarik?” a deep voice spoke from the other
cell. Though quiet, it cut through Ottotark’s angry lust, and he
jumped, relaxing his grip. “Doesn’t he know the Kyattese are
sorcerers as well as scholars? In another second, she’ll probably
cast a spell to shrivel his testicles into wrinkled, rotten
walnuts.”

Ottotark frowned into the cell. “Nobody
wants to hear you speak, Five.” Still, he released Tikaya, shoving
her toward the corporal.

Agarik was gaping at the dim cell, but he
recovered enough to take her arm. Under his firm, professional
grip, the heartbeats hammering in her ears slowed.

Tikaya watched over her shoulder as the
guards led her away, but the unseen man did not speak again. The
trek took her up to the main deck, where they marched past two long
rows of cannons. The sharp tang of gun oil competed with the briny
scent of the ocean roaring past beneath them. She peered through an
open cannon port, hoping to glimpse her islands. If they had not
sailed too far, maybe she could escape to a lifeboat—if the
Turgonians had lifeboats. With that warmongering culture, one never
knew. They had idiotic notions about glory in dying a warrior’s
death, so they might condemn their men to go down with the
vessel.

Dozens of marines occupied the deck, some
sparring in a makeshift arena in the middle and some cleaning
rifles, pistols, and cutlasses at tables folded down from the wall
space between the massive guns. The men slanted her looks ranging
from openmouthed bewilderment to sneering hostility, by which she
assumed some knew who she was and some were not in the need-to-know
camp. The empire did not employ women in their armed forces, which
likely meant she was the only one on board. Not a comforting
thought. More than one man arranged to bump or jostle her as paths
crossed. Unlike at home, everyone she passed was as tall or taller
than she, and their wayward elbows and shoulders battered her with
the force of falling coconuts.

Past the galley, aft deck, the loitering
marines thinned. Tikaya’s guards stopped her in front of a
whitewashed door. A bronze sword-shaped name plaque read: Captain
Bocrest.

Sergeant Ottotark thumped his baton against
the wood planks, eliciting a barked, “Enter.”

Inside, a bare-chested man performed pushups
on a polar bear rug stretched before a desk. Though his short hair
ran the same color as the plethora of steel comprising the ship,
the defined muscles of his broad torso promised him hale. Arms like
pistons in a steam engine, he pumped through another fifty pushups,
while Tikaya stood and waited. The space was large, as one would
expect of the captain’s cabin, but spartan with nothing so
frivolous as curtains for the portholes or cloth for the dining
table.

The captain finished his pushups, jumped to
his feet, and faced Tikaya. Her eyes were level with his nose, but
he probably weighed sixty pounds more than she.

“
Dismissed,” he told the
guards without looking away from her.

Evidently, he was not worried about her
walnut-ifying his balls. He was probably not worried about much.
The collection of dented and scratched daggers, swords, pistols,
crossbows, and rifles on the wall beside his desk did not appear
decorative.

“
Sit.” The captain jerked
his thumb toward an uncomfortable-looking wood stool and strode
around the desk to his own chair.

Tikaya wanted to cross her arms and stare
defiantly, but suspected he would force her into complying. And,
like Sergeant Pissed and Horny, he might like it. She perched on
the edge of the seat.

“
Tikaya Komitopis.” He
gripped the sides of his desk, his eyes intent. “Daughter of Loilon
and Mela. Three siblings. You grew up on your parents’ plantation
and showed a gift for languages at a young age. You studied them at
your university where you went on to teach for four years until the
Western Sea Conflict, which involved your island. Your people chose
to fight against—”

“
Against becoming slaves
to Turgonia, like everyone else you’ve conquered in the last seven
hundred years.”

“—
Turgonia,” he continued
as if he had not heard her. “You were recruited by your government
to break our ciphers, which, despite having no background in
cryptography, you did. Repeatedly. And then your people handed our
decrypted messages to our enemies.” His eyes narrowed, his knuckles
whitened where he clenched the desk. Powerful arm and chest muscles
twitched beneath his bare bronze skin. “You cost us our victory.
Your dishonorable tactics forced us into a stalemate with those
cursed Nurians, and we ended up losing tens of thousands of men for
terms no better than we started with. Is there anything pertinent
that I don’t know about you?”

“
I like coconut shrimp and
my favorite color is blue.” Antagonizing him was probably stupid,
but she would rather burn her favorite books than ingratiate
herself with these people.

His eyes narrowed further. “We were
researching you in order to identify and kill you for your crimes
against the empire, but there’s been...an incident. We need
something translated and our languages experts are taking too much
time.”

That probably meant they were stupefied and
stumped. How desperate did the empire have to be to ask a foreigner
for help?

“
Time?” Tikaya
asked.

“
There isn’t much of it.”
He unlocked a drawer and withdrew the paper she had already seen
along with two rubbings.

He laid them on the desk, and she started to
lean forward, despite her intent to remain aloof. She caught
herself and forced herself to sit back. Yes, the symbols interested
her, but what could she do without the reference texts in the
Polytechnic? Even at home, she would likely be stymied if nothing
like the Tekdar Tablet existed: a bilingual source that said the
same thing in two languages, one already known.

“
Why is time a factor?”
she asked.

“
You don’t need to
know.”

“
Where did the symbols
come from?”

“
You don’t need to
know.”

She tamped down
irritation. “Is it ciphertext? Or a language?” She lifted her hand.
“And, yes, I
do
need to know that.”

“
We believe it’s a
language. An ancient language. We need you to decipher it and
compile a dictionary. Our team can handle the rest.”

She snorted, both at the idea of being able
to simply look at these rubbings and produce a dictionary and
because she would not hand anything to their ‘team’ even if she
could. “You mean your people can take my work, hide it from the
rest of the world, and keep whatever knowledge it affords you to
yourselves.”

“
That’s none of your
concern,” he bit out, fingers still rigid where they gripped the
table.

“
If you’re not going to
tell me anything, then I’ll have to guess. I figure you’ve found
some ancient ruins guarding some fabled treasure and you’ve gotten
your people in trouble trying to extricate the goods without
knowing who or what you’re dealing with. You need to know what the
writing says so you can get at whatever it is you’re after, hoard
it from the rest of the world, and no doubt shoot the foreign
translator who helped you. You people are—”

The captain leapt around the desk so quickly
she did not have time to brace herself. He grabbed her by the neck
and thrust her against the wall. Swords and pistols clattered to
the deck. Her feet dangled above them, and she grabbed his bare
forearms, scrabbling to loosen his grip.

She gasped, tried to suck in air. His
fingers dug deeper into her windpipe. Though a rational part of her
mind said they needed her and would not seriously damage her, pain
and terror pumped uncertainty through her heart.

“
Everyone on this ship
wants you dead,” the captain growled, breath hot against her cheek,
chest heaving with rage, “and I’d like nothing more than to snap
your neck right now.”

Tikaya barely heard him. She clawed at his
wrists and wheezed for air.

Idiot, she cursed herself. Why had she
goaded him? She knew what they were, what atrocities they had
committed during the war. Blackness encroached on her vision.

“
But my orders say to get
that language translated, and you
will
do exactly that. We know where
your family lives. If you don’t help, your parents and your
siblings will be sacrificed. Your help or their lives. You
choose.”

The captain dropped her abruptly, and she
collapsed before she could get her feet under her. She bit her lip,
and blood tainted her mouth. He hauled her to her feet, his hand
digging bruises into her arm. He took the papers, smashed them into
her palm, and shoved her so hard she crashed into the door,
cracking her shoulder against the unyielding metal. Tears stung her
eyes, and she dashed them away. She would never let these people
see her cry.

He pushed her aside to open the door. “Get
out of my office.”