Encrypted (42 page)

Everyone appeared busy.

Tikaya grabbed a lantern and slid bow and
quiver off the crate. She turned the flame down so it would not
make her a target as she ran, then slipped toward the back edge of
camp.

Someone shot one of the creatures in the
eye, and it toppled to the floor. A ragged cheer went up.

Tikaya eased around sacks of corn meal and
rice. A couple steps and she would be out of the camp. She resisted
the urge to hop the few couple obstacles and sprint for the wall.
That would likely draw someone’s eyes. Stealth would serve her
better.

“
The linguist is
escaping!” someone yelled.

So much for stealth.

She bolted. Her boot caught on the uneven
ground, and she slammed to her knees even as a shot fired over her
head. They would rather shoot her than let her escape back to the
others?

Gulping, she leaped to her feet and sprinted
to the wall, lantern and bow banging against her legs with every
step. That was the first time her clumsiness had saved her life—she
could not count on it happening again.

Tikaya plunged into the darkness, using the
blurry crimson runes as a guide. She reached the wall and stood to
the side, not wanting to be silhouetted against them for the
shooters.

Footsteps hammered the floor behind her.

She jabbed the symbol that opened the
cabinet, but nothing happened. Growling, she slowed her movements
and added a rotation. The cabinet popped open.

The footsteps neared. Lancecrest. She didn’t
have enough time.

Then a black shape blurred in from the side,
crashing into him. The remaining beast.

Lancecrest yelled and flung his arms up.

As soon as it finished him, it would be on
her. Tikaya pulled out a cube, praying it would not activate while
she held it. Arms laden, she started toward the tunnel.

“
Over here, you ugly
pisser!” someone cried and a psi wave pulsed through the
air.

It struck the creature full on, hurling it
twenty feet. The edge of the wave caught Tikaya and smashed her
against the wall.

Lancecrest patted the floor for his rifle.
His men poured out of the camp and moved to surround the creature.
And her.

She sprinted for the tunnel.

An arrow clipped Tikaya’s sleeve and
shattered against the wall. Fear surged through her, and she ran
faster.

Someone conjured a yellow orb of light, and
it spun her direction, illuminating her, making her an easier
target.

“
Stop!” A man pointed a
pistol as he ran at her, his face a rictus of
determination.

She had to keep going, hope his aim was
poor.

A shot fired, and Tikaya dove, knowing it
would not be fast enough. But no blast of pain came. The man’s
musket hit the floor with a clatter, and he collapsed a heartbeat
later. Tikaya scrambled into a crouch and squinted into the gloom
behind him. A tall blurry figure in Turgonian black stood in a
tunnel entrance on the far side of the cavern. Rias?

She stepped that direction, but he waved her
toward her closer tunnel.

“
Starcrest!” Lancecrest
fired his rifle.

Rias flew back with a grunt. Tikaya gaped.
It looked like he had been hit, but, curse her eyes, she could not
tell. He ducked back into the tunnel. Lancecrest raced after
him.

Tikaya took a step that direction, but an
explosion roared, and the ground heaved. She was thrown onto her
side, and the lantern flew from her grip. The cavern filled with
confused yells and cries of pain.

A stalactite plunged to the floor where it
shattered and hurled shards everywhere. A second explosion ripped
through the earth. A sinkhole opened up in the floor, and rock
poured in like water over a fall.

Tikaya scrambled for the nearby tunnel,
hoping the alien walls would hold up better than the cavern. She
had no idea where the lantern had gone. Even as the floor pitched,
she clutched the cube and the bow, determined not to lose anything
else.

Blackness smothered the tunnel. Three steps
in, another concussion boomed, hurling her against a wall. Her
breath whooshed out with a pained grunt. The bow and cube flew from
her hands. She crumpled to the floor and barely had the presence of
mind to curl into a ball with her hands protecting her head as
further booms rocked the tunnel.

Nearby, rock shattered and cracked like
gunfire. Tikaya cringed, expecting the ceiling to collapse at any
second. Finally, the explosions ended, but rubble continued to pelt
the floor. She kept waiting for rocks to hit her, but her tunnel
seemed secure. Secure, but dark. Lifting her head to peer about was
worthless since blackness pressed in from all sides. Worse, dust
clogged the air and invaded her throat. She coughed and wheezed as
fine particles smothered her tongue.

Distant, muffled yells made it to her ears,
but she could not pick out words. She shifted to get to her feet.
Her fingers bumped a hard edge. She jerked back. The cube. If ever
there was a mess, surely an earthquake—or whatever that had
been—qualified. She held her breath, expecting the cleaning device
to flare to life, for the orifice to glow red, the beam to lance
out.

But the cube remained inert.

Whatever the reason, she thanked her luck
and hunted for the bow. She found it wedged under a pile of rubble.
Rubble that blocked the mouth of the tunnel from floor to ceiling.
Cave-in.

She hoped there was another way back to the
cavern. And that she could find it in the dark.

Tikaya stood and started to brush herself
off, but a new concern made her freeze. How far did the cave-in
extend? What if it covered part, or all, of the cavern? And the
tunnels beyond? Her heart lurched. What if Rias or Parkonis had
been caught? She still didn’t know if Rias had been shot. Damn,
damn.

She clawed at the rubble, trying to dig a
hole. She had to get back in and check.

A minute later, her fingers were bleeding
and she had made no progress. Breath rasping in her ears, she
backed away. She would not get in that way. She needed to find
another way around. She needed to—

No. Tikaya wiped sweat from her face and
forced herself to calm down, to think. Rias would want her to
continue with the mission, not tear off, hunting for him. For all
she knew, he might have set this all up. She remembered the
clinking. Had the marines been crawling around in passages beneath
the floor, placing blasting sticks?

She turned around and felt her way along the
wall, trying not to feel guilty for walking away from Parkonis and
Rias. She had to ensure those weapons were destroyed, and she could
not assume the cave-in had done that. In fact, she would be shocked
if it had.

The darkness made the trek feel longer, but
she doubted she had walked far before she came to a four-way
intersection labeled with glowing runes. Three possible directions,
three labs. Biology, alchemy, and... She touched the last one, a
new combination of symbols. Mechanical? That sounded promising, but
she ought to let Rias know which way she had gone. She dropped her
hand and snorted because her bloody fingers had already smeared a
sign on the runes.

She padded down the hall. A door whispered
open, and she stepped onto a landing. She expected darkness inside,
but low blue lighting pulsed from the walls. Some kind of backup
illumination, perhaps.

This lab was larger than others she had
visited and had an upper level as well as a lower. She chose the
upper, less out of any notion of what she might need, but because
it would not be immediately visible to someone walking in.

Upstairs, blurry cabinets lined the walls
and high stations dominated the center. She had to wander close for
the edges to sharpen. They reminded her more of woodworking benches
than alchemy stations. Intricate black tools she could not identify
were mounted to the table tops and hung from the ceilings on
articulating arms. Rias would probably be fascinated by them.

Her gut twisted with concern at the thought
of him, but she forced herself to focus on the one thing she could
accomplish here. She dug her notes, the sphere, and a pencil out of
her pocket.

Tikaya put more obstacles between herself
and the landing before stopping at a countertop that was not too
high for her purposes. She thumbed the sphere on and identified the
rest of the numbers from the door pad. More primes, but not the
first sixteen as she had guessed. The sequence skipped a few:
three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen, nineteen,
twenty-three, twenty-nine, thirty-one, thirty-seven, forty-one,
forty-three, sixty-one, sixty-seven, and seventy-three.

“
All right, Rias,” she
muttered. “Where are you? I’ve translated them and done my half.”
As soon as the words came out, she snorted at herself. Yes, they
made a good team, but she
had
done this sort of thing before she met
him.

There had to be some significance in the
missing prime numbers. Maybe these were the first sixteen that
could be turned into a combination that allowed one particular
thing. She drew a bunch of four by four boxes, mimicking the layout
on the door pad, and scribbled the numbers in. Four rows, four
columns, sixteen numbers. She added and multiplied. She looked for
patterns.

The door hissed open.

Rias? Tikaya lifted her head and almost
called out, but could not see the landing and caught herself before
she could give away her position. She waited for the sound of
footfalls, thinking she might be able to identify his tread, but
there was no sound at all.

The door hissed shut.

Quietly, oh so quietly, Tikaya picked up her
work. It was possible someone had looked in, not seen anything
interesting, and left, but she doubted it. That cursed assassin was
the only one who walked without making a sound, and she had no idea
what his intentions might be for her, especially now that she had,
from the Turgonian viewpoint, escaped with the enemy. And if Rias
had run off, too, Sicarius would know he had no intention of
accepting the emperor’s offer.

Tikaya twisted the symbols to open a couple
of cabinets beneath a nearby workstation. One was empty enough she
thought she could fit inside.

She stuffed the cube in one cabinet and
knelt before the larger one. Careful not to make a sound, she slid
boxes and tools out of the way. She could barely breathe, but she
fit.

She pulled the door most of the way shut.
Since the cabinets had to be opened with a turn of the symbols, she
assumed she could not get out if she locked herself in. Terrifying
thought that. No one would ever find her, and the cabinet would be
her tomb. The assassin might spot the door slightly ajar, but she
had to risk it.

Silence reigned in the lab. Tikaya could
hear her heart beating in her ears, her shallow breathing. The
awkward position cramped her diaphragm. Minutes dragged past.

She closed her eyes and rearranged digits in
her head. The four-by-four box reminded her of a Skiltar Square,
those puzzles where the goal was to arrange the numbers so that
every column, row, and diagonal added up to the same sum. It seemed
unlikely an alien race would have the same math games, but she
rearranged and totaled the digits in her head anyway, seeing if she
could find a combination that worked from all sides. It surprised
her when she found an arrangement where each option added up to one
hundred twenty. Could that be the way into the weapons cache?

Her fingers tingled with excitement. Or
maybe numbness from sitting scrunched up in a cabinet. Her tailbone
ached. She longed to crawl out and check her math with pencil and
paper. Maybe Sicarius had left, or had never been there to start
with.

Tikaya lifted her hand to the door, about to
push it open. Then someone glided past the crack.

Black clothing, blond hair.

She held her breath and closed her eyes, as
if the assassin might feel her stare through the crack. He had
sensed the clairvoyant watching him, after all.

A minute later, the door hissed again, and
she spilled out of the cabinet. Sitting on the floor beneath the
pulsing blue light, she checked her math with pencil and paper.
Every row, every column, and even the diagonals added up to one
hundred and twenty. Maybe it meant nothing. Or maybe it was the
solution to the puzzle.

She hopped to her feet, longing to go check
it, but thanks to the cave-in she was not sure how to get back to
the cavern.

The door hissed again. Tikaya cursed to
herself. Now what?

Footsteps sounded on the landing. She
reached for the cabinet door, ready to hide again.

“
Tikaya?” Rias.

Relief swarmed her. “Up here!”

She skirted the workstations and almost
crashed into him at the top of the stairs. He wore his rucksack and
carried a rifle, but he managed to envelop her in a fierce hug. She
clamped onto him just as fiercely, burying her face in his neck. He
smelled of black powder and blood, but it didn’t matter.

“
You came for me,” she
whispered.

“
Of course.”

“
The explosions... I was
afraid you were...”

“
Me too,” he said, voice
hoarse. “I feared you’d been caught in that cave-in. Bocrest was
too quick to light the charges. He was supposed to wait until—it
doesn’t matter now. If I’ve succeeded, they think the weapons are
buried and I’m dead.”

She lifted her arms, intending to hook them
over his shoulders, but her fingers encountered dampness. A torn
section of uniform wrapped his biceps like a bandage. She drew
back, staring at blood on her hand.

“
You’re
wounded!”

“
Lancecrest got lucky.”
Rias twitched a shoulder. “It’s just a scrape. It’ll be fine.
Besides, it was worth it. He was carrying something you might find
useful.” He unbuttoned a pocket, withdrew her spectacles, and
draped them over her ears.