Part Two — The Keys · The Threnody
Chapter Nine
Ke'Thara — Present Day
Ke'Thara was a water world with two moons, and the moons never agreed.
Data had briefed them in the lounge while the Enterprise slid into orbit. The larger moon pulled one way, the smaller another, and twice a day the two tides met over a shallow lagoon in the Orsak Deep and drained it nearly dry. In the ninety minutes before each slack water, a reef the size of a small city lay open to the sky. No one lived on it. The fishing settlements were two hundred kilometers south. The reef was called the Hollow because, at low water, you could see that it was hollow.
"Coral," Geordi had said, studying the scan. "Grown over something. A lot of something."
"A city," Data said. "Or the foundation of one. The structure beneath the coral is not natural. The coral has been growing on it for, I estimate, between thirty and forty thousand years."
"The same age as the chamber," Vash said.
"Yes."
Now, at the lip of the lagoon, Vash stood in a wetsuit on the deck of a survey skimmer and looked at what forty thousand years had made of a drowned city.
It was beautiful. She hadn't expected that. The reef rose out of the shallows in great pale terraces, blue and ivory and a soft bruise-purple where the bioluminescence had begun to wake, and through the coral she could see the bones of something older. Arches. Stairways that climbed nowhere. A row of columns standing in the water like the ribs of a giant, each one wrapped in living color, each one carved, under the growth, with the same looping line.
"Captain," she said into her collar. "We're at the lagoon."
"Understood." Picard's voice came crisp and small from the Enterprise's bridge, eleven thousand kilometers up. "I remind you that Commander Worf and Mr. Hale are to remain within ten meters of you at all times."
"I'll remember."
"I have very little confidence in that."
"Your confidence is noted." She grinned behind her mask. "Out."
She had insisted on leading this one. Picard had let her, which she had expected to feel like a victory and instead felt like a weight. He had not argued. He had simply nodded and said that her instincts had served this investigation better than any procedure so far, and that he would be on the bridge if she needed him. It was a very Picard thing to do. It was more trust than he had shown her in a very long time, and she was trying not to think about why.
Behind her, Tobin was checking the dive rig's seals with the patience of a man who had drowned once, long ago, and planned never to do it again. Worf had already gone over the side and was hanging in the water with the expression of a man who regarded the sea as a fairly personal adversary. Dara sat on the gunwale, running one gloved hand slowly down the edge of her own mask.
"You all right?" Vash asked.
"Fine." Dara smiled. Her eyes were very bright. "I've wanted to see this place since Data said the name."
"Why?"
"It sounds like a word I already knew."
Vash looked at her a moment longer. Then she pulled down her mask and dropped backward into the water.
The cold hit her first, then the quiet. Then the light.
The coral was awake beneath the surface. Every branch and fan and column glowed, faint and green-gold, and the glow moved, rippling along the structures in slow waves as if the whole reef were breathing. Schools of tiny silver fish turned in it like smoke. Below, where the shallows fell away, the old city opened into a long, broad channel of drowned avenues, and the water in them was absolutely clear.
"Seventeen meters to the first terrace," Tobin said over the comm. His voice was thin and careful. "Current's mild. Tide's ebbing. We have, per the skimmer's clock, seventy-four minutes to slack."
"Why does slack matter?" Worf's voice, flat and dry. He had drifted up beside her, phaser sealed in a waterproof holster, looking unimpressed by the entire ocean.
"Because the door is tidal," Dara said.
They all turned. She floated a little above them, her breath coming in slow silver bubbles, one hand resting on a column.
"There's a line of glyphs carved at the base of the first terrace. I read them from the surface, in the scan. They're very simple." Her voice had taken on the quiet, careful cadence she used when she was translating. "When the water is level, the door will be level. When the water is level, the keeper will rest. I think it's a timing instruction. The entrance opens at slack water, for about fourteen minutes, and closes again when the tide turns."
"Fourteen minutes," Vash said.
"I could be wrong about the duration. The verb's unfamiliar."
"What happens if we're inside when it closes?"
Dara hesitated. "I don't know."
"Wonderful." Vash kicked forward. "Seventy-four minutes. Let's not waste them."
Aboard the Enterprise, eleven thousand kilometers up, Picard had not sat down since the team went over the side.
He stood at the tactical rail with his hands behind him and watched four small green points move across the Hollow's schematic, descending in a loose diamond through the glow of the coral. Data had patched the skimmer's relay into the main display. The depth read-out ticked off in meters. Beside it ran a second figure, in red: slack water, 41 minutes.
"She's good at this," Riker said, at his shoulder.
"Yes."
"She's better than good. I read the file. The Hadrel Vault, the Sunken Archive at Tessen, the cistern on Orrin Four." Riker kept his eyes on the display. "I'm told she once talked her way out of a Klingon customs hold using a recipe for plum wine."
"It was a very good recipe."
"You know it?"
"I was present." Picard did not look round. "It was on Risa, the week we met."
Riker nodded slowly. He was quiet for about as long as it took the lead point to drop two more meters, which, for Riker, was a long time. Then he said, in the tone of a man stepping carefully onto ice, "Sir. May I say something that's none of my business?"
"You will in any case."
"You're pacing."
"I am standing."
"You have been standing in a distinctly pacing sort of way for forty minutes." Riker's mouth twitched. "I'm not questioning your decision. Letting a civilian lead the away team was the right call. She's the only one who's read a site like this. I just wanted to ask whether you know why you made it."
Troi, from the command chair, turned her head. She did not speak. She had a way of saying nothing that was an eloquent act in itself.
"I made it," Picard said, slowly, "because since Doria Minor I have decided what we do next on six occasions, and been correct on two. She has advised on five and been right on all of them. It seemed a matter of simple arithmetic."
"That's a good reason."
"Yes."
"Is it the whole reason?"
He considered not answering. Then, because it was Riker, and because there was a long and well-tested habit between them of telling the truth in lowered voices, he said, "I find that I would like, for a little while, to be a person who does not have to be right. It is a restful thing. I had forgotten."
"She's going to fall in love with that sentence," Troi said, from the chair.
"She is not going to hear it."
"No," Troi agreed. "I imagine not."
Riker grinned and had the sense, for once, to say nothing further.
On the display, the green points had reached the base of the first terrace. Data, at the science station, raised his head.
"Captain. I have a return from the lagoon floor that I cannot identify. It is metallic, approximately thirty centimeters across, moored to the seabed by a line. It does not match any natural structure." A pause. "It is also transmitting."
Picard went still.
"On what band?"
"A commercial subspace frequency. Low power." Data's head tilted. "I would estimate it has been transmitting for sixteen days."
"Inform Vash," Picard said. "Tell her to look for it."
"She has acknowledged," said Data, after a moment. "She says she will."
"Of course she will."
The first terrace was a shelf of coral-crusted stone fifteen meters across, and at its base, exactly as Dara had said, a band of glyphs ran along the wall like a line of writing on a page. Vash brushed the silt from them with her glove. They were beautiful, cut with terrible precision, looping and returning in the same pattern as the plinth.
"Copy them," she said.
Dara had already drawn a waterproof slate from her belt. She wrote in fast, small strokes, one gloved finger steadying the slate against the current, and as she worked Vash noticed something. The slate's writing surface was a plain sheet of matte polymer. There was no paper, no bound notebook, no pencil. For the first time in four years, Dara was taking notes on something that would wash clean.
She'd left the notebook on the skimmer.
Vash filed it, in the place where she filed things she didn't want to examine, and moved on.
They followed the channel downward into the old city. The water grew colder. The glow of the coral thinned, and the structures on either side grew larger and starker, wall after wall of pale stone rising out of the dark, stripped of growth here by some current or some quality of the stone itself. The glyphs multiplied. Vash saw them on lintels and on the undersides of arches, a language she could not read, written in a hand she had come to recognize the way a person recognizes handwriting on an old letter.
"Thirty meters," Tobin said. "Six minutes to slack. There's something ahead. A structure. About sixty meters across, closed on all sides. Sitting at the bottom of the channel like a stopper."
"That's it," Dara whispered.
It was. Vash saw it as they swam out of the last avenue. A low dome of black stone, smooth as a bowl, hung with no coral at all, as if nothing living had been willing to touch it. A single round door stood in its side. It was closed.
And beside it, bright against the dark stone, floated a neat yellow buoy.
It was a survey marker, the kind used by a half-dozen commercial brokerages in the sector. A weighted float on a line, with a bright patch on its side. Vash kicked over to it and turned it gently in her hands. The patch carried a stylized coin inside a circle.
The Vantir Trade Consortium's seal.
"Captain," she said quietly. "We have company. Or we had some."
"Report."
"A claim buoy. Very fresh. The seal's unweathered." She ran her glove over the float's base, where the line met a neat aluminum ring stamped with a date. "Sixteen days ago."
"Before the chamber," Picard said.
"Sixteen days before I cut into the wall on Doria Minor." Vash found she was gripping the float hard enough to make her knuckles ache. "They weren't following us, Jean-Luc. They were ahead of us. They were here."
"Commander Worf," Picard said. "Report."
"I find no vessels and no divers within scanning range." Worf's voice sounded grim. "I also find cut marks on the door's frame. Fresh. Someone has been working at the seal."
Vash kicked over to the door and saw it. A thin, clean, silver groove around the rim, the mark of a laser cutter that had tried for an hour and given up. The stone hadn't even scorched. Whatever this was made of, a commercial cutter had been no more than an insult to it.
"They couldn't get in," Dara said, very softly.
"They weren't patient enough." Vash touched the silvery line. "The door opens at slack. Nobody told them that."
"Or nobody could," Worf said.
The water had changed. She felt it on her skin before she understood it, a slow pull, like the first breath of a change in weather. The current in the channel had slackened. The coral's glow faltered, brightened, and faltered again. Tobin said something on the comm about the clock, and then the word slack.
Dara was already at the door. She put her bare palm flat against the stone.
Bare.
Vash saw the glove floating free beside her, drifting away on the water like a dropped flag, and did not say a word.
For a moment nothing happened. Then something very deep and very old moved in the dome, a soft and enormous sound, felt more than heard, like a great hinge turning in the dark. The round door shivered. A seam of light appeared down its center, the pale green-gold of the coral, widening slowly as the stone drew back into the wall.
Beyond it, a passage ran down into the dome, straight and narrow and lit from within.
"Fourteen minutes," Dara said. She sounded very calm. She sounded, Vash thought, like someone reading aloud from a book she had read a hundred times. "We should go."
"Captain," Vash said. "We're opening it."
"I would prefer that you wait for—"
"I can't, Jean-Luc. The door's open." She looked down the lit passage and felt the cold settle under her ribs. "And there's something else. The tide's turning, and the cut marks on the frame aren't the only fresh thing. There's another set of tracks in the silt, leading in."
A beat of silence on the comm. Then Picard's voice, very level. "How many?"
"Two sets. Both boots. Neither one's ours."
She looked at Worf. Worf looked at the passage, and at the slow, green-gold light inside it, and drew his phaser from its sealed holster.
"Then someone," Worf said, "has already gone in."