Chapter Ten

Ke'Thara — Present Day

---

The comm died at ten meters.

Vash had expected that. The dome's black stone swallowed signal the way the old rock on Doria Minor had, and the last thing Picard's voice managed before it frayed into static was a single clipped Vash, wait, which she chose to hear as encouragement. Then it was only the four of them and the sound of their own breathing, and the passage.

Worf went first through the door, because Worf went first through everything, and she followed with her lamp held low. The round door closed behind her at the pace of a slow breath. Tobin, last in, turned to look at it, and she heard him swallow over the link.

"It's fourteen minutes, Tobin. It opens again when the tide turns."

"I know. I read the glyphs." A pause. "I've never liked being behind a closed door I can't open myself."

"Nobody has."

"Some people do. They're the kind who end up in charge."

It ran straight down, forty meters long and three wide, cut through the dome's black skin into a dimness lit from no source she could see. The walls were smooth. The floor was smooth. Every surface had been worked, like the chamber on Doria Minor, by someone whose care had never flagged. The water was cold and completely clear. It pushed against her chest in a slow, steady draw, the sea moving in or out of the dome with the tide.

"Current's reversing," Tobin said. His voice reached her through the short-range link, tinny but clear. "Slack in four minutes. Door's supposed to close fourteen minutes after it opened. We've used three."

"Eleven left. Worf, take point."

"I prefer it." Worf went ahead, one gloved hand trailing along the wall. He had drawn the phaser and held it low. He said nothing more, and Vash found she was grateful.

The passage bent once, slightly, and opened into an antechamber. A round room, ten meters across, with a ceiling too high for the lamps. Along its far wall, seven arches stood in a row like a colonnade in a cloister, each a different height, each carved on its lintel with a single glyph. Between the arches lay only water and dark.

And a man's body, caught against the third arch, hanging face-down in the current with his arms spread.

Vash stopped.

"Dead," Worf said, after a moment. He had turned the body gently. A young man, in a Consortium-issue dive rig, eyes open, mouth slightly parted, his rebreather mask half torn away. "Some hours. Twelve, perhaps. He drowned."

"Trapped." Vash's voice came out thin. She kicked closer and saw it then: the third arch's right pillar had a long, narrow slot in its base, and from it projected the edge of a stone plate, as wide as a door and as thick as her forearm. The plate was drawn back now, flush with the pillar. But the dead man's gear bore a fresh dent down one side, in the exact shape of the plate's edge.

"It closed on him," Dara said.

"Gates." Tobin had come up behind them, scanner in hand. "Seven arches, seven gates. Each one slides across when the tide's slack, and it doesn't open again until—" He stopped. He looked at the scanner and then at Vash. "I don't know, actually. Until someone does something."

"What did he do wrong?"

"Nothing," Dara said quietly. "Or everything. He did not know what to do at all."

Vash turned. Dara floated at the room's center, looking up at the seven arches with her head slightly tilted. The glyphs on the lintels were simple. Vash could see that. Seven shapes, each a line that curled and returned, each slightly different in the angle of its curl. And beneath them, cut into the floor in a wide ring around the room, an enormous version of the same pattern.

"It's a score," Dara said. "Seven phrases. The arches are..." She searched for the word. "They're listening. They want the phrase before they'll let you through."

"Listening for what?"

Dara didn't answer. She drew a slow breath through her regulator, and Vash saw her shoulders settle, the way a singer's did, and then she began to hum.

It was a low sound, barely audible through the water, rising and falling over a handful of notes. Vash heard it through her own helmet as a vibration against her skull. She knew it before she understood why. It was the tone. The exact faint, sustained note that had followed her across a dead world and a starship and into her sleep. Dara was humming it, pitch for pitch, with the ease of someone who had been hearing it for years.

The first arch lit.

It wasn't a flare. The carved glyph on its lintel simply brightened, green-gold, the same color as the reef, and the dark inside the arch thinned and became passable. The second lit, then the third. Dara went on humming, her voice moving up a step, then down, and the arches answered one by one, each in its own turn, until the whole colonnade stood open and luminous in the water.

Nobody spoke.

"Dara," Vash said.

"I know." Dara's voice was very steady. "I've had a full day of listening to that note. I have a musician's ear, and I ran it through my head until it stuck. I wasn't sure it would work." She turned, and her face through the mask was pale and strange and, Vash saw with a small cold shock, radiantly happy. "I think it wants us to come in."

---

They went through in pairs. Vash and Dara first, then Tobin and Worf, each arch rising as they passed, each sliding silently back into its slot behind them. Worf took the dead man's hands and eased them into his own belt, without a word, without asking, and towed the body after them.

"We will not leave him," he said.

"I wasn't going to ask you to."

"I know."

At the fourth arch, Vash heard Tobin's breathing change.

It was a minor thing. She wouldn't have caught it on the open channel. But the link between their helmets was a narrow one, and every sound on it was close, and the long slow rhythm she had come to know over four years of dives and digs had gone short and quick, like a runner's at the end of a race. She slowed her kick and let him come level.

"Tobin."

"I'm all right."

"You're not."

"I'm working on it." A thin laugh, very dry. "It's the door. I keep thinking about the door. It shut behind us, and it's going to stay shut for twelve hours, and I read the tide tables, Vash, I did the math twice, and I know it's fine, and I still keep..." He stopped. His faceplate was fogging at the edges. "I told you once I drowned. When I was nineteen. In a flooded quarry on Mars."

"You told me you almost drowned."

"I told you what I tell people." His voice was low. "I was under for eleven minutes. A girl on the crew dragged me out by the harness. She did compressions until her hands bled. They said the cold saved me." A long breath. "I don't remember it. That's the thing. I don't remember being dead. But I've never liked a door I couldn't open myself."

Vash didn't say it's all right. She had learned that lesson from Renata, in a cold tent in a cold country twenty years ago. A person in the middle of a fear did not want to be told it was small.

"You've been coming down every shaft with me for four years," she said instead. "Every cistern. Every flooded crypt. You've never once said."

"I wasn't going to be the one who held up the dig."

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."

"I know." She heard him laugh, a real one, thin and shaky. "I'm a very stupid man. It's why you hired me."

"Tobin."

"Yes?"

"I'm going to stay next to you for the rest of this. If you freeze, I'll wait. If you panic, I'll hold your harness. If you can't go on, we'll turn around, and I'll explain to Dara why I've failed a gate." She kept her voice level. "That isn't a promise I make to many people."

"I know it isn't."

"Count with me," Worf said.

She had forgotten he was there. The Klingon had come up on Tobin's other side, silent as a shark, the dead man's weight draped easily across one shoulder. He didn't look at either of them. His eyes were on the arch ahead, calm, steady, and entirely without pity.

"Count with me," he said again. "Four seconds in. Four out. It is the breathing of the warrior before a charge. We do it in the dark, before the bat'leth. It does not remove fear. It places it where it can be used."

"I'm not a warrior, Commander."

"No. You are a man who has come into a dark place and is still moving. I have known very few who could claim it." A small pause. "In."

Tobin breathed in.

"Out."

The breath left him in a long ragged stream of silver bubbles. Then in again. Out again. By the fourth cycle the sound in Vash's ear had softened, deepened, and found its old slow rhythm. The arch ahead lit, and the three of them went through it side by side, and beyond it the next gate waited in the water like a held breath.

"Thank you," Tobin said, very low.

"There is nothing to thank me for," said Worf. "A man who counts is a man who lives. It is merely sense."

The fifth arch did not light.

Dara hummed the phrase. She hummed it again, a half-step higher. The lintel stayed dark, and the water in the arch stayed black and closed. Vash watched the seconds go on Tobin's wrist display, nine minutes, eight and a half, and felt the old cold sink in her own chest, the familiar dread of a door that has decided not to cooperate.

"I don't know this one," Dara said. Her voice had lost its calm. "It isn't in the lintel. The glyph's a variation I haven't seen."

"Then we look at the floor." Vash kicked down to the wide carved ring and swept silt from it with both hands. The ring was the score again, written out in full, seven phrases in a single continuous curve. She traced the fifth with her glove. It was the first phrase, exactly. Reversed.

"It's the opening turned backward," she said. "Same notes. Flip the order."

Dara stared at her. Then she laughed, once, startled, through the regulator, and sang the first phrase from its last note to its first.

The fifth arch lit.

"You read that faster than I did," Dara said.

"I read floors. It's the one thing I'm better at than you."

"It isn't the only thing." Dara smiled at her, warm and quick and real. For a moment she looked exactly like herself, and Vash felt the chill in her chest ease slightly. Then Dara turned and led them through, and the feeling went with her.

By the seventh arch the clock in Vash's head had dropped to six minutes. The water was growing turbulent. The turn was coming, and the dome seemed to feel it, a long deep tremor passing through the stone, as if something enormous were shifting its weight.

Beyond the last arch, the passage rose.

It climbed gently through the dome's interior, the floor sloping up beneath her, the water falling away until her head broke the surface and she was standing in a dry, round, low-ceilinged chamber lit by the same pale gold as the reef. The air smelled of wet stone and something faintly metallic. A bell of breathable air, sealed by water, hung in the center of the drowned dome like a bubble in a glass.

"Masks off," Tobin said, reading his scanner. "Breathable. Oxygen's a little thin. Good enough."

Vash pulled her mask down and took a breath. It tasted cold and ancient, like a cellar.

In the middle of the chamber, on a knee-high plinth carved from a single block of black stone, stood the Key.

She hadn't known what to expect. She had pictured an orb, perhaps, another dense dark sphere. This was nothing like that. It was a lattice, a framework of pale, slender rings, each one set inside the next, each one slightly tilted, so that the whole thing looked like a model of an atom or a gyroscope or the skeleton of a bell. It was about the size of a man's torso. It hung a hair's width above its plinth.

And down one side, from the top ring to the base, ran a long, clean, silver crack.

"Oh," Vash breathed.

"Do not move," said a voice from the shadows.

She froze. Worf's phaser came up in a single smooth motion. At the chamber's far edge, pressed back against the curving wall, a man stood in the dim gold light. He was young, barely thirty, in the same Consortium dive rig as the dead man, but his was in tatters, and his face was gray with exhaustion. He held a laser cutter in both shaking hands. The barrel was pointed at the Key.

"Don't come closer," he said. His voice cracked. "I'll do it again. I swear to God I'll do it again."

Vash looked at the crack in the lattice. Looked at the man. Looked at the dead diver floating beside Worf's shoulder, face turned to the water, and understood that the man with the cutter had been sitting in this bell of air for twelve hours with his friend's body drifting outside it, listening to a sound that wouldn't stop.

"Put it down," she said softly.

"I can't."

"You can."

"You don't understand," he said. "It won't stop singing."

The chamber gave another long, low shudder. Somewhere deep in the stone, something closed with a sound like a great door settling into its frame. Tobin looked at his scanner and went white.

"Vash," he said. "The clock's wrong. We've got four minutes, not six."