Part Two — The Keys · The Threnody
Chapter Fourteen
Cirrus Station — Present Day
"The contract had a condition," Kestrel said.
He said it to the floor. The lamp at his feet threw his shadow long and thin up the great sealed door behind him, where it lay across the seven carved rings like a crack.
"The advance was in two parts. Half on signing. Half on what they called proof of presence. The day I reached a site, I was to ping a location to the Recovery Office's relay. A single burst. Coordinates, time, a code." He shrugged, a short, hopeless movement. "It seemed like bookkeeping. I did it at Doria Minor, before you landed. I did it here. I sent it forty minutes after I docked."
Nobody spoke. Kessel, asleep on the floor, made a faint sound and turned his face into the wall.
"And?" Vash said.
"And the sound changed." He looked up. "I was sitting right here. I'd just thumbed the burst off. And the tone in this room, which had been low and steady for an hour, lifted. It sharpened. It sounded—" He stopped. He tried again. "You've been to a concert. You know the moment after a long piece, when the last note's still in the air, and the audience is about to applaud. That held, expectant, almost cheerful sound."
"A chord about to resolve," Dara said softly.
"Yes." He stared at her. "Exactly that. It sounded pleased."
Geordi had pulled out a tricorder. He said nothing for several seconds. Then he said, "Commander Data's been logging the hub's drift radius since we came aboard. Station time, 11:12. Give me a second." He scrolled. "There. A spike. Three point four percent, in under ninety seconds. Then it settles, but it doesn't settle back to where it was. It settles higher."
"What time did you send the burst?" Vash asked.
"11:12," Kestrel said.
The silence was different now. Vash felt it settle into her shoulders like cold water.
"You were paid to do that," she said.
"Yes."
"They didn't need your help opening the door. They needed your location. They needed the drift to go up." She heard her own voice, flat and level, and did not recognize it. "Every time you reach a site, you ping the relay, and the anomaly grows. And the notes they sold pay out on the growth."
"I worked that out about an hour ago." His mouth twisted. "A bit late."
"Roan."
"I know." He held up a hand. "I know what I am. I've known for eleven years, and I've been rather good at not looking. But I'd like, before I die, to have done one thing that wasn't a transaction." He looked at her, and the tired, crooked, self-mocking face she had known at twenty-six looked back, stripped of everything but the asking. "I sent the ping three hours ago. Their ship is ninety minutes out. They're coming for the Key, and they'll arrive at about the same moment this place starts to tear itself apart."
"How long?" Worf said.
"An hour twenty."
Worf looked at Vash. Vash looked at the enormous silent door.
"Then we'd better work fast," she said.
It was the most beautiful lock she had ever seen.
She knew it the moment she stepped close, a slow, floating step across the dead floor to the great circular face and its seven nested rings. She laid her gloved hand on the nearest. It was cold, and very faintly, deeply warm beneath the cold, the way stone is warm in a cellar. The carving ran in a continuous spiral from the outer ring to the inner, looping, returning, looping again. She knew this hand. She had followed it through a dead mining world and a drowned city. It was the same hand that had cut the Key's lattice, but a human had built this door, and the human had done something extraordinary. Ilse Brandt had taken a lock she couldn't have designed and translated it, ring by ring, into steel and motor and gear.
"It's the Key," she said. "The Ke'Thara Key. Seven nested rings. She copied the geometry."
"That's a structural tribute," Geordi said. He had his visor turned to the door's rim, where a bundle of ancient cable snaked into the wall. "Every ring's got its own drive motor. Seven motors. The feeds are intact, the motors are intact, and the reactor's still live. I can see the current moving. It's just that the control system's dead. She built a lock that only works if someone is turning the rings at the right speeds."
"Which speeds?"
"I don't know."
"I do." Dara had come up beside Vash. She was looking at the carving with the soft unfocused expression she got when she was listening. "It's in the glyphs. Each ring's carved with a phrase. The phrases aren't just notation. They're rates. Count the loops per ring."
Vash counted. The outermost ring carried one loop of the spiral. The next carried two. The third, three. The fourth, four, and the fifth, five, all the way inward to seven.
"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven," she said. "That's the harmonic series."
"Yes." Dara's voice had gone strange. "The first seven overtones. It's a chord. You don't open it with a key. You play it."
Geordi let out a slow breath. "Seven motors. If I drive each ring at a multiple of the base rate..." He was already moving, hands going to the cable run. "Tobin, I need you at the junction box. Ring one gets one revolution per minute. Two gets two, and so on. The alignment window comes when the gaps line up. That'd be, what, Dara?"
"Every forty-two seconds for about six." She didn't hesitate.
"Six seconds." Geordi glanced at the chronometer. "That's not much of a window."
"It's enough if nobody blinks."
"Nobody's going to blink," Worf said.
While the two engineers worked, Vash sat down against the wall beside Dara, and for a time neither of them said anything.
The antechamber was cold and close and lit by a single lamp. Tobin's curses rose and fell from the cable run. A little way off, Kestrel and Kessel were passing a bundle of wire hand to hand without a word, in the way of two men who had agreed, for the moment, not to look at each other. The great door's seven rings stood in the lamplight like the face of an enormous clock.
"You've been quiet," Vash said.
"I've been listening." Dara had her knees drawn up and her notebook open across them, though she wasn't writing. "It's very loud in here."
"I thought it was only me."
"It isn't only you." She smiled faintly. "I'd say it's loud for everyone. But I think I hear it differently. Do you ever notice, when you've been in a room a long time, that you stop hearing the hum of the lights? You'd notice if it stopped. You don't notice it going. That's how it is for me. It's been going so long that when I'm away from it, I hear the quiet."
"Is that why you're good at this?"
"I don't know. I think I'm good at it because I've never been afraid of it." Dara turned a page, absently. "Does that sound strange?"
"A little."
"I suppose it does." A small, tired laugh. "I used to think everyone must be like that. When I was young, I mean. I thought the sound was just part of the world, that everyone could hear it and had decided not to mention it. I remember asking my mother, when I was six, why the radiator sang. She said it was only the pipes."
"Was it?"
"I suppose so." Her voice dropped. "It had a rise in it. A little turn. It didn't sound like a radiator. It sounded like someone who was glad I'd come in."
Vash regarded her. She had known Dara Liang for four years. She had shared tents and cisterns and a hundred cold dawns with her. She had never heard her speak about her childhood.
"You never told me that."
"No." Dara smiled. "I wouldn't have known how to start."
"Try it now."
"I'm not sure I can." She shut the notebook, gently, and laid her hand flat on its cover. "I think I spent most of my life waiting for someone to tell me I wasn't mad. And then I got a position at a university and a chair in a department full of very serious people, and I thought, well, if I'm mad, at least I'm being paid for it. And then I met you." She glanced sideways. "You were digging in a trench in the rain. You'd found a wall that wasn't on the plan, and you were so furious. You looked at me and said, 'Hold this,' and handed me a trowel. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I think I've been holding that trowel ever since."
"I don't remember that."
"I know. It's the nicest thing about it."
Vash laughed. It was a surprised, soft, unguarded sound, and it echoed oddly in the dark antechamber. She leaned her head back against the cold metal. She felt something unclench in her chest that she hadn't realized was clenched.
"I'm glad you came," she said. "To the dig. I mean, to the Foundation. Four years ago."
"So am I." Dara was looking at the door. "I've never worked with anyone who listened the way you do. You listen to a wall as if it's telling you something."
"It usually is."
"Yes," Dara said. "That's what I mean."
On the far side of the room Geordi swore, softly and with great conviction, and Tobin laughed. The lamp flickered. Vash let her eyes close for a moment, in the warm, ordinary, aching ease of being beside someone she trusted, and didn't see, because her eyes were shut, the way Dara's hand tightened on the notebook, or the look that crossed her face and was folded away.
It took fifty minutes. Tobin and Geordi worked in the dust of a dead station with hand tools and a portable cell and two meters of borrowed wire, cursing in whispers, while Kestrel, to Vash's astonishment, fetched and held and passed things without a word. Kessel woke and joined him. Nobody sent them away. At minute thirty-eight, the first ring shuddered and began to turn, silent and slow, its edge throwing dull light across the floor. At forty-four, the second. By fifty, all seven were turning, each at its own pace, a vast slow wheel of interlocking metal under the thin glare of a single lamp, and the chord that had filled the room since they arrived resolved into something almost like clarity.
"There," Dara breathed.
She was watching the gaps. Vash saw them too, seven narrow dark slots sliding across the face of the door at seven different speeds, drifting in and out of register. For a moment the slots lined up, a single black vertical line from the rim to the core, and closed again.
"That was the window," Geordi said. "Four seconds. Less. We weren't ready."
"Next one in forty-two," Dara said.
"Then let's be ready." Vash moved to the gap's position. She was wearing a borrowed jacket and a sidearm she'd never wanted, and her hands were shaking. She gripped the rail, found her balance in the thin gravity, and counted. "Worf, you first. Then me. Then Dara. Tobin, Geordi, Roan, Kessel. One at a time. If you miss the window, it'll take a hand off."
"That," Kestrel said, "is not a figure of speech, is it?"
"No."
Worf went in on the count of forty-one. He was through before the window closed, a blur of black and gold. Vash followed, stepping through into a cold so sharp it burned, and heard behind her the vast, patient, scraping sound of the rings turning back into place. Dara came through with the quiet ease of someone who had done this before.
Then the whole station shuddered.
"Hull breach," Tobin shouted, from the far side of the door. "Ring section four. Something's cutting in."
"The Consortium." Kestrel's voice, high and strained. "They've come early. They've mated at dock one. They must have used a breaching charge instead of the clamps."
Vash spun. The great door stood closed behind them, rings turning, sealed. They were inside the core. It was a round, bare, cold chamber twenty meters across, its walls of bare dull metal, a single dim amber light at the center. And in that light, hanging in a hair's width of nothing above a low black plinth, she saw it.
It was larger than the Ke'Thara Key. Twice the size, perhaps. Seven rings, nested, tilted, each a different pale color. It was whole. There was no crack in it anywhere. It turned very slowly, and as it turned it sang, a low clear shining chord, and the whole room seemed to lean toward it like a field toward the sun.
"Oh," Dara whispered.
She had gone white. She took a step forward, then another. Her hand came up, bare, the one that had lost its glove.
"Dara." Vash caught her arm. "Dara. We've got an hour and ten minutes before the station starts breaking up, and a Consortium team cutting through the ring. I need you to read it. Is it safe to move?"
Dara blinked. She turned, slowly, as if surfacing from deep water, and her face was flushed, and her eyes were wet. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry. It's just, it's so..." She swallowed. "It's whole."
"Is it safe to move?"
"Yes." Dara's voice steadied. She drew a long breath. "Yes. Lift it from the base. Keep the rings level. Don't rotate anything. It's... It's very patient. I think it wants to be carried."
Vash wasn't certain why she believed her. She put on her gloves, stepped to the plinth, and lifted the Key in both hands.
It weighed almost nothing. It came free of the plinth without a sound, and the chord in the chamber didn't break. It changed. It dropped half an octave, slow and easy, the way a held note relaxes into its resolution, and the amber light of the room went out, and the dark that followed wasn't frightening.
Then the whole wall behind her exploded inward.
Vash was thrown across the chamber. Something struck her shoulder, hard. She skidded on her back through a drift of loose dust and debris and brought up against the plinth, the Key still clutched to her chest, her ears ringing, her breath gone. The air was screaming. A rip a meter wide had opened in the core's outer wall, and through it, white and blinding and moving with terrible speed, came the cold vacuum of space.
"Decompression!" Worf's voice, somewhere in the roar. "Take cover!"
She got her arm up over her face. A gust of wind hit her like a wall. Through the gap, through the ruined plating and the shrieking air, she saw a cutter-arm of black alloy, a breaching sled, and behind it a cold, flat, lethal light.
The Consortium had arrived.