Page 1 of Kavan

CHAPTER 1

SOPHIE

The shuttle banks over the northern coast and I press my hand flat to the window like a first-year on her first field season.

Osiris doesn't photograph well. Four months of orbital imagery didn't prepare me for the water. It runs pale jade over the shelf, then a green so deep it reads black past the reef line. The cliffs drop straight into it, volcanic rock streaked white where the surf has been working since before anyone bothered to name the planet. And the headland forests have turned. Copper, rust, a burnt orange that has no business on a tropical world. We're nine degrees off the equator and the trees still know what month it is.

"You'll fog the glass," Helena says.

"Worth it."

Director Helena Ostrand has been to Osiris a dozen times and stopped looking out windows somewhere around the fourth. She has a slate on one knee and her reading glasses pushed into silver-streaked hair, and she is three items into a briefing I never agreed to start.

"Storm season opens in four days. Resort occupancy is down sixty percent, which is the only reason the League cleared a dig this size this fast." She passes the slate across. "Tell me what you see."

What I see is a mess of overlapping density returns, the kind of image that means nothing to most people and keeps me awake. Six hundred meters of basalt, and beneath it, a void.

Lava tubes are ugly. They wander, they pinch, they fall in on themselves. This one has corners, and it repeats them at intervals. Something made it, and whatever made it was doing math.

"How much is mapped?"

"None of it."

I look up at her.

"Nobody has been down there in an official capacity, Sophie." She takes the slate back. "That's what I'm offering you."

We come down on an apron cut into the terraces above Cove Nine, and the heat arrives before the ramp does, thick and green and full of salt. The camp is half built. Eli Marchant is arguing with a crate. Zuri Neris has three drones up and a fourth in pieces on a folding table, and she raises a wrench at me without looking up from it.

"There's one condition on the permit," Helena says.

"There's always one condition."

"League Security has assigned a permanent marshal to the excavation. Artifact trade in this sector has gotten organized. He holds operational authority over site safety."

"Over me."

"Alongside you."

"That isn't what operational authority means and you know it."

"Sophie."

"I'm only saying the words are doing different jobs."

He's at the head of the ramp when we come down, and my first thought is that the camp wasn't designed for him. He clears seven feet. He has bronze skin and black hair pulled back off a face built out of flat planes, and his eyes are the color of struck metal, and they go over me once and file me somewhere I will not like.

"Dr. Larkin." His voice is low and unhurried. "Marshal Kavan Orrek."

"Marshal."

"Three items before you unpack." He doesn't offer a hand. "No entry into any chamber that hasn't been swept. No solo movement below grade. Everyone carries a locator, including you, including in the shower."

"That's four items."

"The fourth is free."

Eli turns a laugh into a cough.