Page 22 of Kavan

"What does it shoot?"

"Ships. Anything above a mass-and-drive threshold entering orbit. There are forty-one emitter housings across the island chain and they're all still there, and the ceiling in the temple wasn't a memorial, it was a scoreboard." My voice sounds thinner than I want it. "Two hundred sixteen. They didn't survive that many attacks, Kavan. They won them."

"And the eight-twelfths that isn't awake."

"Is the gun."

The lamp hums. Somewhere down the redoubt somebody is snoring and it sounds obscene.

"Then we destroy it," he says. "You show me the vault, I'll show you what nine kilos of cutting charge does to a control run."

"That was my second nineteen hours." I pull the geological overlay across. "Eli ran the numbers three times and made me check them twice. The emitter housing is seated in the caldera throat and it's holding it. Twenty millennia of magmatic pressure with a Precursor structure standing inside it as a plug. You cut the control runs, the housing loses its containment field, and the island opens."

"How much."

"The whole island. And the chain. And then a tsunami into the resort coast, and the northern archipelago, and everything with people on it for two thousand kilometers." I make myself say the rest. "It cannot be destroyed. It can only be told to stand down."

"By whom?"

"By somebody who can prove they're a returning fleet." I find the fragment I want, the one that cost me six hours. "There's an authorization sequence. It isn't a code. Codes are what militaries use and this thing has outlived every military that ever knew it. It's a recognition protocol, and it's stored at the command core, and the archive said the master record is at the spire."

Kavan is quiet for a while. When he speaks his voice has changed register, and I have learned what that means, and it means twenty-one people just had their mission rewritten.

"Then we aren't escaping."

"No."

"We're getting there before Rourke, because if he wakes that gun to sell it⁠—"

"He doesn't have to wake it. He just has to be clumsy near it." I press the heels of my hands into my eyes. "Kavan, he thinks he's stealing a weapon. He's stealing the pin out of a grenade as big as a country."

"Does he know that?"

"I don't know. I think a man who's been down here eleven days without losing his manners knows more than we'd like."

He offers nothing comforting, and I love him a little for it, which is a sentence I'll examine later when there is time, which there will not be.

We work until 0300 on the route, side by side with the rubbings and the fragments and Eli's overlay between us, and somewhere around 0100 it stops being work.

"Your handwriting is illegible."

"My handwriting is a system."

"It's a system you invented."

"That's what a system is." I take his stylus off him. "Also you've been rotating the district plan ninety degrees the wrong way for an hour, letting me not notice, which is either very patient or very smug."

"Both are available."

"Say it."

"Southwest," he says. "The gutter under the eleventh crosses the transit spine here, and it's four kilometers shorter, and you saw it two hours ago and have been waiting for me to catch up."

"Ninety minutes ago."

"Sophie."

"Fine. Two hours."