Page 6 of Kavan

It isn't. I have spent three days looking for the place where Dr. Larkin's confidence outruns her competence, and I haven't found it, which is its own kind of problem.

I take it up the line instead. Director Ostrand is on the surface at the far end of a failing relay, and her voice arrives in pieces.

"Marshal, is the structure sound?"

"The structure is the only thing down here I trust."

"Then my answer is yes, with your conditions."

My conditions are these. Security enters first. Nobody touches a surface until it has been swept. Larkin stays behind my shoulder and doesn't argue about it where the junior staff can hear.

She agrees to two out of three, which I have decided to accept as a pattern.

The disc beside the door takes the same three rings, and she works them without a lamp because she has already memorized the frieze. Four, then seven, then two. Then a fourth ring I didn't see, recessed into the frame, and she turns that one nine.

The door doesn't swing. It withdraws, the whole nine meters of it sliding back into a cavity that shouldn't exist, and the sound it makes is a long dry sigh of stone settling into a groove worn for exactly this.

Cold air rolls over my boots.

"Vesk. Rask. On me."

The chamber is enormous. My lamp reaches a vault forty meters overhead, ribbed like the inside of a hull, and the ribs aren't decorative, because the seams where they were built to move are visible. The floor is a shallow bowl. At the center, on a raised ring, stands a plinth the height of a man's chest, black and unmarked.

I count exits. Four archways, three of them collapsed behind rockfall old enough to have compacted. That leaves the door we came through, and I dislike arithmetic that comes out to one.

"Clear," Vesk calls from the north arch.

"Clear," from Rask.

Then Rask says, in a different voice entirely, "Marshal."

There's dust on this floor, twenty millennia of it, fine as flour, undisturbed except for one thing.

Somebody has left bootprints. Two sets, crossing the bowl at an angle, walking directly to the plinth and directly away again. Commercial hiking tread, the pattern I photographed on the cliff and matched to nothing in the League registry.

I crouch and put my light low across the surface. The edges are still sharp, and nothing has drifted into them.

"Two days," Vesk says. "Maybe three."

"After we made planetfall."

"After we landed."

I let the archaeologists in because I have nothing left to sweep, and because keeping Larkin out at this point would require physical intervention that neither of us would enjoy. She goes to the plinth like a woman walking toward a door she has been knocking on since she was nine years old, and Marchant and Neris fan out behind her, and I put my officers on the arches and my back to the plinth so I can watch the way we came.

"Sophie." Neris, quiet. "Those are footprints."

"I know."

"They're not ours."

"I know, Zuri."

She has her hands flat on the black surface, moving them the way you would read something, and the material comes alive under her palms in soft amber lines that spread out from her fingers like frost running backward.

Then the ribs overhead begin to turn.

They aren't fast. That's the thing I'll remember. They're unhurried, forty meters of ancient machinery rotating on a schedule it set for itself before my species had a written language, and the whole vault fills with a grinding that goes through the soles of my boots and up into my teeth.