Rakee's fingers adeptly slid back and forth across
the screen, searching through command menus. The color coded
decision trees zoomed in and out as options were culled and
proffered. The reflected colors from the screen swam on her dark
skin. A soft glow from the white dwarf twenty million kilometers
away lit Rakee's face when the computer sifted through the data and
darkened the screen. The small ship was silent except for the hum
of the generators converting sunlight and hydrogen into energy.
Rakee looked out the window at the barren planet's surface, the leading
edge of the solar array sucked up all the light and reflected nothing,
it was a black cutout. She let out a long deep breath, swept her
straight black hair behind her ears and focused again on the display.
Every type of particle, wave and field that was
known to sentience was felt by the instruments and scanners on the
Zarathustra. They focused on a cave a few hundred meters from the
ship. Zara told her the cave was a naturally occurring feature on
a planet that was nothing more that a sphere of rock. Rakee knew
the cave was not a natural occurrence, at least not completely.
She shook her head in frustration at the limitations of the
software. She spun her chair around and quickly walked to the
front of the Zarathustra. The windshield was dirty, but using
binoculars Rakee could clearly make out the symbols that marked the top
of the cave. The symbols were designed to exploit a weakness in
the pattern recognition software. Walking back to the console she
pulled out bolt from her pocket and drew the symbols on the
screen. The screen went dark as the computer thought.
"The Treasure awaits." was Zara's
translation. The language was a dead dialect of the Kalciderian
scribes.
The beauty of the universe constantly amazed Rakee;
stormy gas giants, volcanic moons, red and orange columns of ejecting
gas from dying suns. But this planet was worthless and plain, she
thought. She doubted if anyone had ever landed on it. The
powers that produced the limitless diversity and surprise in the
universe forgot this planet. The white dwarf, of which this
planet was its lone satellite, had never produced life on any of its
five satellites. Planet FJE-154-B's only reaction to its star was
to have one half baked and the other frozen at regular intervals.
Rakee understood why they put it here.
She found her self leaning on the control panel to
look at the cave, she pushed off, crossed her arms and paced the
corridors of the Zarathustra. She asked for music from Zara,
dance music she usually liked, she but immediately had Zara turn it
off. This is a great place for an ambush, she thought.
There's no one within light years of this place. But what are
they waiting for? she wondered. She looked at her watch; thirty
minutes had elapsed since she landed on this no name rock.
Only twice in her life had Rakee faced physical
danger. Three years ago she was coming back late from a nightclub
on Secor II, a rare night off. She slapped the door panel with
her hand on the Zarathustra and the door slid open. At the
console across the room there was a man to which Rakee had just made a
delivery that afternoon. He dropped the cutting tool he was using
to open the control panel and fumbled for his pistol. He was
shaking when he drew. Rakee had three drinks in her from the
club; she did not shake. She blew a hole in his chest the size of
a grapefruit; he shot off a grape sized piece of her shoulder.
Everyonce in a while Rakee would find a spot of blood she missed
cleaning up. While she was offloading the cargo the client bugged
the ship and captured the access codes. Now she scanned the
entire ship after anyone came on board. Traders like her were
robbed, cheated and killed daily. Humans were the worst.
Most often her problem was deciding whether the cargo she was being
hired to haul was stolen or contraband. She would lose her ship
if caught with either, and rarely was anyone willing to pay enough to
cover that risk.
Forty-eight hours ago she was cruising around the
Perry Nebula on her way to Hades Minor, She passed many ships traveling
the well
worn route from Westerly Post. The port engine was out of tune
and Rakee was wedged between the fuel exchanger and the reactor,
testing for the source of the dissonance.
"Rakee, we're receiving a transmission, would you
like me to read it?" Rakee's father set the Zarathustra's
computer to speak in playful, slightly flirty female voice, or least
Rakee thought it was flirty. When Rakee inherited the ship, she
changed the voice to a polite, dry male voice. But she still
called it Zara.
"Go ahead," Rakee said.
"A treasure awaits, do not miss the opportunity of a
lifetime, exclamation point. The Veratains invite you to test
your cleverness and skill. If you succeed..."
"Ooohh, how can I possibly lose? Let's go!"
she chirped.
"Sarcasm, correct?"
"Correct." she grimaced as she loosened a stuck
valve.
"If you succeed, a treasure beyond your imagination
awaits. If you fail, nothing is lost. Bring only yourself
and the contents of your ship to the following coordinates. We
will direct you from there. You have eighteen hours to reach the
following coordinates, SSGC one five nine six six..."
"O.K., is that it?"
"Yes, except for the coordinates."
"That's enough then, delete please."
"I've taken it upon myself to scan the area around
the coordinates. Nothing is there, at least nothing that's not in
the charts."
Rakee stopped her investigation of the engine.
There's something odd about the message, something earnest and playful
about it, she thought. She was an collector of scams and
forwarded the best ones to her friends for a good laugh. But the
scams were usually offers of easy money, rather than outright offers of
a treasure as the reward for cleverness. This was a new strain of
scam, and like a new mutation of a disease interests the scientist, she
was intrigued.
"Actually don't delete it if you haven't already,"
she told Zara.
"O.K."
Rakee started on the engine again, but she kept
coming back to it, running it over in her head. She pulled
herself out of the engine and paced the grated metal catwalk between
the two massive engines. With the conduits and pipes snaking
around them, the engines seemed like quivering spiders at the centers
of their webs.
"Can I deliver this shipment and still make it to
the coordinates in time?" she asked.
The galaxy still relied heavily on small trading
vessels. Only the largest population centers used the large cargo
ships. The small traders were fast, almost as efficient ton for
ton, but they had little to no overhead. Rakee was CEO, CFO,
mechanic, security, and the head office made the trip with her.
Also, low level government beaurcrats found it useful to have a list of
small traders that were known and trusted. For in times of
civil unrest, war, or natural disaster, for a price, Rakee would take
on passengers and save the day for a small few.
"Yes, just barely."
Why are you being stupid and even considering
investigating this? she thought. Because you want to post it as a
warning, or because you want it to be true? This is a trap, or at
least a waste of time, nothing more. People don't give money or
treasure away answering a riddle or something, she thought. She
thought of what her father said after negotiations with a potential
customer broke down. It was a lot of money, and she asked why
they weren't taking the job. He thought for a moment and spoke
slowly.
"Don't trust. Know. You have to
constrain your client's alternates so that you know, you
know what
they'll do, because you've arranged the pick-up, payment and exit so
they have no opportunity to take from you. Don't leave it to
trust. I couldn't plan that deal, I would've had to trust them,
and that I can't do, not with the sort of people we deal with."
She knew the story of the Treasure of the Veratains,
everyone did. Like the Lost Fleet of the Selarid Faction or Dr.
Joris' Gravity Cannon or the Fountain of Youth those with good judgment
ignored the rumors. Those whose wishes got the best of their
beliefs followed the stories that led into harm, or evaporated in the
vacuum. Some thought the Treasure of the Veratains was a
catch of platinum bars hidden in an abandoned freighter floating
in a nebula. Others thought it was a stockpile of information and
evidence detailing the crimes of a million governments for either
blackmailing or exposing. Kaal Firth, Rakee's mechanic, told her
the Treasure was a million gold coins the Veratains minted from the
donations of the converted wealthy. A matter accelerator on the
Zarathustra had fried, only Kaal's feet were visible from under the
accelerator. They would twitch as he talked and worked.
"Don’t tell another soul, but I know where it is,"
he whispered.
"Oh yea?” Rakee did her best impression of
interestedness; she had a good relationship with Kaal, just flirty
enough to keep him hoping and hence not overcharging.
"I got this friend and we're renting an Invren
H5. I was working on his old Argo class twin a few weeks ago, a
real nice machine. It had a custom fusion reactor to match these
big 018 pyron injectors he fixed up. His coolant system is still
slowin' him down though. Anyway, he was surveying a moon near the
Hadrin belt. Of course I can't tell you exactly where it is,
yet. He found a large chamber, a tunneled chamber. There's
no record of it in the mining database and its right on the old
Veratain trading routes. We're getting a drill and explosives and
cutters so we can get in there. Do you want in on the deal?
Split it three ways. We could use your ship to get it out, I know
you can work a cutter."
He pulled himself out from under the Accelerator,
all grease and sweat. He was totally serious, and totally
mistaken, Rakee thought. You're letting your desires get in the
way of the facts my friend, she thought. People's capacity for
self-deception was infinite. She knew the area well. It was
heavily traveled and it was cashed. Every rock bigger than her
ship had been stripped and scanned a dozen times over. It was
probably a collapsed mine that nobody had bothered to reopen.
"No thanks, but good luck to you Kaal." she replied
politely. He looked at her blankly and went back to work.
That was two years ago. Last week she brought in the Zara and he
was still fixing ships and overcharging everyone but her.
The Veratains were the old priests of Gua-Han, she
reminded herself. Rakee knew that the religion was thousands of
years old. She tried to remember what they taught; peace and love
or something. She couldn't really remember, but she didn't feel
like a lecture from Zara. The Veratains didn't exist anymore; at
least the priests didn't call themselves that anymore. Like all
things Gua-Han went through alternating periods of grow and decay, but
it never died completely. Through the Great plague, censorship,
upheaval, war, purges, the religion never died. It was always
somewhere, and often it popped up it disparate places at once, with no
visible connection between the two. To its followers this
indicated the timeless ultimate truth it contained. To its
detractors, its tenaciousness simply reflected the problem of ascribing
intelligence to all intelligent life.
Rakee remembered when her father caught her reading
a Gua-Han dablet when she was thirteen. After unloading the day's
cargo to a large man who was anxious to leave, they secured the
Zarathustra and walked to the market place. Sweat from the heat
and the exertion of unloading the cargo dripped from her forehead onto
the dusty red ground. Darrin bought Rakee a drink from the old
women blending purple and pink starfish shaped fruit. Animals
squawked and the crowded marketplace crawled with food, politics and
deal making. Rakee stared at each of the countless booths and
tables that sold slipshot drives, fuel tanks, intricate statues and
pipes, dazzling bowls and glassware, drugs, computers, guns. Her
father stopped to look at a table with various scanning equipment,
mainly spectrometers and microgravitometers. He began asking the
proprietor questions and Rakee wandered away.
Darrin rarely took Rakee to places like this.
The contained chaos scared and excited her. The colors, smells
and bright colors of everyone's clothing, the occasional whiff of
manure and chattering groups of men in the center arguing and shaking
their fists made her breath heavy. Chanting peaked through
cacophony of the market. A group of monks were chanting on the
other side of the street. They wore black denim jumpsuits, too
big for their lean bodies. From what Rakee could see their body
hair was shaven, including eyebrows. Some leaned against the wall
while a few sat cross-legged, rocking back and forth slowly.
Rakee walked past them twice, trying to look as if she had somewhere
else to go. On the third pass she stopped off to the side and
watched. One of the monks leaned forward and handed her a
dablet. As he leaned she could see his ribs and gaunt body.
He smiled and bowed slightly, saying nothing. She quickly slipped
it into her satchel. Her back to Darrin, she slowly looked around
to see him still haggling with the proprietor who shook his head and
crossed his arms in finality. Darrin reached out to her and
pulled her close as they walked on through the market. A few days
later he caught her reading it. She tried to hide it as he passed
by her room, she had not yet made a habit of closing it. He
grabbed it from her and threw it in the fusion shoot.
"These people are fools," he said loudly.
"They don't know what they're talking about. It’s all nonsense,
don't believe that shit. Otherwise you'll end up begging for
money and ranting on the streets like them." She looked down as
her lip began to tremble. Sucking in a large breath and letting
it out slowly he calmed down and sat down beside her bed.
"They're lots of mysteries in the universe. But no one knows the
answers to any of them and anyone who says they do are either stupid,
or they to cheat you. You don’t want to be a fool and have
everyone laugh at you do you?" he rubbed his hair and looked
down. "Believe what you want to believe Rakee, but be wary;
wishing it were true only lets others take advantage of us."
She knew she had no good reason to go to those
coordinates, no reason at all. It was easy for her to resist such
things, usually she could immediately see the trap behind the stroke of
good luck or quick buck. She could see the sales pitch before it
came, or the pound of flesh clause in the fine print. Not that
she was afraid of a good deal, she lived off good deals. Say you
were offered to move medical supplies to some plague infested outpost
stinking of death and madness, and they were willing to pay to get it
there fast. That's a good deal if you're careful. But the
better the deal sounded the more wary she became. But she
remembered that day in the marketplace, the anticipation, the warmth of
the blue sun on her face, the excitement and uncertainty. Maybe
it’s real, she thought. I'll just be careful.
After the cargo was out of her hands and the money
in them, she plugged in the coordinates.
"I may be a stupid computer, but this does not
compute," complained Zara.
"We're going. Keep an eye out for me, if
things get fucked up, I want an escape route planned."
"Aye captain."
As promised, the signal, which she could not
pinpoint, gave her a new set of coordinates when they reached the first
set.
She paced some more. Slowly, the Zarathustra approached the
planet and landed.
"OK, I'm going in. Keep me updated," she
ordered. Rakee walked purposefully to the storage locker and
began pulling out equipment she needed. Her survival suit was
thick and heavy, but it was worn in and comfortable for its
weight. Her hands ran over the slightly reflective smooth
material and over the occasional nicks and scuffs from years of
abuse. It had a dull reflectivity to it, and it was nicked and
scarred from years of abuse. She untied her boots and slipped
them and her army surplus pants and vest. She looked in the
mirror hard as she took off her favorite shirt, stealing a glance in
the mirror in just her t-shirt and underwear.
Not bad. I'd do me, she thought. She
looked into the mirror closely, a lock of black hair fell in front of
her dark skin and she pulled it all back into a pony tail. She
began breathing heavily and she pulled away from the mirror.
After zipping it up her body warming up from the suit's
insulation. The temperature control kicked and instantly her skin
cooled.
She slung the air tank over her back and pulled the
straps and the metal hooks clinked as she locked them in place.
Her gauss pistol reflected the light from the while dwarf and she
tucked it into the black holster strapped around her left thigh.
Three clips of ammunition, heavy and cool to the touch she strapped
around her right thigh. She clipped two black globular smoke
grenades onto the air tank shoulder straps. The helmet was a
compressed sphere. Three large windows one directly in front and
one on each side with ten centimeter brace seperating them.
Behind her head was windowless and held the elctronics. From the
engine room she retrieved her integrated scanning unit: a sheet metal
box, briefcase sized, on one end were sensors and detectors, which
beamed information to the computer in her helmet. On the bottom
was a small gold colored plaque that read, "This hardware/software has
been certified as non-sentient by the Sentience Directorate, under the
authority of the Sentience Commandments."
The air whistled out of the airlock as the door
opened, she held onto a handle bolted into the wall as the air pressure
pushed her. Her breathing grew deafening as external sound lost
any route to her ears. The effect of the grav-compensator lost
its effect as she stepped carefully down the ladder. She was
carrying a lot of weight, which was somewhat mitigated by the lesser
gravity of the planet. It was twig light now and shadows hid
portions of the terrain, the white sun, low on the horizon, hit the
sharp angles of the rock, and the scene became a heavily contrasted
black and white photograph. The ground was three centimeters or
so of fine powdery dust, covering an uneven granite surface. The
cave lay 100 meters or so ahead, carved in the semi-circle cliff wall
that was about forty meters tall in the center, diminishing towards
either end. Huge boulders and rock formations forced to her wind
a path to the cave. Looking back towards the Zarathustra, the
fading light made the metallic curves of the ship in pop out in relief
to the sharp angles of the boulders in front of the cliff face.
Turning away from the ship she headed into the
cave. The first hundred meters or so looked like a natural
cave. Then, abruptly a pattern of dimples about two
centimeters in diameter covered the cave wall. The shape of the
cave circular became perfectly circular. It curved right and
descended at a shallow angle, corkscrewing down.
She had been walking steadily for ten minutes when
contact with the Zarathustra was cut. Her stomach dropped and her
hand went to her pistol. She dropped on one knee and swiveled her
head back and forth. I'm totally exposed here, this was a
mistake, she thought. The suit's defogger kicked in when her
heavy breathing began to obscure her vision. She pressed a few
times on the touch sensitive screen on her right forearm. As she
suspected, a full spectrum white noise field had overwhelmed her
communications signal to and from Zara. She drew her pistol and
ran back to the surface. Exhausted and panting she ran out of the
cave, looking around as she made her way back to the ship.
"Zara!" she yelled, but only static echoed back.
As her fingers met the control pattern panel on the ship, tiny
filaments from her suit extended into the control panel and connected
with Zara.
"All systems nominal, no ships or contacts in the
area," said Zara, anticipating her.
"Great, I'm coming in."
Once inside, her hands shook as she paced.
"Quite a scare, losing contact like that," she said.
"Yes, disconcerting."
"Is there any way we could get around it'?"
"It's very strong and fills the useable spectrum,
given that we're so near the source I don't think so.
"I'm assuming we can't transmit as well."
"That's correct, do you want to take off and send a
message asking for assistance."
"No, not yet, I think given what we've seen, we have
to assume that they can make good on their threat to erase our
memories. But it’s an option," said Rakee
"Let's string a wire," she continued. "From
what I've seen it would be easy to string a wire behind."
"But shouldn't we assume that there's either
somebody down there, or at least an active security system, it could be
very dangerous, and that wire could be cut easily."
"I know, I know. But I just have to see what's
down there."
"Curiosity..."
"Quiet Zara, remind me who's the sentient one around
here?"
"You're the sentient one. I know, I don't have
any feelings or goals."
"Good, keep that in mind."
"I'm just looking out for your best interest."
"You are the voice of reason. But I gotta do
this."
"O.K." Zara said with resignation.
"I'll get the wire, you keep an eye on those
sensors."
As she walked through the tunnel again, she trailed
the wire, keeping her in contact with the ship. Every five
minutes or so she would anchor the line with a climbing screw she would
drill into the rock. The pedometer read four point three
kilometers. She felt fine, but thought about the distance she was
willing to go before she turned back.
At eights kilometers the tunnel leveled out and made
a ninety degree turn. She pulled up flush against the near corner
of the turn and without exposing her body swung the ISU around the
corner. Most of the channels were scrambled, but a photo turned
out fine. The cave opened up into a straight square hallway,
about 5 meters on each side and 300 meters long. Lights slowly
came on, a soft yellow glow. Rakee froze and took another
picture. She waited a minute taking readings. As she turned
the corner and as she crossed the plane into the hallway she felt
resistance against her body. Her HUD indicated there was a
breathable atmosphere instead of vacuum. I must have passed
through a soft wall, that's expensive, she thought. She didn't
take off her helmet, though her ISU told her she could breath the
atmosphere. The light seeped through simple fixtures attached to
the walls. As she approached the end of the hall she felt heard
and felt a rumble. The wall in far wall began to rise. She
stepped back and went for her pistol. Her face changed from fear
to awe. In the room beyond the wall that opened was a treasure
that would set her free.
In the center of the room, Yordur's lost statue of
Minvidas stood ten meters nigh. Minvidas was holding a rifle with
one hand and the other pointed up towards the new frontier. Gold
bars lay at his feet and a spear made of solid Amazon mahogany and
tipped with an obsidian point leaned against the base of the priceless
statue. It was all real, the gold and jewels were
real, and the artifacts were original, or at least old enough and made
from the right materials. On a statue of Princess Ja'may, there
was a necklace of Sidorian platinum with sapphires and emeralds.
The platinum shimmered and changed colors as she moved her head.
A gown made from the web of the Devorian Spider hung on the arm of an
ancient robot from the court of Ferryhan The Just, its octagon ruby
eyes glowed from the atomic reactor still burning inside. A skull
of the extinct Kilner Dragon, seven meters high, its bone hard as
steel, hung from the ceiling. Its mouth of daggers was
open. Intricate scenes of battle and conquest of a lost empire
etched in acid on the skull over a hundred generations. Off to
the left a suit of armor made of tempered polyanium, the strongest
known material, leaned against a rustly cargo container. Hundreds
of interlocking plates left no gaps in the armor, like a crustacean's
shell. The suit, with its black hue, looked like a discarded
shell from a molted monster. Chests of steel and oak lay strewn
about the room, filled with gold, diamonds and other jewels, as if
afterthoughts placed as filler amongst the other priceless treasures.
She started towards the treasure but then saw her
reflection and stopped. A wall separated her from the
treasure. She put her hand on the wal1 and it felt almost
pliable, like she could bend it. She pushed harder and it did
give a few centimeters but no more. She pounded on it with her
fist and there was no give, it felt like pounding a boulder. It
was like sand, the more kinetic energy you feed into it, the more
resistant it became.
A light went on to the left of her, she spun.
The stone moved revealing a screen. It printed these words in
simple large type,
"Thank you for responding to our message.
There is a treasure before you and it is real. There is a riddle
to be solved. There is only one way to gain entrance. Our
temple scans your body and brain for a certain pattern of awareness and
peace, and once obtained, you will have our Treasure. You may
choose to leave but you memory and records of this place will be wiped
and will never be called again."
She looked back into the vault holding the treasure,
her memory of the villa on New Cyprus appeared. Her client paid
extra for door to door delivery. The town's marina consisted of a
run down ticket station and a large dirt field marked off in
squares. She loaded everything onto the pallet jack. After
thinking about it for a second, she decided to pull it herself.
It wasn't far and the pallet jack was powered, so she only had to walk
along and guide it. She walked through the ancient town's winding
roads filled with stone and brick buildings, all with red ceramic tiled
roofs. She was a sight to the townsfolk, they stopped each other
and pointed, laughed and whispered. She wound her way through the
ancient town and up the curvy road to the villa sat on a hill
overlooking the town. When she arrived at the front gate which
was covered in red vines, it opened and a female's voice told her to
continue up to the house.
She delivered the goods to an older woman, short and
lively, dressed in a black and red dress, who could see that Rakee was
in awe of the place and she gave Rakee a tour of the marble and stone
villa. In the back of the villa and down the other side of the
hill was a lake about half a kilometer from the villa. They stood
and watched the sun set and the sailboats scurry back home. I
could buy that place, she thought pressed against the vault wall.
I could offer them a thousand times what its worth. Thoughts of
what would be raced through her head, the men that would seek her hand,
family and children, the ships she would own, the fame of being the one
to discover the Treasure of the Veratains.
Her saw started smoking just before it touched the
wall with the blade. She threw it down on the ground and walked
away. She didn't have to open it, she knew it was fried like the
others. And just like the others it had been shielded the best
way she knew how. How did they do that? she wondered. Her
attempts to hack the computer system, were foiled by a quantum
randomizer that she could not find. She took out her pistol and
fired off a few rounds into the translucent wall. Just as before,
the wall absorbed the projectile, she could see it stuck there.
It would dissolve in a few hours and the wall would be look pristine
again. She walked outside and took aim the boulders and
outcroppings of rock surrounding the cave. Boulders would shatter
like glass from her pistol. Out of rounds and exhausted, she
walked slowly back the Zarathustra and fell into a disturbed
sleep. When she woke she began planning again, rummaging through
her equipment, bouncing ideas off Zara, then it was back into the cave
to try another plan. Tunnel through the rock? But with
what? She did not have the weapons or equipment to tunnel around
the room. And the walls of the room were three feet thick of
Achillinum, she could not enter through brute force. Cut the
power? But where was it? Probably safely stored inside the
room.
***
A cycle of frustration, inspiration and failure
marked her days and
nights. Trips between the cave and the Zarathustra wore shallow
path in the ashen surface. Each plan she implemented revealed a
new layer of security of the vault. Every piece of information
she could squeeze from her equipment was either disheartening or
inconclusive. She did conclude that they could wipe her memory as
well as Zara's. Finally, it fried her ISU, she screamed and threw
it against the wall, where it made no mark. She yelled again and
ran up to the wall.
"Let me in! Goddamn you fucking freaks!
Let me in!" She pounded her fists against it, eliciting only dull
thuds. After a time her screams turned to sobs. "Please let
me in." She once again contemplated the life that she could
have. riches that were teasing her, all the men that would seek
her hand, the necklaces made out of black diamonds, the dresses made of
satin, the villa. She also thought of the things that she would
never have to do again, scrub the energy capacitors, align the
communications array, sleep in a room with no windows. Thoughts
of her life transformed and her inability to find a solution to the
riddle brought a wave of self hatred and pity.
She sank against the wall and leaned against it on
her side. Turning towards the room that held the treasure, she
did not see what was beyond, but only her reflection. It was like
she had never seen her own face, the strangeness of it held her
attention. The scar near her left jaw was visible in the
reflection. A few months after her meeting with the Gua-Huan
monk, on a planet racked by civil war, an explosion from a bomb had
sent a sliver of metal into her. Surprised by her own blood
running down her arm she did not notice her father yelling her name and
holding his hand over her throat to stop the bleeding. If she
wished, the scar could be made to disappear in a few hours, but Rakee
kept it, at first as an act of rebellion against her father insistence
that she have it healed. But now she unsure why she kept
Her eyes met themselves and she stared hard into them, daring the
others, staring herself down. Another wave of self hatred
suddenly reached her, she saw her face turn into rage and she pounded
the reflection. Turning away, the hatred soon turned to
self-pity. I’ll never have it, she thought. I’ve come this
close and then to have a bunch of self-righteous freaks take it
away. She clawed weakly at her face and body. Her head
drooped and she went limp.
She heard a sliding sound and a rectangle of light
appeared on her right, on the opposite wall where the monitor appeared
before. It was a doorway. She stood looking at it for a
long while, forgetting to ask how the room had been hidden from
her. She stepped cautiously into the glowing doorway.
The room beyond the doorway which was about ten
meters square. Ample light was coming from the ceiling
itself. There lay a simple tan carpet on the floor along with two
large pillows and a chair. On the chair there was what she
recognized to be a dablet, but it did not look like any other dablet
she had ever seen. About 30 cm square, it was larger than usual,
and the worn, smooth wooden frame gave it some heft. She picked
it up and switched it on. Information regarding its contents
appeared and she guessed there was enough information inside to fill a
small library. She looked around the room, and another plan
entered her head for bypassing the security. She remembered she
had an old ISU that was dead in storage. Maybe she could get it
working again. And there had to be a way to shield it so that
they couldn't get at it. She switched off the dablet, tossed it
on the chair and left the room. The door stayed open.
***
Rakee opened her eyes, got up from a sitting
position and set the dablet carefully on the floor. The dablet
displayed the last page of Rayneff's Journey from New Paris.
During the last two months she read
The
Seven Ways of Peace by
Tryanine,
Methods of
Understanding, by Eoppinor, and the
Trance
Practices of the Order of Veratains and all the rest.
Standing
up, she looked around the room and carefully set the dablet on the
pillow. After walking out of the room Rakee stopped and looked
past her reflection to the vault wall. The vault wall slowly rose
leaving nothing between her and the treasure. Rakee smiled
slightly, turned and walked out of the cave. She never
returned. The lucid wall protecting a treasure slid shut again,
as did the door to the room holding the Treasure of the Veratains.