Zeroth Law, page 8
“Tanos?”
He blinked. “Yes?”
“Keep your head down. Things are about to get loud and messy.”
He hid behind the wards as she approached the frame. The code here wasn’t as ubiquitous as it was on the door, and along the outer edge there didn’t appeal to be any code at all, so that was where she did her work.
It was code the Institute would never have understood. To them it was undocumented and thus incorrect, wrong, heretical. But code was never inherently wrong - it merely did the undesirable, usually because the coder hadn’t paid attention or didn’t understand what they were doing.
Right now, she wanted something very undesirable.
A simple loop and some power was all that she needed. For good measure she added more power than she thought she needed, twisting the sigils together into an ugly ouroboros. It was a monstrous thing that couldn’t possibly end well. She felt sweat beading on her forehead as she traced a final line between her ugly mess of a weapon and the feed leading from the door’s controls. Coders had been killed for making less terrible mistakes, and she knew from experience that it was not a pretty death.
As soon as she connected the two she turned and ran. Just before ducking behind the ridge where Tanos was hiding, she looked back and saw her parasitic code glowing blue-white.
“What did you do?” Tanos was peeking out to look.
“I made a bunch of mistakes on purpose.”
“What? How can you -”
The light was shining brighter and brighter. The flickering glow was unpleasantly familiar, a familiarity that bred something more unsettling than contempt. She wasn’t interested in deepening that familiarity.
“Get down!”
She shoved his head back down behind the ridge, and covered her ears with her hands. For another second, nothing happened. After another, Ada became impatient - but if she stuck her head out to take a look, it might well be the last thing she saw. She tensed up when a dull hum grew audible through her hands, though, louder and louder, and in her memory the sound bled together with screams.
The code crashed. Blue light seared the scenery and her irises. The ground shook, trees shook, birds took flight, and dirt rained down on top of them . And in the midst of the chaos, a colossal metal thunk made Ada grin.
Once the dust started settling, she risked a peek. The frame around the entrance was crisscrossed with blackened scorchmarks in the shape of code, and in places the metal seemed to have fractured completely. More interesting still, the door seemed to have disappeared. There was nowhere near enough debris lying around for it to have exploded, so it must have gone somewhere else.
“Holy shit.” Tanos’ mouth and eyes competed to open widest. “You actually got in!”
She felt her hands shaking a little. It had been a while since she had heard code crash, or seen the aftermath. But it was okay this time - nobody was hurt. She responded, speaking loud to quell the shaking in her hands. “Of course I did. What did you expect? That’s what you asked me to do.”
“Well… yeah, I guess. I actually just thought you were cute, and I heard about you making a magical fireplace in the inn, so I figured showing you this might be a good way to get to know you.”
She stared at him, blanking for a moment on the buried compliment. “Okay, that was misleading. Did your parents even die here?”
He looked hurt. “Of course they did! I just didn’t think anybody could open this thing, and I figured you’d be smart enough not to get us killed trying.”
She grinned widely. She came across as smart, even to someone who didn’t know code? That was a compliment she’d happily take. She slapped him on the shoulder and turned him towards the door. “Well, lucky you, you are getting to know me! First lesson: I can do whatever the hell I want, no matter what everyone else thinks. Now do you want to check this place out or not?”
He stared at the ancient ruin, eyes suddenly wide. She felt another pang of warmth at the curiosity twinkling in his eyes. He nodded. “Hell yes. What do you think we’ll find?”
She grinned back, and the feeling of shared fascination with ancient things suddenly brought her back to a time when she was a little younger, a little less bitter. She almost skipped, crossing the dusty grass towards the ruin. "Ancient technology? Code sigil references? Actual ancients, preserved in some kind of sleep? It could be anything!”
They reached the entrance and peered inside. Tanos stood behind her, as though she would protect him. “It’s pretty dark in there, Ada.”
“Of course it’s dark. Bring me a rock.”
“A…? Okay, you know what, sure.”
Tanos was apparently beyond the point where he needed to question her abilities. As he took off, Ada stepped into the ruins. Enough daylight filtered in that she could tell that the chamber was large, fairly rectangular, and bordered by a chest-high platform on one side. It smelled like dust and dirt.
Up against this platform was… something very big. The front tapered down like a wedge, with smoothly curved edges and a rectangular window facing forward. From the tattered seats inside, Ada could tell people were meant to sit in this thing. Behind the wedge-box was was a long, flat surface with knee-high walls around the edge, as though to prevent things from falling off. It seemed to be sitting on the ground, and didn’t look like an integral part of the ruin. Was it mobile? It looked like some kind of flatbed cart, but without wheels.
Tanos appeared by her side. “I’ve got some - woah - what’s that?”
“I have no idea.” She took the two fist-sized rocks he had brought with him and traced illuminating code in a few places on each one, alongside a power reservoir. The rocks would glow for a day or two at least. “Take this one.”
He took it and inspected it, as though his ungifted mind might somehow gain insight into the nature of the code. Ada laid her hand on the huge wheelless wagon, but it seemed inert. There wasn’t much code, though when she touched one small section on the outside a door snapped open. They jumped back and exchanged glances, and she frowned. “Huh. I have no idea what this is.”
“Could it be a tank?”
Ada’s frown deepened. “A what?”
Tanos seemed excited to be able to explain something. “I heard a story about a guy who found this ancient relic, a big metal box he could ride around in, with guns attached to it. They say he used it to conquer Vegas two hundred years ago.”
“Tanos, I bet nobody living within a thousand klicks of here even knows where Vegas is, let alone has been there. Might as well not be a real place. The rumours are too crazy.”
“Everybody knows it’s in the wastelands!”
“And the wastelands are huge. Besides, I don’t see any weapons on this, and there isn’t much code on it either. We can take another look on our way out, maybe try activating it, but let’s see what else we can find first.”
As they stepped deeper into the ruin, leaving daylight behind, the blue-white glow of the code on the rocks was the only thing illuminating the world they had walked into. Clambering up onto the platform, Ada found it wasn’t very wide - two meters at most. The wall was fairly plain, though it was covered in more of the decorative ancient symbols she had seen on the entrance.
Not far into the darkness they reached another door, this one fairly wide but not much taller than a person. Tanos looked at her warily.
“Are you going to blow this one up too?”
“Let’s hope I don’t have to.” She reached out to investigate the door’s code with her hand, but before she could even touch the surface a gentle hiss filled the air, and the door slid upwards into the ceiling. Beyond, lights flared to life.
She knew some of the old ruins still worked, kept running by watchers, but the motion still startled her. “Keep your light stone out, just in case.” As they walked into the next room she put hers away, holding her gun ready. She hoped she wouldn’t have to shoot anything, but it was always a possibility. She had heard enough stories about the kinds of things that lived in ancient ruins.
The next room, almost bright as day courtesy of thin white code on the ceiling, wasn’t very interesting. The only thing inside was a pile of metal cylinders sitting in some kind of grubby dust. On the cylinders she found more of those maddening, meaningless symbols. One day she’d have to stop and figure out what exactly those were.
“This looks like storage. Come on, let’s keep going.”
“Storage for what?”
Ada picked up one of the metal cans and inspected it, but there was no code on it and no apparent way to open it. She thought she could feel its weight shifting, though, as if it contained liquid. Tanos raised his eyebrows at it. “Bombs?”
She paused at the thought, and very carefully set the cylinder down again. “You know, suddenly I don’t want to hold this anymore.”
“Is that code?”
“No, obviously, but I don’t know what they are. Come on, let’s keep looking.”
Like the last one, the next door in this room opened on its own as they neared. The lights beyond it activated as well, and the storage room behind them went dark. The automation of the ruins was unnerving. Had everything really remained functional after a thousand years of neglect? She saw no watchers, but there must be some floating around here - what else could be maintaining it?
“We’re in a kitchen.”
She blinked, and saw what Tanos was pointing at. While the machines that lined the walls were unfamiliar to her, there were some staples - chopsticks, forks, knives, pots, pans, water basins - that Ada recognized from the Institute. The machines, then, were surely for various kinds of cooking.
She looked back to the door they had come through. “I bet that storage room was for food, and the entrance was for bringing it in. There must be another entrance to the ruins.”
“Do you think those metal boxes weren’t actually bombs?”
She considered their shifting weight. “I guess there could be food in there, but how would you get it out? You’d have to destroy the box. That seems pointless. Besides, this doesn’t help answer the question of this whole place really is.”
Tanos didn’t seem to want to help answer that question either; instead, he was peering at the utensils. The chopsticks were stony-looking and slightly ridged, the knives were surprisingly dull and round, and the forks and spoons were curved all around with barely a hard edge. They looked bizarre compared to what Ada was used to, but Tanos didn’t seem to mind. “Well, I wasn’t expecting to find spoons , but I’ll take what I can get.”
Ada rolled her eyes and patted him on the back. “Keep your eyes out for something more educational.”
She kept exploring. Another sliding door led her out of the kitchen, and she found herself standing behind a counter, looking out onto a large room filled with chairs and tables - all firmly attached to the floor. It looked odd, but still, with some imagination, she could venture a guess.
“Hey Tanos! I think this place was a tavern.”
He followed her out, pocketing clinking with utensils, and the kitchen lights turned off. “A tavern? Why would they have an underground tavern?”
“To keep it away from people who don’t like them, like me? I don’t know. Come on!”
The tavern wasn’t the end. It opened into a broad hallway, both ends of which seemed to curve towards each other, as though it were ring-shaped. More ancient symbols covered the outer walls, too, and here she saw they came in two different styles, always appearing together; one of long strings of simple glyphs, and the other of complex sets lines packed into roughly square configurations. The mystery taunted her, but she was delighted to have something to actually investigate, and her eyes were already flitting about. She felt like she had been thrown into a huge toybox.
“What is this place?”
She walked out of the tavern as Tanos rummaged around under the tables. The ancients hadn’t left much lying around when the had abandoned this place, though, and he left disappointed. As they walked, ceiling lights lit up to follow their passage.
As did, to Ada’s surprise, the entire inner wall.
She and Tanos jumped back in surprise as life-sized, moving images of explosions and fighters running about covered a small section of the wall in front of them. A female voice began speaking, her tone suggesting she was narrating the events on display.
“ As war raged in the rimward colonies, corporate and state officials on Earth scrambled to organize a response. ”
The ancient dialect fell just outside the realm of comprehension. Ada felt her mouth hanging open, unprepared to parse whatever was being said.
“This - this is the language of the ancients.”
Tanos approached the wall as the sight of people with guns marching into large, curved metal boxes filled the scene. “What’s she saying?”
Ada listened, carefully, and found after a moment that it wasn’t completely incomprehensible. She had heard it before, emerging from a few old relics in the Institute’s possession, and it was distantly similar to her own language. She recognized scattered words, even fragments of a phrase here or there - things like Earth , for example, or they went - but not enough to make sense of the overall message. The pronunciation was mostly alien.
“I’m not sure.” But she listened. After less than a minute the wall faded to black, and the images appeared to start from the beginning again, with the same narration. She noticed the ancient symbols appearing along the bottom of the wall again, changing as the sights continued. Again, two lines of two radically different sets of symbols, appearing in tandem. What were those damned glyphs for? “Let’s keep going. I don’t know what this is.”
But as they walked down the ring-shaped, sections of wall continued to light up, with more and more images and sounds flickering past her senses. Ada watched as wedge-shaped things - like boats, or birds - flew between the stars, firing bright weapons at one another. She saw burning cities, cities the size of which boggled her mind - hundreds of thousands of people must have lived in them. Such numbers in a single place was almost unthinkable; her own Institute was home to just over a thousand, and few cities were much larger.
They kept walking. A strange scene played out on the next section, with hovering ships not unlike those in the loading area behind them carrying armed men and women across a rust-red desert, under a pale olive-yellow sky. There was no ring in that sky. It looked like no place she had ever seen.
Ada was beginning to have some idea of what kind of place they had discovered.
“This is some kind of archive.”
“A what?”
“At the Institute we had an archive - it was a place for artifacts from the time of the ancients. We weren’t supposed to look at most of them, but some of the things they did show junior coders were images. They didn’t move like this, and there weren’t many, but the ancients did have ways of preserving these things.”
“What kind of images?”
She shrugged. “Honestly, a lot of it seemed really ordinary. Animals, people’s faces, some images of machines none of the coders were familiar with. I remember one image of a pretty girl in a blue dress, standing on a rocky beach. It seemed personal. Not, you know, historical.”
Tanos looked around. “I don’t see any pretty girls in blue dresses here.”
She grinned. “If you do, call me over.”
He grinned back, and his attention returned to the images. “So we’re not going to find any things here?”
She pursed her lips and hummed. “I think we’re supposed to find knowledge. I’d love to, but I don’t know what any of this means. Yet.”
Tanos sighed. “Well, if you don’t mind, I’d like to go check some of the side chambers to see if I can find anything a little more valuable. Or, you know, educational, as you said.”
Ada ignored him, wracking her brain. Whoever had built this place clearly intended for visitors to learn something - they were blasting sounds and images at her, after all. Their mission had gone unfulfilled, though; whatever was being talked about happened before the Fall, during a golden age of human civilization nobody seemed to know anything about. All was forgotten.
Could she remember for them?
Tanos was still staring at her, she realized. “Fine, go look, but don’t try to activate anything without my help. You could get yourself killed.”
“Are you just going to watch those?”
“And listen to the voice, yes. I’m going to try to learn what the people who created this place wanted me to learn, rather than just pillage their tomb.”
Tanos wandered off in search of ancient treasure while Ada stayed and stared at the images, letting each one play out twice before moving on to the next. Her eyes flickered between the scenes and the strange yellow symbols flickering along the bottom of the image. She felt a sense of desperation - whether in herself to learn, or in these archives to be remembered, she couldn’t say. There was a connection here just waiting to be made, but she couldn’t quite see it yet.
Chapter 6
The party was standing where Isavel had fought and killed. She was watching Joon try to puzzle out what he had seen, and he glanced at her with more skepticism than she cared for. “I saw shots from right here. Different kinds, so I doubt it was a gun. I’m betting it was that hunter who's following us.”
Isavel tried to keep cool, to hide the trembling. “I didn’t see anyone else! Like I said, I - I got ambushed by a pathfinder, but I didn’t see any hunter s.” Her mind was racing. She could reveal her abilities, but she had no way of knowing how they would react. She had to do it at the right time, in the right place. There would be an opportune moment, there had to be. This just wasn’t it.
Lessa nudged one of the bodies with her foot. “What about that guy? He looks like a warrior.”
Everyone was wondering what had happened behind the ridge to turn the tide. Isavel stood beside the bodies she had struck down, trying not to look at their faces, trying to think of a plausible explanation. This was a nightmare.
“Isavel, you killed this pathfinder with his own club?” Joon asked. He was not letting up. “And the other two, you have no idea?”
He blinked. “Yes?”
“Keep your head down. Things are about to get loud and messy.”
He hid behind the wards as she approached the frame. The code here wasn’t as ubiquitous as it was on the door, and along the outer edge there didn’t appeal to be any code at all, so that was where she did her work.
It was code the Institute would never have understood. To them it was undocumented and thus incorrect, wrong, heretical. But code was never inherently wrong - it merely did the undesirable, usually because the coder hadn’t paid attention or didn’t understand what they were doing.
Right now, she wanted something very undesirable.
A simple loop and some power was all that she needed. For good measure she added more power than she thought she needed, twisting the sigils together into an ugly ouroboros. It was a monstrous thing that couldn’t possibly end well. She felt sweat beading on her forehead as she traced a final line between her ugly mess of a weapon and the feed leading from the door’s controls. Coders had been killed for making less terrible mistakes, and she knew from experience that it was not a pretty death.
As soon as she connected the two she turned and ran. Just before ducking behind the ridge where Tanos was hiding, she looked back and saw her parasitic code glowing blue-white.
“What did you do?” Tanos was peeking out to look.
“I made a bunch of mistakes on purpose.”
“What? How can you -”
The light was shining brighter and brighter. The flickering glow was unpleasantly familiar, a familiarity that bred something more unsettling than contempt. She wasn’t interested in deepening that familiarity.
“Get down!”
She shoved his head back down behind the ridge, and covered her ears with her hands. For another second, nothing happened. After another, Ada became impatient - but if she stuck her head out to take a look, it might well be the last thing she saw. She tensed up when a dull hum grew audible through her hands, though, louder and louder, and in her memory the sound bled together with screams.
The code crashed. Blue light seared the scenery and her irises. The ground shook, trees shook, birds took flight, and dirt rained down on top of them . And in the midst of the chaos, a colossal metal thunk made Ada grin.
Once the dust started settling, she risked a peek. The frame around the entrance was crisscrossed with blackened scorchmarks in the shape of code, and in places the metal seemed to have fractured completely. More interesting still, the door seemed to have disappeared. There was nowhere near enough debris lying around for it to have exploded, so it must have gone somewhere else.
“Holy shit.” Tanos’ mouth and eyes competed to open widest. “You actually got in!”
She felt her hands shaking a little. It had been a while since she had heard code crash, or seen the aftermath. But it was okay this time - nobody was hurt. She responded, speaking loud to quell the shaking in her hands. “Of course I did. What did you expect? That’s what you asked me to do.”
“Well… yeah, I guess. I actually just thought you were cute, and I heard about you making a magical fireplace in the inn, so I figured showing you this might be a good way to get to know you.”
She stared at him, blanking for a moment on the buried compliment. “Okay, that was misleading. Did your parents even die here?”
He looked hurt. “Of course they did! I just didn’t think anybody could open this thing, and I figured you’d be smart enough not to get us killed trying.”
She grinned widely. She came across as smart, even to someone who didn’t know code? That was a compliment she’d happily take. She slapped him on the shoulder and turned him towards the door. “Well, lucky you, you are getting to know me! First lesson: I can do whatever the hell I want, no matter what everyone else thinks. Now do you want to check this place out or not?”
He stared at the ancient ruin, eyes suddenly wide. She felt another pang of warmth at the curiosity twinkling in his eyes. He nodded. “Hell yes. What do you think we’ll find?”
She grinned back, and the feeling of shared fascination with ancient things suddenly brought her back to a time when she was a little younger, a little less bitter. She almost skipped, crossing the dusty grass towards the ruin. "Ancient technology? Code sigil references? Actual ancients, preserved in some kind of sleep? It could be anything!”
They reached the entrance and peered inside. Tanos stood behind her, as though she would protect him. “It’s pretty dark in there, Ada.”
“Of course it’s dark. Bring me a rock.”
“A…? Okay, you know what, sure.”
Tanos was apparently beyond the point where he needed to question her abilities. As he took off, Ada stepped into the ruins. Enough daylight filtered in that she could tell that the chamber was large, fairly rectangular, and bordered by a chest-high platform on one side. It smelled like dust and dirt.
Up against this platform was… something very big. The front tapered down like a wedge, with smoothly curved edges and a rectangular window facing forward. From the tattered seats inside, Ada could tell people were meant to sit in this thing. Behind the wedge-box was was a long, flat surface with knee-high walls around the edge, as though to prevent things from falling off. It seemed to be sitting on the ground, and didn’t look like an integral part of the ruin. Was it mobile? It looked like some kind of flatbed cart, but without wheels.
Tanos appeared by her side. “I’ve got some - woah - what’s that?”
“I have no idea.” She took the two fist-sized rocks he had brought with him and traced illuminating code in a few places on each one, alongside a power reservoir. The rocks would glow for a day or two at least. “Take this one.”
He took it and inspected it, as though his ungifted mind might somehow gain insight into the nature of the code. Ada laid her hand on the huge wheelless wagon, but it seemed inert. There wasn’t much code, though when she touched one small section on the outside a door snapped open. They jumped back and exchanged glances, and she frowned. “Huh. I have no idea what this is.”
“Could it be a tank?”
Ada’s frown deepened. “A what?”
Tanos seemed excited to be able to explain something. “I heard a story about a guy who found this ancient relic, a big metal box he could ride around in, with guns attached to it. They say he used it to conquer Vegas two hundred years ago.”
“Tanos, I bet nobody living within a thousand klicks of here even knows where Vegas is, let alone has been there. Might as well not be a real place. The rumours are too crazy.”
“Everybody knows it’s in the wastelands!”
“And the wastelands are huge. Besides, I don’t see any weapons on this, and there isn’t much code on it either. We can take another look on our way out, maybe try activating it, but let’s see what else we can find first.”
As they stepped deeper into the ruin, leaving daylight behind, the blue-white glow of the code on the rocks was the only thing illuminating the world they had walked into. Clambering up onto the platform, Ada found it wasn’t very wide - two meters at most. The wall was fairly plain, though it was covered in more of the decorative ancient symbols she had seen on the entrance.
Not far into the darkness they reached another door, this one fairly wide but not much taller than a person. Tanos looked at her warily.
“Are you going to blow this one up too?”
“Let’s hope I don’t have to.” She reached out to investigate the door’s code with her hand, but before she could even touch the surface a gentle hiss filled the air, and the door slid upwards into the ceiling. Beyond, lights flared to life.
She knew some of the old ruins still worked, kept running by watchers, but the motion still startled her. “Keep your light stone out, just in case.” As they walked into the next room she put hers away, holding her gun ready. She hoped she wouldn’t have to shoot anything, but it was always a possibility. She had heard enough stories about the kinds of things that lived in ancient ruins.
The next room, almost bright as day courtesy of thin white code on the ceiling, wasn’t very interesting. The only thing inside was a pile of metal cylinders sitting in some kind of grubby dust. On the cylinders she found more of those maddening, meaningless symbols. One day she’d have to stop and figure out what exactly those were.
“This looks like storage. Come on, let’s keep going.”
“Storage for what?”
Ada picked up one of the metal cans and inspected it, but there was no code on it and no apparent way to open it. She thought she could feel its weight shifting, though, as if it contained liquid. Tanos raised his eyebrows at it. “Bombs?”
She paused at the thought, and very carefully set the cylinder down again. “You know, suddenly I don’t want to hold this anymore.”
“Is that code?”
“No, obviously, but I don’t know what they are. Come on, let’s keep looking.”
Like the last one, the next door in this room opened on its own as they neared. The lights beyond it activated as well, and the storage room behind them went dark. The automation of the ruins was unnerving. Had everything really remained functional after a thousand years of neglect? She saw no watchers, but there must be some floating around here - what else could be maintaining it?
“We’re in a kitchen.”
She blinked, and saw what Tanos was pointing at. While the machines that lined the walls were unfamiliar to her, there were some staples - chopsticks, forks, knives, pots, pans, water basins - that Ada recognized from the Institute. The machines, then, were surely for various kinds of cooking.
She looked back to the door they had come through. “I bet that storage room was for food, and the entrance was for bringing it in. There must be another entrance to the ruins.”
“Do you think those metal boxes weren’t actually bombs?”
She considered their shifting weight. “I guess there could be food in there, but how would you get it out? You’d have to destroy the box. That seems pointless. Besides, this doesn’t help answer the question of this whole place really is.”
Tanos didn’t seem to want to help answer that question either; instead, he was peering at the utensils. The chopsticks were stony-looking and slightly ridged, the knives were surprisingly dull and round, and the forks and spoons were curved all around with barely a hard edge. They looked bizarre compared to what Ada was used to, but Tanos didn’t seem to mind. “Well, I wasn’t expecting to find spoons , but I’ll take what I can get.”
Ada rolled her eyes and patted him on the back. “Keep your eyes out for something more educational.”
She kept exploring. Another sliding door led her out of the kitchen, and she found herself standing behind a counter, looking out onto a large room filled with chairs and tables - all firmly attached to the floor. It looked odd, but still, with some imagination, she could venture a guess.
“Hey Tanos! I think this place was a tavern.”
He followed her out, pocketing clinking with utensils, and the kitchen lights turned off. “A tavern? Why would they have an underground tavern?”
“To keep it away from people who don’t like them, like me? I don’t know. Come on!”
The tavern wasn’t the end. It opened into a broad hallway, both ends of which seemed to curve towards each other, as though it were ring-shaped. More ancient symbols covered the outer walls, too, and here she saw they came in two different styles, always appearing together; one of long strings of simple glyphs, and the other of complex sets lines packed into roughly square configurations. The mystery taunted her, but she was delighted to have something to actually investigate, and her eyes were already flitting about. She felt like she had been thrown into a huge toybox.
“What is this place?”
She walked out of the tavern as Tanos rummaged around under the tables. The ancients hadn’t left much lying around when the had abandoned this place, though, and he left disappointed. As they walked, ceiling lights lit up to follow their passage.
As did, to Ada’s surprise, the entire inner wall.
She and Tanos jumped back in surprise as life-sized, moving images of explosions and fighters running about covered a small section of the wall in front of them. A female voice began speaking, her tone suggesting she was narrating the events on display.
“ As war raged in the rimward colonies, corporate and state officials on Earth scrambled to organize a response. ”
The ancient dialect fell just outside the realm of comprehension. Ada felt her mouth hanging open, unprepared to parse whatever was being said.
“This - this is the language of the ancients.”
Tanos approached the wall as the sight of people with guns marching into large, curved metal boxes filled the scene. “What’s she saying?”
Ada listened, carefully, and found after a moment that it wasn’t completely incomprehensible. She had heard it before, emerging from a few old relics in the Institute’s possession, and it was distantly similar to her own language. She recognized scattered words, even fragments of a phrase here or there - things like Earth , for example, or they went - but not enough to make sense of the overall message. The pronunciation was mostly alien.
“I’m not sure.” But she listened. After less than a minute the wall faded to black, and the images appeared to start from the beginning again, with the same narration. She noticed the ancient symbols appearing along the bottom of the wall again, changing as the sights continued. Again, two lines of two radically different sets of symbols, appearing in tandem. What were those damned glyphs for? “Let’s keep going. I don’t know what this is.”
But as they walked down the ring-shaped, sections of wall continued to light up, with more and more images and sounds flickering past her senses. Ada watched as wedge-shaped things - like boats, or birds - flew between the stars, firing bright weapons at one another. She saw burning cities, cities the size of which boggled her mind - hundreds of thousands of people must have lived in them. Such numbers in a single place was almost unthinkable; her own Institute was home to just over a thousand, and few cities were much larger.
They kept walking. A strange scene played out on the next section, with hovering ships not unlike those in the loading area behind them carrying armed men and women across a rust-red desert, under a pale olive-yellow sky. There was no ring in that sky. It looked like no place she had ever seen.
Ada was beginning to have some idea of what kind of place they had discovered.
“This is some kind of archive.”
“A what?”
“At the Institute we had an archive - it was a place for artifacts from the time of the ancients. We weren’t supposed to look at most of them, but some of the things they did show junior coders were images. They didn’t move like this, and there weren’t many, but the ancients did have ways of preserving these things.”
“What kind of images?”
She shrugged. “Honestly, a lot of it seemed really ordinary. Animals, people’s faces, some images of machines none of the coders were familiar with. I remember one image of a pretty girl in a blue dress, standing on a rocky beach. It seemed personal. Not, you know, historical.”
Tanos looked around. “I don’t see any pretty girls in blue dresses here.”
She grinned. “If you do, call me over.”
He grinned back, and his attention returned to the images. “So we’re not going to find any things here?”
She pursed her lips and hummed. “I think we’re supposed to find knowledge. I’d love to, but I don’t know what any of this means. Yet.”
Tanos sighed. “Well, if you don’t mind, I’d like to go check some of the side chambers to see if I can find anything a little more valuable. Or, you know, educational, as you said.”
Ada ignored him, wracking her brain. Whoever had built this place clearly intended for visitors to learn something - they were blasting sounds and images at her, after all. Their mission had gone unfulfilled, though; whatever was being talked about happened before the Fall, during a golden age of human civilization nobody seemed to know anything about. All was forgotten.
Could she remember for them?
Tanos was still staring at her, she realized. “Fine, go look, but don’t try to activate anything without my help. You could get yourself killed.”
“Are you just going to watch those?”
“And listen to the voice, yes. I’m going to try to learn what the people who created this place wanted me to learn, rather than just pillage their tomb.”
Tanos wandered off in search of ancient treasure while Ada stayed and stared at the images, letting each one play out twice before moving on to the next. Her eyes flickered between the scenes and the strange yellow symbols flickering along the bottom of the image. She felt a sense of desperation - whether in herself to learn, or in these archives to be remembered, she couldn’t say. There was a connection here just waiting to be made, but she couldn’t quite see it yet.
Chapter 6
The party was standing where Isavel had fought and killed. She was watching Joon try to puzzle out what he had seen, and he glanced at her with more skepticism than she cared for. “I saw shots from right here. Different kinds, so I doubt it was a gun. I’m betting it was that hunter who's following us.”
Isavel tried to keep cool, to hide the trembling. “I didn’t see anyone else! Like I said, I - I got ambushed by a pathfinder, but I didn’t see any hunter s.” Her mind was racing. She could reveal her abilities, but she had no way of knowing how they would react. She had to do it at the right time, in the right place. There would be an opportune moment, there had to be. This just wasn’t it.
Lessa nudged one of the bodies with her foot. “What about that guy? He looks like a warrior.”
Everyone was wondering what had happened behind the ridge to turn the tide. Isavel stood beside the bodies she had struck down, trying not to look at their faces, trying to think of a plausible explanation. This was a nightmare.
“Isavel, you killed this pathfinder with his own club?” Joon asked. He was not letting up. “And the other two, you have no idea?”
