How far gone am I when a portable shelter is civilized? he wondered irritably.
He shoved the door aside. Without pausing, he ducked out into the canyon. The door slapped shut behind him.
The canyon’s darkness folded around him like another cloak. The rain had stopped, leaving nothing but puddles with crusts of ice forming rapidly. The sun was over the walls of the main canyon, Jay knew, but the night’s unforgiving cold and dark lingered for hours longer in this side crack. Still, Jay felt his breathing ease, not just from the change in the weather, but from getting away from Lu. It was always easier to think on his own.
It’s so close to finished, I’m getting nervous. And I should have had word by now. Uary’s had plenty of time to find out what that woman is.
Just check the transmitter and get back where you belong, Jahidh, he ordered himself.
All three of the team wore the neckline terminals commonly called “torques” that worked in conjunction with their translator disks to allow them to keep in touch with each other over limited distances. But offworld transmission required more power and a lot more circuitry. When Jay had suggested that the spare transmitter should be set up somewhere away from the shelter, Lu and Cor had both agreed. The reasoning he’d used on them was that if the weather, or a hostile native managed to destroy the shelter, there’d still be a way for the survivors to get word out. His real reasoning had been that the communications system needed a weak link he could exploit.
Jay switched the lantern on and strapped it to his arm. He pointed the beam up the rocky cliff, tracking the handholds Lu had so carefully gouged into the stone. He took a deep breath and flexed his hands before he hoisted himself up the rocky cliff. The rock hadn’t had the chance to absorb any heat from the new day. It was like climbing a ragged block of ice. Jay gritted his teeth and kept on climbing.
About ten meters above the canyon floor, the cliff broke away. Jay swung his leg over the lip and dropped down into a pocket-sized valley. Places like this were called “flood cups” by the inhabitants of the Realm because they could sometimes fill up with water and spill out into the canyon. This one, however, had several drainage holes drilled in it. Jay only had to splash through a few shallow puddles to reach the transmitter.
The unit was a stack of squat boxes. Everything they used on this planet had to be sheltered against the torrential rains and freezing cold that came with night.
Jay undid the straps holding the lantern to his sleeve and hooked it onto the side of the transmitter so he could see what he was doing. Then he lifted back the cover on the main unit. All the keys and displays glowed with a steady amber light and were completely blank.
Jay touched a series of commands he had memorized weeks before they landed here. No response came from the unit. No messages from the Unifiers, then. No change in status to report to their people down here stirring up trouble. Cor and Lu spent a lot of time cursing about the lack of attention their project was receiving from the bureaucracy back on May 16, even with the Vitae so interested in the Realm. Jay suspected both of them were on somebody’s mud list by now for failing to make scheduled reports.
Neither side knew how many messages were being “lost” during transmission.
Jay touched the keys again in a sequence that Lu and Cor had no idea was valid. The transmitter responded by scattering what could have been a random series of symbols from a dozen different alphabets across the screen. Jay took his translator disk out of his ear and slipped it into the download slot in the transmitter. The screen cleared instantly. Jay reclaimed the disk.
As soon as he had replaced the translator in his ear, Caril’s voice spoke to him. “We have released the artifact Stone in the Wall. She and Eric Born were allowed to escape confinement twenty hours prior to my sending this message …”
Jay sat in his tiny pool of light, feeling the cold seep into him as he listened to the details.
Blood, blood, blood! he cursed. Now we have to hunt down her family. He thought about Trail and her eyes, but couldn’t work the brief glimpse of a resemblance into a full-fledged hope. How could those idiots have done this! They know I’ve got nothing to work with down here! For a brief moment, he knew how Lu and Cor felt, bereft of resources and support.
He tried to tell himself it was only a setback, not a dead end. And it would have been very bad if the Assembly had found out how Stone in the Wall functioned before they did, but it was still bad enough. If the Imperialists didn’t have a thorough grasp of how the artifacts functioned by the time the Assembly parties came over the World’s Wall, the chance to win the Home Ground would be gone.