Page 5 of The Captain's Bounty
Hell, we don’t have the technology to do this now.”
“This isn’tourtechnology,” Lissa reminded him with a laugh. Her excitement was building, her hands all but shaking as she spun back to face the others. “Who’s got the mapper?”
Mouth flattening, no doubt already regretting giving her lead, Dex folded his arms. “Stine?”
A man behind him hefted a satchel off his shoulder, stepping up to Lissa before placing his pack on the ground. Opening the fold-over top, he pulled out a white drone, set it on the floor and powered it on.
Flashing green lights on the tips of each wing signaled its brief startup calibration before the motor started whirring. A gentle cloud of disturbed dust billowed out from under the drone as it rose into the air. Twin sonar disks folded out. Emitting its first ping as it drifted forward, the drone flew off down the hallway at just faster than she could easily walk, sending out pings every two seconds.
Pulling a tablet out of the satchel next, Stine switched that on too and Lissa sidled up next to him so she could watch over his arm as her discovery came alive in glorious 4D blueprint mapping.
“This place really is huge,” Boaz noted, laughing again.
Joining them, Dex watched as the drone drifted into the first open archway, sending out pings that gradually bounced back to fill in the map rising from the surface of the tablet.
“This place is a maze,” he corrected, and Lissa had to admit he was right. She glanced from the tablet, to that first archway where the silver-blue wall light was flickering, and then backdown again. The mapper was steadily pinging away, sending back a confusion of corridors without rooms, snaking turns that lead to more turns, and dead ends that culminated seemingly without purpose.
“Send out another one?” the man asked. When Dex nodded, he dug the secondary backup drone out of his now empty satchel and started it up too. Lifting off the ground, it took off. Synchronized with its twin, it drifted into the next archway down, and Lissa watched in growing astonishment as the maze on the screen grew larger.
“Whatis this?” she marveled.
Doing his job, the photographer moved off down the main hall, documenting the layout and every panel of flashing lights and letters on the walls. He had ventured only perhaps fifteen feet when he suddenly stopped, looking down at his foot. “Uh… guys? The tile under me just clicked when I stepped on it.”
“Nobody said anything about boobytraps before I came down here,” Boaz told Dex, much to Lissa’s annoyance.
A staticky click from somewhere overhead startled everyone, and they all looked up as, calmly, a masculine voice began speaking in an unfamiliar language.
“Hello?” Boaz called back.
“It’s a recording,” Lissa and Dex both said at the same time. Turning to the others, Dex asked, “Can anyone understand that?”
Lissa couldn’t count the number of language aptitude enhancing shots she’d taken over the course of her career, or the languages she was now fluent in. The words calmly washing down over them weren’t familiar, and as she stood listening intently, not so much as a single twinge of mental recognition tickled at her brain.
“We are alone down here, right?” Boaz breathed.
Lissa was still searching the ceiling for the hidden speakers when she heard the second click, and then the voice began again, this time in a different, but still unknown, language. “It’s a prerecorded message. If we aren’t alone, I’ll be seriously surprised.”
Circling behind Stine as he continued recording the growing maze on his mapping tablet, Dex softly asked her, “Have you ever discovered anything like this before?”
“I’ve never even heard of another discovery like this before,” she replied.
“Neither have I.” A tic of muscle jumped and clenched along his clean-shaven jaw. He neither looked nor sounded excited to be experiencing it now.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Boaz suddenly said, attracting their attention. “We’ve got working lights, working pre-recorded messages, clean ventilation, buttons flashing on the wall.” He gestured all around them, grinning as if it should be obvious. “There’s working power cells in this thing!” He got excited again. “We get a tenth of a percent of the profits from every new patent Corporate gains through reverse-engineering new tech. We’re going to be rich!”
Lissa turned and gave Dex a hard stare. “Is that so? And here I thought Corporate sent us to look for astatine.”
Dex met her gaze without flinching or apology. “There was always the chance you were right, and Corporate loves to put money on the dark horse.”
And that right there was the difference between GIASS and Corporate, no matter how many expeditions it sanctioned. With Corporate, everything came down to profits.
The means to an end, Lissa told herself, fighting to keep the withering reproach from showing when she looked at him. If this was the find that washed her name clean again, then it would be worth it, no matter who she had to work with or how badly theirmotivation. Even if some of them were more interested in profit over the pure thrill of raw, new discovery.
“Stay together,” Dex ordered, frowning at Boaz until the man stopped smiling. “No one leaves the main hall until the mapping is complete, and it’ll be a buddy system all the way.”
“Want to be my buddy?” Boaz asked, slinging an arm around the shoulders of the guy next to him.
Now Lissa did roll her eyes. This was serious, and the man didn’t have a single one of those bones in his body.
