Page 6 of The Captain's Bounty
Putting distance between them, she followed behind the photographer. That gave her a chance to look into the other archways as she passed them, but she saw nothing beyond the immediate corner in yet another part of the maze. From the hidden speakers, click after soft click, the voice droned on, repeating whatever it had to say in yet another language she didn’t know.
By the time she reached the fifth doorway, they were on their seventh version of the recorded message, and she was just far enough into the bend of the circular hall that if she went any further, she wouldn’t be able to see the open door and the brick wall they’d cut their way through. Looking forward, she saw only a continuation of more open archways into the growing mapped maze beyond… right up until Boaz let out a caw of victory.
“Hey, look at this!” His hand was on the wall and the lighted symbols were flashing wildly around his fingers. “I think there’s a pattern.”
“Don’t—” Dex started to say, but in three quick presses, Boaz completed the pattern.
Lissa wasn’t so far down the hall that she missed seeing the door they’d all entered through slid quickly shut, cutting off their only entrance… and escape.
“You idiot!” Dex snapped, stalking him. “What did you just do?”
“I don’t know,” Boaz stammered. “I thought it was going to open this door.”
Every lighted letter and symbol down the length of the entire hall abruptly dimmed, then flicked from pale blue to bright red.
Alarmed, Lissa started back toward them. “Open the door.”
“Whatever you just did, un-fucking-do it,” Dex ordered.
Boaz shrugged. “Like I know what I did in the first place?”
“Uh, guys?” Stine interrupted, his eyes glued on the mapping tablet. “Something just happened to one of the drones.”
Picking up the pace, Lissa ran to join Dex and, together, they all studied the tablet. Sure enough, the second drone was still mapping, but the first had stopped with unfinished pathways yet to be pinged.
“Maybe the way is blocked?” Lissa suggested.
Before their eyes, the second drone abruptly stopped too. She stared at the map, frozen in its state of unfinishedness, willing the pings to start again. They didn’t.
“Recall them,” Dex said, to the technician who was already poking at the touch-screen controls.
“They’re not responding,” he said, then shrugged. “I’ve got nothing. It’s like they’re not even there anymore.”
“Maybe they went too far?” Lissa suggested. “There might be too many walls between us and them, the signals can’t get through?”
“Uh… guys…” someone else called.
Glancing up from the tablet, Lissa looked first to the man standing now almost directly in front of the door Boaz had closed, and then followed the direction of his stare straight up to the ceiling where one square of marble tile had slid back. A silver sphere was slowly descending through the gap. There were no wires that she could see, nothing holding it pinned. Another drone?
The others backed out from under it, retreating together in nearly perfect unison. Lissa’s scholarly brain found this synchroneity oddly fascinating, a reminder that humans were, once upon an ancient time, mere animals that other animals fed on. Those prey instincts were still there, it seemed, bringing the herd together as they eyed the approach of something that might be a threat.
The silver orb wasn’t moving like a threat, though. It was just hovering there, a little red light on the underside blinking rhythmically in a way that reminded her of the mapping drone’s start up procedure.
“We are going to be so rich,” Boaz said again. “If nothing else, we just made the phrase ‘battery life’ obsolete.”
The plating on the underside of the sphere opened up and two small discs on metallic extenders descended.
“Is it a mapper?” the man who’d first noticed it asked, just as the discs took aim at him, then fired.
He dropped before she could shout, his body twitching and jumping under the crackling white snakes of the energy that had killed him.
“Shit!” someone screamed, and then they were all running.
Dex grabbed her arm, forcing Lissa to duck with him through an open doorway into the maze just as the sphere took aim on its next victim and fired. “Run! Run!”
And just like that, she went from being co-leader in a party of twelve, to running for her life in a party of three. She and Dex followed at the heels of Stine, racing down the blood-red-lit corridor with his empty satchel and mapping tablet clutched to his chest. In every corner and corridor they ran down, the disembodied voice droned on in yet another unknown language and the shouts from the men they’d gotten separated from echoed sharply behind her every time someone else died.
All too soon, they found one of their mapper drones, not floating stalled at a blockage or mapping on beyond the reach of the signal from the tablet, but lying in pieces all over the stone floor where it had been attacked. Destroyed.
