I can’t be convinced to leave. Kieran has tried a few times now, but even though I know it’s futile, I won’t board the dinghy. We traveled months to get here. We stumbled blindly into answers, but they’re answers all the same, answers to the most important questions in the universe.
June and her accomplice have taken to bashing the door in with small, powerful robots. It looks like long work. They’re a hundred meters away, but every now and then the faint white light of the sun catches the reinforced glass of their helmets looking our way.
When I can’t stand their and Kieran’s and Pumpkin’s stares, I retreat to where I’ve found a patch of hidden, dry, and lifeless dirt beneath where a road bunched up and crumbled. It is such a small patch. I plant the seeds and dump the water. I hope Kieran’s not watching. I want to be alone. The bunched road, cinched together into a pyramid over the dirt, provides me some cover from Verity Co. at least.
I can’t stand them. I can’t stand what they do. I can’t stand their hollow reasoning. This cluster had the potential to be one of the greatest, most significant discoveries in our history, and now Blyreena and her people’s work will be locked behind an interminable paywall or, if deemed too valuable to sell, kept for Verity Co.’s self-propagating uses alone. I shake with rage that our home worlds might be under threat from whatever wiped everyone else out, and that the Verity Co.’s of the world are content to ignore that possibility—that likelihood—for a profit. I want to scream, I’m so frustrated.
I walk back to my brother. He hasn’t left where he was sitting beside me about an hour ago.
I follow his gaze to the Organizer’s office, where June is squeezing herself inside the removed doors. She steps out and sends a robot inside after a minute, probably to clear more of a path. I wish all those little bots would break down without repair. I will it like I might honest-to-cosmos develop powers right here, but lo. You know how it goes. I can’t even pull from the dark, sad well within myself and blow up their dinghy so they can’t get back to their ship, because I have no idea where it is, and our scanners can’t pick up something stealthed as effectively as theirs must be.
“Hey,” Kieran finally says. Pumpkin’s in his lap and getting lots of pets.
I sit next to them. “Hey.”
“Looks like they’re getting inside.”
“Yeah.”
Harsh light fills the dark spaces behind the doors, Verity Co.’s silhouettes moving like lithe shadows between the rubble. The robots’ grinding, crunching work echoes off the buildings all around us.
“I wonder how they found it so fast,” Kieran says.
“Verity Co.” Like that in itself is the reason. And it kind of is. Top-of-the-line resources, singular ethics, skilled cache-hunters upgraded with bionics and platinum-grade cybernetics...
“Even Verity Co. can’t have orbital scanners that see through fortified earth and steel.”
The ping we got on the cache from orbit was indeed from underground, from a location whose very purpose must have been amplifying the signal in otherwise impassable conditions. It’s as clear to me as it must be to the Verity grunts that there are underground structures, but as far as I know, Kieran’s right. Only seismic imaging could really map things that deep. We have the location of the cache but not the path there. “They probably have a seismic reader here,” I say.
“Hm. No. I don’t think so.”
I’m not arguing with the tech kid.
“Even if they had it, they’d have to have been here during a quake to get those kinds of reads,” he says.
“Tremor-pulse scanner then.” I know some stuff.
He shakes his head. “We’d see it if they had it. Things are big and unwieldy as all hell.”
The lights and silhouettes move deeper inside the Organizer’s office, almost out of sight. I’d admire the building more if not for its inhabitants. Geometric, aesthetic carvings in the walls, filled in with reflective glass, catch the sun so that its light pools into the cracks like neon. The dome shines too, a bright beacon in the otherwise drab, dusty terrain. Even though the whole planet is a grid of buildings mapped along identical plots and straight lines, there is something very central about it. Tall, bright, and decorated, it draws the eye.
It reminds me of the dilapidated spire on Panev. The Organizers really lucked out with the working digs. Only...the spire wasn’t for that arm of the Stelhari government.
I think real hard for a moment.
“Do you think,” I whisper, because I cannot risk even the zero percent chance Verity Co. can hear me, “maybe they don’t know how to get to the cache? Maybe they’re just guessing?”
Pumpkin rolls over to reveal his suited belly. Kieran keeps petting. “Doubt it.”
I push to a stand and start toward our dinghy.
He calls after me, “Are we going?”
“Shh,” I snap, and wave for him to follow.
“What?”
“Just—come on, Kieran. Please.”
He picks Pumpkin up and follows me to the dinghy, where I look over the scan we picked up from orbit. The red blip that marks the cache rests five kilometers beneath the ground we’re parked on, angled slightly more east, a few meters away from being directly below the Organizer’s office. It is reasonable to think that it is, therefore, connected to the Organizer’s office. Pure proximity. And no other building—
I inhale sharply.
“What?” Kieran’s pressed to me, shoulder to shoulder, Pumpkin held close to his chest so we can all get a look at the small screen on the dash.
“It’s the biggest,” I blurt. I giggle. It sounds mad, probably.
“What?”
“They think the path underground is in the Organizer’s office because it’s the biggest building. The main building.”
“What’s that have to do with anything?”
I close the scan data. “On Panev, we found the cache in the most impressive building, right?” Kieran’s looking at me like I’ve become slightly deranged, but Pumpkin’s tail is flicking. He’s got it too, I think. “But it was the Sciences Spire. Blyreena called it that. It’s where the scientists worked, not the Organizers.”
“Organizers are like...”
“Like, purely administrivia; coordinating projects between other wings of government; public liaisons,” I ramble. I know I’m not making sense to him. It’s alright in my head, but it never comes out the way it sounds in my head. “Point is, Verity Co. is”—I look out the hatch to make sure they haven’t snuck up on us—“assuming the cache will be there because it’s the biggest, most impressive building.”
I walk slowly out the hatch, trying to maintain my look of defeat from before. Lights and shadow still dance just inside the doors of the Organizer’s office, and the din of robots is still echoing off the grid.
“That’s it?” Kieran sighs. “Scout, I don’t know. This sounds like reaching.”
I laugh. It is ludicrous to think that they’d make such a banal mistake, but not when everything they’ve seen supports it. The cache is pinging from right below the office, and the last planet’s cache was nestled right into the heart of the biggest, obviously most central structure in the city. Even back home, the most important secrets always end up in the most imposing constructions: Verity Co.’s headquarters, for one; along with all the big intersystem banks that hold our home’s wealth; museums; academies... The bigger something is the more important it is, we’ve all seemed to agree. It’s like everyone’s forgotten that the hallmark discovery for nuclear power came from a dead exoplanet with an estimated former population of just five hundred thousand native Espilie people.
The cache on Panev was in the Sciences Spire. Blyreena was sending scientists to Nebul, not Organizers. I don’t understand the Stelhari government perfectly, the intricacies of how each branch supported the other, but I’ve listened enough to know that if the cache was in the science-dedicated building on Panev, it’ll be in the science-dedicated building here too.
I lead the way to the closest building that’s not the Organizer’s office and search the exterior for any sign of its purpose.
“Wait,” Kieran says. He’s frowning. “Why wouldn’t they be right?”
There’s nothing marking the outside, but the flimsy door gives easily, revealing a dusty, rubble-filled room beyond. An emblem and a word are engraved into the wall, cut through by a crack. My suit’s computer translates it to Builders.
“Because I think the cache initiative belonged to the Sciences, not the Organizers,” I say, picking up the pace to the next building.
“Wasn’t that what, uh, that Stelhari was, though? An Organizer?”
“Blyreena? She was an Organizer, yeah, but also Panev’s president and an Interstel councilmember.”
“So?” He drags the word out, confused.
“So we’re looking for the Sciences building, I think.” I hope.
I push my way into another blocky structure to see a foreign symbol denoting the Stelhari currency and a word below it translating to Financers. My hunch about this area was right, at least. It seems like, while all the buildings on Nebul are practically identical, the ones around the Organizer’s office are all dedicated to a wing of the Stelhari government. I’m too invested to distract myself with wondering about the geographical and cultural differences that led to such different prioritizations in construction between Panev and Nebul, but I make a note to look into it later.
Another building takes a little longer to get into, but when I do, I find Educators along the back wall. Kieran’s picked up the gist of it now. He helps me discover buildings dedicated to the Navy, Transportation, Histories, and Ethics. We’re half a kilometer away from our dinghy now, but I’m moving with purpose—not tired at all. I’m giddy with the possibility that I’m right, that Verity Co.’s blunt tactics have finally failed them, that their inability to see this civilization as once alive has failed them. But I’m nervous too. If I’m wrong, I’ll be devastated.
We arrive at another building the size and shape of all the others, with a dark, dusty foyer I glimpse through a fissure in the outside wall. I run my headlamp over the interior, highlighting what symbols I can find. My translator displays the half-crumbled letters Scien above a parabolic emblem of an atom. I sigh with relief.
“Let’s find a way in,” I say, and I’m breathless with the hope of it.