Page 32 of Kavan

"Sophie."

I'm pulling on my jacket. My hair is a disaster. My thighs are still trembling.

"I know," I say. "Let's go and be irreplaceable."

CHAPTER 20

KAVAN

Neris finds the transponder at 0630 and won't let go of it.

"It's League," she says. "A personal beacon on a nine-minute cycle, which is what you set them to when you're trying to make a battery last, and it's coming from a substation on the tenth."

"Ours?"

"Marshal, all of ours are in this room."

Which leaves one answer, and it's the answer I've been avoiding since the clean coat.

Rourke has an entrance. He's had it since before we made planetfall, and it doesn't come out at Cove Nine, and a man with a private door doesn't confine himself to what he brought down with him.

The substation sits under the tenth terrace with two approaches and a service gutter past the north wall, and I spend ninety minutes at a port learning it. Four guards on rotation. A powered barrier across the inner chamber that isn't smuggler equipment, because smuggler equipment doesn't glow amber.

Behind it, three people sit against the wall with their backs to the stone, and one wears a League field jacket with a director's flash on the shoulder.

"Kolar," Sophie says, when I bring her forward to look. Her voice thins out on the word. "That's Aneta Kolar. She's Helena's deputy. She was supposed to be running the surface camp."

"For how long, do you think?"

"They look—" She stops. She makes herself look again, properly, the way she looks at a wall. "Eight days. Maybe more. Kavan, that's a survey barrier. That's Precursor. They didn't build a cell, they found one and shut the door."

"Can you open it?"

"Not from outside. There'll be a control plinth in the chamber."

"Then that's the plan."

We move at 2200 in two elements. Vesk goes north with four of them and makes noise. I take three through the gutter and come out of a maintenance hatch four meters behind the guard rotation, and the next twenty seconds are the part of my work I don't describe to civilians.

Sophie is through the hatch before the last man is down, and she has the plinth open with her lamp in her teeth, and the amber barrier drops thirty-one seconds later.

Kolar tries to stand and can't. Enwright, one of the surface technicians, gets an arm under her. The third, a young geodesist named Tarn Obuya, is holding something wrapped in a shirt against his chest and won't surrender it to anybody, including me.

"How many of you were taken?" I ask.

"Three," Kolar says. Her voice is ruined. "Cove Three. There's a lava tube behind the third headland that opens into the complex nine hundred meters down and it's been open the entire time. They came up it at night."

"And the other three?"

She looks at me and doesn't answer, and I don't ask again.

"Director Ostrand?"

"Alive when they took us. The League has a cordon on the island and no idea what's underneath it." Kolar's hand closes on Sophie's wrist. "Sophie. They made us cut something out of the floor."

Obuya unwraps the shirt.

It's a crystal a hand-span long, faceted along its axis in a pattern that isn't decorative, and it holds heat, and the light in it moves.