Page 34 of Kavan

The shards say we have been reading the architecture of a people who were terrified.

There's a directive in the third shard, addressed from something the glyphs call the seat to every installation commander, and it reads as no military order at all. It's a limitation. The gate-keeper is to hold the gate. It is never to be given the decision. Any escalation beyond interdiction requires a living authorization, delivered in person, at the seat.

They built a weapon that could sterilize a star system and then they spent, as far as I can reconstruct, eleven hundred years making absolutely certain it could never fire on its own judgment.

"Kavan." I stop walking. The column flows around us. "The Warden isn't malfunctioning."

"It has killed four of my people."

"Yes. Because it's doing precisely what it was told and the last person allowed to tell it anything died twenty millennia back." I turn the reader so he can see a glyph string he can't read. "It isn't defective. It's obedient. It has held a gate since before we had writing, waiting for somebody with the authority to relieve it."

"And the authorization is a person."

"Someone able to prove they're the returning fleet. Not a code. A proof. That's why it lives at the seat and that's why it needs somebody who can read eleven hundred years of context, because the proof is historical." My hands have started shaking and I put them in my pockets. "Rourke has a key that opens doors. He doesn't have anything that will make that machine stand down, and if he pushes it hard enough it will stop interdicting and start doing the other thing."

Kavan is silent a beat.

"How much of that protocol is in your hands?"

"Fragments. I've got the shape. I have maybe nine of what I think are fourteen elements and I have two hours of walking left to find the rest and if I'm wrong about any of it⁠—"

"Sophie."

"—if I'm wrong, twenty-three people and a resort coast and a hundred forty thousand tourists⁠—"

"Sophie." He never raises his voice. He doesn't now. He steps into my line of sight so that the reader and the tunnel and everything else is behind him. "Look at me."

I look at him.

"You're frightened because the load is real," he says. "It is real. I won't tell you it isn't, and I won't promise you it will be fine, because you would stop believing anything else I said."

"That's not comforting."

"I'm not comforting you. I'm briefing you." He fits his hand to my throat, thumb along my jaw, which he has done exactly twice and which reorganizes my nervous system both times. "On your first day on this planet you read a cliff and found a corner nobody else had seen in twenty millennia. Since then you have read us out of a sealed chamber, through a construct patrol, across a vent gallery, under a plaza and into a room with a sky in it. Every single time you have said you weren't certain, and each of those times you have been right."

"And when I'm not?"

"Then we'll be dead," he says, "and it won't have been because you did too little."

I laugh. It comes out ragged and it helps.

"That's the worst pep talk the League has ever produced."

"It's accurate."

"You're impossible."

"I'm consistent." His thumb shifts, once. "You told me to do it badly."

The last fragment resolves at the tenth hour, in the fourth shard, in a maintenance log about lamp requisitions that some bored quartermaster used as scratch space.

Fourteen elements. I have all fourteen.

And the fourteenth is no glyph, no date, no number. It's an instruction, and I read it three times before I let myself believe it, and then I go and find Kavan up at the front of the column and I say nothing.

Not yet.

I need to be sure first, and I need him thinking about the fight, and I refuse to be the reason he hesitates at the wrong moment.