Isaac Holliday was feeling some trepidation as he arrived for his first dinner on board the Hermite. In his experience, navy food was second only to army food in its wretched and inedible nature. Considering that he was prone to occasional bouts of sea-sickness, any meal taken on board ship was a risk.
Etiquette demanded his attendance, however. At exactly 1630 an invitation had been delivered to his cabin, cordially requesting his presence at Captain Oswald's table. Getting into his dress uniform had been difficult in such close quarters, but he had managed. Isaac was lucky to have a cabin at all. Between the pilots from the 303rd, the extra mechanics, Dr. Lukas, and her excavating team, space was at a premium on board the Hermite.
The appearance of the officers' wardroom surprised him. Usually doubling as a medical storeroom or operating room, it had been transformed for the evening meal. The stores had been move to the perimeter of the room, while a gleaming white tablecloth shone under the electric lights, laid with delicate silverware and china that vibrated with the thrum of the engines. Seven places were laid out, complete with small cardboard name tags. Isaac saw his own on the Captain's left, and Dr. Lukas' on Oswald's right.
Isaac was nearly the last to arrive; still absent was only the captain. Four of the ship's officers in dress whites were making small talk at the other end of the wardroom, while Dr. Lukas was standing alone on the opposite side of the table. Isaac bowed in her direction.
“Evening, Doctor.”
She nodded. “Major.”
He gestured to the table. “This is fancier than I expected on board a ship.”
“Mmm.”
Captain Oswald burst into the room without warning.
“Major Holliday, excellent to see you. And Doctor Lukas --” he kissed her hand before she had an opportunity to resist, “-- a pleasure. Please, everyone, be seated.”
They took their chairs. “We'll not be dining so formally every night, of course, but I wanted to start things off properly. I hope you'll excuse the name cards, but I have a second lieutenant who attended finishing school and has the most wonderful hand for calligraphy.”
The short man was practically bursting with energy. On a hunch, Isaac checked the wall clock – it read precisely 1800 hours. He tried to signal Lukas with his eyes, but she hadn't had time to notice before Captain Oswald began speaking again.
“The Hermite is usually stocked with quite humble fare, even at the officers' table, but the King has seen fit to fund your expedition unusually well, Doctor Lukas. I am sure you'll agree that it would have been a shame to let his generosity go to waste, and so I picked up a few choice items this morning while ashore -- just for tonight, of course. Steward, the wine please?”
Two stewards appeared with bottles of wine and made their way around the table. Dr. Lukas declined her glass, but Isaac accepted a heavy goblet full to help steady his stomach.
“No wine tonight, Doctor?”
“Thank you, Captain, but I find it interferes with my work.”
“A shame, but that's more for us, eh, gentlemen? A toast – to the King!”
“Long live the King!” Seven voices rang out around the table, and six glasses of wine were drained.
“Ah. Excellent.” Oswald smacked his lips. “But let's not waste any time, eh? Steward?”
The first course began to make its way onto the table. Isaac watched with increasing surprise as each additional dish was produced from the galley. Oswald had not been exaggerating when he spoke of the king's generosity.
The short captain dominated the conversation, addressing his comments to each member of the party in turn. He and Isaac had a long conversation about the relative merits of the S84 and S86 cavalry mounts, Oswald finally allowing himself to be won over by Isaac's experiences in the cockpit.
“The added visibility more than makes up for any differences in the control setup. Sure, maybe you're a bit faster on the obstacle course, but as a test pilot I've been through the thing a million times. Now, the field, that's a totally different thing.”
Oswald laughed. “Quite right, Major, quite right. I'll have to forward your opinion along to our marine assault division.”
“Marine assault?”
“Oh yes, it's a new division being developed by the navy.” Oswald seemed pleased that Isaac had taken the bait. “Quite an interesting concept, actually – the idea is to take a hostile beach from the water with amphibious steam cavalry, opening it up to a landing by the army. Still in the testing phases, I expect. They were still looking for a suitable unit last I knew.”
Isaac nodded. “That explains some of the prototypes we've seen lately. Lots of tests in sand and mud. I think both the 84 and the 86 both have been ruled out, they're too heavy to maneuver in the shallows.”
“Ah, that's a shame.” Oswald moved on around the table, giving Isaac a chance to catch up on the food in front of him. The only member of the party who didn't receive any attention from the captain was Dr. Lukas.
Finally, after dessert, (a lemon sorbet that had been kept on ice somewhere below deck; “The only good thing to come out of the East for the last twenty years!”), Oswald turned to Dr. Lukas. “Now, Doctor, I believe that it is your turn. If you could excuse us, gentlemen? Except for you, of course, major.”
The four officers stood, and paying their compliments, left the room. Dr. Lukas turned to the captain. “What do you mean, Captain?”
“Now that we're under way, I'm sure that you have more to tell us about Saint Marcos.”
“I am supposed to brief you both before we arrive, yes.”
“Well? There's no time like the present, doctor.”
Doctor Lukas looked around the room. “We have no maps, no charts--”
“Ah, I thought you might say that.” Oswald snapped his fingers. The doors on either side of the room sprang open, and the stewards reappeared. The silverware and china were swept off of the table, followed by the tablecloth. Underneath was a huge map of Saint Marcos. The stewards disappeared as quickly as they had come.
“You have a taste for the theatrical, Captain.” Dr. Lukas remarked. Isaac could tell that she was annoyed by Oswald's preemptive gesture.
Oswald remained unperturbed. “So I've heard. I like to think of it as a natural affinity for stylish presentation, instead of an actual flaw of character.”
“Indeed.” Lukas sighed. She looked at the map, seeking in vain for some imperfection. “I suppose . . . this will suffice.”
“Saint Marcos actually consists of two islands, the greater in the North and the lesser in the South. Greater Saint Marcos is dominated by a single mountain peak in the center of the island, the cone of an extinct volcano. The rest of the island is tropical in climate, originally covered in jungle. Some of the vegetation has been cleared for sugarcane, the island's primary industry.”
Lukas's slender fingers moved to the South side of the main island. “The town of Saint Marcos is located around the only protected harbor on the island. The bay is more than large enough for the Hermite to anchor. This is also where the island's only river empties into the ocean. The governor's house sits next to this river in the center of town.” She pointed out the spit of land that formed the harbor's Western border. “There was a battery located on the hill at the end of this peninsula before the war, but it was blown up by the Navy during the occupation.”
Oswald nodded. “Rear Admiral Dunland's work. He was a captain back then.”
Lukas continued. “The lesser island is uninhabited. It is entirely covered in jungle, and is at its highest point less than five hundred feet above sea level. A large, extremely deep lagoon lies at the center of the island, reachable through three different channels.”
“We appreciate the geography lesson, Lukas, but what's the point? Why Saint Marcos?”
Lukas looked up at Isaac. “This.” She pointed at the map. Isaac and Oswald peered over the table at a small dot in the forest.
“What's that?”
“A series of Torman ruins. I had planned to show you the survey team's diagrams during the briefing, but since Captain Oswald has--”
“You mean these diagrams?” Oswald pulled a long tube from the supplies stacked behind him. He removed several sheets of paper, smoothing them out over the map of Saint Marcos with both hands.
Lukas stared at the blueprints. “I wasn't aware that the Royal Service had authorized any additional copies.”
“They haven't.”
“Then how--”
“The ruins, doctor?”
Isaac hid a smile in his hand. It wasn't often that he saw someone steal a march on Dr. Lukas . . . although he doubted that Oswald was earning himself any favors. He watched as the doctor strove to control her mounting frustration. After a few moments, she resumed her dialogue.
“The ruins were mapped three months ago by a team from the Cimbrian Royal Service. They had suspected that there was a temple on the island for some time, as Admiral Dunland had reported the capture of several significant artifacts during his occupation of the island. The artifacts were found mostly in the homes of Coalition aristocrats, but of course they refused to cooperate. It wasn't until the loss of a navy airship on the mountain that the ruins were discovered.”
“The navy lost an airship?”
Oswald nodded. “It happens more often than we'd like to admit, Major. The Engels was departing Saint Marcos with dispatches for Oberon when it went down in the jungle. Mechanical failure, they tell me. Bad luck for them, but good luck for us; the ruins were stumbled upon by the rescue team. Please continue, Doctor.”
Lukas smoothed the temple blueprints once again. “The Torman Empire was nominally pagan from its foundation in 1737 FE until its dissolution in 2277 FE, barring a brief experiment with the Saric church in 2159. Worship was coordinated across regional governments, and despite the dominance of Agathian intellectuals at the Imperial level most cities had one or more temples.”
“Is that what we're looking at here?”
“Yes. The complex discovered on Saint Marcos is of typical Torman design. Here we can see a large rectangular building in the center, surrounded by columns.” Lukas outlined a rectangular area of rubble, the missing sections filled in lightly with pencil. “Inside there was an altar, statues, and a crypt for storing the remains of important members of the community. Outside there were several other buildings for ceremonial and domestic use.”
“Why this temple? What makes it important?”
Lukas looked back at Isaac. “Two reasons. One, it's far larger than any other Torman temple we've ever found. And second, the artifacts inside are early Saric, not pagan.”
“So what?”
“We've never found any indication of a major Torman city on Saint Marcos. A few fishing huts, maybe, but nothing large enough to support a temple of this size. And Isaac, the Saric church didn't even exist in this part of the world for another three hundred years. The temple is a cultural and historical anomaly. We will establish a base camp--”
“Aren't you forgetting something, Doctor?” Oswald was looking at her with raised eyebrows.
“No.” Her response was a flat monosyllable.
“Mmm.” Oswald rocked back on his heels once. “Surely you weren't planning on leaving us in the dark regarding what they found beneath the altar, were you?”
Lukas gaped. “Captain, I – how do you – the only reason I came back was that they assured me that there would be the tightest level of security surrounding my project! The tightest level!” She had now turned on the captain and was spitting with rage. “I trusted them; apparently I was mistaken! If this is how Cimbria handles all matters of national security – !”
Even Oswald looked surprised at this outburst. “Doctor, please! If I overstepped my bounds, I apologize, but know that it was all in service to the mission. There is no one more invested in the success of your project than I am.”
Lukas turned back to Isaac, nostrils flaring. “How about you? Should I keep going, or have they told you everything too?”
Isaac held up his hands in a posture of surrender. “I know nothing.”
Doctor Lukas looked skeptical.
“He's telling the truth, Doctor, unless his sources are better than I think. And you should know that despite my people's best efforts, I have no idea what they found beneath the altar.”
Doctor Lukas looked back at the captain. “Fine!” She smoothed the scattered blueprints. “Fine.”
“Beneath the altar --” she glared at Captain Oswald, “-- our survey team found a cave in that led to an older level of the temple. There are a series of tunnels underneath the site that precede Torman settlement by a significant period. That the temple was built over them is no surprise – most cultures erect their religious buildings on the ruins of those they supplant; it carries significant symbolic meaning. No, the surprise is what the survey team found in these tunnels.”
“What did they find?”
Lukas took a deep breath. “Major, how much do you know about the etching process used to create your mounts' control cores?”
“What does that have to do with--”
“Major, please.”
“Well, not much.” Isaac scratched his head. “As I understand it, by treating thin sheets of cambric with special chemicals, logic patterns can be carved into them. Then, when the sheets are laminated together, a series of electrical cables are connected to various points on the core. If it's done right, you can rig a complex series of inputs and outputs in a very small space. A Cimbrian science team came up with it a few years ago, right?”
“You are essentially correct . . . except for the last statement. The technology wasn't invented . . . it was found.”
“What do you mean . . . found?”
“Three years ago, a temple much like this was discovered in the Greyspikes. In the ruins beneath it were kilometers of tunnel walls inscribed with interlacing lines. There was no discernible pattern, except that they came in squares about eleven centimeters to a side. We couldn't--”
“We? I thought you were off studying the Daki.”
“I lied, Isaac, the Institute for the Advancement of the Sciences has been sworn to secrecy by the Royal Service. Although apparently some of us are taking that oath more seriously than others . . .” she glared at Oswald, who returned her gaze until she broke away.
“As I was saying, we couldn't make head or tail of it until the sample was found.”
“The sample?” Oswald lead closer, placing his hands on the table.
“A piece of cambric, approximately eleven by seven by six centimeters, and refined to an impossible purity. Part of it is missing – we looked for months for the additional fragment, but without any luck. There are five hundred and twelve contacts on one surface, and seventy three on one of the damaged sides. After a month of testing we determined that they were for the input of electrical charges. A careful dissection showed that the sample was composed of several hundred individual levels of cambric, each with a different pattern etched in the surface. The patterns were later matched to a segment of wall elsewhere in the complex.”
“Cambric? In the ruins? But how?”
“We don't know. But when I say cambric, understand that this is something totally different from what you or I understand as cambric. The sample was incredibly light, with a density far below that of water.”
“This brick of metal floats?”
“Exactly.”
“Rahm's sake.”
“Also, while we've been able to emulate some of the properties of the sample, our control cores are nothing but crude imitations. To encode the logic patterns of the original sample with our current process would produce a control core larger than this vessel.”
“Where is the sample now?”
“I don't know. Somewhere in a vault below Oberon, I can only assume. It's been split up, remember, and was not very large to begin with.”
“So that's why we're here? The Royal Service thinks there's another sample on Saint Marcos?”
“Exactly. A larger one, in better condition. Not to mention more wall patterns to decode.”
“How important would that be, if we did find it?” Isaac looked to the two of them.
“Were you following the Thyrennian campaign?” asked Doctor Lukas.
“Of course. We were testing and sending new units to the front the entire time.”
“Every single core you tested was designed by engineers in the Royal Service, working from patterns copied from the walls of the Greyspike complex. The steam cavalry that Cimbria sent to Thyrene with electric control cores--”
“--outperformed the Asfarian units even when outnumbered more than four to one. I saw the battle reports. Rahm help those poor bastards, we ran over them.”
“Exactly. And Captain Oswald, I'm sure the Navy has been enjoying their new range finding equipment?”
Oswald smiled. “It seems you are as well-informed as I am, Doctor.”
Lukas snorted. “I should be. I wrote the logic patterns inside myself.”
Oswald's smile drooped. Lukas turned back to Isaac.
“When I left the project, only a small percentage of the data taken from the Greyspikes complex had been processed. As the Royal Society works through more of it, our own logic etching continues to improve, but we need a complete sample to move on to the next phase.”
“The next phase?”
“That should be a secret even from you, Captain Oswald, and will remain that way for the time being.”
There was a brief silence as Isaac and Oswald mulled over this new information.
“Doctor,” said Isaac, “you said that the sample was refined to an impossibly pure level?”
“Yes. Hundreds of times more sophisticated than anything Cimbrian industry has ever produced.”
“So . . . if we didn't make it, and there's no evidence that the Tormans ever used cambric . . . who made it?”
“There are theories,” Lukas frowned and looked away, “that the material was part of a larger vein of ultra-pure cambric, formed in a geological freak accident. People have even gone looking for this vein. Personally, I find this theory . . . unlikely.”
“What do you think, then?”
“I think that just because a satisfactory explanation has not been found does not mean that there isn't one.” She was looking back at him now. “Finding another sample can do nothing but bring us closer to an answer.”
There was another pause. Oswald was looking at the map of Saint Marcos again. Isaac followed his gaze. “Are you seeing some of the difficulties that I am, Captain?”
“If you mean the fact that Saint Marcos is an occupied territory, then yes. The Coalition could make our lives very difficult if they find out what we are up to.”
“What do you mean? I though the island was occupied by Cimbrian troops.” Lukas looked over to the captain.
“It is, but you must understand what that means. We maintain a garrison on the island, and it is ruled by a military governor, but beneath him the Coalition bureaucracy was left intact after Admiral Dunland's departure.”
“What? Why?!?”
“Cimbria doesn't have the manpower to replace every civil servant in the occupied territories. Keeping the local government intact is a comprise we have to make if the occupied territories are going to be governable at all.”
Isaac sighed. “Unfortunately, it means that almost any one of the regional authorities could be a spy.”
“So what do we do?”
“We operate independently as much as possible. The city is the only place with a dock that can handle the heavier equipment, but once it's unloaded we can move it anywhere. I recommend that we establish a fortified base camp outside of the city, near the ruins. Perhaps here--” Isaac indicated a location Northwest of the city, near the coast. “This stream can provide us with water, and we can land lighter supplies using the ship's boats here on the beach. If the worst happens and the Coalition retakes the island, we can move the Hermite near the shore here and cover a retreat with the ship's guns.”
Oswald nodded. “I'll send most of the ship's marines with you. Between them, the steam cavalry, and whatever men the local garrison can spare, you should be secure.”
“We'll cut down these trees to create open firing arcs, and use the timber to set up a palisade. Doctor, we can use your excavating equipment to dig a trench around the fort.”
“Do you think these precautions are really necessary, Major?” said Doctor Lukas.
“If what's in this temple is as important as you say it is, then yes,” said Isaac. “We know for certain that the Eastern Coalition has been anxiously watching the conflict in Thyrene. It is no secret what sort of advantage your work has given us, and once they figure out what we're looking for they will no doubt want it for themselves.”
“I see. In that case, you are welcome to use my excavators . . . but they still need to reach the temple as quickly as possible.”
“Of course.”
“Lukas, how long will it take you to dig everything out?”
She shook her head. “I don't know. It depends on what we find. If there is another sample on Saint Marcos, we'll bring it back and the Royal Service will send a larger team to explore the rest of the temple. If not . . . well, it will take a few weeks to be sure, but if there is no sample then this expedition loses its importance.”
“The less time we're on the island, the better. It gives the coalition less time to respond.” Isaac looked back at the map. “My pilots are good, and I'm sure the Hermite is ready for a fight, but if the Coalition shows up in force we might have to hand over whatever we find.”
The three of them stood for a moment, until Captain Oswald broke the silence. “Thank you, Doctor. We'll work out the details over the days to come, but do you have anything else for us tonight?”
“No.”
“In that case, I'm going to wish you both good night.” He turned for the hatch, but stopped before passing through. “Oh, and Major?”
“Yes?”
“The strange tardiness of your orders has not escaped my notice. It would be troubling if there were dissent in High Command regarding a mission of this importance. I'm looking into it . . . but for now, I would appreciate it if you kept your concerns to yourself. As a personal favor?”
“Certainly, Captain.”
“Excellent. In that case, good night to both of you.”
“Captain.”
“Captain.”
And with this the short man strode from the room. Lukas immediately sank back into her chair. A frustrated sigh escaped her lips.
“I don't believe it. The nerve! The . . . pure egotism!”
“You're upset that Oswald pushed you into this conversation tonight?”
“I'm upset that he has access to information that should be secret! If he already knows about the ruins under the altar, who else might know? My project is endangered already, and we're not even to Saint Marcos yet.”
“He's playing a couple different games here, and I don't know why.”
“Do you think we can trust him?”
“I . . . think so. He knows more than he should, but I believe him when he says that he wants this expedition to succeed. Who knows, maybe his connections will be useful?”
Lukas snorted. “You mean his total disregard for authority? It's more likely to get him a court martial.”
“Perhaps. Either way, he runs a tight ship. You have to give him that.”
“Competence is no indicator of trustworthiness, Major. Now if you'll excuse me, I have work to do.”
“Have a pleasant evening, Doctor.”
Lukas slipped out through the hatchway. Isaac stood for a moment, looking at the map of Saint Marcos. Cambric . . . the sample . . . ancient ruins . . . the Coalition . . . he had a lot to think about. Isaac went upstairs to get some fresh air.
