Search: A Novel of Forbidden History (7 page)

“And my outpost has not been visited,” Rutheme continued, “for almost thirty years.”

“Thirty . . .” Hamilkir looked away. The storm-tossed horizon was hidden in the gray mist of driving rain, moving onshore, almost here. “Has it happened, then?”

“I think it’s up to us to find out.”

Hamilkir turned his attention to the bridge ship at anchor. The launch boat had reached it and was being hoisted on board. “We have no more ships that can make the voyage. Can yours?”

“We can cross the sea, but not to the White Island.”

Hamilkir knew what his next question had to be. “Then we’re to build new ones that can?”

“We must. I’ve brought the knowledge.”

“We have it here as well.” The knowledge of the bridge ships was safely preserved on the stone altar in the outpost’s Chamber of Heaven, along with the eleven other gifts.

“Do you have the workers?”

“Yes. And the forests.”

Rutheme clicked again. On her ship, both rows of oars were being set in motion to maneuver it to port. The wind was too strong to risk the sails, and they’d been struck.

Hamilkir saw beyond the reason for her questions. “You no longer have those resources at Ehschay.”

“We’ve had to turn the library into a fortress.” Rutheme wrinkled her forehead in confusion. “We’ve given them everything. Yet they attack us. Do they not do that here?”

“A few ambushes out past the farmlands. It’s more a question of differences between the hunters in the forests and those we’ve taught to farm.” Hamilkir knew there would likely be more ambushes in the time to come as logging operations expanded for the new ships suited for the voyage home.

The
ahkwila
here believed the oak forests held special properties that Hamilkir had not seen demonstrated, and so could not accept. For, if an unseen force could produce no consistent effect, in the way that channeled lighting could always attract certain metals, then the force wasn’t simply unseen, it wasn’t real. The people of the oak, however, had yet to grasp that basic understanding of the world and its workings: that a thing was a known fact, or it was not.

Rutheme glanced at the
ahkwila
standing together, waiting for her ship to reach the dock so they could moor it. She dropped her voice as if she feared that one among them might understand her language. “Do you feel safe here?”

“I do. We’re making a difference. The oak people honor the library.”

“Then they’re different here. Different from all the others.”

All the others.
Hamilkir was afraid to ask her what she knew about the other outposts. Though, in time, he knew he must.

That night, the storm raged and lightning flashed. This time, though, it wasn’t captured in the rods of iron to be stored in glass jars and slurries of iron filings. Instead, the scholars and apprentices of Kassiterithes gathered in the great hall for the
evening meal. Not for companionship—the
khai
had little need of that—but to hear the story of the crossing of the dark sea.

It had been uneventful. For three days of the crossing, the winds had slowed, so the rowers had toiled: Bridge ships were never becalmed. Most importantly, the star paths remained true. When land had been sighted on the seventy-second day, the watchtowers of Hamilkir’s outpost had been easily seen through the lenses of the distant eye. Rutheme’s wayfinding had been that precise, even on a voyage that she, and her
khai
rower, Torhiram, had never made before.

After the formal stories had been told and reports given, the visitors mixed among their fellow scholars to ask and answer questions. Rutheme and Torhiram shared Hamilkir’s table, but the conversation was strained.

Hamilkir was puzzled when he realized the cause of the unusual tension: the presence of his
ahkwila
concubine, Brighid. True, at first sight, she could seem alarmingly pale, the straw color of her braided hair indicative of disease had she been
khai
. Even so, he had learned that, like all creatures, different
ahkwila
took on forms and coloration specific to their different regions. This was a known fact, and easily adjusted to.

Instead of her appearance, then, Hamilkir wondered if it might be his concubine’s knowledge that caused his guests’ concern. He had seen the flicker of surprise in both Rutheme and Torhiram as Brighid had greeted them in their own tongue. Yet why would anyone be troubled by evidence of knowledge shared?

Finally, he thought he saw the answer in Rutheme’s eyes. The way she stared at Brighid’s belly when the concubine’s purple-trimmed white shift pulled across her. A child grew there. His.

Then Rutheme, noticing that her host had registered her distaste and disapproval, spoke as if Brighid were not capable of understanding.

“Are there others?”

Hamilkir knew she meant children born of oak and shadow. “Twenty-two.”

Whatever Rutheme and Torhiram thought of that answer, they shared their reactions only in a glance between them.

“Are there not similar children in Ehschay?” Hamilkir asked.

“There were,” Torhiram answered.

Hamilkir could see his concubine’s concern at Torhiram’s use of the past tense.

“Where did they go?” Brighid asked. She slipped her hand into his and squeezed it. As mysterious as the gesture was, Hamilkir had learned the
ahkwila
took comfort from it.

“They were not
khai,”
Rutheme said. “They were not
ahkwila.
Where could they go? Accepted by no one.”

Hamilkir squeezed his concubine’s hand as she had taught him. “We accept them.”

“So did we,” Rutheme replied, “until the attacks began.”

“I told you,” Hamilkir said, “there’s no fighting here.”

“There’s always fighting.”

Hamilkir refused to accept that pronouncement.

“Two wolves in a cage,” Torhiram said. “There can be only one. So, in time, there is only one.”

“We’re not animals.”

“No,” Rutheme agreed. She stared at Brighid. “But they are.”

Tears trickled down Brighid’s cheeks, pale no longer but splotched with red. Hamilkir had been with her long enough to know the tears did not mean his concubine was in physical pain—instead, some thought had caused her an internal, unseen discomfort.

He spoke more sharply than he meant to. “That’s not a known fact.”

Neither of his guests responded to his unintended insult.

“Sometimes,” Rutheme said, “I believe that the
ahkwila
are what the Navigators warned us against.”

“They warned us of the ocean.”

Rutheme gestured at the pregnant
ahkwila
. “Which one? The ocean of water? Or the ocean of flesh? Both can swallow us.”

“Unless,” Torhiram added, “we take action against them.”

Hamilkir stood. He found the conversation unpleasant. “I’ll take no action against the people of the oak.”

“Someone must,” Rutheme said. “Or else the Navigators will be proved true twice over. Once for the fate of our home, and once for our own.”

“Tell me you’re going to arrest David Weir.”

Jack Lyle’s response was a snort of amusement. Twelve years in the air force, another sixteen as an agent in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, and he knew Colonel Miriam Kowinski’s type. One detail out of place, one comma missing, and she’d bring down the wrath of heaven on the hapless fool responsible. A quality he could admire, if not emulate.

“Eventually,” he said.

As if preventing herself from saying anything she’d regret, the colonel shifted her attention to Lyle’s specialist working on David Weir’s computer. It was midnight on a Monday, and the rest of the office area in the lab was deserted.

“He was stealing DoD data,” the colonel said.

“I understand.”

“We’ve known about it since the first day he tried to cover his tracks.”

“Colonel, your lab’s security is outstanding.”

“So why isn’t Army CID in charge of this investigation?”

“Because the Air Force OSI is in charge, per General Capuzzi’s direct order.”

Lyle saw Kowinski’s spine straighten at his not too subtle reminder that in this affair, he, a civilian agent of the air force, had authority over her, an army colonel.

Before she could protest again, his specialist said, “Gotcha.”

She was Roz Marano, delectably freckled with short brown hair and, like most of the agents in Lyle’s detachment, all of fourteen. Sometime around age fifty, Lyle had begun to notice how everyone else he worked with was growing younger.

Roz, who was actually twenty-nine, sat back in Weir’s chair and cracked her knuckles. “I’ve extracted the core roots from the protected files and set it to write to disk.” She turned her head to look innocently at her boss. “Want that in English?”

Lyle shook his head. Two months earlier, when this investigation had led him to Weir, Roz had slipped a program into the lab’s network that
recorded every keystroke Weir made, and whenever he deleted a file, it made a copy where he couldn’t find it. Lyle was content not knowing more than that. In his life, machines that required anything beyond an
ON
and
OFF
switch rarely stuck around long enough to become good friends.

“How about an ETA?” he asked.

Roz checked Weir’s computer screen. Lyle couldn’t tell what she saw there that could give her a time estimate. “Five minutes.”

He turned to Kowinski. “Then the computer’s all yours.”

“It’s always been mine.”

“Colonel, I don’t like getting my toes stepped on, either, but sometimes we have to let the little fish go so we can get the big ones.”

“Mr. Lyle,” Kowinski said, emphasizing his civilian title, “I get that Weir is selling the data he’s stealing to someone you think is more important than his sorry ass. But the only reason this lab accomplishes its mission is the trust the men and women in uniform have for it. Maybe stealing someone’s genetic profile isn’t as big a crime as whatever you’re gunning for—but multiply that small crime by three million people feeling they’ve had their privacy rights trampled. Then add all the people who, because of that betrayal, decide not to cooperate with us in the future. To this lab, and to me, that’s irreparable harm.”

Lyle thought that over, though he knew he didn’t have to. Three million service members having their feelings hurt and future recruits being hesitant to add their DNA to the armed forces registry was an easier challenge to deal with than America’s enemies being able to pinpoint every secret underground command post and continuity-of-government facility in the country, and every hidden U.S. sub pen around the world. How Weir was linked to the person responsible for that very real threat, Lyle didn’t know, but he was determined to follow any lead that would result in achieving his mission to bring Holden Ironwood to justice.

Of course, he could say none of that to the colonel. “I understand your concern.”

Kowinski folded her arms, apparently realizing that if he couldn’t give her even the slightest indication of the stakes he was playing for, then those stakes must be huge. Lyle felt bad for her, but relieved.

While the two women watched whatever there was to watch on the computer, Lyle ran his eyes over the featureless office cubicle, noting how little had changed in Weir’s absence. When the suspect had resigned this morning, a security guard had watched as the kid boxed up his personal items, not that there had been many to begin with. Two months earlier, the first time Lyle had searched the office, he’d been struck by the impersonal feel of it.

Almost everyone else in this section of the lab had a personal coffee mug with slogans or pictures. Almost everyone had photos of family and friends on the bulletin boards and on the walls boxing in their desks. At least a third of the cubicles had artwork by children. David Weir’s was different.

On his cubicle’s bulletin board, he had lab schedules and memos, all current and neatly arranged. The only other item on the board had been one personal photo: a three-by-five color print of a forested landscape, completely nondescript.

Roz had copied the photo with one of her handheld gadgets and sent the file to OSI forensics for analysis. She’d also noted that it was an actual photograph, not something produced on a home printer. The code on the back of the print revealed it had been made twenty-one years ago at a large film-processing lab that, in the predigital age, served more than two hundred supermarkets, drugstores, and camera and gift shops in Los Angeles. After all that time, there was no way to determine where the original roll of film had come from, or who had submitted it for processing.

However, OSI had forwarded the image to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. By measuring the angle of shadows in the photo and the terrain elevations in the landscape, and, for all Lyle knew or cared, doing something that involved chicken bones and chanting at midnight, the image analysts had determined the exact place and date the photo had been taken: twenty-one years ago near Big Bear Lake, California, on July 2, at 14:24 hours, local time.