“I have a theory about Ixth. I think it belonged to, or was at least somehow associated with, an ancient race known as the Mahact. It may even have been their homeworld.”

  Severyne kept her face impassive. To profess belief in one outlandish imaginary thing was an eccentricity; to believe in two was pathology. “The Mahact are just a story, Archambelle. They were supposed to be, what, ancient wizards or something? They’re no more real than the Ebon Witches or cave ghosts or the Strangleman.”

  “I believe the stories of the Mahact are rooted in fact,” Archambelle said. “They were powerful gene-sorcerers. Mad tyrants. Terrors of the galaxy in ancient times, long before the Lazax empire rose. They twisted the bodies of their enemies to amuse themselves, and did the same to their servants to make them more useful. They could enslave other species with a glance. The Mahact hated everyone, and hated each other, and released horrific technologies into the galaxy in pursuit of incomprehensible feuds, or just for fun. Then the Lazax stepped in, an upstart race full of ambition and ferocity. The Lazax defeated the Mahact, killed every last one of them, and took control of what remained of their dominion, including the imperial seat on Mecatol Rex.”

  “Or so they claimed,” Severyne said. “Sounds like propaganda to me – ‘Oh, be grateful, citizens, we saved you from the scary star wizards.’ It’s nonsense.”

  Archambelle sighed. “Many scholars share your view, but I believe the Mahact were real. I think it’s safe to say they were terrors, and that any single member of that strange race possessed more technological power than the entire Barony does today.”

  “You’d better hope one of these guards isn’t secretly a political informant,” Severyne said. “Good citizens, like myself, know that no one could be greater than the Barony.”

  Archambelle waved that away. “You must rise above such concerns, captain. Some things are beyond politics, and the stakes are much higher than personal ambition now. Not that personal ambitions can’t be satisfied in the process.” She gazed at the broken door of the ancient chamber.

  “The Mahact are long dead… but the wonders they created remain, waiting for worthy successors to claim them, and use that power to found a new empire.”

  “On Ixth, you mean?”

  “Yes. If I’m right about Ixth being the homeworld of the Mahact, it is a graveyard now, a monument to a dead race… but there are treasures in those tombs. If we can locate Ixth, and loot that technology, the Barony will become what we always claim to be: the most powerful faction in the galaxy, rightful inheritors of the throne of Mecatol Rex, destined to be the new rulers of a single galactic empire.”

  “Ruling a single galactic empire didn’t work out well for the Mahact or the Lazax,” Severyne pointed out.

  “True,” Archambelle said. “But the Letnev are superior to those filthy aliens in every respect except technological might. We would run the empire properly.” The doctor was a patriot, then – just one whose loyalty was so unquestioned by the higher echelons that she could indulge in petty critiques of the regime.

  “You have some plan to find Ixth, then?” Severyne said. “A plan that, inexplicably, has something to do with an old Federation of Sol colony world like Darit?”

  “The Mahact were secretive, paranoid, covetous – we can’t expect to find a map leading straight to Ixth. They would have hidden any such map, broken it into pieces, disguised it with a cipher. But if someone very smart, and very dedicated, put enough pieces together, followed enough clues… they might find the way.”

  “You think there’s such a clue here?” Severyne slapped at a bug on her neck. Biospheres were repulsive. She couldn’t wait to get back to space.

  Archambelle smiled. “Oh, yes. I have found certain artifacts I believe to be of Mahact origin, and fragmented files, largely corrupted, but with suggestive lines of code intact. Mentions of a map that could lead to a hidden treasure planet – a planet that must be Ixth. My colleagues and I have been gathering those hints for more than a decade, translating them, and looking for clues. One such clue pointed to this world, Darit, as ‘the key to the key.’”

  “I thought we were looking for a map. Now we’re looking for a key?”

  “We’re looking for both. And sometimes, instead of a map, there’s mention of a ‘navigation system,’ or simply ‘a compass.’ Maybe we’re looking for all three. Or one thing that serves all three functions. Perhaps we need a map or a compass or both to find Ixth, and a key to open it. I don’t know. But… I think the secret might be there.” Archambelle pointed to the door in the hill. “May I please take a look?”

  “Fine,” Severyne said. “Since the future of the Barony and the fate of the galaxy is at stake.” She glared around at the guards and surveyors. “None of you heard any of that, all right?”

  “Yes, captain!” they chorused, with acceptable levels of zeal. Severyne decided not to have them all executed to keep the secret safe. Likely there was no secret at all. This was probably just a vault full of mud and crawling things.

  Archambelle slipped through the crack in the door, and light spilled out. Severyne followed, more carefully. She looked around the interior, and found it much as it had appeared on the video. The only notable difference was the scent, which was rather musty and stale. She crouched and looked at the skeleton on the ground. “What manner of creature was this?”

  The doctor spared it barely a glance. “The physiology is unfamiliar to me. Some unknown species, then. Almost certainly one of the many slave races of the Mahact, sent here to hide the key. But where is it? What is it?” She went to the console and began manipulating knobs and dials, causing the incomprehensible characters on the screen to change.

  “What am I looking at?” Severyne peered into the square compartment at the center of the screen array, with its odd nozzles and manipulator arms, some with crusts of organic effluvia on the tips. “Is this some kind of… biomatter printer?”

  Archambelle groaned, staring at the streaming characters on the screen. “That’s exactly what it is. I’m looking at the logs, and this machine… it made an organism. I shouldn’t be surprised – that’s what the Mahact did. They were wizards with flesh, gods of genetic engineering. Some say they could even create life from non-life. Our scientists can’t even create living wood from raw chemical components, let alone animal life, but this machine made… wait. It sampled a dominant local species, which based on a glance at this DNA code is clearly human, and then created an organism based on that template, with… frankly incomprehensible additions, hidden inside the genome. Lines of dormant code, strange strings of RNA, chemical signatures that make no sense inside a living creature. They should be totally inert. Though I suppose if they combined with some sort of catalyst, internal or environmental… or maybe there’s a kind of internal timer, counting down…”

  “What are you talking about?” Severyne demanded. “You’re saying this machine created a person? A human person?”

  “It created something that looks human,” Archambelle said. “But only because it sampled a human’s DNA to create a template. If the machine had sampled a Letnev instead, the child would look Letnev, and if it had sampled a Hylar, the child would have fins instead of legs.”

  Severyne looked into the compartment. “This machine built a child?”

  “It would have been an infant, at the beginning,” Archambelle said. “Something small, showing perfectly ordinary human development, most likely. I wonder if it’s a sort of camouflage, so the child would blend in with the local population? But underneath, the child would be… something other than human. I don’t know what, but – wait. There’s a message in the archive. A brief note that was apparently displayed, hmm, approximately nineteen standard years ago, when the child was first… printed? Decanted?”

  “Settle on the nomenclature later,” Severyne said. “What did the message say?”

  “This a loose translation, mind you, but it says, ‘The child is the map and the key.’” Archambelle slammed her fist on the console. “The map and the key! The path to Ixth must be hidden in the child, probably written in its genetic code!”

  “Mmm,” Severyne said. “Can you make the machine print us another child?”

  Archambelle shook her head. “This device was meant to do one thing, and it has done it. The reserves of organic material are spent, and I can’t begin to imagine what to refill them with. I suppose the Mahact who created this chamber expected one of their operatives to find it and decant the child. I’m sure one of them would know how to decipher the secrets hidden in the child’s blood.”

  “It all seems a bit involved,” Severyne said. “You’d think they could just write the directions down.”

  Archambelle shrugged. “Maybe it’s not that simple. There could be complicating factors we can’t imagine or hope to understand. The ways of the Mahact can be incomprehensible. They were as gods to us, captain.” Archambelle’s eyes were wide, and she gazed around the chamber with a reverent intensity Severyne found troubling. Zealotry had its uses, but Severyne preferred not to be so close to it, in case it exploded and made a mess. “You can’t expect to understand everything the gods do.” She sagged. “But some stupid human found this place, nearly twenty years ago, and triggered the machinery. The child is lost. The map, and the key, lost.”

  Severyne sniffed. “I imagine we can find it. The number of humans in the immediate area numbers in the hundreds, not the thousands. Small communities gossip, and everyone knows everyone else’s business. The human who discovered this place probably burst into the nearest tavern and shouted ‘Who wants to buy a mechanical baby?’ Even if she showed more discretion than that, there would still be rumors. Mystery infants appearing in the absence of pregnancies always start people talking – such things are either a scandal or a miracle, and people love both. I’ll have Voyou make some inquiries, and see what we can find out.”

  Archambelle perked up. “Yes, captain, it’s of the utmost importance, this supersedes all other elements of your mission–”

  “The child could be dead, of course,” Severyne mused. “Is that a problem? I think they bury their dead here, instead of sensible, efficient cremation, so we might be able to recover bones with some viable DNA inside.”

  “If it comes to digging up a corpse, I’ll wield the shovel myself,” Archambelle said. “But alive is better. Alive and cooperative is much better. I don’t know exactly what form the code will take, and the message says the child is the key as well as the map – what if it has to be alive to activate the wormhole, perhaps via some sort of sophisticated biometrics? What if the child has to speak some phrase, something programmed deep in its memory, that will come to mind only when the child reaches the appointed place? We simply can’t know until we arrive… wherever it is we’re going.”

  “So we need to find a local mysterious foundling, now a young adult, and convince them to accompany us to an unknown destination, ideally of their own free will, since if the child decides to fight us, they could ruin everything?”

  “Yes,” Archambelle said. “When you put it that way… it sounds like rather a difficult challenge.”

  “Nonsense,” Severyne said. “Once Voyou tracks down this human compass of yours, and does a little research, I’m sure I can come up with the right lie to elicit the desired outcome.”

  •••

  Severyne’s comms buzzed with Archambelle’s priority call, and Severyne shook off her memories and answered. “Well? Have you completed your preliminary examination of the girl?”

  “I have.” Archambelle’s voice was dull. “There’s nothing in her blood. Nothing in her tissue. I examined her hairs under an electron microscope. I looked at every inch of her body, in case her freckles and moles formed some kind of star chart. I examined her fingernail clippings and the underside of her tongue and every other part of her, inside and out. I found no code. No sign. No ciphers, no secrets, no coordinates. Nothing at all.”

  “That’s not good,” Severyne said. “Did you ask her about the yearning?”

  “What?” Archambelle said. “What yearning?”

  Severyne sighed. “You didn’t read the dossier I compiled on her, did you?”

  “Why would I? I was interested in her genetics, not the details of her life or the psychological profile you used to concoct your silly secret space princess story!”

  “If you’d read the file, then you’d know about our princess’s yearning, so I suggest you take a look, doctor.” Severyne shut down the comms and sat smiling in the dark. She knew she should focus on the success of the mission, especially since Archambelle’s very powerful friends back home had called to make it Severyne’s mission too… but seeing Archambelle frustrated was still something to savor. “Speaking of the secret space princess,” she said to herself, and switched on the hidden cameras in Bianca’s room.

  Chapter 15

  Bianca repeated the Letnev words Ayla had just spoken. She couldn’t imagine why she’d ever need to say “These mushrooms are too pungent,” but the phrase was now lodged in her mind, along with hundreds of others. She’d never tried to learn a foreign language before – everyone she’d ever met spoke hers, though people from the most distant valleys rounded their vowels in a peculiar way – and, it turned out, she had a knack for it. At least, she assumed so, judging by the fact that she was already doing what Ayla called “third-year lessons” just a few days into her studies. Maybe the program was intended for small children? The machine didn’t show any surprise at her progress, but then, surprise was probably beyond the scope of Ayla’s programming. Bianca was also, simultaneously, learning the trading tongue used by most of the species who used spoken language at all when they had to deal with one another; that language was far simpler, with logical rules and a more limited vocabulary, and she’d basically mastered it already.

  Bianca had been back to the doctor three times, and had every fluid she could produce drawn out of her (including some she’d never even heard of – what was a lymph, anyway, and who knew she had fluid in her spine? That one had pinched a little). She’d been prodded, poked, scraped, scanned, exposed to various wavelengths of light, and endured having every inch of her body examined through a hand-held magnifying glass, wielded by Doctor Archambelle personally. “What are you doing that for?” Bianca had asked.

  “Looking for unusual moles,” the doctor said. “You’ve been on a planet, under a sun, and people of Letnev heritage are vulnerable to skin cancer in such conditions. Your health seems perfect, however.” The doctor didn’t sound very happy about the good news, but then, the Letnev, as a rule, were not a joyful people. They had so many wondrous things – high technology, the freedom of the stars, citizenship in one of the great societies of the galaxy – but as a group they seemed less cheerful than the humblest farmer on Darit.

  Ayla said, “You have progressed to the year four curriculum. At current rates of language acquisition, you will achieve full fluency in Baronic Letnev in two days. Would you like to begin the next lesson?”

  “No, not right now.” Bianca flung herself down on the bunk and looked up at the ceiling. She was bored. She was sick of studying languages, the Letnev “entertainment” videos and texts available didn’t merit the name (it was all patriotism and shooting, with very little kissing and cleverness), and she’d already written two letters to her parents and three to old Torvald, which Ayla assured her were being transmitted. At this point, she’d even welcome another round of medical tests, just to get out of her cabin.

  She was free to walk around the ship, but guards trailed her everywhere, because “elites must be protected,” which made her feel awkward, and the ship was pretty dull anyway. She’d been to the engineering deck and the bridge and the navigation room and all of them sparked a million questions, but no one would teach her anything, except the hydroponic gardener, who’d been happy to talk to her for an hour or so yesterday about farming techniques on a spaceship versus a planet. Bianca had made one or two obvious-seeming suggestions for improving crop yields and the gardener had acted genuinely stunned by her ideas, though she supposed he was just being nice and humoring her; if it was obvious to her, it must be obvious to everyone, right?

  Funny how she’d never had any ideas about farming back home, but maybe the change of scenery had inspired her mind to look at things from a different angle.

  She’d also discovered a knack for computers. With a little digging around, she discovered there was surveillance in her room, though it was intermittent and usually brief – spot checks rather than constant vigilance. Maybe the Letnev spied on everyone that way. Even so, she managed to create a loop of her napping under the covers that she could run while she did things she doubted the captain would approve of. She’d had a lot of fun exploring the ship’s various databases, learning all sorts of fascinating technical details about spacecraft, though there were restricted areas where the security defeated her efforts to explore… at least so far. The officer files in particular were heavily encrypted, and her attempts to satisfy her curiosity about Voyou, Archambelle, and the captain were stymied at every turn. She was getting better and better at understanding the architecture of the Letnev systems, though, so in time–

  Someone knocked at her door, and Bianca sat up and said, “Come in!”

  Doctor Archambelle entered, wearing the strained expression that passed for a smile with her. “Greetings. May I sit?” Bianca gestured grandly to the fold-down seat, and Archambelle perched on its edge.

  “Is everything all right?” Bianca said. “Did the tests show something wrong?”

  “No, nothing we didn’t expect,” she said. “Your health is excellent. But I was perusing your file recently, and read something I wished to ask you about.”

  “You have a file on me?”