Thyal chuckled and linked their arms. They set off down a paved pathway to the right and he increased their pace.
"Are
we in a hurry to get somewhere?" she asked after several moments.
"Mysteries
…" He winked, a most un-Le'ankan expression. "Father suggested I
might be interested in something a ship of Gleaners brought for examination.
Since the others are delayed – how long?"
"No
telling. They'll contact me when Dulit arrives."
"Since
we have some time to wait, I thought you might be interested also."
"You
did say Gleaners? The garbage-pickers of the universe? The carrion-birds of
every known stellar battle since spaceflight began? Gleaners?" She shook
her head and let out a low whistle of amazement.
The
path took them down a short tunnel, below a dividing wall older than the last
major conflict to scar Le’anka. The wall stood there as a reminder and warning,
of the damage that people could cause themselves when they tried to rewrite
Enlo’s teachings to suit their tastes and inclinations, and put political
expediency over truth and honor and purity of the soul.
"Exactly."
His voice echoed softly against the tiles lining the tunnel.
"Does
it give you a cold shudder of impending disaster? The idea of Gleaners sharing something they found? Before
they could profit off it? Yet it's
totally in character with Gleaners to want all the profit, and trick others
into doing all the work. Take all the risks."
They
came up the tunnel on the other side of the wall and faced a dimpled landscape,
with massive buildings for lecture halls, and facilities for scientific
demonstrations. Each building sat in its own depression in the landscape,
shielded and decorated by hedges and flowering trees that gave no indication of
the serious, universe-shaking matters discussed and decided and discovered
within those sedate walls.
"Father
says Master Pejoris and his team theorize these Gleaners fear another faction
of them will unlock this mysterious thing they can’t analyze. Before they
figure out how to profit from it. They're desperate enough to win the race that
they are asking for help."
"Enlo
take me home now. I've seen it all," she murmured.
Thyal
sighed. Their gazes met and they laughed quietly as they approached the
double-wide, metal-bound doors of their destination. The building most often served
as a lecture hall with amphitheater seating for four thousand. Analysis
equipment was stored under the center platform and raised as needed.
Containment facilities and equipment in this particular building, on the far
side of the Academy grounds, made it useful for examining questionable
materials.
They were quiet as they walked the last length of pathway to reach the building and went inside. The building’s passive security system scanned them for identification. Thyal’s master’s pin gleamed softly, pale blue for a moment, reading his bio-signs. M’kar’s locator wristband flashed green, acknowledgment of her identity and rank, and recording her location, if anyone in the Fleet might need to contact her.
The Gleaner mystery object sat in the pit in the center of the vast hall, on the platform where a lecturer would stand. M'kar and Thyal stayed at the place where the doorway let them into the amphitheater seating, halfway between the roof and pit floor. They leaned on the railing and looked down into the pit. The craggy lump looked like dirty, metallic slag from more than a hundred meters away. M'kar guessed it to be maybe two meters tall, roughly ovoid, maybe six or seven meters around the widest circumference.
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