“Let’s not spend all the gold before we even have it,” Yamashida said. “Is there any sign of the mirror?”
The girl’s ears drooped. “We’re still cataloguing the room, my lord. If it’s here, it’s probably over in the far left corner. There’s an armored cage there full of smaller storage containers, but the major said we should wait for you before we go through them.”
“Quite right,” Yamashida said. “The sacred treasures are not to be viewed by those of inferior blood, let alone handled. Akio?”
Akio frowned, but didn’t argue. Instead, he led our group across the room and down to the secondary vault. This one was a lot less secure, basically just a big cage surrounding a table and some smaller shelving. The door had been cut off at some point, and the boxes on the shelves were jumbled up like someone had searched through them. But nothing seemed to be damaged.
I wondered what was in them. But Akio and Lord Yamashida both went straight to a pedestal at the back of the cage. There, surrounded by a bunch of sensors, sat a large flat box of ancient wood. Handmade, or it looked like it at first glance. Something about it seemed a little off, though.
Yamashida started to reach for the box, but Akio cleared his throat pointedly. The older man grimaced, the most emotion I’d ever seen on his face, and reluctantly stepped aside.
The case didn’t even have a real lock, just a set of camouflaged buttons that you had to press in the right combination to open it. Camouflaged to normal humans, anyway. They stood out like a sore thumb to me, and Akio didn’t seem to have any trouble finding them either. He casually flashed a burst of x-rays to outline the mechanism, and then opened it after a few moments of thought.
So that’s what x-ray vision is good for! Wait, Mom was setting me up to pick antique locks? That didn’t make sense.
The androids all turned around as Akio carefully cracked open the ancient case, and peeked inside. Sure enough, it held an ancient-looking disk of polished metal. Pretty underwhelming, although I guess it’s kind of neat to think that people could make things like that even way back in the dawn of prehistory.
Akio closed the case, and locked it again.
“This is a momentous day for the Masu-kai,” he said.
Yamashida managed a thin smile. “No one will be able to question the legitimacy of our claims now. We should secure it at once.”
“I suppose you’re right, Uncle. Major Wen, detail a team to transport this case back to the ship and secure it in my personal vault. I want a full squad on guard there at all times until we return home.”
“Yes, milord!”
A pair of marines floated over, and reverently picked up the case. Something about it was still bothering me, though. It looked like wood, but there was a faint pattern of discoloration that put the lie to that illusion. Lines of material laid just below the surface that were a slightly different color in the infrared spectrum, and arranged with way more precision than human hands could ever manage. As the marines carried the box past me I realized that the lines formed a set of kanji, repeated over and over.
It said ‘replica’.
I pretended to rub my nose to cover a smile. It was a fake. A pretty good one, if it fooled Akio, but you can do amazing things with fabricators. Heck, it might even be an atomically perfect facsimile. That would explain why they needed to label the case, to keep it from getting mixed up with the real one.
Only, why was the box labeled in a way no one but me could even see?
That horrible suspicion came back, stronger this time. But I pushed it away. I watched the marines leave, still trying to decide if I should tell them what I’d seen.
“I wonder what’s in the rest of these boxes?” Akio said.
“A question for another time,” Yamashida said smoothly.
His com sent out a packet to the relay one of the techs had just set up on the wall behind us. Copies immediately bounced back to all of the androids around us, and for a couple of milliseconds almost all of them froze. Then they started moving again, but they were suddenly trying to keep their expressions blank.
I had a bad feeling about this. I floated back a few cems so that I was brushing up against Emla, and moved a shield bot to hide my hands from the marines at the cage door.
Emla, give me the package!
The guys were still talking, although it felt like the conversation was moving in slow motion now. “What do you mean, uncle?” Akio asked, with a slight frown on his face.
Yamashida slowly shook his head. “Lord Hoshida has become a fool in his old age, and it seems his heir is no better. Did you really think I was going to let a careless whelp like you push me aside, and steal all the glory?”
Here it is! Emla sent, pressing a tiny capsule into my hand. I palmed it, and crossed my arms. Another slight shift, and no one could see the access port hidden below my left armpit open. I hurriedly pushed the capsule full of tritium into place.
“Careless?” Akio replied mildly. “Do you think I came here unprepared, Uncle?”
“I know all about the warbots lurking behind us, and the sniper team out on the hull,” Yamashida said. “But your youthful attempts at subtlety fall well short of the mark. Did you know that my techs were the ones who developed our marine training program, fifty years ago?”
Now Akio finally looked concerned. He glanced around, and took in the blank faces around him.
“Major Wen?” He said cautiously. “Who do you serve?”
“The shadows will always belong to Lord Yamashida,” she said. A smile full of malicious glee broke out across her face, and she sent a signal to her troops. Their warbots all turned to cover us.
“So that’s your plan?” Akio sighed. “Trap yourself in a confined space with a supersoldier who has nothing to lose?”
“Silly boy. You’re talking to a meat puppet. Major Wen, you may kill them now.”
Chapter 27
I honestly don’t know what I would have done, if he’d said ‘kill him’. But if he was getting rid of witnesses too then there wasn’t any choice. If I wanted to get out of here alive I was going to have to fight.
Someone had just cut Akio’s datanet connection, but it looked like the android in charge of that hadn’t gotten to me yet. So I jumped my mind to maximum speed, and sent an urgent warning to Captain Sokol with a recording of the last few minutes attached. I wasn’t sure how much danger the ship was in, or what emergency plans the captain might have, but hopefully the advance warning would do him some good.
Then I had to focus on myself.
Emla was already linked into my tactical command system, and she almost managed to match speeds with me.