Fortune's Light - Michael Jan Friedman [70]
The body was at the base of the slope. They knelt down beside it.
“What are we looking for?” she asked.
He tried not to think about what they were doing. He couldn’t shake the notion that it was one step removed from grave-robbing—if very necessary grave-robbing.
“A communications device of some kind—that is, if I’ve guessed right about Teller’s method of finding his way through the maze. And even if it’s here, it won’t be easy to locate. Lyneea searched him pretty thoroughly and didn’t find a thing.”
“Then it’s not in his pockets,” concluded Crusher.
“No. Not in any obvious pockets, anyway.” He played the beamlight on Teller’s footwear. “Try those.”
“His boots?”
“Just a hunch. I don’t think Lyneea looked there.”
The doctor removed the dead man’s right boot and reached inside it. Immediately she turned to regard Riker, and a grim smile played at the corners of her mouth.
“There’s something here all right,” she told him. “A couple of somethings, in fact.” A second later she drew out a plastic rectangle.
“A chit,” said the first officer, recognizing it easily. He trained his light on it. “A valuable one at that—you don’t see too many of this denomination.” And the thing was black. “Issued by Madraga Rhurig.”
“What does that mean?” asked the doctor, delving deeper with her narrow fingers.
“Probably Teller’s payoff, or at least the first installment. And since it came from Rhurig, that’s probably who hired him to steal the seal.”
Crusher plucked out something else then—an object the size and shape of the chit but thicker.
As Riker illuminated it, she turned it over in her hand. It was silver, with four fingertip-size plates and three tiny but separate readouts above them.
“He had a pocket sewn inside his boot,” explained Crusher, still looking a little incredulous. “This fit right inside it, along with the chit.”
“It looks Maratekkan,” he observed. “They’re good at miniaturization.” He pulled his glove off with his teeth and held out his good hand. “May I?”
She gave it over. Cradling it in his palm, he fingered one of its plates. Immediately one of the readouts became illuminated; numerals appeared.
“Coordinates?” ventured Crusher.
“That’s what they look like,” he agreed. When he touched another plate, the first readout died and a second one sprang to life. It displayed the same sort of numerals.
The third plate triggered the bottommost readout, but that one was blank, as if it hadn’t been programmed. That left the fourth plate, which was set below the first three and centered.
Riker had an idea what it was for. Touching the first plate again, he reactivated the original set of numerals. Then he tried the fourth plate.
Suddenly the thing started beeping. Not loud—in fact, if it hadn’t been for the silence all around them, they might not have heard it at all. But it was loud enough.
Riker nodded, gripped the thing tighter. He looked at Crusher.
“A homing mechanism,” he told her. “The louder this beeping gets, the closer one is to one’s objective.”
“I see,” said the doctor. She tapped the topmost readout with a fingernail. “It looks as if it’s got two active settings. You think that one of them will lead us to … what’s it called again?”
“Fortune’s Light.”
“Right. And the other setting, I imagine, would indicate the way out.”
“That would make sense,” said Riker. “Teller probably planted a transmitter near one of the exits.”
“So what are we waiting for? Let’s follow the audio signal and—”
A sound. They froze at the same time and exchanged glances by the glow of the beamlight.
It could have been one of those skittering things, Riker told himself. There were enough of them down here. But somehow, he didn’t think so. The sound had been too heavy, too substantial. And it had been isolated, with nothing before or after it—as if whoever made the sound had realized it, and stopped before he could make another one.
Riker jabbed a forefinger at the opening above them; Crusher nodded. They had to