The Riddled Post - Aaron Rosenberg [14]
* * *
Fabian, Duffy, and Pattie stood in the workroom, glancing around.
“It was unlocked?” Duffy was asking.
Fabian nodded. “The only one in the building that was. I checked with Corsi. She blasted her way through the others.”
His friend grinned. “That’s our Core-Breach.” Then Duffy sobered. “This was Madl’r’s private workroom, judging from the records. Those locks on the doors, they’ve got codes keyed in by whoever’s assigned the room. The central computer doesn’t have access to them, except in an emergency situation, when it can lock or unlock the entire building, depending on what’s necessary.” Duffy shook his head. “I mentioned to Sonnie before that someone could’ve been after whatever the scientists were working on. Well, we’ll worry about that later. Let’s see what we can find here.”
The three of them began combing the room. Fabian took one of the worktables and Pattie the other, while Duffy checked the cabinets.
“I have something,” Pattie announced after several minutes. She was studying an object on the table, and Fabian joined her, as did Duffy. The object was roughly three meters on a side, square but mostly open—a hollow half-sphere formed the center.
“Notice the surface,” Pattie indicated with one claw. “No breaks or gaps. This is a finished piece.”
“Okay, but what is it?” Fabian ran a finger along the inside of the ring, searching for tactile clues. “Looks like a cradle of some kind. I’d guess these are power couplings, for recharging.” He pointed to several small linkages he’d felt near the top.
Pattie was holding her tricorder. “Two meters exactly—the same size as the holes.”
“So we’ve found the holder of the thing. That’ll help.” Duffy glanced around again. “But blueprints would be better, or a log, or something.” He frowned. “What’s missing here?” Fabian and Pattie both looked around the room.
“The device?” Fabian offered, but Duffy waved it off. It had been the obvious answer, of course, and Fabian had known it wasn’t what Duffy was thinking, but he’d wanted to eliminate every possibility.
“A computer?” Pattie suggested, and Duffy nodded. The minute she said it Fabian knew she was right.
“That’s it—no computer. What kind of scientist works without a computer?” On a hunch, Fabian stepped back over to the other worktable, rummaged again through the objects piled haphazardly on top, then noticed the shallow drawer slung underneath. “Aha!” he announced, pulling it open and hauling out several large sheets of paper. And, amazingly enough, a book.
“I’ll bet night duty for a month that this is what we’re looking for.” Neither Duffy nor Pattie took him up on the offer, as he hit his combadge. “Commander?”
* * *
“Well, I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news,” Fabian said to Sonya over the comlink. “The good news is, this Madl’r was a typical scientist, kept notes on everything. We even found a journal.”
“And the bad news?”
“He didn’t write it in anything we can read.”
“Write it? He didn’t record his notes?”
“Of course not—that’d be too easy.” Even on the combadge Sonya could hear Pattie and Kieran chuckling in the background. “This guy actually handwrote his journal—on paper!”
“Great, a Luddite.” Sonya leaned back in her chair and tugged absently at her cuff. “Well, bring it up and we’ll set Faulwell on it. What about diagrams, schematics, blueprints?”
“That’s the other bad news. We’ve got what are probably engineering diagrams, but we can’t make heads or tails of them—they’re written in whatever he did the journal in, and it’s more scribbles and little sketches than anything else. We know this thing is round, at least.”
“Which we’d already guessed. He had nothing on the computer?”
“Just the same basic personnel record everyone had—he was either really paranoid or really old-fashioned. Or both.”
“All right, bring up what you can. How are Commander Duffy and