Opalina Outpost

Chapter 20 /Part 2/

The inspector kept right on his heels as they descended. Ravi bit the inside of his lip when he heard voices and spotted two spots of light against the far wall. Yorune and Lio were crouched low, chipping away at the rock wall, working right through lunch. The crew had made a lot of progress during the morning, and the stripped-away rock revealed a massive swath of metal expanding in all directions across the wall. It seemed to emanate its own silvery glow alongside the light from the lanterns.

He nearly reached them before he realized that the inspector wasn't with him. Turning back, he held up the lantern a little, and saw Tarik poised on the last stair before the room, his eyes huge. Ravi's stomach sank.

"Who're you?" Lio snapped. He stood in front of the wall with a scraper in one hand. Probably ready to fight Tarik with it.

"Lio." Ravi put a warning in his voice. "This is Tarik Sarrel. He's here from the ziggurat." He nearly added, "Don't be a dick," but maybe Tarik deserved a little of his own haughtiness reflected back at him. Goddesses knew Lio was capable of it.

Tarik hovered over the nav board that Duhar had lain across. He waved his hand at Ravi, throat working around a squeak. Ravi brought the light and the toolbox closer to him, and the inspector rushed to open the box with clumsy hands. Yorune and Lio came to peer over his shoulder as he shuffled through tools and removed what looked like a long, black spike with a handle. "Stand back," he ordered, sounding winded. Ravi had to yank Lio backward a pace.

The spike emitted a high-pitched whine. A click from the handle, and a blue-white electric circle shot out where the spike touched the metal table. The charge raced outward like a wave, before it dissipated on the luminous metal.

"Highly conductive," Tarik muttered. He swapped the spike for an ugly metal tube with a trigger hold like a laser rifle.

"Don't—" Lio sounded as if he was the one about to be tested.

"If it's a true Mastali alloy, this won't make a mark. Just heat it a bit." Tarik pulled a bulky, rigid glove onto one hand and positioned the instrument in the other. A bright, violet-edged flame flared at the narrow end of the tube, and Tarik held it against the metal. It hovered there for almost a full minute, but when he flicked it off and set the tool down, the table looked untouched. He pressed two glove-protected fingers to the metal, waited a second, then looked at the glove carefully. Where the glove had touched the metal, it glowed faint pink. Tarik nodded and looked up at Ravi. "This is definitely not an old hov part."

"Great," Ravi said. Even to his own ears his voice sounded hollow.

The inspector galloped to the metal patch of the wall to repeat the tests. It seemed the same as the metal that formed the nav table, except the heat glove didn't light up at all after Tarik blasted the flame against the wall. He repeated the test in the same spot at least three times, his frown deepening every time the glove came back the same dull grey color. On a fourth test, he held the flame in place for a few minutes and gingerly touched the wall. The glove still reflected no heat.

"Strange," he muttered. He moved to the edge of the metal patch, where the rock overlapped it. Ravi checked his holowatch. Any minute now, Jossen would reappear with the rest of the crew. He almost sighed with relief when Tarik began to slowly put away his tools, glancing up at the wall the whole time.

"Com Endessen," the inspector said. "I'll need you to send away the recruits for our discussion."

Even Yorune looked a little frosty at the dismissal, and Ravi interjected hastily, "Why don't we go to my office, then." Ideally before Aziri showed up and ripped into this guy. He hustled Tarik past Lio's glare and back up the stairs. The inspector dawdled in the tunnel, and Ravi stood impatiently in the muster room doorway, holding it open for him.