Book 1: Chapter 8

“Hey,” Linua said. Eret was too intent on the computer, and didn’t respond at all, but Anith raised her head.

“Oh hey,” she said, waving a hand. “Welcome. We’re grounded, and we would be sitting at home except Mum had a meeting tonight so we persuaded Dad to bring us here to keep an eye on us. We’re doing homework.” She pulled a face. “Well, we’re supposed to be doing homework, but only one of us is.”

Linua followed her glance to Eret, who still hadn’t responded, or in fact noticed that Linua was in the room. Anith poked him with her pencil.

“Hey!” he rubbed his arm and then saw Linua. “Oh hi, Linua.” His brain apparently caught up with his sister’s words. “I am doing homework, you clod, just not actual school homework. It’s for the Computer Club.”

Linua wondered how many clubs Eret was in. A notice on the back of the computer he was using advised that the computer was for the use of three-body simulations only.

“Are you allowed to use that computer?” she asked, coming further into the room.

“Of course not.”

Linua glanced over her shoulder.

“Won’t your dad come in and check to make sure you’re not using it?”

“No. He doesn’t know that I know the password to log on.”

Linua blinked.

“How do you know the password?”

In answer Eret flipped the keyboard over, showing a username and password taped to the bottom.

“Oh.” Linua drifted a bit closer, swinging the Keng Boh Kids backpack round to her front, ready to take the storage stick out of it but hoping that Eret and Anith would notice the logo first. The response was gratifyingly immediate.

“Are you a Keng Boh Kids fan too?” Anith asked.

“My Grandmother doesn’t have a TV,” Linua said nonchalantly. “But sometimes I watch it at my cousin’s house.”

“The sixth series is out next week.” Eret sounded excited. “I’m trying to model the scene with the gargantua attack on the research station.”

Linua didn’t want to admit she’d only ever seen four episodes, none of which had involved a gargantua attack on a research station.

“Oh cool,” she said, sidling round the desk to look at the screen. It showed a giant monster, which she vaguely recognised as something prehistoric that had gone extinct millions of years ago—it wasn’t the kind of thing Grandmother felt necessary to educate Linua about. Eret clicked a button and monster swung its massive tentacles while opening its feeding orifice and roaring soundlessly.

“I haven’t got the animation quite right yet, I’m going to do another pass tonight and see if I can tweak it a bit.”

“Did you make this?” Linua asked, genuinely impressed.

That was all it took to set Eret off. He showed her the process from beginning to end, from the modelling to the texturing, and the rigging, then the animating. It was actually kind of interesting, but she had to wait some time before there was enough of a gap in the flow of words for her to mention the storage stick.

When Eret finally paused, distracted by a part of the model he had decreed was out of alignment, she pulled it out and explained.

“The thief somehow hid it under the lectern in the classroom,” she ended.

“Ancient gods,” Anith said, with feeling. “Why didn’t you lead with that? You would have saved yourself twenty minutes of totally yawny stuff about animations.”

“No, I don’t mind, that was totally mez. I’m glad you showed me.” Linua flipped the storage stick over to display the metal connectors. “Only … how do we look at the images on this thing?”

Eret made give-it-to-me motions, and she reluctantly handed it over.

“Pickle will know,” he said confidently. He minimised the animation window and brought up some other window. “Let me log into the bulletin board and message him.”

Linua had heard the astronomers discuss bulletin boards, and was vaguely aware that it was something the research teams used to keep in touch with each other about their finds and their research. She hadn’t been aware that it was something that teenagers could use too.

She watched Eret type in a message.

“How soon will Pickle respond?”

“Oh immediately,” Eret said airily. Sure enough, it was only a minute before there was a gentle ping from the computer, and a new message flashed up.

“He’s sent a link. Hopefully it will have instructions.”

“Are you sure you should click it?” Anith asked doubtfully. “It looks dodgy. He could have got it from anywhere.”

“Everything Pickle posts is dodgy.” Eret clicked the link.

It brought up a video, grainy in texture, depicting a middle-aged man with hollowed out cheekbones, a large moustache, and a thick foreign accent, standing in a garage filled with untidy junk and demonstrating how to use gold and copper wires to connect a storage stick to a computer’s hard drive. It was immediately apparent that the storage sticks were manufactured in military facilities, and hadn’t yet been released for civilian use. The man in the video kept saying things like, “make sure private network is engaged in case government has location software put.”

Anith put her hand over her mouth.

“Where does Pickle find these videos?”

“I’m pretty sure the thief or whoever he bought it from on the black market would already have removed any locating software on our stick,” Eret said. “Let’s give it a go.”

“Oh yeah right, why not, what could possibly go wrong?”

“Linua, do you know if there are any gold and copper wires around?”

“There will be some in the electrical cupboard,” she said reluctantly. “I know where the spare keys are.”

This was surprisingly easy, because no-one ever noticed people with brooms—unless of course, you were Dr Aedan and you’d run out of student slave labour. But Dr Aedan wasn’t roaming the corridors today. Linua returned with some coils of wire in packets.

She handed them over to Eret, then played the role of scout, because she could push her broom up and down the corridor outside and warn them if any of the researchers were about to enter the classroom.

Instead of thinking about what was on the storage stick, Linua found herself instead considering Anith, and specifically Anith’s clothing. Today Anith was wearing a pair of denim jeans and a long-sleeved white top, over which was a lacey pastel pink jacket. She had her hair bundled up in a messy bun on top of her head, which suited her long, elegant neck and delicate collar bones. For the first time, Linua realised how old-fashioned and school-girly her own clothes looked.

Naturally they had been chosen by Grandmother.

They consisted of a navy-blue pleated skirt, which came to just below her knees and had approximately the same shape as a sack, a properly starched white shirt with embroidery round the collar, a v-necked sleeveless navy-blue cardigan, long navy-blue socks, and sensible navy-blue leather shoes with shiny buckles.

Linua had been wearing variations of this kind of outfit since she was seven. She had never noticed any difference between herself and the Castle Yi children, since they all wore a gi during practice and traditional Shang clothes on Nimrasday. But here, at the Observatory, the difference between Linua and Anith was marked.

Not even a Keng Boh Kids mitani backpack was enough to make up for it.

It took Eret nearly an hour to connect the storage stick, which involved lots of messaging to and fro with Pickle, and allowed Linua to get most of the cleaning done, but in the end Anith popped her head round the door and beckoned Linua back inside.

Eret had the pictures from the storage stick up on the computer monitor.

At first, Linua was disappointed. There was nothing like the beautiful and delicate gold orrery of her imagination. Instead, the images depicted the remains of what looked like a dark brown string bag sitting in an open drawer in what was presumably aisle three of the vault. The bag was little more than a scrap of netting, constructed so that it had odd holes placed apparently at random across the fabric.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Not sure.” Eret clicked through the pictures, which were all of the same string bag from different angles, some showing the whole thing in one shot, and some close ups.

“Is that really worth breaking into the vault for?” Linua couldn’t get over her disappointment.

“Maybe it’s a star map,” Anith said slowly.

“A what?” The others turned to her.

“You know, like in Keng Boh Kids where they find an ancient star map and they have to predict where in the desert they would have needed to stand two thousand years ago in order to be in the same place.”

“Oh yeah, I remember,” Eret said.

Linua shook her head, eager to show her secret superpower—the first time in her life when her knowledge of adstronomy was actually useful.

“That would only tell you which latitude to be at, unless you had the exact date and time when the star map was made.”

“She’s right.” Eret sounded frustrated. “Maybe there’s a date on it somehow?”

Anith scrutinised the images.

“Yeah, but even if there was, one, we can’t read it; and two, would we even know what calendar? Keretic? Babilim? Shang?”

“There’s another problem,” Linua pointed out. “The map is made of string. It’s flexible and it stretches. It means the map could be distorted by, like, a lot. What’s the point of predicting the location if it’s...” How much did string nets stretch? “…fifty percent inaccurate or whatever?”

“It must mean something.”

“There’s clearly data encoded in it,” Linua pointed to a part of net. “This bit is twisted to the right, and this bit here is twisted to the left.” Her finger moved to another part. “This circular bit here has twelve lengths of string woven into it, but that one has only seven. It’s irregular, but it’s not random. I bet if you logged all the different ways the string is connected and put it through the Konita-Song Algorithm it would generate a high i coefficient.”

There was a little silence.

“What the hell is the Kon … whatsit algorithm?” Anith asked.

“It determines how much information a message contains, or if it’s simply random noise,” Eret said airily.

“Do you actually know that or are you just making it up?”

Eret’s ears went slightly red.

“I was guessing … a bit … but I have actually sort of heard of it before.”

“Yes, that is what it’s for,” Linua said hurriedly, trying to head off a sibling argument.

Anith heaved a sigh and flopped back in her chair to stare at the ceiling.

“Why couldn’t you have decided on a club that involved less maths? Model-making, or photography or something like that?”

Linua looked speculatively at Anith. Was she someone else who wasn’t that interested in astronomy?

“Stop complaining. You got a scooter out of it,” Eret pointed out in an annoyed tone of voice.

“What does that mean?” Linua asked, glancing between them.

Eret’s ears got even redder. Anith grinned evilly.

“After the metal-detecting fiasco Mum and Dad banned Eret from starting an after-school club by himself. So when he and Pickle decided they wanted an Astronomy one, guess who got volunteered to join too?” Anith pointed to herself.

“Shut up!”

“Oh, am I embarrassing you…?”

“Are you twins?” Linua interrupted, before the argument could devolve further.

Anith laughed and Eret gritted his teeth.

“No, everyone asks that. It drives Eret nuts.” She sounded pleased. “Eret is eighteen months older than me, but the way our birthdays fall he’s only one year above me in school.”

That would make Eret sixteen, the same age as Sayo Hui.

Eret cleared his throat heavily.

“Well. Anyway. Shall we get back to the artefact? If it’s not a star map, what is it?”

“We need to post those pictures on the bulletin board and everyone needs to research them.” Anith glanced at Linua thoughtfully. “We should give Linua access to the bulletin board too.”

Eret nodded.

“Good idea.” He turned to Linua. “Do you have a computer?”

Linua was slightly taken aback at the idea of someone her age having her own computer. She shook her head.

“My Grandmother has one, but I don’t use it.”

The most Linua had ever done on a computer was print things out of the Observatory terminal which held the telescope readings, and enter figures that she had calculated for the researchers, or measure fuzzy blobs. She knew how to point and click, and how to type with two fingers, but the rest was a mystery.

“Would your grandmother let you use hers?”

Linua’s mind boggled at the idea of telling Grandmother that she wanted to use the computer to look up pictures taken with an ex-military spy camera by a thief. But if she sneaked into the library after Grandmother went to bed, she might be able to use the computer without anyone in the house finding out.

“Maybe?”

“Alright, here’s the link for the bulletin board. I’ll make you an account now.”