Rake appeared in his periphery. “What is it?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Rake.” Griffith stood in front of the wall to the left of the wide window. “There’s a door.”
Rake crossed back to Mesa, who busily swept through menus on the terminal. She passed the pyramid off to Rake without so much as a glance. Griffith raised his gun and shifted to the side.
With her pistol in one hand and the pyramid gripped in the other, Rake cautiously approached the door. It slid open, and she set the pyramid down near the threshold before moving inside with Griffith shortly behind.
Cavalon took a few cautious steps forward and peered in. The doorway led to an arched corridor made of the same smooth matte gold, curving around the outside of the empty circular chamber. Griffith and Rake disappeared down the corridor, while Cavalon hovered in the doorway and waited.
“Clear,” Griffith said a few moments later.
“Cav?” Rake said.
“Coming.”
He found them halfway down at what must have been the point opposite the window. The inside wall held a three-meter-wide control panel. A handful of old-school, non-holographic terminal screens, all without power, mixed with a variety of panels containing levers, switches, buttons, and gauges of all kinds.
“What do you think?” Rake asked.
Cavalon shook his head. Not a damn label in sight, even with Viator symbols. “I’m not sure.”
“Cavalon?” Mesa crackled through his comms.
Rake waved him off, and he headed back out into the main room. Mesa still stood at the terminal, and he joined her, looking down at the flat, non-holographic display. She’d brought up an overhead schematic of what looked to be the chamber beyond the window.
“This technology is … odd,” she said. “And old.”
“How old?”
“I do not know. It is not the kind of design I would expect to see from Viators, ancient or otherwise. Does this look like anything to you?”
His eyes flashed over the diagram, but he couldn’t make sense of most of it. Though to his surprise, he recognized a few of the Viator symbols from what he’d learned looking at the atlas menus. “Off-line” flashed in the upper corner, and symbols he’d surmised from the bomb schematics to mean “fuel” were listed below a flashing red heading, among a few others he couldn’t interpret. Beside it, a bold, green symbol acted as a heading for another list full of symbols he didn’t recognize.
He pointed to the first line below the green heading. “What’s this mean?”
Mesa tilted her head. “The third symbol means ‘aid system.’ As in a support system. The first two…”
“‘Cryonic,’” Griffith’s low voice rumbled. Cavalon turned to find the tall man standing over his shoulder. “Then, ‘stable.’ So, ‘cryostatic.’”
Cavalon looked back at the schematic, assigning that one to memory along with the few dozen others he now understood. “Is this ‘divertor’？” He pointed at one listed under the red heading.
Mesa nodded. “Yes. Very astute. Specifically, ‘waste diversion,’ I believe. Or ‘byproduct.’”
“And this last one?”
“‘Plasma…’” Mesa said, then tilted her head back and forth a few times. “‘Plasma-1.’”
“Meaning hydrogen plasma?”
“Correct.”
Cavalon ran his eyes over the schematic again, trying to account for it as a whole. Fuel injection, cryostatic and waste-diversion systems, plasma, hydrogen, rings of coiled metal …