Sanctum

Maria

"Maria to Ops," Del called into her communicator, not pausing as she rounded the corner leading to the main tunnel. Five seconds later she stopped dead. "Maria to Ops," she repeated, shaking the battered communicator gently.

Still no response. Del checked the communicator's indicators. It was working fine. "Del to Icey."

"Yo."

"Icey, call Maria."

There was a pause. "No response."

"Try manual, we still haven't got the bugs out of the voice-recognition."

"I did try manual..."

"Something's wrong. Maria always answers... Attention Fantasma residents," she said, and as soon as the Ops computer recognized who she was speaking to her voice rang out down the tunnel. "This is Delithita. Whoever knows the location of Ghost Maria Wolfe please contact me at once. Thank you."

A moment later the communicator crackled with static, then cleared. "Roberts here," a gruff male voice said. "Saw her off the Deep End twenty minutes ago. Haven't seen her leave."

The Deep End was the tavern on the garden level, at the very farthest section of the colony from the surface-- either up or out to the side of the scarp. "Thank you. Del to Deep End," she said.

"What?" the bartender, an angry young man with a cybernetic eye given to him by the Cybrids after they took his original for experimentation, snapped.

"Maria there?"

"She's in the back. I'll get her."

There was a longer pause, then the bartender replied sheepishly. "She's not here... she didn't come out of that room, though, I swear."

----------

Delithita and Icey entered the Deep End's back room, a cluttered mess of boulders that anyone could have been blocked from view among, at least at a glance. After searching and calling her name for a minute, Del sat down on one of the boulders and considered. They'd questioned everyone in the tavern, and no one had seen her leave. If she had done so, there was no way she could have come out from behind the bar without being seen.

"Maria this isn't funny!" Del shouted.

No response.

Icey spoke into his communicator. "Yes, we need a medium mover in here. That's right, in the back of the Deep End. Good, hurry it up please." He turned to Delithita. "Got a mover on the way to get the rocks out of here.

Del nodded, then squinted at a faint line in the rock wall. She got to her feet, touched the stone, ran her fingers down the line.

It was an airlock door.

She pressed her hand where the fingerplate should have been but nothing happened. She gave the panel a hard push and it slid open.

She stepped inside, shining her wrist light in. The back airlock door looked like most other ones, and had a blinking "Atmosphere positive" cross on the panel.

Del shrugged, and approached it.

And screamed in terror as the floor of the airlock spun under her feet, disappearing, dropping her down a shaft that her wrist light could not find the bottom of.

She reached out, her flailing arms striking stone, and caught herself several meters down. The shaft was only a meter and a half wide; she could climb down. She paused to still her frantic heartbeat, then called up to Icey. "There's an uncharted shaft here. Narrow. You can climb down." She proceeded down the shaft. Above her, Icey looked over the edge.

"Let me know what you find," he said dryly. Del sputtered with outrage, then growled a curse and climbed down.

It was twenty minutes before she reached the bottom. She looked up and the rectangular opening to the shaft was barely a pinpoint in the distance in a featureless blackness. She shined her light around and found a door, which she pushed open.

It was a standard airlock. The green cross blinked on the opposite door, so she pushed it slowly.

It opened.

Dark red light shined from a single panel resting on the opposite wall. She took in the shape and size of the room: rectangular, five by five meters, with a comfortable two point five meter ceiling.

A table with a simulated wood top and a narrow stone pillar supporting it was the room's main feature. A candle glowed faintly in the center. A chessboard with a single black queen pitted against a half a dozen white pieces sat on the opposite side of the table in front of a carefully crafted chair.

Del walked over to the chessboard, examined it. The queen stood between two knights, not in danger from either. The enemy bishops guarded a double X of squares from the white's left flank. The queen skirted the edge of the X. Three pawns remained on the board, along the right flank in a slash formation that the black queen could not penetrate from the front.

The queen's previous victims, five pawns, two rooks, and a king, watched the battle from their resting place behind the last black row.

A tiny data pad sat behind the white rows. Del looked it over. A miniature version of the game decorated it. Del pushed the control panel and one of the knights charged past the queen. The message "KK to KB7" appeared. Understanding dawned, and she pushed the knight to the indicated position, and stepped back from the board.

The queen was now in danger again: if it took the obvious route, the other knight would be able to capture it. If it moved to capture the knight, it would be in the bishop's path.

Del raised an eyebrow, and turned to examine the rest of the room.

Two more chairs were present, one at the table and one across the back left corner of the room. Del crossed the room, noticing something on the chair.

It was a scarp deck. She glanced through it, shuffled it as she looked around.

She looked back at the deck, puzzled. Something was missing.

Spreading the cards out on the table she identified the missing card.

The Ghost.

Slowly she turned around, noticing the thing she had missed earlier.

The Ghost card was on the wall, held there only by friction with a small ledge below it, less than half a centimeter deep.

She picked up the card, and there was an airlock panel behind it.

"Damn you, Maria," she said, with a soft laugh. She thumped her fist on the door.

"Enter," Maria's voice called from the other side, calm, quiet.

Del pushed the door open and passed through the airlock, and found herself in practically an exact copy of the room she had passed through. The only difference was that the scarp deck was on the table with a hand beside it and a six of Light showing, and the chessboard was in a slightly different configuration.

Maria sat in front of the chessboard, her hands clasped in front of her meditatively. She did not turn to Del when she entered, only contemplated the chessboard.

"Am I disturbing you?"

Maria glanced up then. "Of course not."

"What is this place?"

She touched the black queen, moved it two spaces diagonally, foiling an attempt by the bishops to pin it in the corner. Only when she had completed the move did she look up. "My sanctum."

"How long have you had this?"

"Several months."

Del blinked. "And you never mentioned it to anyone?"

"If everyone knew about it, of what use would it be?" She placed the queen back in starting position, wiped the white ranks, and set them back up. There was no king or queen.

"I didn't mean to disturb you..." Del turned to go.

Maria shook her head. "Friends are always welcome." She spun the chessboard around and gestured to the opposite chair.

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