Prologue
"Your father will be here soon," Drax reminded her gently and with a small smile.
Lystra looked up from her workstation just long enough to meet the gaze of the wiry, powerful man with the grizzled salt and pepper beard, balding head and the cutting dark eyes. "I'll be ready, don't worry. Well, not 'ready,' ready, but that will be soon enough, I think. I hope."
Drax gave a knowing nod. "We've spent too long on this project now to be stymied so close to the end."
"Believe me, I know." Day in and day out for years she had toiled with Drax to make sense of what had been discovered, and, only now were the fruits of that labor at hand. Indeed, she couldn't remember a time when she wasn't some degree of disheveled or exhausted from all the work even though she understood the need for it. Remnants such this from the old world were virtually unheard of finds and the chance to make use of them was rarer still "But it will be fine."
"I like your confidence, girl. Fortunately for you, so does he. He's always had a soft spot for you as with few others."
The truth of that twinkled in her eyes and pleased her no end. Indeed, he'd based the mark of those in his inner circle upon the blue in her eyes. Regardless of the type of jewelry, it marked those in Mareth's inner circle and the world was open to them in the Kingdom of Draleth as it was to no one else save the king himself. Some used the gift of the king's favor sparingly while others lived for every advantage it gave and every vice being marked as so above the law made permissible.
Lystra herself had little use for it beyond the fact that it allowed her the freedom to set her own goals, just as she had done in the here and now. For as long as she could remember puzzles intrigued her just as they had Drax, but none more so than this as it held itself out as one of the greatest puzzles in the whole of the world.
And this one was almost solved. Once it was, Mareth would have the whole of the world at his feet. Lystra knew that would please him and she lived to do so. If one performed to expectations his affections were lavish. If one had failed terribly or consistently he could turn as cold as the most bitter winter. Fortunately for her, she had never really had the opportunity to sample that aspect of his personality firsthand.
Indeed, he smiled broadly as he approached her after having glanced around the corridors and the room itself as he often did when he visited and she couldn't blame him. His royal purple coat helped make him appear all the more dashing in the way that the collar plunged sharply to contrast his ruffled, white, silk shirt against it. Behind him, two male guards took positions on either side of the entry and became statues. His smile was easy and his movements measured but fluid like a diplomat and he wore his late middle years well.
He hugged her tightly. "How is my dearest one?"
She returned the embrace warmly. "I am well. I understand you have been busy with your duties."
He gave Drax a quick glance before refocusing his attention on his dearest. "I have indeed. There are preparations to be made, and that's in addition to every other duty that a king must perform in the day when we are in the midst of war." He smiled. "You are close, I hear. Show me."
She was more than happy to lead him to the computer terminal at the bottom center of four banks of them that circled the room. On the paper thin screen itself were columns of numbers, most in orange, but some of the sequences were in yellow and green. Lystra's fingers moved animatedly from one set to the next as she spoke. "I was right in that, with what was left here to work with I had to convince both the sender and receiver to accept a new means of data compression in the information packets that will go back and forth."
She exhaled almost as an expression of pride. "It took a long time to gain something like a working understanding of the language used, but, since I'm getting signals that the machinery seems to understand
