room in his underwear, swearing, “Shit, shit, shit!”
Ell sat up on the couch where she’d been sleeping and jumped to her feet, a startled look on her face. She followed him out into the corridor where he dodged cleaning bots that only came out at night. Charging down to the lower floors, he took steps three at a time in a headlong dash. He stopped just outside the blind corridor, and Ell stopped beside him.
“What are you doing, little brother?”
“I’m not sure,” he said.
He held the dagger in his right hand with the comp tablet in his left displaying the interior map of Starfall. He extended his right arm so the dagger passed into the blind corridor, and the corridor suddenly appeared on the map. He pulled the dagger back out of the corridor, and it disappeared. In, out, in, out, he waved the dagger back and forth, watching the corridor appear and disappear on the map. All along it had been the dagger that triggered the appearance of the corridor on the map, not him. With the exception of that one time he’d always had it stuffed in a pocket.
He sat down on the floor in the corridor with his back to a wall and put the tablet aside, then examined the dagger carefully. The overlord key, it had to be, but again he found nothing to indicate it was anything more than a cheap, decorative blade.
Standing over him, Ell asked, “What is it? What’s bothering you?”
He looked up at her and said, “The overlord key, I need—”
He stopped in midsentence as her eyelids fluttered and her mouth opened. In a trancelike state, she stared at nothing for several seconds. When the moment ended, she looked down at him and took a step back. Then she subvocalized into her implants, “Add, get down here right away.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
She ignored him as she told Add their location. In a matter of seconds a breathless and half-dressed Add came running down the corridor and stopped beside Ell. She asked the same question Charlie had. “What’s wrong?”
Ell looked at Charlie and said, “Say it to her. She has to hear it in your voice for the implant programming to kick in.”
“Say what?”
“What you said to me a moment ago about the key.”
“The overlord key?”
Those words had the same effect on Add as they’d had on Ell: the eyelids fluttering, the trancelike state that lasted for only a moment. When Add regained her composure she looked down at Charlie, held out her hand, and said, “May I have the dagger, little brother?”
Charlie extended the hilt up to her. She took it, looked at it for a moment, then pressed the sharp edge of the blade to the back of her hand and made a small cut there. She handed the blade to Ell, who then cut the back of her hand. Both cuts weren’t deep, and began healing rapidly due to the genes engineered into the twins’ ancestors.
“DNA lock,” Ell said as she handed the dagger to Charlie.
He noticed two red smears on the blade’s edge. It wasn’t a terribly large blade, about the length of his middle finger, hilt the same. As he looked at it, the blade and hilt came apart with a click. There was no hidden compartment, no secret documents that would lead him to concealed wealth and power, but the connection between the two was an odd sort of plug-and-socket type of arrangement.
Charlie rushed up to the security center with the twins on his heels. He sat down at the security commander’s station and examined it, looking for an interface that would mate with the dagger. He saw nothing visible, so he put the dagger down and ran his hands over the surface of the station.
“I’m looking for a visual distortion field,” he told the twins. “Help me.”
He repeated the process at the other stations. Again nothing. Eventually he and the twins ran their hands over every inch of the security center, every station, console, the floors and walls. They even stood on the consoles and ran their hands over the ceiling. Nothing.
“Computer,” he said. “Define the overlord interface.”
“This system does not recognize the reference to overlord interface.”
He needed to try a different approach. “Computer, define all references to overlord.”
“Overlord is undefined in this system.”
“Damn!”
Dagger in hand, he headed back down to the blind corridor. With the twins standing in the hallway outside it, he stood facing the featureless wall with the visual distortion field. “Cesare,” he