What the Silent Comm Unit Kept

The last record stopped in the middle of a fight. The next one picks it up in the middle too, and it is not much longer than the fight was.

What survives is his shorthand. Early on, one of his blows landed well and left a wound that went on working after it, for some while. A cultist's blow landed just as well. Then he hurt himself: the note marks it as a bad stumble, and he took the cost of it away with him. For a time afterwards he was less nimble than he was used to being. Someone, perhaps him, took a shot at the leader and missed. The note names the leader there for the first time in his own spelling, Tahomin. The last line of the fight says only comm unit.

He doesn't record how it ended. When the records resume, the party is searching the bodies, and Tahoman's comm unit and datapad are in their hands.

He listed what they found the way he lists everything, without comment: a d-suit fitted with a thermal capacitor; an acid pistol and three batteries for it, one partly spent; a survival knife; a broken detonator; field rations; ringwear of lashunta make; a scattergun with fifty shells; some credits. And a psychic booster, a small device that lengthens the reach of the mind. Beside it the note says, simply, Taeon grabbed it. It is one of the few times his notes record him wanting something. I don't make much of it. He was a telepath, and it was a tool for telepaths.

The list ends with the comm unit, in bold. That is where his attention went next.

It was not switched on, and neither was the datapad. They could get into both. Dr Olmaya Solstarni was with them by then. The records don't say how she came to be there, or in what state; they had been following her trail for a long time, and the note gives her one sentence. She said that Tahoman had been in contact with other Devourer cults.

The datapad held messages back and forth with the people the party had already met in those ruins. Their own message was in there too. After it, the note says, there was nothing else.

The comm unit held more. Its logs were unsecured, and three hours before the party took it, something significant had been sent from it. Grek unlocked it. It concerned a place the note calls the Gate of 12 Suns. The gate opens onto a demi-plane, and the demi-plane hides an unspeakably powerful weapon. Someone, most likely Tahoman, had recommended that they go after it. Approximate coordinates were attached, pointing to a stretch of asteroids in the Diaspora. Beside them he wrote drift travel is crazy, and below them, on a line of its own, two pieces of one. He doesn't explain either.

The Fragments tell this part, and they tell it the way they tell most things, as though a door had swung open:

And the leader of the cult lay silent, and the thing he spoke through lay silent beside him.
And the thing was dark, and they did not need it lit to read it.
And the doctor they had sought stood among them, and she said: He spoke to others of his kind.
And in the dark thing were the words of those they had fought,
and their own words also, and after their words, nothing.
And Grek opened what was not locked, and found what had gone out three hours before them.
And it named a gate of twelve suns, and a hidden place behind the gate,
and a weapon in the hidden place that could not be spoken of.
And it named the scattered stones where the gate might be.
And Kopalo wrote it down. And beneath it he wrote: two pieces of one.
And no telling knows what he meant by it. Some say he knew. This telling does not.
And they had come for one woman, and they left carrying a road to the stars.

— Fragments of the Keepers, the Kopalo cycle, as it is usually told

The Fragments make a pilgrimage of this. The records are a single list of bullets, and Grek does the opening in them, not Kopalo. Still, the last line is fair. They went up that mountain looking for a scholar and came down with coordinates, and the coordinates were three hours old. Someone else already had them.

There is a short entry in the Field Canon that the novitiates learn after this one, and it reads like his notes:

A captured device is read twice: once for what it says, once for what it last sent.
(Kopalo, from field notes; Castrovel.)

— the Field Canon, on Signals, later additions

They came down off the mountain. Below the ruins they found a small open place, flat ground, where their comm units began to work, though only a little. Stone and canopy swallow a signal the way they swallow sound, and anyone who has worked in deep forest learns to climb or clear before calling out. They found their clearing.

A university expedition comes next in the note, without detail. It took eight days to get back. The note marks the portal area, and then the university again. There the party was offered free tuition, a scholarship, and a research grant of a thousand credits. I like to think the university knew what it was paying for. The note doesn't say.

Then they turned toward headquarters, and three more days passed.

He went up that mountain after a missing woman, and the records place her among them at the end. His notes give her one line. They give the comm unit the bold type.