Gray drew back Jason’s attention. The commander pointed at a few icons drawn in various spots on the page. “Jason, can you bring up these small drawings onto my tablet?”
“Not a problem.” He picked up a stylus and stepped to the laptop.
Sister Anna shifted out of his way. As she did, she retrieved the second tablet from the table. “May I?” she asked him.
“Of course.”
While Jason set to work, the nun joined Bishop Yelagin and whispered in Russian, clearly consulting with him about something.
Jason used his stylus to circle the icons that Gray had pointed out. He had chosen tiny sketches of what appeared to be onion-shaped images in varied levels of detail. They were spread across the page, but Jason lined them up in a row and dispatched them to Gray’s tablet.
Monk and Father Bailey stared over Gray’s shoulder at the small icons.
“What are you thinking?” Monk asked.
Gray lowered the tablet and returned to the laptop. “That drawing in the center of the page. It’snota compass.”
Jason stepped next to the commander, leaning shoulder to shoulder with him. “Then what is it?”
Gray pointed to a final sketch, just below the center one. “Here is another example of those orb-like drawings. Only this one is slightly more detailed in its functional design.”
Monk stared over their shoulders. “That sketch looks like a crude version of the larger one in the center. Like a first attempt at drawing it.”
Jason nodded. “But if it’s not a compass, what is it?”
Gray turned to them both. “We’ve seen something like this before. Just a couple years ago.” He nodded across to Father Bailey. “You did, too.”
Jason shared a confused look with the other two men.
Gray straightened and brought up a new image onto his tablet, one he had already pre-loaded, as he had clearly come to this conclusion when he’d first picked up the tablet.
The picture he showed was of a tarnished brass globe, about the size of a baseball, engraved with symbols and Arabic numbers, all encircled by arched arms and etched bands.
“The hidden sketch on the page is not a compass,” Gray impressed upon them. “It’s a drawing of a spherical astrolabe, like the one shown here.”
Jason understood, appreciating how much the photo matched the 2D sketch.
Anna and Yelagin came over to look, too.
The bishop frowned. “But what does it do?”
Gray explained. “This brass artifact dates to the fifteenth century, to the Middle Ages. It’s part cosmic map and part analog computer, one capable of calculating nautical positions.”
“But why draw an astrolabe,” Yelagin asked, “then hide it?”
“I may know,” Anna said, drawing all their eyes. She returned to the laptop and ran a finger around the circumference of the sketched astrolabe. “Mister Carter, there are symbols written along here. Can you make them more discernible?”
“I can try.”
He took over her spot and boxed off each symbol, then tasked his AI program to bring those particular icons into better focus, to bring to life any hint of ink in the faded page.
Everyone gathered as the result slowly resolved into view.
Once done, Jason zoomed in on the astrolabe and its surrounding symbols, each one set off in its own assay box.
“I still don’t get it,” Jason admitted. “Those symbols... they look like arcane scribbles.”
“They’re not arcane,” Anna explained. “They’re just old.”
