by Elliott Kay
“Ah. Right. That’s smart. Did you come up with it?”
“Half the reason I’m out here is to study how the dust here messes with sensors. I know a thing or two,” she replied.
“We really think we’re gonna find something so big we’ll want to cover it up?”
“We’re gonna get started on the far end of the canyon soon. Maybe before you get back, if everyone else finishes up this morning. The Minoans were running to something down here. I’ve wanted to dig out that mound since we arrived. It’s right in the path of the lahar from the volcano, so it’s natural for there to be a big mess at that end. More sediment probably piled up over time. But it’s convenient, too, y’know? Seems like a good spot for one of their carved-out dwellings to me. Maybe we’ll find more than that.”
“Huh.”
Naomi waited. “What?”
“Why didn’t we start on that from the beginning if that’s what you wanted to do?”
“Oh, I wanted to start on the path first, ‘cause it seemed too convenient to be natural,” she huffed. “Vandenberg decided to put that off. The mound, too. You’re all students, so you’ve got proficiency stuff to get knocked out. And there’s some due diligence to all the stuff we’ve done up until now,” she admitted. “But yeah. I’ve wanted to work on this.”
“I’m kinda surprised we didn’t jump straight to it after we got the obelisk working.”
“We wanted to make sure we had a sense of how closely we’re being monitored before we committed to anything that might be too big to conceal. But at some point, we’ve gotta push on.”
“So are you saying we’re moving too slow, or too fast?” Tanner wondered.
Naomi hesitated. She had more than one answer to that, and she wasn’t sure of any of them. “It doesn’t matter. We’re pushing on now. I’ll see you when you get back. Maybe we’ll have a head start on the mound. Keep your eye out for some way we can report to the Union like we’re supposed to while you’re in town.”
She headed back to the camp as Tanner went up the path with Antonio and Solanke. Across the canyon, students finished up their current test pits and surveys. None of it was wasted work. Students needed to learn methods. Shortcuts and leaps to conclusions might send them skipping right past other important discoveries. Her explanation to Tanner had been sincere.
Yet similar concerns to his rattled around in her head. She’d chewed on the same issues ever since they uncovered the obelisk. Of course she’d thought about it. She considered telling Tanner the same, but she didn’t want to get into it with Solanke nearby, waiting to go.
It didn’t seem like a wise topic to discuss. Finding the obelisk may have been a surprise, but they both knew the level of tech it contained was no shock. Not when they knew the leader of the expedition understood far more about the Minoans than he’d let on.
Naomi wondered how much Vandenberg hadn’t shared with her yet.
The expedition’s other babysitter sat in a camping chair by their hut. It fit the pair’s habits. Garcia watched the class work with the barest show of vigilance while Solanke kept close to Tanner. The split left her with time for a private word in the field lab.
Inside, Vandenberg slowly circled one of the work tables with a scanning unit held over the sealed jug Tanner had dug out of the ridge up above. Dirt still clung to the jug, filling in the patterns etched along its sides. Scans would only provide exact measurements and simple surface readings. The jug was as resistant to penetrating instruments as every other example of Minoan “earthenware,” but the surface scans were a chore that needed to be done.
“How do we look?” Vandenberg asked.
“They’re on the way. Probably up over the ridge by now.” Naomi joined the professor at the table. “Shouldn’t this be done by the student who found it?”
“Unfortunately, that particular student would bring in unwanted eyes,” said Vandenberg. “It’s the same reason we’re sending him away.”
“Also because he’s my intern and it’s his job.”
“Right,” grunted the professor.
“You think the pottery is something we should keep confidential, too?”
“Given what we’ve found, I’m of a mind to keep everything as confidential as we can. This may not be the usual low-tech ruin people are used to. I don’t want to assume anything we find out here is what it appears. Not even the pottery.” He made no more apology than a gentle smile. “Tanner can catch up on whatever techniques he missed when we’re on our way home. In the meantime, the best thing he can do for us is to provide a distraction for our minders.”
“You don’t think they’d be here without him, though,” said Naomi.
“I don’t know. The more I think about it and the more I think about this site and the state of affairs with Minos Enterprises, I suppose this may have happened anyway. At least with him on site, these mercenaries have more pressing matters to worry about than how they might profit on whatever we might dig up.”
Naomi’s eyes drifted to the crate of packing materials under the next table over. It was locked, but not visibly so. Its utter mundanity provided the first layer of protection for the artifact inside. “Did you know we’d find that thing?”
Vandenberg’s eyes came off the scanner readout to meet hers. Then they turned to the door.
“Everyone’s busy. Don’t worry about them. How did we get the obelisk working on the first try?” She kept her voice barely above a whisper. “You knew what kind of power lead would interface with it, didn’t you? And how much power to give it?”
“I didn’t know,” Vandenberg corrected. “I suspected. I theorized based on the evidence.”
“Evidence you’d never seen before?” Naomi didn’t try to hide her skepticism.
“It’s not the first of its kind I’ve seen,” the professor confessed. “It’s the second. This obelisk is the first I’ve found intact. The other was in pieces.”
“And you never told anyone about it? Where is it?”
“In a vault on Fremantle. A friend in the engineering department at the university helped me examine it privately. I can’t go public about such a unique piece without disclosing where it was found, Naomi. That would only have pointed treasure hunters and who knows what other idiots to this site years before I could return. Imagine the damage they could have done.”
Naomi bit back her first response. Suspicions about old light and radio waves were one thing. Alien tech like that was another. He’d been in violation of Union laws before coming out here, but confronting him with that wouldn’t keep him talking. “So what else did you know? What else haven’t you told me?”
“I knew about the material issues. Even my engineering friend initially thought it was stone. We didn’t examine that angle for a week. You needed all of ten minutes to figure it out. As for the power interface and the images, again, we didn’t have an intact sample. Whatever the other obelisk held in its memory is all a jumble. I knew it would react to being powered up and I had a good idea of the input required. Everything beyond that is a fresh discovery.”
“What else?”
“The obvious things. I took samples of the sediments here, the canyon walls, the basics.”
“Yeah, I know that part. Come on. There’s more you aren’t telling. You trusted me with the signal data when you recruited me. What else haven’t you told me?”
“The pathway down from the ridge is convenient because it was built by Minoan hands,” said Vandenberg. “You were right to want to examine it more closely. It’s concealed by sediment and erosion now, but the construction is there underneath. The pieces of the obelisk I found were scattered down the pathway, partly buried by desert dust. In looking for them, I dug deeper on the path and found steps. Longer and broader than typical human stairs. I covered my tracks, but that path was built for a reason. Something must be down here.
“I steered you away from excavating the path because I didn’t want to waste our time on it. Also because I didn’t wa
nt to leave it exposed and draw attention.”
Naomi folded her arms across her chest. She’d pushed the point with him three times since they arrived. She even mentioned her suspicions when she saw his recordings from his first visit. “You could’ve told me.”
“Every secret shared is another chance the rest could be exposed, even by accident. I never doubted your discretion, Naomi, or your loyalty.”
Again, she bit back her first response. Worries about looters and opportunists were legitimate, or at least arguably so. Yet he’d praised her intuition about the obelisk, which she’d been proud of, and then invoked her loyalty. She couldn’t come right out and accuse him of being manipulative. It would seem paranoid. She couldn’t ignore it, either.
“So what about the north wall? You kept ‘steering’ us from probing there. It’s sediment piled high up along the end of the canyon, so it’s an obvious place to look. Do you already know something about that, too?”
“No, but I’ve suspected all along, as you have,” said Vandenberg. “I wanted to wait until we had a sense of our monitors. Your idea for cover from the sun and prying eyes above made the wait more than worthwhile.” He sighed. “I like to think I was straight enough with you about my intentions there.”
Naomi didn’t feel like giving him a pat on the head, but she sensed he might not move on if she didn’t acknowledge it somehow. She grunted, hoping it would be enough.
“Additionally, with Tanner peeling off one of our minders, it may be easier to explain the plan to the rest of the class. I doubt the other soldier will care to listen in. Hopefully from there, we can all get on the same page. We may even get more done this way.”
The beep of the shelter’s entrance prevented him from saying more. Kim and Gina shuffled in together carrying a large black jug covered in dust, much the same as the one on the table. “Check out what we found,” Kim said with a giddy smile.
“You unearthed that just now?” asked Vandenberg, moving to help them get the heavy relic to another table.
“We’ve been working on it for about an hour. Didn’t want to attract any attention,” said Kim.
“And we waited until the other babysitter wandered off for a bathroom break before getting it over here,” added Gina.
“It wasn’t too difficult to dig out,” Kim went on. “But look. There’s more. We found cloth samples.” She reached under her shirt to pull out the plastic bag she’d concealed on the way in. Colorful, tattered fabric sat inside.
Vandenberg took the bag from her to set it down on the worktable, turning on more lights for examination. “You pulled all of this free? Tell me you took video.”
“Of course. This was scattered through the earth around the jug. We couldn’t dig up the jug without breaking up the placement of the cloth so we recorded everything and kept working.”
“But why would you do that without getting me first? You know what a find this is. These are the first cloth samples we know of. What if—?”
“Professor, listen please,” Kim pressed. “We had to keep working once we found the jug. It’s broken. The seal is broken. Look.” The jug from the ridge above still hadn’t been opened, its seal holding fast against human hands. Kim pulled the lid from this one with no more effort than opening a cookie jar.
Naomi and Vandenberg leaned in to look. Rough crystalline orbs sat inside, packed together in blue-hued sand. At the surface, they could count at least three orbs. The width and depth of the jug provided room for considerably more.
“Once we knew this was potentially exposed, we had to dig it out,” explained Kim. “There’s more. We ran a material analysis. That one is Minoan stone, like a lot of the pottery,” she said, pointing to the first jug. “This one is an artificial material matrix like the obelisk.”
“Is it the same?” Naomi asked.
“I don’t think so, but I didn’t have that data in my instruments to compare.”
“You didn’t—”
“No holocoms,” Gina cut her off reassuringly. “We stopped ourselves on that.”
“Okay. Good,” said Naomi.
Vandenberg stared at the cloth in the transparent bag. “You should have come to get me,” he murmured. “I should have been there.”
“We’re not all on the same page, professor,” Naomi pointed out. “We don’t all share the big picture here. Things are going to get lost in the gaps.”
He let out a frustrated breath. “What’s done is done, I suppose. Kim, how much did you excavate around the jug? Could there be more cloth out there?”
“I suppose it’s possible, but I don’t think so. This was all within the ash layer, right above the natural sediment. Like it had fallen and been buried there. The cloth was mostly draped over it, but torn in pieces. We didn’t find anything else.”
“Like one of the Minoans fell over the jug as they died and completely decomposed over time?” Naomi put in.
Vandenberg shrugged. “We’ve never found physical remains of the Minoans themselves. It fits the pattern. We couldn’t even know for sure they wore clothing until we saw the recording in the obelisk. I’d thought all of that decomposed, too, but here we’ve salvaged some.”
“That’s what I figured,” said Kim. “And I figure the rest of the cloth actually did decompose over time. We can dig more. I didn’t want to expose anything else that might be there, so once we came to the end of the cloth we stopped. But my hunch is this is all that’s left.”
“And this much Minoan crystal would be worth a nice hunk of change, so we probably don’t want to draw a lot of attention from the mercs,” noted Gina.
“Right. The other reason we didn’t come running,” said Kim.
“We’re gonna have to get over that sooner or later,” said Naomi, looking to Vandenberg.
“Yes. Your point is taken,” he assured. “Our gophers are on their supply run now. We should get everyone else together for a meeting.”
“What’s going on?” Gina asked.
“We’ll leave it until we’re all assembled,” said Vandenberg. He glanced to Naomi to add, “And no later than that. In the meantime, we should set this jug where it won’t attract attention. I suppose I could get back to the other one…although now I think we know what we’ll find inside.”
Chapter Seventeen:
Opening Up
“You don’t beat an insurgency with guns and intimidation. Not really. You beat insurgencies with jobs and civil rights. You beat them with progress. Naturally, big money types find that galling. They don’t want to do that kind of hard work. They’d rather pay someone to stomp on the insurgents. It doesn’t work. It only keeps the people with guns in business.”
--“Lessons of a Corporate Soldier,” Bill Hathaway, August 2280
Silence held in the cab of the hauler, spoiled only by the sound of the tires rolling over the desert road. No one said much after they’d left the camp. Antonio sat at the wheel, keeping his eyes on their path. Tanner watched the rolling grey scenery for trouble from the shotgun seat. He didn’t count on the vigilance of Solanke from the back seat to keep them safe.
In truth, Tanner didn’t expect any danger. Mostly he kept his eyes on the dunes and hills and let his mind wander. It wasn’t as if either of his companions wanted to talk—until, unexpectedly, one of them did.
“Do you have nightmares like that very often?” asked Antonio.
The question brought Tanner’s thoughts and his attention back into the cab. It hadn’t been provoked by conversation or any odd thing on the road. He wondered how long Antonio had chewed on it before asking.
“You woke up kinda freaked out again,” Antonio elaborated without prompting. “I mean, we had to wake you out of it the first time. You were sweating and thrashing and stuff. Does that happen a lot?”
“Couple times a month, usually,” answered Tanner. “Less if I keep busy, which is probably why it hasn’t happened out here until now. The work out here keeps me busy, but I guess I’m starting to adjust. It’s
not enough to distract my brain anymore.”
“That sounds like a lot.”
“It’s way less than in the beginning. This is progress.”
“For how long?”
“I had similar dreams once in a while after I, uh, left my first ship. Seemed natural at first, given everything that happened. It didn’t become an ongoing thing right away. Not until after I left the Navy.”
“Probably would’ve been weird if it happened while you were there. You don’t get much privacy, right? What if everyone was having freaky nightmares and waking each other up all the time?”
“That did happen sometimes,” said Tanner. “Not just me, either. You learn to deal with it. If you’re lucky, anyway. Sometimes you’re surrounded by assholes and everyone’s a jerk about it. One problem with being in the military is everybody’s supposed to be tough, but ‘tough’ doesn’t solve problems like that. It can help to know you’re not the only one with nightmares. Or whatever else might be bothering you. That’s how you start getting better.”
He waited for Antonio to take the opening.
“Two or three times a month is better?”
“Yeah. That’s with medication and counseling. And a little time.”
Antonio seemed to stop himself from looking Tanner’s way. He kept his eyes to the road. “You don’t mind talking about it?”
“Christ, I’ll talk you into a coma if you let me.”
“I have a gun and it’ll be self-defense,” grumbled Solanke from the back seat.
It wasn’t meant as a joke, but the complaint put a smile on Tanner’s face anyway. “No, I don’t mind talking about it.”