SDF-Yangtze, Near the Core...
"Drone is in position and holding," the Pyrk technician noted, looking up from her station to where both Doctor Brilla and Captain LaCrosse were hovering over her shoulder. "And targeting resolution is... terrible. But within acceptable range."
"Good." LaCrosse looked over the station. The question wasn't whether he trusted the Ensign to have done her job correctly, but whether he trusted the mish-mash of heavily filtered and cross-referenced data they were being forced to use. According to the sensors, the drone was holding station less than a hundred meters from the vaguely rhomboid object that sat in the center of the particular stable zone they'd chosen.
"All stations, report readiness..." For a moment Felix tensed while the various bridge stations reported their status. If something went wrong he wanted to be ready to get out as fast as he could, even though the Yangtze was nearly two light years away in the middle of nothing. "All stations report ready..." He looked at the screens again.
"Waiting on pattern match," the Ensign spoke up. "Coming up in two minutes."
The idea was to wait until the movement of the objects matched a known point along the seemingly random movement of the gravitational stable areas. If there was an implosion, explosion, or any other event, it would be more likely to be pointed away from them. Just in case.
"Go ahead..."
"Thirty seconds..." The timer scrolled past. "Still holding station... Five... Four..."
On the spars of the far-away drone, four grapple units had been mounted instead of the usual missile pods. Given the unpredictable nature of the area, two were magnetic grapnels and two were just large claws that would try to latch on. If there was anything to latch on to.
"Firing..."
Four simultaneous shots and four projectiles shot away, running out until they collided with something. One of the magnetic grapnels was a clear miss, sailing off to the end of its tether, but the other three hit. Another ricocheted away, but two held.
"We have lock."
"Any reaction?" LaCrosse looked over to the main holotank, where a large image of the singularity slowly spun. It was a representation, full of lines and data points, and he watched it while another technician ran the incoming data.
"Nothing currently."
"Back the drone off then, Ensign," he turned back to the station. "Nice and slow."
She nodded and send the commands to the drone, which began to pull slowly backwards until it reached the end of the two remaining tethers. Both detached and for a moment there was silence and then a collective sigh across the bridge.
"Sorry, Captain," the Ensign shrugged, "It could be non-ferrous, or there's nothing to latch onto, or both."
"Not your fault. We'll just have to go with option two."
Option two was a net.
----
Ixutsangi, Ixut System...
'You should see this...'
'What?'
Timmons paused for a moment, looking across the dark desert while around him a quartet of the Queen's soldiers slowly buzzed. Somewhere behind him the rest of the delegation was resting, moving forward in shifts as the slower human made his way across the shifting sands. The golden pyramids of the Ixut had already dropped below the horizon and in the distance he could see the low line of cliffs where the shuttle was stashed beneath it's camouflage blanket.
'They're leading me down into some kind of tomb for safekeeping. You want to see?'
'Sure,' Timmons stepped forward again. He didn't like the idea of using a tomb for the purpose, but it would be reasonably secure against escape attempts. The houses had turned out to be mostly made of the same wood pulp as most of the decorations and, for both the ixut and the two humans, it would have been easy to just push through the walls.
A video feed appeared in the corner of his vision and he expanded it out. The sand wasn't treacherous, and he was wearing his armor under the robes, so even if he took a fall it wouldn't look like more than a clumsy incident. That thought tickled his brain, but he put that aside as he watched the feed.
'Behind the throne there's a stone arch that leads down into the crypt. There's a number of stone blocks positioned to block the entrance... Three, I think. Then a long hallway that leads to this room.'
She slowly looked around the room from a point somewhere in the middle. It was square, with a row of columns on both sides, and two sizable doors on either end. Sconces for torches had been carved into the pillars, which were themselves carved with the swirling and flowing language of the ixut, and firelight guttered and flickered in each one. She walked closer to an individual pillar so that he could see that the pillar was actually carved through, allowing the torch in the center to illuminate both the middle and the wall behind the row. A series of green lines appeared over the pillar and began to pick out the flowing characters, filling in more details as she walked around it.
'It's the story of the sixth Queen,' she read off. 'Who her parents were, who taught her. A biography.'
'Interesting. How many of the pillars are carved?'
The feed swung as Trinya walked down the line, more characters being recognized and translated as she went, the results slowly scrolling by at the bottom of the video.
'Eight. Twenty total. Looks like they are planning ahead.' She stopped at the last one, 'This one is for Ma'Ejako. It's got her parents, the scribe who witnessed her birth... Huh. Wish we'd have found this place first.'
Timmons read the scrolling text, 'Yeah.'
'Kidnapping, war with Apoakhor... Destruction of Apoakhor... More kidnapping... Not a very nice lady.'
'Then why did those other soldiers rough up her guards?'
'What? Oh...' Trinya thought back to the incident they had witnessed a few days before coming into the city.
'Actually,' Timmons considered his own question, 'You might be the answer to that question. She might have spent too much, or lost too many soldiers. Taking you, when your people are supposedly far away and rich, is a calculated risk.'
'No threat of war from a distant people, but 'they' will want me back. Gotcha.'
'Yeah. So what else is in there?'
The feed began to move again as she walked around the back side of the pillars. Behind each and thrown into flickering relief by the torches, was an alcove. Some were filled with a statue while others were empty.
'I'm gonna guess these are the former rulers,' Trinya supplied, stepping up to one. It depicted an ixut in full regalia, their carapace picked out in gold and paint on jewelry and ornaments. 'This is King Saemtra,' she turned to the pillar, reading off the text. 'He was the first... Killed in battle.' She looked down to where a small shelf stood at the base of the statue.
A small container of sticks, as well as a pile of fuzzy paper and a flint and tender in their respective slots sat on one side and a small conical holder sat in the middle. 'Incense of some kind. Smells good.' Trinya held up a stick and sniffed it. 'Religious significance? Probably.'
Timmons nodded. The shift was changing, and four more guards buzzed around him for a moment before the previous set began to drop back as he walked forward.
'I'm not gonna say it's ancestor worship, but it's ancestor worship.'
Trinya moved on. The empty alcoves weren't actually empty. Instead they held various perishable goods, or served as a kind of storage. Woven mats made of a local river plant were positioned over these. They'd seen the same plant worked into the decorative tracery and glass work at the summit of the open pyramids and they'd found that the ixut ate the stalks while the leaves went into various goods, such as the mats.
'I'd guess this leads into the burial chambers,' Trinya paused in front of a pair of large doors at the end of the room. Stone slabs set into thick wooden frames, they were secured with a pair of complex draw bars that sat in elaborately sculpted gold-plated rests. These depicted a pair of ixut warriors holding spears and shields, with the spears forming the draw bars.
'Think I should take a look?'
'I wouldn't, at least not right now. They might have something about desecrating the dead. They put you in that room, so I'd stay there.'
Trinya nodded, the feed bobbing, and she took a closer look at the carved ixut soldiers.
'Wood and gold leaf. It's very nice. But the spears look real, if a bit gaudy.'
'Good to know. But I'd rather you just shoot them if you have to.'
Again she nodded, 'What about you?'
'Haven't decided yet. Should be close enough to the shuttle soon. Then I could call the Euclid. Go all Biblical on them.'
'Pillar of fire from heaven, rushing winds... The classics?'
'Well it does remind me of Egypt. Timmons leading his people into the desert.'
