"Log, PF plus twelve Tellurian days. Lieutenant Seward reporting in.

"I would have logged a record yesterday, but we were busy picking up stakes. The scouts mentioned there's a river near the genotype seeder site. Flowing water is good. When everything is poison, every little bit helps. We're just settling in now.

"I'm close to a breakthrough on the food problem. More later."

--Recording recovered from Site Resh, reconstructed 1887 CE (restricted access)

----

Earlier: 17 Falling Seeding, 1886

Strathlic Dig Site

"Adon above, give me those," said Inquirer Morrison, grabbing the tools from Jerem before the fool could deal any more damage to the chair leg. One would think that being at the bottom of an open dig site would provide a constant reminder of the need for delicacy.

Apparently, one would be wrong, at least if one were overseeing undergraduate students.

"Sorry," Jerem said, but Morrison just sighed exorbitantly and lightly brushed the dust from the artifact embedded in the ground. Undergraduates. Honestly.

It didn't help Morrison's mood that just on the other side of Strathlic, hundreds of archaeologists were unearthing more interesting remains. Large numbers of underground tunnels criss-crossed the city a mere few miles away. They'd already found a number of scientific artifacts within the dirt-filled corridors of steel.

And here Morrison was in the dead suburbs of a Last Era ruin, pulling some child's toy chest out of the ground.

He hadn't seen Inquirer Handes for a week. That didn't help his mood, either. He knew that jealousy was corrosive and prided himself on being a rational man. He ought to be happy for Alison. She was leading a team in the most active dig site that the Free City of Hallard had ever engaged.

Maybe they shouldn't have started sleeping together. Then, at least, Morrison wouldn't feel like he was lacking anything. Or anything more than usual.

"We gonna pop the lock?" asked Jerem, his jaw smacking as he chewed his gum.

"No," Morrison said, using the tone of voice one reserved for idiot children and/or undergraduates. Same thing, really. The lock was a lovely piece of metal, and a little brushing would bring out the engravings in it. "There's no sense in opening it until we know what's inside and whether it's worth opening."

"Thought finding out what's inside was the whole point." The wet popping sounds coming from Jerem's mouth grated on Morrison's ears. Seriously, did the idiot child and/or undergraduate ever spit the stuff out? No, better that he not. If Jerem fouled Morrison's dig site, his fellow inquirers might dig up a suspiciously recently dead corpse a few weeks hence.

That is because you are an idiot, Morrison did not say. Instead, he said, "We'll send for a spatial-resolution device. It will give us a reading on the interior without damaging it."

"All those devices are on the other side of the dig site."

Even better. "Make yourself useful. Head over that way and ask Inquirer Handes to bring one."

If nothing else, it would let Handes know Morrison was thinking of her. Maybe she'd find the time to visit him at some point in the next few days, assuming she could tear herself away from all of the exciting discoveries that she was clearly engaged in on the other side of the city.

Children's toys. Blech.

Morrison heard Jerem start the biomobile. In the meantime, he sat down to organize and catalogue the finds they'd made over the past few days.

There was a pistol that he'd pulled out of the drawer of a desk they'd finished cleaning up the day before. Today it would have been priceless, but in the Last Era, who knew? Maybe it was an unremarkable weapon, even if it was more metal than forgebone.

More metal, everywhere, in everything. Back before the Wildlands had been lost to the Chimeras and exploiting distant rural resources became impossible, they'd spent steel like it was water.

There was a spherical device that housed a gyroscopically stabilized ball. It was small enough for Morrison to get his hand around; the weight of the interior ball shifted and jerked as he moved his wrist. A piece of exercise equipment? The whole thing was made of a plastic harder than any produced in the present day.

There were books, of course, but they were in tatters, long since decayed. A scrap of fabric, which had survived despite the passing eons, might have been from a pillowcase.

They'd been regular people. They had access to wonders unimagined today. Probably took them for granted, too--

"Morrison!"

He jumped. He hadn't expected to hear that voice. Inquirer Alison Handes stood looking down on him through her glasses from the edge of the tent, her hands on her hips, wisps of brunette hair that had evaded being captured with her ponytail dancing across her forehead in the muggy breeze.

That gaze always made him feel like a specimen to be dissected. He didn't mind. "I hadn't expected you to come to my dull little hovel," Morrison said, rising and slapping the dust from his hands. "Welcome."

"I can't lend you an imager," Alison said, abrupt as always. "They're all in use."

"It figures." Morrison looked at the toy chest. "The dig has to save them for the important sites."

"Precisely. We've discovered something, Morrison." What was going on in Alison's gray eyes? Was that uncertainty that he saw? "Something that needs all of our imagers."

Lucky. "Congratulations."

Alison scratched her nose, breaking the illusion of authority, transforming back into an awkward professor. "And all of our human resources."

"Are you asking me for help, Handes?"

She scoffed. "Don't flatter yourself." Then paused. "Also, yes. I am."

They drove in silence to the other side of the city. Morrison knew better than to badger Handes for more information. She would share when she felt like it. Still, excitement swirled in his heart as they rode down makeshift roads past half-excavated ruins.

Whatever this was, it had to be a big discovery if they were preempting all of the other sites in the dig.

Thank Adon for big discoveries.

The fatigue from full days spent excavating and full nights spent fixing undergraduates' errors fled when Morrison caught sight of the dome ahead of them. "Is that--"

"A silo," Alison said, her eyes not wavering from the road. Crashing into priceless archaeological ruins was inadvisable. "Mostly underground."

The apex of the dome jutted out just a bit above the ground, but if the dome as a whole represented a mere 15 degree arc of a sphere and you followed its arc down beneath the ground, it would be the roof of a silo almost 100 yards across.

Of course, Morrison was speculating now, but he would know more when Alison was ready.

"Ah, there they are." Handes jerked her chin toward the dome, where several teams were setting up imagers at constant intervals around its circumference. The devices' nerves were already digging into the ground, and engineers and archaeologists clustered around the ten-legged contraptions, staring at the vine-screens of its upper body. "Took Reglar's and Boris's teams long enough to get here."

Six teams working together to determine the interior and exterior dimensions of the silo. Plus its contents. Morrison recalled his mother's story about ten blind men each feeling a different part of a Chimera's body and describing it differently. It had never made sense to him. Wouldn't the Chimera just eat them?

He was somewhat less literal now than he'd been as a child. Seeing the six teams prepared to feel out the dome's contents now, he understood the ridiculous story better.

Alison idled the biomobile. It purred as she slid out. "Come. We can't have these knuckle-draggers injuring our artifacts."

The whole dig was here. Different professors and inquirers had chosen different imagers to direct. As he followed Handes to one of them, Morrison wondered why she'd invited him here. She'd said that they were shorthanded, but they seemed to have it under control.

Unless... she'd invited him because she wanted to spend time with him.

This was a date.

He smiled at Handes as she stared at the screen. She didn't notice.

Best date ever. Maybe he should find her dates. They grew in these climes.

Or better yet, maybe find a nice fragment from a date-based wine bottle somewhere in the dig–

"Right there," Alison said, pointing. To the screen. "What's that?"

The engineers leaned in. So did Morrison. "It's a tunnel," he said.

"Who would build a vertical tunnel out of steel?" Handes muttered.

"You just gave us the definition of a steel silo."

Handes gave Morrison a flat look. "Insufferable literalist twit. Silos contain grain. Sometimes they contain vine-mines or other materiel. Silos don't contain other silos."

But this one did. As the nerves continued burrowing through the rock and feeling out the internals, the silo-within-a-silo became clearer. It was mostly steel and plastic, though forgebone seemed to provide exterior structure. Its nose, toward the sky, was pointed. Its bottom--

Its bottom was a set of massive nozzles. "Are those engines?" Morrison whispered.

He'd seen pictures of mythical weapons used during the Exodus and in the centuries after the Heavenfall. They'd had engines with nozzles that spat flame to throw them into the sky. Some rumors said the gigantic cannon in the center of Acerbia spat similar but smaller devices. Lunatic hallucinations, he was sure.

"It's a weapon," he muttered.

"No," Alison said. She pointed at the screen. "It's far too large around."

"Weapons can be large."

"And the diamondglass at its apex?" Handes grinned. "It's not a weapon.

"It's a vehicle."