We spent the afternoon in near-space trying to map a path to Pandora, but though the path Par was following did seem to lead there, one of the gates was a rotational which seemed likely to shift soon, so Ruuel decided we’d look for a better route another day. By the time we returned, Ninth Squad had left with the Litara, and I was no longer feeling too embarrassed to talk even to Fourth Squad.
I’d rather the whole day hadn’t happened, though.
Friday, April 18
Creepy
It took the greysuits well into mid-morning to finally solve what they decided was a deliberate layer of extra security around the lower levels. I went in with only Fourth Squad, since Squad One’s now stuck with covering watches. The good news was that there were no more shield walls, so we were able to travel freely through the three rooms of the fourth level, and down to the fifth level. The bad news was there was still no handy library, or big wall of explanation in stone, or any writing.
Except the names carved on all the sarcophagi.
I might have felt tempted to be smug if the place hadn’t freaked me out so much. I wasn’t too bad on the fourth floor, just felt kind of squashed when we went in, but I thought that was because we were deeper underground and the place was creepy. The fourth level rooms were wedge-shaped, taking up a third of a circle each with the outer wall arranged in a tier. It reminded me of the audience of an auditorium except instead of seats there were all these not-quite-upright sarcophagi. Smaller, and far less stylistically rendered than Egyptian ones, so that it was like there was a room full of tilted, metallic people looking down at us.
When we’ve been doing these initial searches, Sonn’s log has been streamed back to the ever-growing audience of greysuits, but only the people in charge (in this case Tsen Helada, Islen Duffen, Islen Tezart and Tsur Selkie) have been in channel and able to make comments. Islen Duffen, sounding considerably startled, wanted a closer examination of the sarcophagi, and I had my first opportunity to obediently err on the side of interrupting.
"Are they blurry to anyone else?" I asked, sounding fantastically apologetic – I’ve grown far too used to making sure to keep my mouth shut when we’re on-mission to feel at all comfortable piping up whenever the notion strikes me.
"Show us," was all Ruuel said, signalling for Fourth Squad to hold.
I streamed my log to the mission channel. It’s pretty hard to describe the blurriness. It was like each sarcophagus was layered over the top of itself over and over again, except not quite lined up. Not all of them were blurry, and some were far blurrier than others.
"Scan the whole room," Tsur Selkie said, and I looked slowly around, finding a few other blurry things, though nothing nearly so bad as the sarcophagi. There were lots of carvings on the walls, of upright, stiffly posed people gazing up proudly at the three familiar god wanna-be’s, and that bit was particularly blurry. Even Halla went blurry a couple of times.
"Vitals are raised," Ruuel said. "Return?"
"Not yet. Keep that stream open, Devlin, and report any further developments."
We wandered around the fourth level, finding it all much the same: spectacular and spooky and in my case blurry. Since I hadn’t shown any negative reaction other than signs of mild effort, we went down to the final room.
I was by no means surprised to see three final sarcophagi, facing what looked like the top third of a car-sized malachite marble rising out of the floor in the very centre of the room. By see, I mean peer through a blur of white and grey and gold, trying to make out the shapes. I went over the mission log later to see what it looked like to everyone else. Ruuel’s and Halla’s view of it was almost as confusing as they switched through their Sights, but very different to mine, involving dark mists and shadowy human figures. The sarcophagi were very beautiful renditions of the three who were featured so gloriously on the third level, slightly stylised, with lots of gold and silver and black metal.
"Impressions?" Selkie asked.
"The central stone is the power source of the shield," Ruuel said. "Beyond that…there is a great deal beyond that, but I cannot interpret it."
"Danger," Halla added. "Almost – almost, I would call it active menace."
Ruuel turned his head to me to remind me to speak and also, I think, to check how I was holding up. The interface would be showing how hard my heart was thumping. I felt like I was jogging slowly uphill.
"It’s heavy," I said, and hated how stupid that sounded, but went on confusedly: "Like gravity is heavy. Like it’s pulling everything around it down. Warping it."
"Return Devlin to the surface," Selkie ordered crisply. "And then act as escort to the technicians. Nothing is to be approached until we have every scan imaginable."
I was sent straight to medical, where I was told that I’d been using some sort of Sight talent, probably, maybe. I’d developed a ripping headache by the time we were back on the surface, which is apparently a common symptom of people learning how to use their talents, and made me feel even sorrier for kids inducted into the Setari program. I was stuck with having brain scans for much of the day, but it’s not as if anything much else happened. The technicians were escorted very cautiously down and spent the rest of the day running scans and trying to work out what the heck the room was doing.
And now it’s morning again. I stayed in the Diodel’s medical section under close monitoring overnight, but they’ve let me go. They haven’t the foggiest idea what blurry overlays mean.
Reinforcements
The Litara arrived just after breakfast with what seemed like ten thousand people, including Eighth Squad. I’d had no problems with Eighth when I tested with them or when they were on the Pandora mission, and was glad it was at least a squad I’d worked with. Still, I felt stupidly embarrassed saying hello to them, because I knew that before coming to this assignment they’d have heard all about how someone from Ninth had teased the stray too much and were reprimanded for it. I know that everyone in the Setari must have heard some variation of the story, since the entirety of First Squad sent me worried emails telling me to always let them know if I needed anything, and even Zan sent me a long email updating me on what’s been happening with her, which is Zan’s way of being supportive without poking at my psychological aspects. Zee is much better, and both First and Twelfth Squad are back on Tare doing rotations. They’re no longer posting Setari to guard Pandora because the Ddura does such a good job keeping it safe.
The Litara also brought more Kolarens: mainly archaeologists. There’d been a Kolaren who arrived with Squad One whose job appears to be to watch and report back to Kolar’s government, but before today there wasn’t a significant percentage of Kolarens on site. I’m not certain how this will impact on the balance of the expedition, but it complicated my morning. Islen Duffen had booked me for the morning to tell one of her senior minions everything I knew about tombs, Egyptian burial practices, sarcophagi, and from the sounds of it the complete mythical beliefs of the whole of the Earth. I was already too aware of how little I knew, and particularly worried about mixing up what was history, what was mythology, and what were things I’d seen on Stargate. It did not make it any easier to find myself being interrogated by half a dozen people (four Kolarens, two Tarens) who kept breaking off to argue with each other, and also occasionally disputing the things I was saying, or being impatient and critical because I couldn’t answer all their questions, and still speak relatively slowly and disjointedly.