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Chapter Forty Six

  Cataphractoi

  The next room Miliam and Abigail stepped into was built like a gallery in a museum. Unlike the small pedestal in the first chamber, this one had plinths lining both walls, at least a dozen in total. Nothing sat atop them, but embedded within an angled panel near the top of each one protruded something that looked curiously like memory sticks. Not the thin and low profile USB drives contemporary to Miliam, but the rger cards used in old gaming consoles.

  “Think these are all projectors too?” Miliam wondered as she looked over the first plinth to her left.

  “Indeed,” Abigail agreed as she ran a hand over the opposite plinth. “They seem designed to draw attention to these cards; storage devices I presume.”

  “Are you going to activate one?” Miliam asked, walking over to join Abigail, who gnced her way.

  “Typical procedure would dictate far more care be taken in documenting our finds, but…I suppose we do not have time for that. I will activate one so that we may see what precisely these are, then collect them,” Abigail expined as she id a hand on the magic circle pced just slightly above this plinth’s memory stick.

  “You weren’t taking a whole lot of care when you burned through those doors…” Miliam pointed out dryly. She hadn’t really been expecting the schor to resort to cutting through the locks instead of attempting to preserve everything like an archaeologist.

  “Time is of the essence, after all, and I am a researcher, not someone accustomed to working in the field,” Abigail replied while observing as the plinth came to life, dispying a user interface neither of them could read. Its designers seemed to have foreseen that, however, judging by the pictorial instructions on-screen.

  “If this pce survived this long, I’d think it would survive long enough for a proper expedition,” Miliam commented, watching Abigail fiddle with the UI.

  “Perhaps. The very fact that I knew of its existence, though, foretells that others will find out as well. My acquaintance located this vault by pure coincidence, and there is no reason to assume another could not do the same, even discounting the possibility that she lets slip the location to someone else,” countered Abigail, eyes locked on the projected screen in front of her. After a few more motions she was able to access something other than the basic UI: a three-dimensional render of a sculpture.

  “Huh, I thought this pce looked a bit like a gallery, but I guess I wasn’t too far off,” observed Miliam as she walked around the plinth, looking at the sculpture from all sides. It was some sort of animal; a tetrapod with a narrow face and sharp features, a mane, and a powerful tail tipped with a club.

  “I believe it to be a complete cultural archive…or as complete as its makers could manage, at any rate,” Abigail assessed, scrolling through a variety of artwork with no discernable simirities to indicate why they were grouped together. “This one may be a record of all physical artwork their species produced. A genius solution; when faced with total destruction, enough of them realized nothing of their culture would survive intact and digitized it instead.”

  “Why not preserve the originals if they could build a pce like this that could survive a cthulid?” Miliam wondered curiously.

  “It may be that nothing not tightly secured to the ground would have survived…or alternatively, it was simply infeasible to build a rge enough storehouse for everything,” Abigail specuted, shutting down the projector and removing the memory stick. “It is also likely that such mediums could not survive the passage of ages even in a sealed environment. In that situation, a non-votile storage method is certainly ideal.”

  Miliam carefully removed another of the memory sticks and looked it over. It seemed to be some kind of crystal storage akin to the game cartridges on the Astrum Vitae. To the naked eye it just looked like a thick panel of fragile gss, not a nigh-indestructible data drive capable of preserving information without degradation for hundreds of thousands of years.

  “Y’know, it would have been a tragedy if they went to all that trouble only for their singur time capsule to take a direct hit. I bet there’s a bunch of them around the system.” Miliam handed her memory stick over to Abigail and began helping her retrieve the others as she spoke.

  “Quite likely. At least some would have been destroyed no matter how well defended they were, but now that you suggest it, I suspect they would have foreseen that. Had we the time, it may have been worth it to investigate the remains of the pnets the cthulid obliterated first- repositories such as this one would have had a far greater chance of survival there,” Abigail theorized with a thoughtful tone, expanding on Miliam’s idea. At the same time, she proceeded down the line of plinths and collected all of the memory sticks on that side, meeting up with Miliam at the other end.

  After waiting for Abigail to secure her own set of storage devices, Miliam handed over the ones she was carrying so that Abigail could pce them in a protective case as well. Once that was taken care of, the two of them proceeded into the next- and apparently final- room.

  Compared to the previous two, this room was much rger. It was at least the same length as the Astrum Vitae’s engineering section and twice as wide. Along the far wall was some machinery, but every other surface was covered entirely in writing. Due to the sheer scale, it took Miliam a few moments to even recognize the circles enclosing that unreadable text.

  “Incredible,” Abigail breathed as she stepped inside, gazing at the enormous and complex spellwork. On the other hand, Miliam had stopped at the door- she was too shocked by the bones littering the floor to take another step. Most were shattered but recognizable save for the few Abigail’s feet had brushed against, which had disintegrated on contact.

  “Um, Abigail?” she stage-whispered, some archaic monkey-brain part of her mind warning her that this was actually a tomb and they were looting it. Which was silly, because the same could have been said of the Astrum Vitae, but Miliam had been entirely in survival mode at the time and so it hadn’t occurred to her.

  “Yes, wh- ah,” Abigail began as she turned around, spotting a raised finger Miliam hadn’t notice herself move. “That stands to reason. It must have been necessary to have live mages present in order to operate a spell of this magnitude. With a cthulid bearing down on them, they must have needed to make active modifications to the spells protecting this vault…”

  “Are you just going to ignore that those bones are hundreds of thousands of years old!?” Miliam yelled at Abigail, getting little more than a startled blink out of the schor.

  “Excellent observation! I was so focused on the magic that I failed to even consider the age of the corpses,” Abigail replied as if Miliam had merely made a reasonable point in a spirited conversation. She looked over the bones, as well as the dust left in her wake. “Hardly my area of expertise, so it is difficult to specute, but it could be a difference in bone composition, or perhaps a side effect of the magic they were using.”

  Listening to Abigail speak, Miliam found herself to tear her own hair out. This was the first time she’d seen the woman truly in her element, and it seemed she had become so focused on the scientific aspects of what she was seeing that she’d lost sight of all else. As a side effect, of course, Miliam did feel herself calming down a bit just from seeing Abigail so calm.

  “Agh…so, can I take it that this whole trip was a success?” she asked, changing the subject away from macabre hypotheses about long-dead mages. Judging by the look of disbelief Abigail shot her, Miliam had just made a bit of an understatement.

  “A success? Miliam, dear, this is quite possibly the greatest archeological discovery of this generation! What’s more, it is entirely data! Auctioning off a mere copy of this entire find will likely earn you more money than my university will pay you for helping me obtain the originals,” Abigail expined incredulously, showing more unrestrained emotion than Miliam had ever scene from the rgely stoic woman. Her intensity threatened to rock Miliam back on her heels.

  “They’d just let us do that?” Miliam asked, surprised that Abigail’s workpce wouldn’t wish to monopolize the findings.

  “I believe it would be negotiable, with certain stiputions of course. The buyer would only be getting first rights for a certain period of time, and only under the condition they not disseminate it, most likely. Eventually all of the data will be released to the public, but being among the first to study it and perhaps replicate a dead civilization’s greatest works would be beyond valuable,” Abigail pointed out a bit more sedately.

  “Great. That means I should be able to repce those point defense turrets we tore out…maybe even get some proper armor for my ship!” Miliam excimed, not noticing the amused smile Abigail made in response.

  “You might be able to think somewhat bigger than that. Now then,” she said, turning back to the extensive spellwork filling the room. “I will need to document these formations in detail. There is no guarantee that this masterwork was recorded in the archives, particurly if it was only finished at the st minute…”

  Abigail retrieved her grimoire and began photographing the room- a function Miliam hadn’t expected the little pocketbook-style device to have. While she did that, Miliam looked over the spells herself. The text was flowing like Arabic or cursive, but if there was some indicator of where each words began or ended, she couldn’t find it. Each concentric circle was filled all the way around with a single unbroken string of writing, unlike the pictographic nguage used in modern Gaian Collective spells.

  It was too early in her studies for Miliam to make any judgement on how that would affect the spells. Strictly speaking, pictographs weren’t a requirement; they were used because they allowed information to be packed in more densely. So it wasn’t out of the question that spells could be written this way, using pin text, assuming she was interpreting it correctly.

  Her mind began to wander. Some part of her felt a bit disappointed that this was all there was to the ancient facility. She’d somewhat expected a sprawling complex or a decaying ruin. Something that required guile and effort to overcome. Instead, they’d found a treasury with its gates unbarred and unguarded. It was a gift to those that came after, or perhaps a warning of the dangers hiding in the shadows of the universe.

  She fell from her train of thought when a call came in from the Astrum Vitae.

  “Captain, you need to return as soon as possible! Eun-ji just detected another ship!” Min-ji reported in a panic. Hearing that, Miliam felt a sinking feeling in her gut and it took her a moment to reply.

  “Got it. We’ll be back soon,” she said before switching her channel back to Abigail. “Abigail, we’re leaving! Min-ji just called to tell me we’re not alone here.”

  “Wha- no! You cannot be serious; I have yet to fully document our findings!” protested the schor. “Much of the text is still covered by bones!”

  “Then brush them aside and wrap it up. If we get too greedy and die here, everything we’ve been through will be pointless,” Miliam commanded with a bit more fire than she could usually summon.

  That was the fear talking. She didn’t know exactly what they were up against, but she doubted Min-ji would have asked her to come back if it were just a corvette.

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