GM IC: [color=7e5e7f]“Well, if someone can feed me a targeting solution I can keep the Lancier trained on it. Shouldn’t do more than singe Miss Jacira, but it should knock out anything down there fine.”[/color] Artemie supplied, watching from overhead. [i]Voyager[/i] was much lower than the more dedicated superiority types, but it simply wasn’t well suited to the sand if she could avoid it. She was just too big, she wouldn’t be able to move around as easily. And staying above kept her out of the immediate vicinity of danger in case she needed to intervene. [color=7e5e7f]“Eyeballing it wouldn’t be great.”[/color] Her tone was light, but the Lunite was on the edge of her seat. With worry, yes, but with excitement mostly; they were digging up something artificial, buried on an alien world. A culmination of her own lifelong quest, right here on the first day. [i]Aurora[/i]’s fingers may not have been the perfect instrument but they dug easily into the soil, clearing away years with every scoop. Efficiency didn’t matter at such a scale, the streams of soil sliding back amounting to nothing worth noticing from inside its cockpit. Decades gone in a second, centuries in just a few more, and thousands of years before a minute passes. Only a few long minutes before its fingers brushed metal, wiping the loose layer just above it away with as much dexterity as the war machine could manage. Its sensors refocused, ‘eyes’ peering deep into the earth to pierce the unknown. And the dead of eons past peered back. It was tilted up just a little, as though it had fallen on uneven ground. It had a ‘face’ once, at least two eyes even though the left had been mangled beyond recognition. Its head was an elegant crest, tapering back where it pierced deeper into the ground. The Proximal sun struck the dusty black material and it gleamed violet wherever it touched save the surviving eye. The sun struck it directly, it couldn’t do anything else; despite its position it had fallen where it could gaze at the sun overhead. The lens glowed viridian in Volana’s HUD, bright and focused as though it had merely been waiting. The machine was smaller than most of those that had disturbed its grave; assuming it had mostly the same proportions as their own Orbitals it was little more than fourteen meters from head to toe. Her excavation had unearthed down to its collar when she paused. [color=aquamarine]“Ah, found something. Is an Orbital. Or, something like.”[/color] The Aurora resumed digging, more carefully, to reveal more of the shape below. [color=aquamarine]“No unusual readings. Continuing for now.”[/color] Odyssey’s drone was perched towards the edge of the hole, just clear of where Volana dug, and angled to capture and transmit whatever was visible at the bottom. The whole ground team, Dr. Harding included, had the next best thing to front row seats to Volana’s continued excavation. Its shoulders came next, elegant pauldrons with gilded edges. At least, an elegant pauldron. The right was visible, as evidently the machine had been propping itself up on its elbow but the left was completely gone. Wrenched away just to the side of its collar, taking part of the torso with it. Its breastplate was pierced where a living thing’s heart would have been just deeply enough to glimpse its reactor housing. Crystalline shards, perhaps formed by pressure over the eons, rested within the wound where a cockpit looked to have been. Its torso tapered to an impossibly thin waist by any human design and then stopped. Or more accurately it ended. The machine’s lower half was gone, without any sign of it in the immediate soil. [i]Aurora[/i] grasped it carefully now that it was mostly exposed and pulled, lifting it easily free of the soil in a cascade of sand and shrapnel. Its surviving arm hung limply with a long, tapered rifle still held in its hand. Dr. Harding blew out a deep breath and eyed it carefully. [i]<>[/i] She stopped, realizing she was thinking out loud. The field team lead looked at her tablet again and took another deep breath. [i]<>[/i] Some of the scientists looked a little uncomfortable even through their suits as the realization sank in that they were standing on a graveyard. A graveyard of God, if His dominion extended so far, only knew how many souls. Though not all of them. How long is an age to the earth? People like their hundred years, more if they’re fortunate, and they die. A single rotation of the system is more than enough to mark their time, one more tick towards their end. But the earth doesn’t care. If you give it enough time it may. So many years that the sun goes out, taking the planets with it. Such a passing would be noteworthy. But the years in between are meaningless, the shifting surface as the years march on utterly devoid of anything but the expected. How long for the passing of time to even register on such a scale? The excitement died down long ago, even so. It had ended in one, incredible explosion of power. Everything went dark. And when they rose again everything was still, and that was good. Their apparati never changed their tune, as common and consistent as the wind. In time they would wind down like the rest. The flickers of celestial bodies striking the surface never even registered, so infinitesimal they were. Until the new ones. They were discontented. The quiet had gone on for so long, they could not have hidden. Their existence was too fragile. But how, then? They rumbled and stirred, shedding the planet that had grown around them. The answer would be known. Kilometers away the disturbance registered, too far for the landbound Orbitals to see. But within easy reconnaissance range of those in the sky. [i]<>[/i] Harding started again, head snapping in the direction of the rumble she felt in her own feet. [i]<>[/i]