A clean chapter! Oops. The crew of the Long Tall Sally find a planet that may or may not be what they're looking for, unearth some answers that may or may not be helpful, and meet a new person who may or may not be friendly. Ah, the coyote life.

Part three of The Trouble with Coyotes is clean and I'm very sorry about that. Really. There will be smut in the last chapter, don't worry ;) This is all about plot development! And character development! And tomb raiding, or what Xocoh calls "applied archaeology." Ahem. As always, thanks to :iconSpudz: for helping me work on this at MFF, I believe when both of us were even sober????

Released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Share, modify, and redistribute -- as long as it's attributed and noncommercial, anything goes.

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Part Three of  The Trouble with Coyotes, by Rob Baird

Want to jump right in? Xocoh (coyote tomb raider) and Miguel Ribeiro (jaguar accomplice) have teamed up with Casey and Devin, whose freighter will carry to them to the ancient lost city, Sjel-Kassar and its treasure. The clock is ticking: criminal families are after them, seeking a powerful secret technology Sjel-Kassar is said to hold. As the chapter opens, they've just escaped from an ambush and the ship is headed towards what they hope is the right planet...

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“So, here's a question."

Devin was on his back, with the upper half of his body slid underneath one of the Long Tall Sally's electrical consoles. The coyote's voice came out muffled. “Yes."

Miguel frowned. “I didn't actually ask it yet."

“Oh. I figured you were going to ask if these consoles always exploded when the power grid took a hit."

“That does seem like a design flaw," the jaguar said. Starship design wasn't exactly his forte — in fact he really knew nothing about them at all — but that seemed to be an obvious problem. “How did Health and Safety let that one through?"

Dev pushed himself back from underneath the console and sat up to paw through his box of tools. “They don't plan for ships being shot at, is mostly it. It isn't just that they like drama and excitement. On a warship, they'd have all the systems insulated and stuff. But that costs money and takes up space, and... well."

“And you like drama and excitement?"

“Maybe a little." He found the tool that he was looking for and disappeared back into the ship's guts. “What was your real question?"

“How likely is it that we were followed? Is that possible?"

“Possible? Sure. Likely?" The coyote trailed off; Miguel hoped it was because he was distracted with the repair work. “Yeah."

Great. “Are you worried about it?"

“No. But then... well. I'm a coyote," Dev offered as an explanation. “None of us figure we'll see much old age. My dad always told me to plan on checking out early. Truth is, even if they know our rough direction, they're not going to be able to narrow it down to a specific system. And they definitely can't beat us there. We're not going to wind up in another ambush."

It had taken them the better part of a day to fix the damage from the previous ambush. “But do you know how long we'll have once we get to the planet?"

“A long time."

“'Long' from the perspective of the universe? What kind of 'long'?" 

“If you want my advice, doc, you're too stressed. Take some drugs and relax. We've got this under control." Devin thumped the console affectionately, and then reached over to reconnect the power. The computer flared to life for a moment.

Then it hissed, and showered the coyote in sparks.

He sighed. “Take the drugs, at least."

Until he had been sufficiently reassured that his life was not in mortal danger, though, Miguel wasn't in the mood. He concentrated on helping Devin with the repairs: first that console, then half a dozen more. This served as a distraction, even if it didn't do much to convince him that the Long Tall Sally was still spaceworthy.

Not, he reminded himself, like starship design is exactly my forte. I'm sure it will be fine.

Casey, meanwhile, had been busy researching. When the repairs were done, and after a less-than-restful sleep, Miguel joined everyone else in the cockpit to see what she'd found. The jackal sat, guru-like, behind a three-dimensional projection of their destination. “Collado-Strauss is an uncharted binary system. From the information in the database, it's a seven-planet system. Three gas giants, four rockies; two of them are in the habitable zone."

Xocoh walked in a circle around the hologram, as if doing so might reveal further details. It did not. “Nothing about possible life, though?"

“Nah. That wasn't really a priority when they did the long-range scan. And nobody saw a reason to take a closer look."

Collado-Strauss, the jackal explained, was outside the normal tradelanes and spectral analysis didn't indicate any particularly interesting resources were in abundance. With so many systems around for colonization and exploitation, there wasn't any need to head for the middle of nowhere.

“There is a slight complication. You pointed it out, spottycat. Dev blames you, at least."

Dev coughed. “I credited him. He was asking me how likely it was we were followed. The only problem with being out of the tradelanes is our wake will be fairly detectable. Casey's taking precautions, though. Aren't you, Casey?"

“Yep," the jackal said.

“What precautions?" Xocoh asked.

The jackal shifted about in her seat. “Secret ones?"

“That means they're good. Casey learned from the best," Devin reassured them; at least, he was as reassuring as a trickster defending another trickster could hope to be. Xocoh left the worrying to Miguel, who was busy counting down the hours as the freighter hurtled onwards. Casey's briefing had not, after all, really told them anything new.

The Long Tall Sally dropped out of hyperspace into what, at first glance, was so much unremarkable vacuum. Casey looked over the navigation data and shrugged, voicing a similar sentiment. “We're here. Where are we?"

Their sensors confirmed the results of the Confederation survey: two planets within the system's habitable zone. One of them was entirely covered in water. The other was a Terra-massed world, its oceans broken up by large continents. “Huh," Xocoh said.

Miguel turned to look; the coyote girl was staring at the ship's computer. “What?"

“This was an inhabited planet. Emphasis on was."

“How do you know?"

“It's not inhabited now." True, the continents were composed of rocky deserts and canyons — there was no sign of plant life, at least not as any of them understood it. “But look at the emission lines. Trace elements of synthetics. There was an industrial society here..." She shrugged. “Maybe fifty; a hundred thousand years ago."

Casey glanced over her shoulder, and reached out her paw to the freighter's throttle. “You think this could be it, then? Should I take us in for a closer look?"

By the time they reached orbit, high-resolution surface scans confirmed the coyote's suspicions. They could see traces of unmistakably artificial activity — the straight lines of old roads, and irregular clusters of geometric objects mostly buried under forty millennia of shifting sands. “Cities," Dev realized. “Dead cities. Pretty cool."

“Yeah," Casey agreed. “What killed 'em?"

“If this was a Hano colony, that's a matter of dispute." That was the easiest way for Miguel to summarize it, although he went on in further detail anyway. Even the dates for the true end of the Hano Empire were up for debate. Forty thousand years ago? Forty-one? Thirty-five?

The most popular theory he was aware of blamed the fall on an internal rebellion; as the tablet they found made clear, such rebellions were far from uncommon. One of them, the thinking went, had eventually succeeded.

Others blamed sudden catastrophe — a supernova, say, or a plague. Still others said the Hano had never truly collapsed; they'd simply devolved, over millennia, into a number of smaller successor states. The jaguar didn't really have a position, although the last one seemed more likely.

The roads, for one, were a good clue. The Hano weren't known for their roads. On the other hand, the Tarvinians that Miguel studied were famous for it — the roads were their monumental architecture, ceremonial pathways that stretched out for endless kilometers. If this planet had roads, then perhaps the practice originated with the Hano and they'd simply become Tarvinian.

“Here's something to think about," Xocoh mused. “If we can still see atmospheric pollution now, it must've been incredible back then. If this is forty millennia of reclamation, back then we wouldn't even have been able to see the surface."

“Good point. I'll make sure to do a full scan; make sure you won't asphyxiate or anything. We can see now, though — any thought on where you want to put down?" Casey had settled them into a circular orbit, aligned with the planet's equator.

“The map we found looks to show a perspective from the southern hemisphere. Can we scan for signs of development there? I guess there's not a huge temple lying around, huh?"

There didn't seem to be much of anything, aside from the roads. Miguel and Xocoh took the next six orbits to find any likely candidates. In the end, they both agreed on an expanse in the desert where many of the half-buried roads came together.

Miguel had only the roads to go by — there were definitely no temples; no large buildings of any kind. The roads seemed to come to dead ends at tall, straight columns. He had to hope there would be some clue when they were actually on the ground.

The Long Tall Sally touched down softly; Casey's natural recklessness was tempered by their lack of any knowledge about whether or not the surface would even support them. Fortunately, it did. “Ground's solid," the pilot reported. “Just dirt, I guess. Normal planet, really. Breathable atmosphere. Are we ready to go?"

Ordinarily it would've taken Xocoh the longest to get ready, but she'd been champing at the bit all the way through the freighter's descent, and as soon as the hatchway opened she jumped through it — even before the gangplank had been lowered. “Practice," she shouted, in answer to Miguel's skeptical glare. “With the antigrav boots. Gotta keep in practice."

Miguel wasn't comfortable with AG boots, which Xocoh wore mostly because she enjoyed jumping off things just as much as she enjoyed clambering up on them. He had comfortable hiking shoes, instead; the odds were good they'd be doing a lot of walking. He'd swapped out his professorial attire for a sturdy, wide belt and a stabilized, gravity-dampening backpack, though. The ship's crew hadn't even gone that far; they looked the same as ever.

Like him, they waited for the ramp, and made their way down carefully. Under a beautiful sky, on an utterly dead world, they looked around and took stock. “Where do we even start?"

Xocoh pointed to a tall grey spire protruding from the ground a hundred meters away. “There. It's big, at least, and Sancho thinks he'll be able to read something." She'd picked it as their landing spot, in favor of a shorter column a few kilometers to the west.

But without anything else to go on, 'big' was a good place to start. Up close, the building was even more imposing. It was a little like a Terran lighthouse, hundreds of kilometers away from any water. Its walls were covered in worn glyphs — battered by the elements, but not so battered as to be unrecognizable. “It's Hanotic," Miguel confirmed.

“It's in damned good shape." Devin reached out to run his claws over the lettering. “You said it was forty thousand years old?"

“Silver's mostly nonreactive. You're seeing sandblasting, basically — it doesn't really erode much, otherwise."

“It's made of silver?"

Xocoh laughed at Dev's question. “You thought we only did this out of academic interest? What does it say, Sancho?"

The jaguar had downloaded every ancient dictionary he could get his paws on, storing it in his brain so that his retinal implants could translate the writing for him. “The translation matrix is having a hard time with it," he said. The letters kept shifting, morphing on the fly as it tried different angles on the work. It was giving him a bit of a headache.

Xocoh knew that. It wasn't, after all, their first time together. She patted his shoulder with deceptive gentleness, for a coyote. “Take as long as you need. It's okay."

That didn't help the headache. He was grateful when the translator settled down, at last. “It's a monument. This is the... the third gate of the Great Complex. It was dedicated by Empress Talus." The rest of the writing told the story of a war the Empress had fought against an internal rebellion, 'thirty planets strong.'

“Lot of unhappy people."

Dev, Miguel realized, didn't understand the scale of the Hano dominion. “It goes on to say that the monument is composed of the silver extracted from the rebels' bodies. Twenty-six tons of it."

The coyote jerked his paw back from the wall. “Holy fuck..."

“They didn't screw around." Xoc was far less concerned; it was long in the past, and they had other problems to deal with. “If this is supposed to be the third gate, where the hell is the complex?" The other buildings they could see — windworn stone, islands in the desert sea — didn't amount to much.

“Good question," the jaguar said. He didn't have an answer.

Xoc paced in a frustrated circle around the monument. “Alright. Next column, then. You said there were more, right? Let's try the next one."

Setting aside the one Xoc had already dismissed, the next closest column was still over four kilometers away — far enough that it was faster to fly. The ride was tense; Xocoh clearly felt that they'd come an awfully long way to be disappointed. She stalked along behind him when he went to investigate.

“Don't tell me this is another 'gate,' Sancho."

Miguel scanned the writing on the column until he could be certain. “Hey, Dev. Tell Xoc this is another gate for me. The fourth gate."

“Xocoh, doc says this —"

“Damnit! Then we're missing something. You think this is the right planet, don't you? I mean, it has to be — you don't just get lucky like that. There was a star map on the tablet, we followed the star map, we're here now, and…"

“I think it has to be the right planet, yes. If that hologram was actually referring to the capital of the Empire, I don't see how this is anything other than the right place. Maybe the city is somewhere else? We have a lot of planet to cover, after all."

“Maybe we're too low." The coyote looked up at the column. “I wonder…"

Wonder seemed a fairly innocent term for what she was doing. “You want to get up there?"

Xocoh unhooked one of the tools from her harness. Closing one eye, she took aim at the top of the column, and fired a line of thin filament towards it. A firm tug on the line demonstrated to her satisfaction that it had found a good hold.

That wasn't to say it was particularly safe, but safety hadn't ever been high on her list of concerns. Fixing the tool back to her harness, she hopped onto the column's side and clambered her way up. Her nimble fingers scrabbled for handholds — but if she had any great difficulty, it was invisible to the watchers on the ground. She moved like she was born to it.

Given sufficient motivation, coyotes could accomplish an awful lot. She disappeared over the top of the column; the waving brush of her tail was the last thing they saw. “Is this usual?" Casey asked.

“Usual enough." Miguel snapped his wrist, turning their radio link on. “What's it look like up there, 'yote?"

“This must've been a watchtower of some kind." Her voice came back nice and clear: Xoc didn't scrimp on her equipment when it mattered. “There are handholds and railings and stuff."

“Any way in?"

“Yeah. There's a door, I think." The radio turned what happened next into a muted hiss, for the listener's benefit — it was actually more audible from the ground. The top of the column brightened up sharply for a few seconds. “Now there's not."

“Not what?"

Xoc leaned over the top of the column; her eyes were hidden behind black shades. “A door," she called down to them. “You guys coming up?"

The three of them looked at each other. Dev looked at the other coyote, peering past the rim of the column. He coughed. “I think Casey and I better stay here. Hold down the fort and all. You know, in case anybody comes to check out the ship."

“The planet's dead."

“Yes," Casey nodded. “But we'd rather not be."

If Miguel intended to get any archaeology done, though, he didn't have the luxury of concern for his own mortality. The jaguar sighed, but when Xocoh tossed a length of climbing wire down to him he clipped it to his utility belt and started dutifully making his way up the edge of the column, letting the wire carry most of his weight and choosing every step carefully — a hell of a lot more carefully than his partner had done.

He was a little out of practice. That tended to happen, when you were trying to distance yourself from coyotes and coyotian proclivities. Xoc pulled him over the top, waiting for him to get back to his feet. “Stairs," she said, pointing to the black hole where a door had once been. “I can see stairs. A few meters down."

Miguel flipped his torch on so that he could take a look. The inside of the column had been painted, or covered with some kind of white enamel. “It's in pretty good condition… undisturbed, if I had to guess. Before somebody blew a hole in it." The door, still smoldering from Xocoh's plasma cutter, lay where it had fallen.

“Good sign, right?"

“Yeah."

Xocoh sat at the edge of the broken frame, letting her legs dangle into the darkness. “What do you say we get started, huh? Just in case those dogs were serious about us being followed." Plus, he didn't have to say, she was naturally excitable and incautious.

She did, at least, have the good sense to toss a handheld drone down first. It bounced off the floor, skittered another half-meter, and came to rest. A dim flash signaled the pulse of its scanning lasers.

Miguel didn't wait for a report. He didn't have to; the signals must've come up 'safe,' because Xocoh pushed herself from the threshold, dropping the three meters to the floor below and landing softly on nimble coyote feet. “All good," she told him, scooping the drone back up and brushing it clean.

He allowed himself a little more time and a little less grace than Xocoh. The wreckage of the door rattled when he thudded to the ground, and the jolt it sent up his body was more than a little painful. But he made it. Xoc grinned, and dipped her muzzle to the stairs.

“Shall we?"

“Not quite." He put one of their survey transponders on the wall, first. The size of an acorn, it was an archaeologist's best friend. It could scan the interior of a room, and communicate with other transponders in the network to pass along radio signals — and, with enough time and effort, to build a map of a site. “We're here for science, remember? Isn't that what you said?"

“Sure," Xoc told him. “To get you to come along…"

The forty-millennia gap left Confederation scientists without a clear picture of what the Hano had been. The dominant species in the sector looked a little like antelope, save for their four twirling horns, slitted eyes, and prominent fangs.

So the Hano probably looked similar, if larger. The stairs were designed for a creature half as big again as Miguel. Xocoh simply hopped down from them; the jaguar went a bit more carefully, doing what he could to take in as much detail as possible.

“What do you think we'll find at the bottom, anyway?"

Xoc shrugged. “A map? Something we can read. I'm a little curious about what happened to the city."

“Yeah?" They were halfway down the column; he stopped and fixed another transponder to the wall. “We all are, right? You must have something specific in mind."

“The fact there's nothing alive on this planet is a little creepy, Sancho. Right? Something happened to the atmosphere. If we can still see it forty thousand years later, it must've been really polluted. And then we come here, and there's just these gates — nothing else. Is this why they called it a lost city? Did they actually level it?"

“Maybe it was like the Blishians," Miguel suggested. When that race faced the imminent destruction of their homeworld, courtesy of an impending collision, they simply blasted off whole cities, turning them into massive, enclosed space stations slowly sailing through the cosmos.

“Maybe. But why leave the columns behind? It's weird, Sancho. Weird."

“If they took Sjel-Kassar with them, there won't be anything left to plunder, either."

“Well," she said. “Yes. That, too. I have needs, Sancho. I can admit that."

At the bottom of the column they found two doors. Checking the survey transponders, Miguel figured they were about five meters below 'ground level' outside. They must've simply opened to the outdoors, before eons of abandonment buried the gate's entrance.

That was it. No map, no writing to point the way forward. Only the doors, and an ornately decorated floor. The centerpiece was a circle, a silver spiderweb four meters across and filled in by a mosaic of red and blue jewels. Xocoh scanned it quickly. “Corundum. Ruby and sapphire."

“The metal? Silver?"

“Iridium. Over… something else. Titanium, maybe. Lot of iridium, though. What does it mean, doc?"

“I don't know."

Xocoh stared at the circle, scratching her head. She snipped off a piece of lightwire from her spool, pressed it to the wall, and pinched it so that it came to life. The room was flooded with soft, daylight spectrum light; the gems in the circle glittered with it. So did Xoc's eyes. “Start knowing. Earn your keep, Sancho."

What am I missing? Am I missing anything? Start from the beginning. “We have a radially symmetric mosaic, consisting of… one, two… eight… twenty-seven spokes."

“Three cubed. Maybe that was important?"

“I have no reason to think so. The Hano didn't use a base-ten system, and they didn't really believe in sacred numbers. They were celestially oriented. Maybe this matches against… hm." He knelt down and took off his backpack, pulling out a holographic emitter so that he didn't have to use the one implanted in his paw. “Let's see…"

“See what?"

“Answers, Xoc. I'm a professional, remember?" He programmed his computer with their coordinates, and brought the hologram to life. First he tried a map of the terrain around them. Then he tried stars — every constellation they knew about from Hano mythology.

“What are you doing?"

“Seeing if these spokes and lines match up against any known star configurations."

“Like a map?"

“Exactly."

“Do they?"

Miguel played with the hologram for another few seconds. “No. They're too regular. This looks… pretty much exactly symmetric. It seems like a compass, but it's not. It could be a map, but it isn't. It's just… just…" 

Frustrating, is what it was. He had the sense that something had escaped him — had escaped them both. Xocoh's radio chirped, and Casey's voice came from the coyote's wrist. “Hey, new 'yote. Got your treasure yet?"

“No. We're at the bottom of the column. It's empty. Just doors. The doc and I are working on it."

“Making progress," Miguel added. 

Xoc snorted. “How are things out there?"

“They're fine. Dev and I have invented a new game. It's called 'I spy, and when you say 'dirt,' you have to avoid it when I hit you.' It's a lot of fun. We —" Her voice cut out in a yelping squawk.

“Casey?"

Devin answered. “In the lightning round, it's all about groping jackals. She's finding that out."

Xocoh shook her head, and tapped the radio off. “At least someone's having fun."

“What? You want me to grope you, Xoc?"

Eyes narrowing, she turned her attention back to the floor. “I want you to figure this out. It's not a map, so what is it?"

“Maybe there's one of these in the first column we found. We could go back and investigate." He flinched away from her bitter scowl — Xocoh could be awfully threatening, for someone who weighed barely half of what he did. “Fine. Start again. Picture it's back then. Both these doors are open. You come in from one, and you see this dial. It points you towards... well. Nothing. It's symmetric. It doesn't point you towards anything."

“Maybe it wasn't mean to be seen from the inside."

“Those doors are so big, though... I think they would've stayed open. This would have been a gate, right? And you wouldn't have something this ornate and hide it. I mean, it's well-made. It's composed of precious materials. They're precious, so it must've been valuable, but... but. No. That's not true."

“Sancho?"

“We know the Hano used sapphire industrially. Like that tablet. Like —"

They both had the same idea at once. Xocoh's big ears perked up. “You're a genius! It's a tablet! It — it is a map!"

She was packing the survey scanner they'd picked up at Majestic Harbor, a piece of military-grade technology significantly more advanced and precise than Miguel had ever had access to before. Xocoh either knew what she was doing or faked it well; a minute later she had it running and pointed at one of the jewels in the mosaic.

Gradually, her excitement faded into frustrated anger, furrowing her brow and curling her muzzle. “Nothing."

“Nothing?"

“No regular patterns. I mean... here, look at the transform. This is nothing. God damn it. They're toying with us."

“I don't know." Miguel sat down, cross-legged, and tried to clear his thoughts. “You wouldn't store data on something you expected people to walk on. This is right in the middle of the gate. They would've walked on it — I mean, it's corundum. And iridium is pretty hard, too; harder than steel, for sure. Maybe it was... maybe..."

“Maybe this is a dead fucking end. I guess we could blast this out and take it with us." She growled and stomped over to the wall, pinching the length of lightwire to turn it off. The column plunged back into darkness.

Mostly. Miguel's eyes adapted first. “Hey," he said, just loud enough to get Xocoh's attention. The spiderweb was glowing. Softly, to be sure, but it wasn't so dim that he could convince himself he was only seeing reflections or ghosts.

The coyote left the wire in place, still dark, and crouched down to examine the mosaic. “How?"

“Is it phosphorescent?"

She broke out the survey module again. “No, I don't think it is. It's..."

“Glowing brighter," he finished, although that might not have been where she was going with the sentence. “It's absorbing the energy from the scanner, I believe. Can you turn it up?"

“Sure. A bit."

'A bit' brought a steadier glow from the object. “I wonder what happens if you add more power. I'm saying 'I wonder' because I know you want to. I also know you don't have it, so we're safe. Maybe we could — Xoc, what are you doing? Why do you have a gun out?"

“Not a gun. It's an x-ray laser. X-rays are basically light, aren't they?"

“Xoc... coyote... Coyote, don't do anything stupid."

“You know me, Sancho."

“Don't do anything stupid! Don't —"

She switched the laser on, pointed it at the center of the mosaic, and pulled the trigger. Xocoh had her black glasses down; that was Miguel's cue to look away. He couldn't see what happened directly — just a bright light, casting his shadow against the far wall.

And an ominous, grating rumble. “Xoc, do you ever pay att... atten..."

The rumbling was getting stronger. Miguel pushed himself to his feet and turned to look at the floor. The silver spokes now filled the gems with radiant blue light, framing every section of the mosaic with razor precision. It was so clear that they both saw what happened next at once, and unambiguously.

One at a time, each wedge formed by the spokes dropped. They spun as they did so, fanning out, and thumped crisply into place atop waiting metal platforms. Thirty seconds later, and the two were looking at a spiral staircase, dropping five meters into the earth.

“Well," Xocoh said. “I guess you do walk on it."

The glow faded quickly, but it was enough to see that the staircase ended at a silvery metal arch. The path beyond was open — which was to say that it was pitch black. Miguel, who had volunteered to carry the larger flashlight, led the way down the stairs. “The Arch of Emperor Navin," he read from the inscription above it.

Xocoh leaned through the arch. The path beyond descended, curving downwards while the beam of Miguel's flashlight was still clearly visible. “The air's still good," the coyote said; Miguel placed a transponder and followed her down. “What do you suppose this was? A cellar? An armory?"

“I guess. The walls are the same enamel as the inside of the column. It doesn't seem very ornamented. Functional, really." As they made their way further in the corridor widened and the ceiling grew taller. Their flashlights reflected off empty white walls: no decorations to study, and nothing valuable to take.

“Maybe it was a shelter. Maybe there was a war, and they hid down here."

“Maybe."

There was no sign of it. Nothing was damaged. The corridor seemed to have been hermetically sealed, for all intents and purposes — a bare, empty hall on a bare, empty world. Miguel was beginning to think that they hadn't really found what they were after at all. He didn't want to say the word, not to Xoc at least, but it was a bit of a disappointment.

This can't be Sjel-Kassar. Sjel-Kassar was one of the greatest mysteries of the galaxy. More than a just a few silver columns in the middle of a desert. He tried to focus on the positive, instead. Even if it's not, it's definitely still Hanotic. The inscriptions on the gates will be useful — Dean will like them. I can still get a paper out of this.

“Sancho, what's goin' on?"

“What do you mean?"

“This is more like a mine than anything else. If it wasn't so pristine, I'd say that's what it was. We're descending pretty quickly. If this was Emperor Navin's tomb, we should've seen something worth taking by now. Right?"

“Well..."

She sighed dramatically. “Something worth taking meticulous records on, happy? But we haven't. We've been walking for a long time, and we don't have anything to show for it. And... and look. This is a dead end."

“It's another door," Miguel clarified. A heavy, silver-colored door, flawless except for a small notch directly in its center, and framed by an arch done in brighter, polished metal. “There's writing on it."

“Which says?"

“It says... well. It's in Hanotic. It says... hm. 'No eye is closed that may not one day reopen. There is no death, but deathlike slumber and its visions; none shall enter here, save they of noble dreams.'"

“Well. That's cryptic and not at all helpful," Xocoh said. 

“Archaeologists have a flair for the dramatic. That includes whoever wrote the dictionary, you know. It's probably a poem, or a metaphor, I guess."

“What it is, is a good sign. This is a tomb. That's a tomb warning. They're telling us not to break in."

“But you're going to."

“Well, of course."

Nothing about the door suggested how this might be done. Unlike the mosaic in the gateway, it was completely unbroken; there were no jewels, no levers and, of course, no instructions. Xocoh pulled her laser out, turned it to the lowest setting, and fired. There was no reaction, not even a sympathetic glow.

She tried again, at a higher strength. “Nothing. This may take a while, I guess, Sancho. Get comfortable."

“What are you planning?"

The coyote held up her plasma cutter. “Same way I got in to that column. I didn't make it all the way to this fabulous hidden tomb to let an old broken doorknob stop me. Shield your eyes."

It wasn't worth arguing. She'd do it anyway, and besides, Miguel was curious, too. The jaguar shut his eyes, and covered his ears against the hiss of the torch doing its work.

The light and sound only lasted for a few seconds, nowhere near enough for the job to have been done. “The fuck..."

Nothing about the door had changed. “It didn't work? Are you getting enough power?"

“I'm getting enough power. It's just not making a dent. It must be too thermally conductive, I think. Or…" She turned the torch on the door again, pulsing it quickly. A bit of light flickered back, shorting out the torch. “What the fuck? Sancho, look at this."

In her other paw, she was holding the survey scanner. She turned it so that he could read the display. “Is there something in particular I'm looking for, Xoc?"

“This." Another burst from the torch. “Look at the impulse response."

“Again: what am I looking for, coyote?"

“Do you see an impulse response?"

The jaguar shrugged. “Yes, I think so. You want to run an analysis on it?"

Xocoh scowled and tossed the torch off to the side. “What's causing it? I turn a plasma torch on this door; it should burn through. This ain't a burnthrough."

“It's disabling it? Some kind of active protection? That can't be…"

“Did I, or did I not, just say 'what the fuck'?"

Miguel took few prudent steps away from the door. There was no good reason for an archaeological site to be protected by any kind of force field — definitely no good reason for one that had been abandoned since the dawn of time. By any reasonable measure, it shouldn't even have had the ability to generate power.

“We'll have to find another way in," the coyote was already deciding. She retrieved her torch and, growling her pessimism, tried the corridor wall. “No dice here, either. Well…"

“How much detcord did you bring?"

“Not enough."

Before she could do anything more foolish — her eyes already had a dangerous glint — Miguel set up a holographic transmitter and started loading in the data they had from the survey transponders. It gave them a decent map of the area from the corridor to the gateway. They were a few hundred meters below ground, and had traveled in a straight line from the gate. “Hm," he said.

“What?"

“We came in through the fourth gate, right?" Xocoh was giving him a so-the-fuck-what? look; he would gain no points for stringing her along. “Assume for the moment that the corridor leads us to an old tomb complex — takes us straight there. We've identified two gates, and a probable third one — the one you didn't want to investigate. If we take our path from the gate as perpendicular to a tangent line drawn on a perfect circle —"

“Then the gates would form evenly spaced points on it, and then there would be —"

“Twenty-seven gates in total and —"

“Twenty-seven spokes on the mosaic in the gate we found."

“Yeah."

Xocoh tilted her head at the hologram. “Fine. So what?"

She must, the jaguar decided, have been waiting until later to thank him for his deductive logic. “So what, is that implies the site is a circle with a radius of over twenty kilometers. That's implausibly large for a 'complex.' But for a city…"

“A disappeared city."

“Right. I think what we can do is run an aerial survey and see if there's any sign of what's on the other side of this door. Maybe a clue as to what happened. Plus, no blasting."

That part clearly disappointed the coyote, but she couldn't argue the point he'd made. “Yeah. Fine, doc. Be all practical." She held up her wrist. “Hey, space dogs. You there?"

None shall enter here, save they of noble dreams. That certainly ruled them out, didn't it? Xocoh had never had a noble thought, and Miguel knew he hadn't been doing a good job of resisting her particular form of corruption. She had a way of getting to him.

The word flickered — he'd been staring at it too long. The computer in his retina had decided he wanted to know more about what he was looking at.

amujetik'ka [adj. 3rd gender dat, “amuje" + -etik + keh, ku]

1. noble, of nobility

2. royal, highborn

from PE amuchii, amechii

Attested Taimir Codex, 39252 BCE; Sola Codex, 38805 BCE; Column A52-E, 38260 BCE

Miguel felt his tail jerk. He called up the version of the dictionary he had filed away for offline access.

jali [adj.]

1. worthy

2. honorable, noble

from PE jahal —

He didn't care where it was attested from. Xocoh was still trying to raise Casey and Dev. “Hello? Space dogs, c'mon…"

A voice finally answered. Dev sounded a little out of breath. “Uh — oh, hey. Hey, Xoc." Sulabetke [noun, 3rd gender dat pl., “sula". 1. dreams; 2. fantasies; 3. stories. “You guys, uh — uh, you okay down there?"

“We're gonna come back to the surface, I think. Miguel and I think we should run another survey and — hey! Now is not the time for feeling me up."

“That's what I said," Dev answered. He couldn't see what the jaguar was doing — tugging Xoc's jacket down and pulling the silver locket from around her neck. “But, you know… Case always gets her way, and… uh, what I'm saying is, if you could give us a couple…"

Xocoh had stopped paying attention. She was focused on Miguel.

He flipped the locket open and retrieved the little sapphire tablet from it. He held it up to the little notch on the locked door. The fit looked to be perfect. Without waiting to lose his nerve, he clicked it into place.

Sharp, clean blue light spread in radiant lines to the edges of the door — and beyond. It raced down the corridor, leaving in its wake a thick maze of glowing blue-violet glyphs. The clean, white surface was covered with them, every available inch dense with Hanotic writing.

Xoc tapped her wrist blindly until the radio channel closed itself. “Sancho… what is this…"

She was too startled even to have asked it like a question. Miguel couldn't blame her: the jaguar's muzzle hung open, and he struggled to find the ability to speak. “Everything… stories about people… about festivals… businesses… advertisements? It reads like a billboard. You have those memory crystals? There's more information here than I can store on a survey transponder."

“Sure. Of course, Sancho," she murmured; still overwhelmed herself.

He turned in a slow circle, taking it all in. “I'm just… wow. This could change everything about what… oh my God. My God, coyote."

“Yeah?"

“The inscription on the door." The original had disappeared; what glowed in its place held his attention as though his eyes had been chained to it. He dared not even blink, lest it vanish again.

But the letters were too bold for that; too boastful. “What does it say?"

“'Traveler,'" he began, whispering.

Traveler, welcome. Enter here in peace the Fourth Gate — the Quiet Gate — to the most hallowed, most wonderful city…

“… Of Sjel-Kassar."

“But… how? Even — even with forty thousand years of sand covering everything, this is too far below-ground. It's a relic. It's…"

“We lost the connection," Dev said, over the radio. “I think. I was saying if you wanted to come back, if you could let us have a few minutes to, uh… to set up the camp and…"

Her ears pinned back, her fingers trembling, Xocoh reached out to the door and pulled the tablet free. Silently, weightlessly, the door rolled to the side. Xocoh gasped — and then, helpless, she let out a shriek.

“Uh — Xoc?"

“Get down here!" Her words ran together. She attempted it again, to even less effect. “Geddownere."

“Uh."

“Devin," Miguel tried. “You need to see this."

“But —"

“You need. To see this."

“Well —"

Xocoh closed the line. “It can't be real. It… it can't be real."

It took half an hour for the crew of the Long Tall Sally to appear; by the end of it Miguel had to practically hold Xocoh down to keep her from springing. Casey's words were, mostly, an echo. “You're fucking with me. This can't be real."

“It has to be a hologram," Dev added. “Right?"

“It's real," Miguel told him. “Or real enough that it fools our scanners. The survey module isn't anywhere near high-enough res for this. We didn't bring anything that was."

“What is it?"

The Fourth Gate, the Quiet Gate to Sjel-Kassar was not at its perimeter. Not, at least, in the conventional sense.

Sjel-Kassar lay beneath them. Before them. Around them. At first the city seemed to float: it was not until closer inspection that one perceived the supports that held it aloft. Its sharp-edged, angular buildings might have been obsidian, or they might've been something darker still.

“It's a sphere," the jaguar said. “A perfect sphere, as far as I can tell. Seventy kilometers across. The gates lead to it from the top."

“The Hano worshipped the stars. When they corrupted the skies of their homeworld..."

The inner surface of the sphere was black, but far from empty: studded with a perfect replica of the night sky, dazzling and jeweled at any angle. It was this glittering darkness that the crystalline buildings of the central complex reflected. “They moved... underground?" Devin sounded incredulous.

Miguel was incredulous, too, but there was no arguing with the immense presence of the city. “They were the greatest civilization this part of the galaxy had ever seen. They had the resources for it, and apparently the desire."

“Then what happened?"

“Good question. The city still has power. From what I can tell, it's drawing it from the planet's core — but completely isolated. Biological scans are coming up nil. Xoc and I are pretty certain there hasn't been anything living here since the fall of the Hano Empire."

“What now?" Casey asked.

A path led from the ledge on which they stood to the open door of a huge cylinder; seats lined its interior, obviously designed for larger beings. It was to this cylinder that Xocoh turned her open paw. “Now, we take the bus. You heard the doc — this place still has power."

They followed her lead inside; the inner surface of the 'bus' was clean and white, made of the same enamel as the city corridors. At their entrance, it lit up, also in the same way, albeit with far fewer symbols. “It does seem to be active," Miguel allowed. “It follows a track that leads into the city — where it ends exactly..."

“You don't know," Devin finished. “We don't really know anything. Aren't you worried that this might be… I dunno. Aren't you worried about traps or anything? Trigger some… some ancient reprisal?"

“That's just an urban myth. They don't really booby-trap these things. A lot of work for no reward."

“All the same. Do you have any drones?"

Miguel shook his head. “Not enough. Not enough by a factor of... a hundred. A thousand. This is... this is the biggest archaeological discovery in — well — in ever. There are a thousand dissertations waiting in just that hallway you walked down! The scope of information here is... it's not even immense; it defies that. It would take years to achieve even a basic —"

“What about this button?" Xocoh asked, interrupting him. She'd gone all the way to the front of the cylinder, which seemed to be a spartan cockpit of sorts. A row of big windows, facing the dense, razor-edged buildings of the city, lent a sense of direction to the craft. And if it was a cockpit, the control panel was surely the flat, transparent-glass panel. A few symbols adorned it: Xocoh called them 'buttons' because they lit up, reacting to the proximity of her paw.

“Understanding," Miguel finished, and went forward to get a clearer view of what she was looking at. Casey and Dev followed him. “These are controls. Don't touch them. This says... uh... it says... 'sun.'"

“Lights, then?"

“Perhaps, but it could also be —"

She pushed the button, and the 'bus' filled with a soft glow, emanating from every surface. “It's lights. What about this one?"

“'Death'."

“What?" Casey jerked her head in the jaguar's direction.

“Death. Um. Destruction? Self-destruct, maybe? Suicide..."

“He doesn't want me to push it," Xocoh muttered. “Doc, what does it say?"

Miguel kept staring at the word, walking through every alternate translation he could find; every reference in every codex. It paid to be cautious when coyotes were around. “It says 'city.' Technically, it says 'to city.'"

“So I should push it." She twisted around, looking at the others. Devin and Casey shrugged; Miguel knew better than to protest. Xocoh tapped the button. The 'bus' shuddered, but didn't move. When she tapped it again, nothing happened. “But..."

Miguel stayed quiet.

“Maybe the power's not completely working? Maybe if we... hm. Let's see. It still says whatever it said before, so if that's 'to city,' then..." Xocoh scratched at the base of one of her ears. “Well, then the best way to diagnose this will be running an EM survey... Sancho, can you set the scanner module for... oh, what's that look, doc?"

He wasn't as good at dry stares as she was, but he did his best before reaching over the coyote. “This here says 'lock release.' The dial next to it says 'speed.'" He pushed the former, and ran his paw smoothly over the image of the dial embedded in the glass to spin it counterclockwise — the way the gateway floor had spun when it opened. The vehicle started to move immediately. “Will you pay attention to me, now?"

“Smartass," she said, and then added a quiet “fine" under her breath. “Can I at least turn the dial further?"

“I think so."

The transport's acceleration was smooth enough to be imperceptible; only by looking at the scanning module and the distance it measured to the city could Miguel tell they were traveling at nearly two hundred kilometers an hour. “It probably makes sense to split up. We can cover more ground that way. Doc and I are both experienced archaeologists, so..."

“I am. You're a tomb raider, 'yote."

“An experienced one," she countered. “You know I'm right. I'd say me and Devin; you and Casey?"

The prospect of two coyotes working at the same nefarious end troubled the jaguar. On the other hand, he felt he was getting on fairly well with Dev. Maybe he'll even listen to me if I tell him to keep Xoc on a leash? It was worth a shot. “That works. On conditions, though. You want me to defend your salvage claim, right? Well, that means I call the shots. Survey first. Leave everything until we've got it recorded — you fuck up the provenance and you make my job harder for no reason."

“I can't take anything?"

“Nothing, Xoc."

“What if it's really shiny?"

“Leave it. Think about it this way, coyote. Coyotes. Canids. The better picture we get, the better we know what's valuable, right? Don't want to load up on trinkets and then find the Sacred Emerald of Nix."

Casey perked her ears. “What's that?"

“I just made it up." He didn't know what they would find, after all. The city, larger and more imposing by the second, was an enigma from every possible angle.

Perhaps it had been abandoned in a hurry, for instance; perhaps it had succumbed to natural disaster. In that case, he'd expect to find much of the city's daily affairs left intact: an archaeologist's dream. There were certain indications of this, like the banal news that crowded the corridors.

On the other hand, perhaps it had been abandoned deliberately. There were indications of that, too. The ominous inscription over the locked gate seemed to lend some weight to that theory. Then they might find it utterly stripped of anything valuable: the treasures long removed, and the remnants of everyday life long gone.

Or it might have been constructed deliberately, as a monument — or a tomb. Miguel could just as easily fashion evidence for that scenario. The simple truth was that he wasn't certain; none of them could be.

But they were about to find out. The ferry alighted in a depot midway between the city's center and its periphery. Xocoh and Devin set off by themselves; as the archaeologist, Miguel kept the survey module, turning it on every new thing he could find.

There was plenty to analyze. Everything from the wide streets to the buildings, long-abandoned and cloaking whatever purpose they'd once held. It overwhelmed even his desire to be scientific about the whole affair. Miguel would be dead hundreds of years by the time students finished plumbing the depths of Sjel-Kassar.

If they ever did!

“Is this everything you hoped for, doc?"

“Even more than that. It's in perfect condition. I don't even know that I can think of an analogy to what this is like. Any lost city in this condition would be the find of a lifetime. But this city? Sjel-Kassar?"

“Until Xocoh gets her paws on it, at least. I guess you've got a handle on her, though. You two used to do this on the regular, after all. Apparently."

“Never regularly. I was just… a convenient tool. After I got my PhD, that gave me access to a bunch of libraries — makes it easier to do research. Plus I can carry more weight than she can. And, ah, I can forge authenticity certificates pretty well."

The jackal nodded; it didn't seem to surprise her. “I didn't exactly take you for a complete straight arrow, doc. I mean… you did also give me access to your convenient tool, right? Now, when you say authenticity certificates…"

“I don't do that anymore."

“You followed your girl to some ancient-as-fuck city for her to graverob, spottycat. You would, for the right price. All the Confed stuff? Form EC-550?"

“550, 552, 554," he said. “General license for Terran and Confed artifacts, limited license for academic transport of non-Confed artifacts."

“EC-600?"

He raised an eyebrow. “No. That's minerals. I don't know anything about rocks."

“Damn. I have a regular source for Corian firestones, but the guy I work with for certs charges me out the fucking ass. It's hard to make an honest living at dishonest work, doc; it really is."

“I've heard that the fees they pay for EC-600 certs go to making sure the mines on Coria stay ethically compliant, you know."

“Really? I haven't heard that. Hey, look — a distraction." She pointed in a random direction, and then narrowed her eyes to think of something to ask about it. “What do you suppose that is?"

She had pointed to a tall, shiny tower. At first it looked to be smooth-edged, but closer inspection showed light glinting off straight facets. Twenty-seven faces, in all likelihood; it seemed to be a recurring theme. “I don't know."

“Like you didn't know celestial navigation?"

He granted her a chuckle. “Less than that. I wrote my dissertation on the monumental architecture of the Tarvinians. You want to hear an exciting title? Extension of the Tar Ensha ley system in the latter Hoya dynasties, 23-22 MBCE. That got me a PhD."

“What does it even mean?"

It meant that the Terran Confederation included hundreds of systems, and those systems had thousands upon thousands of years of history. Far too much for any one person to comprehend, even plugged into META. The Tarvinians were probably descendants of the Hano, but who knew? None of them had survived, either. It didn't grant him special insight.

Xocoh Zonnie was a native Terran, just like Miguel. Her family traced its lineage back to some other empire, the Aztecs. What do you know about them? she'd asked him, once. Not a fucking thing, he'd admitted. They'd been out prowling in some old tomb, then; Xoc was making idle conversation. They'd both been high. His answer had made her laugh.

Casey probably wasn't asking about that. “The Tarvinians didn't build columns or temples. They built huge, straight roads along geometric lines. We still don't completely know why. They died out twenty thousand years ago — the first Confed survey ships thought the roads were natural formations."

They were close enough to the tower that when Casey turned to detour towards it, he followed without complaint. “Can I ask a dumb question?" She didn't wait for his permission. “Does it matter? I get why Xocoh wants to find this stuff, but…"

“It matters, yes. It matters because… there's no excuse for the secrets of the past being lost. Maybe five thousand years ago, when all we had was the oral tradition and everyone was living harvest-to-harvest, that was okay. But now? Now, there's no excuse. That's the way I see it. If you're a supervisor in a widget factory, you can always make another widget. You can't remake this history — if we miss the opportunity to understand the Hano, it's gone forever."

“Do you understand them?"

“No."

“Do you understand those people you studied? The Tavilliums?"

“Tarvinian. No."

“Then…"

“But we do. As a society. I'm just a fraction of that understanding. But I'm doing my part to expand it."

“What about this?"

The tower wasn't labeled in any way that Miguel understood. Most of the buildings weren't — there weren't any street signs, either. It all came down to patient observation. And the survey module, which told him that the tower was radiating power to the surrounding buildings. That, itself, was a clue: now they knew what power generators looked like in Sjel-Kassar.

Small victories. He tried to sound more certain of them when the four reconvened, six hours later.

“So. Here's what we've got."

Sjel-Kassar was arranged along — no surprise — twenty-seven radial spokes. They converged at a large square, with the Temple of Lasul at its center. Given the number of buildings, and their configuration, Miguel estimated that the city must once have been home to millions of souls. Far more than a temple complex, it showed every sign of having been a living, vibrant city.

Based on rough estimates, the jaguar had identified half a dozen types of structures. The most common, which he thought of as apartments, were tall, evenly positioned, and regularly spaced. There also seemed to be 'businesses' — close to street level, with large windows and big, empty halls. Then there were 'temples,' adorned with ornate, geometric sculptures and stylistic glyphs, 'civic buildings' with glyphs but no sculptures, 'power buildings' still thrumming with energy, and a final type with no markings or obvious doors.

“It would've been the seat of government," he explained. “So there's a lot to look at. As it is, I've used up four memory crystals storing data from the survey module. We might need more — the closer we get to the center, the more important we can expect the buildings to be."

Xocoh listened, or seemed to listen, and nodded when he finished. “The buildings are composed of silicon dioxide, with some limited inclusions. None of them are very valuable. Inside, we found a bunch of artifacts — more tablets, some tools, a lot of furniture… also not made of anything precious." As a coyote, she had different priorities.

Naturally, those were the priorities shared by Casey and Devin. The other jackal picked up on what would've been the most promising word. “What about the artifacts? Anything interesting?"

“Some silver, from what Dev and I saw, and some platinum-group metals — mostly iridium. At scrap value —"

“You're not going to scrap anything," Miguel said at once.

“Maybe just until we break even," she answered. He couldn't tell if she was teasing him or not. “Hopefully Sancho's right, and there's better stuff further in."

Although Xocoh swore up and down that she wasn't tired, the same could not have been said for the rest of them. Between the initial survey and the work of breaking in in the first place, they were all running on borrowed energy. When Devin suggested returning to the freighter to sleep, Xocoh found herself outvoted.

They started early the next morning, picking one of the city's main avenues and working their way down it, looking for promising buildings. One in particular held the coyote girl's eye — a tall, imposing building with a single word adorning its facade. Her intuition, she averred, said that it was important. And then she asked Miguel to translate, in order to lend her intuition some much-needed support. 

“Museum. No… hmm."

The word could be translated as either 'museum' or 'archive.' Miguel went to look up the context in which the glyphs had first been identified. They appeared only in a few documents, and never as the lintel inscription on a building in an ancient lost city.

But he took his best guess. “'Archive' seems more likely."

Xocoh hopped up the stairs, leaving the others to follow. The door did not open automatically, but her sapphire tablet served to unlock it and it rolled obligingly off to the side. Acutely conscious of just how few he had left, Miguel clipped a survey transponder to the inside wall.

Xocoh unrolled some lightwire, snapped it into life, and gave them a better look. The main floor of the Archive was completely open, its floor unbroken save for a set of wide stairs descending to a lower level posed right in the center of the room.

Around the edges, the light glittered off gemstones embedded in the wall; flat and flawless, larger versions of the tablet in the coyote's locket. It distracted their attention for a few seconds. Miguel was the first to notice the tridents and spears posed vertically between each jewel. It wasn't worth asking if they were weapons: each was subtly different, but the razor edges of their pointed tines required no imagination.

“Good sign?" Devin asked.

“The Hano were an empire focused on conquest. As you might've picked up from that silver column." Miguel thought the spears were probably ceremonial, too large to be comfortably held. But who knew how large the Hano had been?

“This would've been a place where people came to gaze on their victories, you know?" Xoc was looking on the weapons, taking them in with hungry coyote eyes as she made her way further in, towards the staircase. “Appreciate the... the unequaled majesty of the Empire."

“It's definitely majestic. Case, we can fit those spears an' shit in our hold easy, right?"

“Sure. Lengthwise, at least. It depends on how heavy they are."

Xocoh's tail wagged mischievously. “I have a better question. What do you suppose is in the basement collection? Must be even better, right? You ready to appreciate it?" She started down the stairs, and Miguel allowed himself a moment to look around again.

“Xoc, I'm not sure that's a good idea."

“I haven't stolen anything yet, Sancho," she reminded him. Now that they had something obviously unique and valuable, the coyote's mood had improved markedly.

“Seriously. I have a bad feeling about this."

“You always have bad feelings. You have bad feelings about spring flowers and blowjobs, doc; take it easy." Her voice, echoing up the stairs, had regained its characteristically light dismissiveness. “What's on your mind?"

“This isn't a collection. That door, right? There's just the one door — you had to unlock it. And it's maybe three meters across? Fit one person at a time through it? Would've been a hell of a queue."

“True..."

“Where's the inscriptions? The decoration? The tapestry? No, no — Xoc, c'mon, this must've been something else. An official building."

“Fair enough." At the bottom of the stairs was a locked door; inscribed above it was 'Archives of,' followed by a completely unfamiliar symbol. Undeterred, Xocoh tapped her paw against the entrance.

The door flashed, and a voice that boomed from everywhere and nowhere all at once filled the Archive. Kallushatakki estotham. Kallushatakki estotham. Kallushattaki estotham. And then, before the jaguar's translator could get a lock, it stopped.

“Hey, we're the first people to hear spoken —"

“Get down," Miguel shouted. A quarter second after she'd done so, a sizzling crack filled the air. Xoc was flat on her belly, motionless. “Coyote? You alive?"

“Yes. Pretty happy the Hano were so tall..."

Devin, who had also hit the floor, sat up cautiously and peered down the stairs. “Lasers. They're still active. You know, doc, when I asked about traps yesterday, I wasn't trying to foreshadow anything."

“Just in case, keep your mouth shut," Xocoh called up to him. “I like being in one piece."

“Against all evidence." Miguel imaged the stairway with the survey module, and waited for it to finish processing. She was right about being smaller than the defense's intended target. “They're at waist height. You can crawl out safely."

By the time her head appeared over the edge of the topmost stair, Xocoh had lost whatever sense of fear and mortality had been briefly shocked into her. “That was exciting, huh?"

“Maybe let's try someplace else?"

“I dunno." She pulled an energy bar from her field jacket, broke it in half, and tossed it down the stairs. The light of its abrupt, violent disintegration flickered in her green eyes. “That must be protecting something interesting..."

“Maybe," Miguel repeated, “let's try someplace else."

“Might be more spears! Or lasers like that one. Or designs for their ships. Or!" She popped the other half of the energy bar into her muzzle to keep him in suspense, chewed quickly, and swallowed. “Might be a bunch of boring old books you could read! What do you say?"

“Let's try someplace else."

“I kinda vote for that," Casey raised her paw. “If we're voting."

Miguel sighed heavily. “The Temple," he said, relenting. That had been her aim all along, but he'd wanted to get a better sense of the city before they went too deep into any single part of it. That took patience.

And Xocoh didn't have much time for patience. “I thought you'd never ask!"

The Temple of Lasul looked the same as it had in their hologram. In real life it was massive but just as geometric; just as precise. Its glass walls had been carefully polished: the black depths seemed to stretch out to an infinity filled with reflected stars.

They spent a lot of time staring at the reflections: there did not seem to be a way inside.

A grand staircase, a hundred meters tall, led to a plaza and a huge, ornamental door: shut, and without any obvious way to force entry. Unlike the city gate, there was no place for any key to go; the door appeared to be flawless. Miguel set the survey module to work at a high-resolution scan — Devin helped to enhance its precision further, courtesy of some tools in his backpack — and had to hope with the rest of them that it turned up something useful.

As the hours passed, though, it became clear that it had done nothing of the sort. On Casey's prompting — the jackal seemed to think coyotes had some mystical ability to bend the laws of physics — Devin got his tools back out and started trying to modify the scanner again. Their reward was a loud, panicked beeping. Miguel started, looking in every direction to see where it was coming from.

It was, it turned out, coming from Casey's computer. The jackal's ears flattened in alarm. “Shit."

“What is it?"

“Proximity alert. Came from the orbital beacon — must be another ship. Dev, c'mon."

“You can't tell anything from here?" Miguel asked.

“No. Doesn't matter — it isn't like we ordered delivery pizza, guys."

Dev had already snapped his toolbox closed, but as he started to swing his pack on he thought better of it, tossing it back to the ground. “Keep it. Stay here — probably safer. Might need you to set up some cover, though."

“Probably safer, but..."

“We can bring the ship in closer if you need to get out. Don't worry. You can... well, you can't trust us," Casey amended. “But I do want the rest of my money, and that's in your bank account..."

Devin was already running, and Casey deferred any additional explanation in favor of chasing him. Xocoh's eyes flicked from the exit to the pile of tools at her feet. “We could catch up."

“Maybe you could. I'm not good at aerobics."

The coyote laughed, and turned her attention back to the computer. “Exercise, doc, it's just exercise. Okay. Hm. So this does feel like a lock. It feels like there's a response signal when we hit the door with the scanner. I think..."

“You want to keep working?"

“Got a better idea?"

“Aren't you worried about..." He didn't finish the sentence; a better question replaced it. “Do you ever worry?"

“No."

“Even when you're sober?"

She glanced up at him from the computer. “I don't know what that's like. What's it like, Sancho? Is it worth trying? It doesn't really seem like it's worth trying. It doesn't seem to do much for you, I gotta say. You're awfully stressed. Why don't you put that to use and figure out what's hiding from us here."

It was so easy for her to say that. Typical flippant coyote. She was always flippant. Xocoh seemed to think that all it ever took was her own volition to make things happen. Show up in my class and tell me you've got the key to Sjel-Kassar. All I have to do is figure it out. Well, it wasn't that simple, was it? We had to… oh. Wait a minute. “Oh, fuck me, Xoc. No — I know you're about to make a dumb joke. Fine. Of course we didn't notice anything!"

“Why not?"

He held the survey module at arm's length, stretching it as far away from the door as he could and leaning out to touch the smooth metal. Yep. There it is. “Remember how that hologram was encoded? Ultraviolet lasers. There's one here. It's trying to scan something."

“So that surge we picked up was just... the laser energizing. Right. Great. Now..."

“Touch the door for me, Xoc. Again. Again. Again."

“You just like seeing me stretch, don't you?"

“Kinda. Again. One more time. Hold up the tablet." The picture was getting ever clearer, even without coyote eye candy. “Okay! I've got it. The laser does a random walk. It's looking for a crystal. When it scanned yours, it sent another pulse, and then that was it. Didn't like what it found."

“Good work. Unfortunately, I don't have another key."

Miguel felt rather pleased with his cleverness, though he tested his hypothesis by trying the door himself before admitting it out loud. “We don't need one. We can beam a reply right into the lock. This survey module has a laser emitter that works."

Xoc slid back from the door to lean against the jaguar's side, seeing what he was working on. “Works to unlock it, or just to communicate?"

“Just to communicate. But it's a start. It's using an invisible laser at the hologram's wavelength, but it's not scanning the hologram. It sends a word in... either Hano or Proto-Eigic. It must want an answer."

“Run through the dictionary. See if one works."

Depending on who you asked, there was more than one dictionary, so Miguel combined them all. His programming abilities were old, and rusty, but within half an hour he had the survey module cycling through the entire list. Ten milliseconds later, it stopped. “Yes! Got a word, sent a different word back, got another word..."

“They're talking. Do it again."

Experimentally, all the valid words came from their Dictionary of Late Hanotic, which shortened the time it took to try every combination. Even with this discovery, though, Miguel didn't quite know what was happening — the words weren't piecing together a grammatically correct sentence. He modified his code to keep trying, building off the previous set of words and hoping something would become clearer.

“It keeps going..."

“Apparently."

“Is that right? The sequence is already a million words long?"

“Apparently. That brings up a new problem: we're going to run out of space on the surveyor. I'm not sure this is actually working."

“But it's what we have. So it's close enough." That was a fairly coyote philosophy. Xocoh pulled a memory crystal from her pack, though, and connected it to the module so that her philosophy had time to do its work.

Good-quality crystals from Baima could store a few dozen zettabytes of information — and they'd definitely paid for good crystals. Miguel watched the process with a mix of growing intrigue and futility. “I wish I knew what was going on. It's building some kind of dialog... the same word always works in the same position, it's just..."

The 'dialog,' as he called it, had just ticked past a hundred thousand words when the radio turned on. “Anybody there? Still alive? Not disintegrated?"

“Working on it, captain. How are things over there?"

“Yeah. About that..."

Miguel looked at Xocoh. Their eyes met; she shrugged. “Is that good or bad?" he prodded cautiously.

“We're gonna come back down. Uh. With company."

“Is that... good or bad?"

“Don't bother with the sentry guns or anything."

“Is… is that good or bad?"

“I mean really don't, not like I'm using reverse psychology. No guns. You don't need guns."

“Is that good or bad? Is that..." The link was closed. “Why is it so difficult to answer a question like that? Is it or good or bad? I mean —"

“What's good for a coyote or jackal is not always good for others," Xocoh pointed out. “Indeed, it's... it's rather often not good for others."

“So we just have to... find out?"

She shrugged again.

They had nothing to do but wait. Xocoh clambered up to the lintel over the temple entrance, and was the first to notice the approaching visitors. Miguel left their equipment behind and joined her. “Three people, huh? I mean, that's Devin and Casey..."

“Yeah. And..."

The third figure was another dog. Fortunately, not another coyote; he had Dev's pointy ears, but his red fur and curly tail made him look more like a spitz of some type. Is that better? Maybe that's better? “Do you recognize him?"

“Nope."

They had to wait to find out about that, then, too. The trio wasted no time in making their way up the stairs. “Welcome back," Miguel said carefully.

“Thanks." Casey gestured to the new person. They could not have looked much different: he was thick-furred, and his fluff poked out beneath a garish floral-print shirt and his ratty shorts. “We brought friends."

The dog — close up, Miguel thought he was probably an akita — stuck out his hand. “Hey, mate. Call me Satari."

“Miguel. Uh, not, like… Satari Kai?"

“Aw, sure, yeah — you've heard of me?"

“We all have." Xocoh nudged Miguel aside, and shook the akita's paw, too. “I'm Xoc. Miguel and I are the ones who hired your friends."

“Right! Right, yeah, I heard that. With the key to Sjella, eh?" Satari dispensed with the second word in the city's name, and the way he pronounced it “shelluh" took Miguel a moment to figure out.

Xoc had no such difficulties — or, more likely, she simply rolled with it. “Yup."

“And some fancy-ass old shield that can make any ship invulnerable."

This again? I'd almost forgotten about it. “That," Miguel corrected, “I wouldn't be so sure of. Sjel-Kassar is an older story. This Shield thing — there's a few references in super old Hano tablet fragments, and then nothing. Nothing until crazy people started going on about it a few hundred years ago, when 'ancient empire fever' took off."

“You don't think it's real, eh?"

“It's more likely the Hano Empire built the Egyptian pyramids." Which was to say that, so far as Miguel was concerned, there might have been some kind of 'Great Dark Shield' — but it hadn't acquired its mythic power until storytellers got hold of it. Otherwise there would be something in the archaeological record. “We have real things here, though."

Xocoh perked up at the opportunity to show them off. “Right! This here's the Temple of Lasul. We're waiting to get in."

“'Waiting,' eh?"

“Sancho figured out how to unlock the door. We… think. It turns out there's some kind of a laser, and some kind of a code, and… well…"

Devin knelt down next to the survey module to see what was going on. “Oh, huh. That's weird."

They all gathered around, as though watching a coyote stare at the holographic display of a computer had some sort of intrinsic interest. The jaguar wondered if he might not have missed something. “What's weird, Devin?"

“You're definitely unlocking it. This looks like a classic example of a gyre-and-gimble protocol. They're really easy to implement with certain kinds of architecture…"

“And?"

“There's no 'and,' really. It's a call-response negotiation, using a massive dictionary to increase the difficulty of cracking them. Now, because of the heuristic, it is possible to break them — it's just that deriving an equivalent of an eight-word key requires… well. The upper bound is based on the size of the dictionary raised to the eighth power. How big's your dictionary?"

“I don't know. Um, sixteen thousand words or so." Miguel tried to do a quick calculation in his head, and decided it was even faster to give up “Is sixteen thousand to the eighth power… big?"

“It's not that big. It would fit in this city."

“What does that mean?" Satari asked.

“I mean there are probably more atoms in this city. Fortunately, that's just an upper bound." As if on cue, the temple rumbled, and the big door rolled off obligingly to one side. “See? In the end… in the end, the matching key was only twenty terabytes long."

“Bloody hell. That ain't bad." The akita whistled, impressed. “I think. What happens now? We're going in?"

“We're going in," Xocoh said firmly. “This was the centerpiece of the city, after all. There's bound to be something good."

If there was, they couldn't see it. Stairs on the other side of the door dropped down into darkness; the light of the city beyond faded quickly. Xocoh had multi-spectrum night-vision glasses; she was alone. “Dev?" Casey prompted. “Fix it?"

“Fix what?"

“The power grid? You're a hacker, coyote — you knew enough about that lock, didn't you? C'mon."

Devin's ear twitched. “I don't think it's as simple as plugging in a generator."

“So? C'mon, do some coyote stuff."

“I guess… hm. No guarantees, but I suppose we could try modifying some of our existing equipment. Yeah. Yeah. If we narrowed the beamwidth and increased power to the photon emitters…"

“Worth a shot, right?" 

Devin leaned over, twisted the focusing ring of Casey's flashlight two clicks, and turned the brightness up to the maximum setting.

Satari was the first to pick up on it. “Not bad." He chuckled, and kept chuckling until Casey figured out what had happened and scowled. The chuckle broke into an open laugh. “I like ya, ya coyote bastard."

Hiding his own smile, Miguel followed Dev's lead in turning his flashlight up and placed one of his remaining transponders to collect a record of what they were seeing. The Temple of Lasul revealed itself in bits and pieces, under the beams of their lights.

The first room was a great hall, with a broad central path. Along either side, Hano glyphs formed a litany of the civilization's pantheon. Even a cursory look got Miguel's mind racing. He was certain he recognized hints, in the myths, of stories and legends in the civilizations the jaguar himself had studied.

As soon as it had become clear that there wasn't anything that could be pried up easily from the floor, Xocoh had raced on ahead. “Hey," she called back, from the gateway that ended the first hall. “Look at this."

This.

Another hall. Statues flanked them to either side. Figures: they must surely have been the Hano themselves. Each stood three meters tall. Their limbs were straight and muscular; four walking limbs, and two arms that ended in curving claws. Long, twisting horns sprouted from stern-faced heads.

The statues were crafted of copper, with the details picked out in silver. The horns were gold. The claws were gold. Each statue had been adorned in fabulous armor — the armor looked genuine, not ceremonial, nicked and scuffed and battle-worn. “Bloody hell; look at the size of these bastards…"

“Gold… iridium… these eyes are firestones — but I've never seen ones so radiant…" Xocoh, Miguel saw, couldn't help licking her muzzle. “The armor's steel alloy and titanium, but still…"

“Worth a pretty penny, eh? Twenty million credits a piece, easy."

“You're not getting a percentage, Satari," Casey warned.

“I'm not? Hey, Xoc. Yotie."

Xocoh was still entranced by the statues; her voice carried a hint of distraction. “Take it up with the space dogs. They already have their contract."

“Then he's not getting a damn percentage!"

“Yes, he is."

Devin's dark tone pulled even Xocoh away from her scanner; now they were all looking at the coyote. Casey tapped her foot against the floor. “You know something we don't, Dev?"

“Case, you know how many mercenaries are after us. We're going to need the Kai Syndicate's help. Better bring him in now. If we wait until we get ambushed by a New Family fleet and he's the only one who can save us, he'll be able to ask for a lot more."

“Foreshadowing again?"

“Just call me genre savvy, doc. Mr. Kai, if we have the Syndicate's backing, you get half our cut. If."

“What's your cut?"

“Two percent each."

“We'll match it. Call that four percent," Miguel volunteered. Xocoh would understand, or they'd argue it out later. “Remember, this is just one room, in just one temple. There's a whole city out there."

“Yeah," Satari said, drawing the word out while he thought the deal over. It only ended when he was out of breath, fifteen seconds later. “Alright. Alright, I'm in. I like that for an investment."

Xocoh was still caught up in the moment to care about any lost revenue. Casey, though, grumbled. “Hope it's worth it."

“Well he is right, you know. I woulda charged a lot more if ya waited 'til that ambush. The hypothetical one."

Devin blinked. “Are you genre-savvy too?"

The akita tilted his head when he met Dev's gaze, staring him down. And then he chortled. “Naw, I was just havin' a laugh. Don't think anybody knows where you've gotten to, not yet."

“You found us," Miguel said.

“Sure, sure, but only 'cause Kaitlyn was using a technique I taught her."

“Who?"

“Kaitlyn Candace," Casey growled. “Me. Don't use that name if you want to keep your teeth."

Xocoh patted the jackal's shoulder. This, it seemed, was less to reassure her than out of impatience: they had, after all, only just started and the temple complex was massive. “Later," the coyote said. “Let's find something to cheer you up."

The hall of statues branched out to a dozen adjoining rooms; the main path led to one final chamber. The dead end, a dome forty meters across and fifty meters tall, was as glamorous as the statues in its own way. Jewels picked out the curves and whorls of detailed carvings: constellations, Miguel realized. The whole thing was a planetarium, a replica of the sky in precious stones.

“Not bad, not bad…" Satari's sharp ears had pricked forward. “And this thing?"

'This thing' was a pedestal in the center of the room, topped by a polished, perfectly round metal dial with a single arrow cut into it. Miguel scanned the inscriptions. “This shows the… the 'gifts of Lasul.' I don't know what that means, exactly."

“Well, this beasty's outta place, though. Not level."

By 'beasty,' Satari meant the dial, which was indeed noticeably tilted from its base. Miguel nudged it with his paw; it settled down, and a soft hum began to emanate from the pedestal.

Around them, the jewels on the wall lit up: a gentle glow, little more than enough to make them visible. The constellations were made out in violet; the rest of the stars were indigo, barely more than a hint of light.

Miguel tried turning the dial; it resisted for a moment, then rotated smoothly into a new notch. The carvings on the wall shifted, displacing one another like the squares of a child's puzzle until they had settled into their new configuration. There was no sound to the movement, fluid and graceful; almost organic.

The dial's arrow pointed to a new inscription. “Lasul's first gift was the conquest of the Culani," Miguel translated aloud. “'Now their stars belong to us.' I guess this is showing where that planet was in relationship to the city."

“Ah, sweet as," Satari said. “Want one of these for my house."

Miguel rotated the dial again. “Lasul's second gift was the conquest of the Passim. From them we learned… I don't know. This word isn't in the dictionary. I hope it was good."

Although, from a certain perspective, anything could be good. Even a recipe for Hano goulash would tell him a great deal about their culture. Xocoh, though, was impatient. As soon as the wall stopped moving, she turned the dial for him again. “What now?"

“Lasul's third gift was the… oh, boy. The secret of the Great Dark Shield," he finished reluctantly. “'Which is called'… I can't recognize that glyph, either. A proper noun. 'Through this the empire will be kept safe until the end of time,' it says."

“So it's real," Devin said.

“Is it here?"

“I don't know, Xoc."

“But it is real, mate?" Satari asked.

“Do you want a simple, dramatic answer, or a boring, accurate one?"

The akita shrugged. “Let's go 'accurate.' I ain't one of them." He jerked his thumb in Xocoh's direction, but clearly meant to include the other two canids.

“The word for 'shield' doesn't have any other translations in our dictionary. That implies they're not being metaphorical. And the grammar of the sentence that follows uses a construction that implies — implies, I stress — it was a physical object."

Xocoh wasn't allowing herself to be distracted. “You think it's here, Sancho?"

“I don't know. There aren't really any hints. As I said, it's not well-attested in our records, so everything we 'know' is pretty much made up. If I had to guess, that archive we found earlier might have the answer. The glyph here is the same one we saw back there, over the door that tried to kill you. That seems more than coincidence. But then, I'm not… what did you say, Devin? Genre-savvy?"

“I noticed. Try this: 'I'm no expert, but I think I know where the answer might be.' Then add a dramatic pause, so we all know the pay attention. Do you have a bad feeling about it, too, doc? How bad is it, on a scale of one to ten?"

The first attempt at breaking into the archives had already almost vaporized Xocoh. That should've counted for a lot; on the other hand, the coyote had chosen a profession that exposed her to things like that fairly often. “Maybe a seven."

“Good, good. I'm no expert, but I think I know where the answer might be. Pause." He paused. “That archive, with the deadly invisible lasers and the scary voice protecting it."

“Oh, sweet," Satari said. Of course, he hadn't been there. Miguel had. The jaguar glanced at the inscription again, dwelling on the sinking feeling that was beginning to build.

“I'm not done. Satari, tell me that sounds dangerous."

“What does? Deadly invisible lasers?"

“Yeah."

The akita went along gamely. “That sounds dangerous, Devin!"

“Oh, it is. But I tell ya what."

Miguel swallowed. He knew they were mocking him, but his mind was elsewhere. His voice felt dry. “No, it's even worse than that."

Devin had been planning his own finish, but seemed pleased with Miguel's. “Not bad, and I like the expression."

“Looks like he's seen a ghost," Satari added.

“It doesn't really fit grammatically. 'That sounds dangerous, but I tell you what: no, it's even worse than that.' It can't be worse than dangerous. It can only be more dangerous."

Miguel swallowed again. “I mean it. You don't understand what we're dealing with, here. What they've done. It's… it's worse than anything I could've imagined." Without proof, there was no way to convince the others of his certainty about the Shield — what it had really been, and whether it still existed.

Xoc might've thought of him as a wet blanket, but she knew him well enough to know when he was on to something. She stopped what she was doing to listen. Casey and Dev had also gained sufficient familiarity to read between the lines of his haunted look and wide eyes. 

Satari Kai had not. He watched Miguel carefully, waiting for him to say anything else. Nothing was forthcoming. The jaguar was trying to get his head around it. He was trying to convince himself that what he'd read was untrue. He was —

Satari clapped his paws. “And… scene!"