There was an encouraging vengefulness in her tone. I approved. The others were playing games, and Peg wanted to protect that. But she knew real danger, real killing. She still hadn’t explained how the pirate champion related to all of this, but I let it die for now. Because up ahead I saw our destination at last. A lonely fragment covered in ancient structures.
It was time.
We swooped down toward the fragment, which was bigger than many of the others I’d seen so far. “It’s huge,” I noted to Chet as we skimmed along, scouting for dangers. IR scans indicated no body heat signatures, though I’d learned not to be careless about that.
“Indeed,” he said. “I now understand why some are so much bigger than others. They’ve been growing for longer.”
“This…” Dllllizzzz said over the comm. “Here… I was… Here…”
Again, it was more than she normally said, and got Shiver excited. I was focused, however, on the ruins I could make out at the fragment’s center, and I navigated toward them.
“Yeah, I remember this place,” Peg said. “We visited it when it first drifted into our region a few years back.”
“That’s right, Captain,” Maksim said. “So why are we here again, Spin?”
“Historical investigations,” I said. “Chet here is an archaeologist.”
“A right noble profession, my good man,” Chet said. “Ancient artifacts can tell us much about ourselves!”
“Uh, I guess,” Maksim said. “But—”
“Leave it be, Maksim.” Peg cut him off. “Their reasons are their own. The rest of us will search for salvage while we’re here.”
I narrowed my eyes. Peg didn’t seem the type to let our reasons be “our own.”
“Spin and I will need time to study those ruins directly at the center,” Chet said. “I’m circling them on your monitors.”
“Dllllizzzz is vibrating uncomfortably,” Shiver said over the comm. “Though she’s excited, I think she doesn’t want to land. She feels…anxious? Maybe the two of us should stay up and keep watch.”
“Fine by me,” Peg said. “Maksim and I will stick near, Spin, while you do your…archaeology.”
Our group landed in a ruined courtyard, while the two resonants stayed in the air. There wasn’t a lot left of most of the ruins—fallen walls, the outlines of buildings. A few somewhat-intact stone structures.
I popped the canopy and climbed out, meeting Peg on the ground. “This place is old,” she said. “Not a lot of wind in here, and no rain, so things don’t weather much. If something looks this bad, it’s probably seen thousands of years.”
Chet and I shared a glance, then started toward one of the mostly intact structures, helmets under our arms.
“Doesn’t look too promising, Captain,” Maksim muttered from behind. “This place must have been picked over hundreds of times.”
“Agreed,” Peg said, “but keep growing delens just in case. We’re here to keep our promise to Spin.”
I remembered the structure ahead—it had been injected into my mind by the previous step on the Path. We walked up to it, and directly inside I found my first surprise. The wall behind the small foyer had a faded old mural on it—and the figures it depicted were most certainly human.
“Amazing,” Chet breathed. He rushed up to it and leaned in close. “Our own people, Miss Nightshade. All these years, I never found any ruins that I could identify as human…”
I couldn’t make out much of the mural. Just some figures holding baskets, maybe?
“I could not guess at the culture,” Chet whispered. He reached out to the mural, then paused—perhaps not wanting to touch it and further contribute to its degradation. “To be perfectly honest, I don’t remember much about where we came from. Our homeworld. I must have once known…”
“Earth,” I said. “Humankind left there a few centuries before you were even born. It’s lost now. Vanished.”
Together, we moved farther into the structure. The roof had long since fallen in, so we didn’t lack for light—and from the refuse on the floor, it seemed the place had been ransacked over the years, and had possibly been in a firefight.
I felt an…eerie, haunted sense. There were so many signs of life, but no people. We found the portal in the last room, built straight into the wall, the characteristic flowing lines carved into it. But this one was cracked down the middle. Broken. Would it still work?