They detected the far side wall over an hour after entering the temple.

They descended in the starlancar, braking as they dropped.

"There's gravity pulling us down," Kat said. "I'm going to have to land, we can't hover."

"Let's just hope these floors can hold the weight," Nadian said.

Nothing terrible happened as they landed, and they sent out probes. There was no appreciable radiation, and observed that the floor appeared to be made of the same stone as the outside.

"There's even a breathable atmosphere out there, according to the scopes," Nadian said. "But I still recommend we wear rebreathers. You never know what dust is in the air in these old tombs."

"A tomb? This is no tomb," Fergus scoffed.

"Might as well be," Nadian replied, shoving a bagged rebreather into the man's hands.

The gravity was appreciable, Brooks noticed. It was about a third less than Earth, he guessed after a few steps.

The drone porters unloaded supplies, and when Brooks was handed his pack, he noticed that it had been rifled through. He glanced to Nadian, who smiled and shrugged. "Kat did a security check. Just had to be sure."

"You are not a trusting person."

"I think it's justified after that second team you sprang on me," Nadian replied.

Fergus was standing off to the side, holding up some kind of sensor. "We've gone further in than the depth of the temple," he said. "It's impossible, yet here we are."

"Your estimates must be wrong," Kat said flatly.

"Woman-"

Brooks stepped closer. "May I see?"

Fergus glared at Kat again, but then turned to Brooks, his glare lessening. "Look. It's accurate, our velocity readings are from the ship itself. We've gone almost 30,000 kilometers inside this thing."

The numbers looked accurate, but Brooks did not have any way to confirm them. He just nodded.

Kat walked away, and Fergus leaned closer. "I dinnae trust them, Captain."

"But you trust me?"

"Aye. I don't begrudge you your mission, so long as I get to be a part of the real team - the one that will be going deep."

"What do you think of this place?" Brooks asked him. "You must have a theory."

"Oh, I have scads of them, Captain. Right now, my bet is that this place is one of the Lost Temples of the Anunnaki - godly beings who came to Earth in ancient eras and taught mankind how to create society."

Brooks felt some amusement. "And when was that?"

"Around 6400 years prior to the common era, the Yarmukian culture - the first in the area to develop agriculture."

"After the Natufians," Brooks noted.

"Yes, well, they gave it up in the Younger Dryas - they are not the origins of the civilization there."

"So," Brooks asked. "Did the Anunnaki teach the Natufians as well?"

"Enough with the bloody Natufians!" Fergus grumbled. "The point is, that in the 6th millenium BCE the first ziggurats started to appear, and they greatly resemble this structure. It's no coincidence! We will find signs of the connection further in, I have no doubt!"

Of course he had no doubt, Brooks thought, since his mind was already made up that it existed.

"I'm curious why humans couldn't have figured out how to pile up bricks," he asked.

Fergus growled. "Are you making fun of me, Captain?"

"No. But we're talking about my distant ancestors, and I find it reasonable that they were able to think and create without external help." He gestured around. "I feel like if the people who built this came to Earth, they'd have left a much bigger mark."

"I suspect," Fergus said, "That they were already greatly declined by that point."

Nadian came up to them. "Is Fergus telling you his Anunnaki theories?"

Brooks nodded, and Nadian grinned. "Careful, Fergus, you might get a real backer. Don't know what you'd actually do with real funding."

Fergus spat at Nadian's feet and stomped away.

"We're heading out," Nadian said to Brooks. "I hope you're ready."

"I am."

"There's an entrance to a tunnel about three hundred meters off that way," Nadian said to the group when they came together. "We head in, that's where we're going to find the interesting stuff."

Brooks gestured up. "So this massive area - is it just to impress?"

"Can't say yet," Nadian replied. "We don't even know what surrounds it. I suspect that shape is important in this place, like a zerodrive hoop. If it served some practical purpose, that is."

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

They started out, moving at a quick pace.

They came to the entrance leading deeper into the temple soon after; it was only a ramp extending downwards, though many symbols and marks were built into the walls.

Brooks stepped closer, shining a light on them.

He recoiled. "Look at this."

Nadian stepped closer. Brooks swung his light over the image - and it faded. It was not simply blended out in the brightness, but it had disappeared.

He moved his light away - and it returned.

"Photosensitive," Nadian muttered. He looked to the others. "Be careful what you shine a light on. We don't know if some of these might be triggers."

Brooks turned up the passive light amplification in his HUD, and they began their descent.

After a few tens of meters the ramp led into what seemed a proper complex; the halls were not simple tunnels, but had doors, markings, and varied in dimensions for unknown purposes.

Without their lights, any light from the outside should have shut off quickly, leaving them in blackness.

But the walls themselves seemed to give off a pale yellowish glow; it illuminated little, yet made edges of walls and floors immediately apparent.

They came to a junction, and Nadian stopped, studying the various directions.

"Well," he said. "Here we go."

They picked a path; it took an annoyingly long amount of time to decide as Fergus seemed to want to argue every point.

Ultimately, they settled on a direction and set off.

Brooks found his patience waning as further bickering occurred between Kat and Fergus, and he moved ahead to walk next to Nadian.

"Sure you want to be at the front?" Nadian muttered, scanning the latest intersection.

"I've done this before," Brooks replied.

He noted that something seemed off here. He could not tell what, though.

The halls were simply wrong. They stretched off, unlike any they had seen yet, into an impenetrable darkness that consumed any light that entered them.

"Look at the symbols," Nadian said quietly. "They're larger and embedded in sections of brighter color."

Brooks could see them, but the color - it was there, but faded. "Radiation fading," he added.

"This place hasn't always been as safe as it is right now," Nadian said, rubbing his face. He looked around. "We have to be careful. We don't know what might trigger a change."

"The shifts in the radiation field probably occur on geological time," Brooks said.

"They could also be artificial," Nadian replied testily. "And if we do the wrong thing, we get very, very crispy, very quickly."

Brooks nodded. He dug into his bag, taking out a device and placing it against the floor.

"Repeater," he told Nadian. "So we can still talk to the outside. I've placed others further back. Seems wise to put them before this."

Nadian nodded, and Fergus stepped up next to them, his latest argument seemingly put on hold.

"'And lo, the People of Jin multiplied'," the mythologist said softly. "Jin begat two sons, who begat a whole lot more fuckers. The bastards spread across the stars 'unto the furthest corners'. With them they took the secrets to the cosmos, even how to build into new layers of reality . . . like we now see before us." He glanced at the others. "This is just as described in the Seventh Script of Dueh-Thoth."

"Which is a fake," Kat snorted.

"Do not get me started on that! Parts were faked, but the first and seventh books are well-attested in Dessei records."

"Thoth," Brooks said. "That's an Egyptian god, the god of knowledge."

"The Moon, sacred texts, mathematics and science, and magic," Fergus replied. "He was also messenger and secretary for the other gods."

Brooks pressed on. "You're claiming they reference him in a Dessei text?"

"It's a cognate deity," Fergus said. "Dueh- their god of the same subjects. It's not a basic similarity, either, they share too many things in common for it to be coincidental . . ."

"Here we go," Nadian muttered. He seemed fine with the pause, though, as he continued to regard the tunnels, which seemed to demand major decision-making for progress.

". . . both married to deities of law, they were both self-begotten, bloody hell even their depictions are the same as bird-headed humanoids!"

Fromm, standing near Fergus now, seemed to be listening intently, and the mythologist focused on him, perhaps appreciating an attentive audience.

Brooks looked down the tunnels.

"What do you make of them, Nade?" Kate asked Nadian.

"There's something just wrong here," he replied. He was fingering some small objects in his hand. "And I can't tell what. I don't like it."

Brooks looked down each of the three directions, but could only agree. It was as if they were seeing only a part of the whole; key elements remained hidden somehow, for his mind to fully parse what he was seeing.

"I think these warnings are all the same," Nadian continued. "There's a kind of text I've seen in some ancient temples - we call it Higher Script. It's . . ." He laughed once, uncomfortably. "It's higher-dimensional."

"I've heard of that," Brooks said. "I've never seen it. I always thought it was fictional."

"Well, it's real," Nadian said. "When you view it from different angles, it changes shape in ways a normal thing shouldn't. And I think that means that viewed from different angles it means different things."

"That," he said, raising his arm, "Could mean the difference between walking into something interesting and walking into something that'll kill us."

He threw one of the objects in his hand; a pebble, down one hall, and it skittered off the stone.

The sound continued, growing quieter but not stopping.

"It's still going," Brooks said. It alarmed him on a level he couldn't elucidate.

"Yeah, like it's falling in a weird gravity. So maybe if we go that way we can't come back."

Brooks looked back. "Kell. Can you make any sense of this? It doesn't make sense to us."

Kell stepped forward. "Yes," he said simply.

"Well, is there anything else?" Nadian asked sarcastically.

Kell regarded him as if he were a worm. "Stop throwing pebbles, for one. It is childish."

Nadian sighed and threw up his hands.

"This way," Kell said. He strode forward.

He wasn't walking down quite any of the paths, but his movement blurred and shifted.

And then he was walking down all three.

"Shit," Nadian muttered. "Well, let's hope that it won't kill us."

Brooks rose, but Nadian stepped forward first, heading in the same direction as Kell, which looked like he was about to walk into a wall.

But after some steps, his movement, too, shifted, and he was suddenly visible down all three routes.

"A proper higher-dimensional hallway," Fergus said. "Now that is interesting!"

Kat followed Nade, and Brooks followed her. It was strange to aim yourself to walk into a wall, but as he moved the hall seemed to shift to accommodate his path.

From his point of view, it didn't even look odd.

Just an optical illusion as you went down it. He looked back, and saw that the path back likewise seemed to have split into three.

Kell had stopped, waiting for him. As Brooks stopped, Fergus slipped by him, glancing over and grinning. "We're in higher dimensions now! The builders of this place, they could even build into zerospace! If we're lucky we'll get to learn more about it than anyone alive."

Brooks glanced to Kell. "Any truth to that?"

"It is unwise to probe into ignorance," the Ambassador replied.