The Kusansee disaster had occurred when a cache of Ancient Kāruan war machines had been discovered three centuries ago. The very act of discovery had caused them to come back to life, at which point they had followed their last programmed command, which had been to destroy an Ancient Kāruan military outpost. The military outpost had been long gone, replaced by a walled city called Kusansee. The war machines had obliterated it, killing hundreds of thousands of people before going dormant again. For a long time the area around Kusansee had been a no go zone, patrolled and defended by the military, until sufficient technological advancements had been made which allowed scientists to neutralise and dismantle the war machines.

Alnan nodded.

“Yeah, that’s what he thought too. So the idiot went running into the nearest village, shouting that he’d found Ancient Kāruan war machines. Everyone panicked. The police went bumbling around the site, warning everyone to stay away. Archaeologists started turning up. Half the villagers were outraged when the military arrived and commandeered their houses. The other half had already scarpered, thinking that they was about to be razed by war machines. And of course, since my unit was in the neighbourhood we got drafted to stand guard over it, for all the good that woulda’ done if it had booted up and started firing.”

“So what happened?” Linua asked, fascinated.

“A whole bunch o’ slow, careful steps. The immediate surroundings were evacuated o’ civilians. The military brought in mobile artillery units, and set up a perimeter. They had gunships hovering overhead. They got a remote-controlled digger and started excavating it.”

Alnan paused again. They had both forgotten that they were supposed to be cleaning.

“It were from Ancient Kāruan times, right enough,” said Alnan. “But … turned out it were a vat for making wine. Back in them days there was this berry that used to grow there, what made some kind of sweet liqueur.”

Linua pictured the assembled soldiers, all clutching their guns, as a wine vat was revealed, and laughed. Alnan shook his head at the memory.

“What a lot of twats we all looked. But once all the fuss died down I got talking to one of the archaeology students, and he were as happy as anything. Apparently they learned a whole load about ancient wine-making techniques which they hadn’t known before. So at least one person got something out of it.”

Linua hadn’t been able to tell Grandmother that she wanted to be an archaeologist, and anyway it would be a bad time to do it now, when they were in the middle of the war over clothes. She decided to practice by telling Alnan instead—not that telling Alnan would be remotely the same experience as telling Grandmother.

“I’ve decided I want to study archaeology,” she said.

Alnan took this in his stride, as she had known he would.

“It’s good to know what you want in life,” Alnan said, nodding approvingly. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I left school, so I just joined up. Much better to have an idea of where you’re going.”

“Do you regret going into the army?” Linua asked curiously.

Alnan paused with the mop between his hands and considered this.

“If I could go back and do it again,” he said, “I would’ve gone for a specialist role, instead o’ just infantry. But I didn’t know then that was an option, see. I just wanted to get away from the fishing boats, which is what all the other lads my age did, and the only other option I could see for someone like me was the army. But no, I don’t regret it.”

The conversation paused for a while as they carried all the cleaning equipment—bin bags, dusting clothes, cleaning sprays, broom, dustpan, brush, mop and mop bucket—down the stairs to the ground floor.

“How do you get to be an archaeologist?” Alnan asked, as they started emptying all the ground floor wastepaper baskets.

“I need to study archaeology at university,” Linua said. Even as she answered, she knew that wasn’t going to cut it with Alnan.

“And how do you get into university for that?”

Linua had no idea.

“Do you know any archaeologists you can ask?” Alnan said, once she had informed him of this.

“No, but there’s an archaeology department at the University of Herkow. I could ask there. Or at the museum.”

Alnan nodded.

“Then you’ve got a plan.”

Alnan liked to approach every task by breaking it down into its smallest constituent parts and then he would start working his way through them one by one. He was very methodical like that. His shift at the Observatory followed a set routine from which he almost never deviated. Halfway through the cleaning he had a fifteen-minute break scheduled, where they drank a cup of tea and watched something on Alnan’s tiny black and white TV in the janitor’s cupboard.

Today was a program of famous people who had died recently, with a short obituary for each one. Grandmother liked obituaries as much as Alnan did—it was one of the sections she invariably turned to when she read the newspaper on Nimrasday—so Linua assumed this was an old person thing.

She started to drift off, thinking about her project, when a name caught her ear: Professor Chuyn Hee Guo, who had led the expedition to investigate the Ancient Kāruan site several months ago, had recently died, and was being featured on the program.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Last year a private treasure hunter had sent an agent to break into the Observatory, and take photos of a map in the museum vault. The map the private treasure hunter had been after had turned out to be immensely valuable. It had been mis-identified as a star map and lain undetected in the vault for decades.

About ten months ago, after it had been re-discovered, the map had been moved to the Shinboa Archaeological Museum, where scholars had studied it carefully in order to determine the location of the lost facility it was purported to record. An expedition had even been dispatched to investigate the facility but, to the Astronomy Club’s collective disappointment, no word had since appeared in the media of its success or failure.

Linua felt a chill unfurling inside as she listened. Had the expedition killed Professor Guo?

The report said that he’d died of a viral infection, after a long battle with illness. How could he have been so ill, when eight months ago he had been well enough to launch a challenging and potentially dangerous expedition to a lost Ancient Kāruan facility?

The obituary programme spent more time dwelling on his career than on his illness and death, but Linua decided to report this to the Astronomy Club tomorrow, and see what they said.

When she had first joined the Club she had been worried that Alnan would be insulted that she wanted to spend one evening a week with them instead of him but, on the contrary, he had been delighted, and had encouraged her to spend as much time as possible with them.

“Better to be with kids your own age, not a boring old man!” he said, to which she had protested that he wasn’t boring.

At the end of his shift, Alnan retrieved the key to the museum vault. It was Eret’s dad who had agreed that the Astronomy Club could pursue the project Linua had suggested, and who had liberated the key to the vault from the trustees.

That he had been able to persuade the trustees to allow the vault key to be kept on the Observatory premises was a big concession, given the events with the thief last year. It was kept in a safe in the office of the Head of the Observatory. A new CCTV system had been installed throughout the Observatory, and an alarm system had been set up at various points throughout the building, not least for the museum itself and the vault. For the first couple of months after the break in last year, there had even been a security guard prowling about, but ultimately it had been deemed too expensive, even with the largess gained from the discovery of the map. The security guard had been dispensed with, and upgrades to the telescope had been ordered instead.

After Alnan had opened the vault for Linua and secured the alarm system, Linua went down the steps and into a large room with a low ceiling, filled with rows and rows of metal filing cabinets. Stored here was the collection of Sir Lee Seng, who had built the Observatory a century ago. The collection had been added to since, so there were all sorts of things hidden away in the big metal drawers.

Linua’s proposal had been for the Astronomy Club to check each artefact against its description in the inventory, to see if there was anything valuable or rare that had been mislabelled as something more mundane, as had happened with the map. The Astronomy Club had been keen on the idea and, once approval had been gained from various adults, the project had commenced with a great deal of fanfare and excitement.

However, the members of the Astronomy Club had discovered that checking inventory was a long, boring process, and after nothing of note had been discovered they had fallen by the wayside one by one, until only Linua was left. There was usually a forty-five minute period after Alnan had finished his shift and before the car service came to collect Linua, which gave her a little bit of time every day to go into the vault and continue the project by herself.

It was during this process that she had discovered that she liked archaeology.

Linua hefted the massive inventory tome, which supposedly listed everything held in the vault, and took that and her own printouts to the aisle she was currently working on. The inventory book was ordered not by type of find, or even by filing cabinet, but by the date the item entered the collection. This made it enormously hard to keep track of anything that was in the museum. Linua’s first self-imposed task had been to copy each item from the book into a spreadsheet computer program, which had columns for the name of the artefact, the date it entered the collection, the page of the inventory it was recorded on, the period it was from, its provenance, and where it was stored.

This allowed Linua to use the spreadsheet software to sort the collection by its location in the vault instead, and made it easier to check each drawer one by one.

Linua loved the sense of time she got from handling the artefacts. Each one could be hundreds or even thousands of years old. In long ago days, before the entire astronomical community had become obsessed with the search for Lord Nimras’s mothership, they had searched the skies for answers to other questions, some of them quite nonsensical, but Linua liked the sense of mystery and adventure imbued in the objects she came across.

One had been a tablet full of tiny chicken-scratch figures that had apparently been the household inventory of nobleman from the Kingdom of Kāru. The translation of the list of items had included a tapestry of giant burrowspider silk, woven in moonlight by the Midnight Priestesses of Amerash to preserve its unique colour. Linua had no idea who the Midnight Priestesses of Amerash were, but they sounded like something she wanted to find out about. Another item had been part of a mural portraying a royal orrery, complete with the tiny figure of a cat, whose paws batted at the moving globes. A third item had been a series of portraits, preserved under glass plates, depicting ancient astronomers who had served at the Maze Palace court during the New Kingdom, and Linua had been hugely delighted that one of them looked a bit like Eret's dad.

So far each artefact Linua had checked so far had turned out to be in its correct place, and nothing that had mis-labelled, at least that she could recognise, but she was only halfway through. There were still a lot of drawers to check.

She pulled open the first drawer, and checked it against the printed list from her spreadsheet. This contained a collection of Ancient Kāruan electrical connectors retrieved from a two and a half thousand year-old cache that had been buried during the Post-Deluge period. The cache consisted of four standard round connectors with double pins, and one non-standard flat connector with three pins. The four double-pin connectors were there. Where the three-pin connector was supposed to be, however, was an empty space.

Linua stood there for a little while and thought about this. Then she carefully read the description and checked the drawer again. Yes, still missing.

The sensible thing would be to continue with the inventory. The three-pin connector had probably been put in the wrong drawer at some point, or moved by accident. If she continued slowly and methodically, as she had been, she would probably find it.

Or, she could spend the next twenty-five minutes going through every drawer she hadn’t yet checked to see if it really was there or not. She bit her lip while she thought about it. It wasn’t a hard decision.

She pushed the drawer shut with a snap, and put aside the heavy inventory tome and printouts. She could do it if she went fast. She flicked open each drawer, checking the contents as quickly as she dared.

By the time she closed the last drawer she was two minutes late for her car service, but that wasn’t important. She knew the driver would wait.

The important thing was that she hadn’t found the missing artefact.