"Are you as excited about this as I am?" Carrie asked as she all but bounced along beside me on our way to the obelisk's containment building.

"I guess so," I said.

"Show some more enthusiasm! If this works, we'll be able to go back out into the field!" she said. "Do you know how long it's been since I've been able to really cut loose in a fight?"

"Last week, you cut one of my fingers off in a match and nearly cut through my femur," I answered.

"No! That was all an accident," she insisted. "I meant in a fight with live weapons and life or death stakes."

"Oh," I said, realizing what she meant. "Last week, you cut one of my fingers off in a match and nearly cut through my femur."

"See if I don't aim a little higher next time," she grumbled quietly, making me laugh.

"I get it," I told her. "I haven't spent more than seven years planetside since Rallypoint either. Every other time I was in space and going to the next fight. Spending nearly twenty years on one planet, even with something like the obelisk, isn't something I expected to do until later in life, closer to having to pick out a casket and funerary music instead of settling arguments between scientists and engineers."

"You have to admit though," I said with a smile, "this has been a nice little vacation."

"Yeah, I guess it has," she agreed. "I feel more ready to get into the fight than ever before! Makes me wonder if this is how Kyouka and the others felt when you finally took them off Planetary Leader duty."

"I know it is," I said. "Julio was constant submitting requests to me to let him join an Extermination Force, even as a foot soldier. Kyouka and Pat were even worse."

"Patrick's always been about the fight," Carrie said. "Makes sense that he'd hate having to play Govenor for a few decades."

"Demigod James, Horseman Applewood," the Head Engineer, Jacksons, greeted us just inside the door. "Please follow me; and thank you again for allowing this demonstration to continue."

"Not your fault that we ran out mithril," I told him. "I just hope your work with the divinium alloy shows fruit after this."

"As do I," he agreed. "We're just running through final checks of the equipment and double-checking the storage devices are ready for the expected amounts of data. The entire knowledge base of an alien race that was more advanced than anything we've encountered thus far! It's exciting to think about! I wasn't able to sleep at all last night!"

"I'm more excited to learn what sorts of weaponry they left us with," I said. "Having the entire knowledge base is wonderful, sure, but what I'm paid to worry about is the Scourge and wiping them out."

"I want to know what kind of foods they ate," Carrie chimed in.

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"Given the predatory evolution hypothesis they put forth," Jacksons said, "I feel comfortable with the idea that they were herbivorous creatures. Why else would they wonder about predatory evolution?"

"No, they were definitely carnivores," I told them both. "Omnivores, maybe, but you don't have canines like those and eat plants."

"Really? I understand you were graced with the chance to see them, sir, but I didn't realize you were able to see their teeth. What else were they like?"

"Tall as the Nephilim, covered in a thin layer of hair, three eyes, six fingers," I told him. "More than a few times, I've wondered if Yurnel and her team unlocked the genetic markings they left us with so long ago. Tall, strong, and flexible, the Rif'nay'fex and the Nephilim have more in common that way than anyone realizes. Makes me wonder if the Madman didn't lie to them and we're really just Rif'nay'fex that evolved differently."

"If that's the case, then it means we can never beat the Scourge," Carrie said. "If we start thinking like that, then we'll have to hand them every planet we've taken back so far. I choose to think that there was at least one person who looked over the Madman's work with us and they made sure he didn't leave us weaker than they expected."

"According to the obelisk, they expected dinosaurs to be the ones that found them," I told her. "Not hairless apes like us."

"I cannot wait for the opprotunity to converse with the obelisk's artificial intelligence," Jacksons said. "So many questions, so many answers! I'm giddy!"

Just after saying that, Jacksons lead Carrie and I into the observation room that overlooked a very different containment theater from the one I'd first lead the scientists into nearly fifteen years ago. The natural dirt floot with small shoots of plantlife had been replaced by a series of clean, white, metal, square tiles. Scattered across the one hundred by one hundred room were banks of storage servers, thousands of feet of cables, and computers that were constantly running simulations and tests on the obelisk and the theories that had put forth over the last fifteen years. Moving throughout the room were the engineers that would be monitoring the connection between the obelisk and the storage servers we'd brought for everything it held inside of it.

"Looks like chaos down there," Carrie said. "Makes me glad I'm a fighter instead of a researcher."

"They think the same thing about combat," I told her. "Engineers and scientists all have their own battlefields they fight on, they just call them labs and lecture halls instead of battlefields."

"Still glad I don't have to know what all the moving parts down there are called," she said.

"I agree about that," I said. "How long until go time, Jacksons?"

"Looks like maybe another ten minutes," he said. "The final checks are almost completed."

"Excellent," I said. "I'm hopeful that nothing goes wrong with all this."

Jacksons and Carrie both groaned at my words.

"Why would you jinx them like that?" Carrie asked. "Now it's guaranteed to go wrong."

"If someone doesn't put the words out there, then they aren't invited in," Jacksons agreed with her. "The first rule of testing anything as important as this is that it will work by the power of belief."

"And if it doesn't work?" I asked.

"Then we can't blame anyone for why it doesn't work and we can focus all our efforts on finding the problem," he said as if that was obvious.

Before I could say anything, an alarm tone rang out and most of the gathered scientists in the containment theater moved to leave the room while the few who remained moved into positions around the obelisk and took up posts at the computers.

"Beginning connection in five," one of them began to count out loud as most of the others furiously typed at their workstations and two others moved a large cable with a lever connector on it closer to the point that the mass of cables and wires connected to the obelisk would interface with the servers that were waiting for the data from the obelisk.

At one the two engineers nodded to one another and together, with a heavy heave, slammed the connection hope and dropped the lever to lock the entire contraption into one piece.

"Connection made," the scientist that had been counting called out. Nineteen years in the making and now we'd find out what our psuedo creators had left behind for us.