Discovery Pt. VII (standard:science fiction, 1465 words) [7/8] show all parts
Author: Goreripper	Added: Dec 11 2001	Views/Reads: 2412/1693	Part vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
The door to the inner sanctum of the Daktar relic is opened at last, and with it the secrets of Arcana's doom.

VII 

Except for the swathes of light provided by our torches, utter darkness
met our eyes when we stepped through the door into the labyrinth's 
inner sanctum. Darkness, and total silence. Thousands of years had 
passed since any living thing had entered this chamber. Taking the 
first steps into that place was as momentous for me, an archaeologist, 
as when I had first set foot on Arcana. There was the thrill not only 
of discovery, but of being the first to witness something that had lain 
hidden for millennia. 

Our team set to work without delay, erecting batteries of lights that,
once they were switched on, illuminated a vast, round chamber, 
encrusted with the dusts of time but otherwise virtually untouched. The 
almost cryogenic state of this place had served to preserve it in an 
almost pristine condition, and we were alarmed to think what effect 
even the merest touch of our hands would have on the objects arrayed 
before us. 

The room was circular, somewhere in the vicinity of quarter of a span in
diameter. Around a large central pillar that appeared to consist of a 
range of sophisticated equipment including vision screens there orbited 
several rings of what were most obviously work stations. Many of the 
objects on the desktops were on the verge of almost complete ruin 
merely due to their incredible age and several turned to powder at the 
merest touch, but at isolated locations we found rather well-preserved 
examples of many devices, some of which we took to be visual display 
units and manual input interface units that looked very much like our 
own keyboard units from antiquity. Several of these still had 
characters apparent on the top faces of each key. 

By far the most significant find however was one which we simply did not
expect to make. Considering the vast age of the place, and the 
completely deserted state of the rest of the complex as we had so far 
explored it, we just were not prepared to find, slumped back in a chair 
in a position of evident prominence in the room, a magnificently 
preserved specimen of the race we had come so far to discover. The 
excitement this caused can no doubt be imagined; it took considerable 
time for it to pass and I am quite sure Professor Neffergi would never 
have forgiven himself if he had not been there to see it. 

To say that the corpse was perfectly preserved would be to overstate the
facts. The cadaver was, in fact, exceedingly wizened and blackened, 
completely dehydrated and brittle as the salt crust on a dry lake bed. 
It was, after all, 100,000 years old. The back half of the top of the 
head was nothing but a hole and at first we could not identify what 
that meant, until a younger colleague retrieved an object from under a 
nearby desk. It had most likely fallen there after being dropped by the 
creature before us. The object was easily identifiable as a small 
projectile weapon; such things had featured rather too prominently in 
many of the transmissions we had received from Arcana. It would take 
several months before we would discover the reason for the creature's 
suicide, and with it we learnt what had become of the ancient 
civilization of Arcana. 

Many of the items our team removed from the facility on Daktar can now
be found at the best museums and universities throughout the sector, 
some may even be part of private collections, and the body we found now 
lies in state in an airtight coffin as the principal display piece of 
the Neffergi Wing at the Calambrosi University. The function of most of 
the things we found were almost immediately apparent, often because we 
had seen them in intercepted transmissions or because their design was 
so similar to objects and tools of our own design that they quite 
simply could not be anything else, but the decoding of the data we 
discovered took a great deal longer. We quickly learned that the 
central pillar of the chamber was also the mainframe for the ancient 
computer system and once we had ascertained how to effect the removal 
of the data banks we did so; both these data banks and the mummified 
remains were sent directly back to the Discovery with Professor 
Neffergi, whom it would seem had no difficulty finding enthusiastic 
team members to begin work on them virtually instantly. For my part, I 
stayed on at the site with Guillamo and several others, carefully 
cataloging and packaging objects, mapping and recording their positions 
within the room, measuring, weighing, speculating. It was some weeks 
before the Professor called for us, which only meant that he had become 


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