‘Turns out,’ Rochester said as the class marched over to the laboratory building, ‘that Lambert Stenger is something of an expert on Harbinger artefacts.’
‘I thought you knew,’ Melissa said. ‘He’s written a bunch of scientific papers on the subject along with various magazine articles and a book. The Harbingers Demystified. I don’t think it was a best seller, but it’s one of the better books on the subject for the general public.’
‘Did it demystify the Harbingers?’ Nava asked.
‘Well, not so much. I mean, we know so little about them that all he could really do is explain the most popular theories and suggest which were the most likely to be true.’
The lab building was white concrete, of course, and seemed to have a lot of corridors in it. Postgrads, mostly in casual clothing, looked askance at the stream of young adults trooping through their domain. There would, probably, have been things said if they were not following along behind Lambert. Another thing Rochester had discovered was that Lambert was one of the senior educators at the school. He had tenure, which technically gave him the right to be called professor, but he had told them to call him ‘mister.’ Nava wondered why he was teaching metaphysics to a bunch of freshmen, but maybe he just liked doing it.
Laboratory 126 was a room with a lot of equipment in it. Nava had no idea what most of the equipment was or what it did, but there was plenty of it. There were also various things which were probably Harbinger artefacts given that they looked nothing like any of the other equipment in the room. The thing they were here to see was obviously not the only item under investigation. Nava noticed something which looked like it might have been a weapon – it was shaped like a gun though it was all smooth lines and there did not seem to be a trigger – though it could also have been a child’s toy or a hairdryer or something for trimming toenails for all she knew. It appeared as though the Harbingers had built devices on aesthetic grounds as much as for functionality. If the device was a weapon, it was not terribly threatening. Then again, an alien might not find a nine-millimetre pistol threatening if they had no idea what it did.
However, one of the artefacts was different. It sat in pride of place under a plastic dome in the middle of the room. There was a remote camera on a robotic arm slowly moving over it. Presumably that was recording as much fine detail as possible before anyone got to work on trying to analyse the thing.
‘It arrived yesterday,’ Lambert explained as the class gathered around to watch the process and examine the artefact. ‘We are currently taking external measurements and images. Lidar this morning to give us a full, three-D model. The camera is now recording microscopic imagery in the visible spectrum along with near-infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths. This is… an absolutely amazing find.’
Why it was so amazing was not especially clear, though it was different from the other things under study. It was a black box. Not quite a cube, the top surface was about two centimetres smaller in each dimension than the bottom. The base was probably about thirty centimetres on each side and it was roughly thirty centimetres high. Not huge. Yet it gave off the strong impression that you should stay the Hell away from it. Carved into three of the side faces was some sort of image. A figure, humanoid but clearly not human. The fourth face had writing carved into it, though it was not any kind of writing Nava had ever seen before.
‘Those are Harbinger glyphs,’ Melissa said, keeping her voice low. ‘No one knows how to read them.’
‘And is that what the Harbingers looked like?’ Nava asked, pointing vaguely at one of the figures.
‘Probably. There are a few instances of carvings and statues like that on Harbinger sites. Long limbs, long fingers, and a thin body. Fairly big head. The one skull that’s been found suggests that they had around twenty-five percent greater brain capacity than humans, but that doesn’t necessarily make them more intelligent.’
‘What makes this artefact different from the others, Mister Lambert Stenger?’ someone asked.
‘Ah, that’s a very good question,’ Lambert replied. ‘I’m glad someone other than Rochester Hunt or Melissa Connelly asked it.’
‘I was going to,’ Melissa muttered.
‘This is the only instance of a functioning Harbinger artefact ever discovered.’
‘No way!’ Melissa had, perhaps, not meant to say that quite so loudly, but Lambert did not seem to mind.
In fact… ‘Very well put, Melissa Connelly. Ha! Yes, that was very much my reaction when I was told about it. I didn’t believe it until it arrived and we did a cursory inspection. Full analysis is yet to be carried out, but this device is emitting quintessential energy in a manner consistent with an active spell.’
‘B-but how has it stayed functional all this time? Tens of thousands of years and it’s still operating? That’s…’
‘Unprecedented. Unique. Quite marvellous. I have no answer to your question at this time, but I am very much looking forward to finding out and I promise that you’ll all be among the first to hear it. We live in fascinating times, students. This single artefact from a long-lost civilisation may be the key to sorcery we have yet to conceive of.’
It sounded great, but Nava found herself wondering what kind of magic could be in the thing that it made her want to leave the room.
~~~
‘It’s all over the news channels,’ Mitsuko said. ‘Finding an
