‘Probably,’ Nava agreed.
‘She’s been grumpy since we left the lab,’ Melissa said.
‘When have I ever been grumpy?’
‘Since we left the lab, obviously.’
‘I wouldn’t say she was grumpy,’ Rochester said, his tone thoughtful. ‘Sullen, perhaps.’
Nava kept her mouth closed aside from to put food in it.
‘Well, the fact that the artefact was brought to SAS-squared is a boon for our publicity and a big boost to our reputation,’ Mitsuko said. ‘Mel, would you put down a note to discuss it at the next council meeting? I wonder if Lambert Stenger would agree to a few more class visits.’
‘Probably,’ Melissa said. ‘He seemed quite enthusiastic about showing it off to us.’
‘Because you’re enthusiastic about the subject,’ Rochester said. ‘Still, I’d imagine he would like to garner more interest.’
‘I wonder what it does.’ Melissa stopped eating to stare at the ceiling as though imagining all the many things such a device might be capable of. ‘I mean, it could be anything. If it’s still functioning, maybe it’s some sort of quintessence aggregator. Maybe, with this thing, we can get other artefacts working.’
‘I doubt it,’ Nava said. ‘To me, it looked like a container. It looks like it was built to contain something.’
‘What?’
‘I have no idea. On the other hand, the Harbingers went to the trouble of building something which would keep whatever it is locked up forever. I can’t see it being good.’
Melissa’s eyebrows rose. ‘Well, that’s certainly dramatic. Have you been reading Gothic horror novels?’
Nava gave a small shrug. ‘It’s just a feeling. I don’t think anything good is going to come of messing with that artefact. If it was me who found it, I’d have dropped it in the nearest black hole.’
Mitsuko frowned. ‘You aren’t normally like this. What has you so disturbed about a weird, black box?’
‘I have no idea. It just… felt wrong.’
‘As far as I could see,’ Melissa said, ‘it was just a black box with some carving on it. Shame we can’t read the writing. That might tell us what’s inside.’
‘Personally,’ Nava said, ‘I hope we never find out.’
235/5/18.
Lambert pressed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, his brows furrowed. Maybe, just maybe, he should give it up for tonight. It was eight in the evening and he had been working on the artefact scans all of Sunday. His understanding wife knew that he was excited about his new object of obsession, but his daughter was likely to get grumpy if she did not see her father at all today.
His eyes wandered over the array of screens showing various different views of the artefact. It was proving to be just as fascinating, and enigmatic, as expected. The exterior views were, of course, the epitome of enigmatic. The carved images were probably representations of Harbingers, but there was limited information on exactly what they looked like when they were wandering the galaxy and these carvings were somehow different. It was not something Lambert had yet managed to put his finger on, but there was something a little off about these specific carvings. He had a computer running a comparative analysis of these three images against every other known representation. The writing was as indecipherable as always. The likelihood of anyone ever discovering a Rosetta Stone for the Harbinger language was basically ‘a snowball’s chance in a supernova’ to none.
The interior scans were a little fuzzy, but from what Lambert had been able to make out, the mechanisms within the case – which was made of an unusually dense material, hence the fuzzy scans – were unlike any human magical engineering. The only absolutely clear thing inside the artefact was a sphere, right at the centre, which none of the scans could penetrate. Sonar, radar, or magical, nothing he had tried could get inside that sphere. Lambert was beginning to suspect that the entire artefact was there to support what had to be some sort of force barrier. Whatever was inside, it had to be exceptionally important.
He was staring at one interior image, trying to resolve what he was seeing while simultaneously trying to persuade himself to go home, when one thing jumped out at him. In the upper right portion of the image, fuzzy but clear if you looked at it right, there was a switch. It was a classic toggle switch, a stick protruding from a slot. The stick was protruding from the bottom of the slot, as though it had been flicked down. Flicking it up…
Lambert was alone in the lab. Everyone else had left to have at least a bit of a weekend and Lambert himself should get up and do the same. The switch could be examined more carefully in the morning. Perhaps they could trace what it connected to and work out what it did. Playing with it now was not a good idea.
But there was a switch…
One of the spells Lambert had learned to make life easier was Telekinesis. He had enough power to deadlift forty-five percent more weight with his mind than he could with his muscles. That was not necessary to move a toggle switch. The difficulty was in seeing what he was doing. He set up an imaging radar system which had produced the best pictures so far, and then he fumbled around with his mind, using the least amount of power he could muster until he saw the switch move on the radar display.
‘Well then,’ he said to the artefact. ‘Let’s see what this does.’
He flipped the switch.
235/5/19.
Courtney stood in lab 126, wondering why someone had let a tornado loose in it. Various bits of equipment had been thrown into other bits of equipment. And ‘bits’ was now the appropriate term for a lot of it. Mixed in with the gear Courtney thought she should probably recognise were several things she did not. Given that this was a lab devoted to analysing Harbinger artefacts, she guessed that she was looking at some of them. They had not
