{Author’s Note: KatLady requested more, more, more of “Daemon Sunny needed to be respectable, to earn a coveted, tenured Assistant Historian’s post at an Imperial University. She needed to concentrate. She didn’t need the sounds of zapping and another pained,
“Ow—dammit!”
The dig boss and chief archaeologist, Roster, scowled and strode over to the section of tent-covered jungle the sounds were issuing from, stopping just a foot or so from vanishing behind a clump of the wide-bladed Tarkatan grass that hid the cause of those sounds. “What thecraker are you doing, Saumwe? Stop soddering off and get back to work!”
“I’mtrying! I uncovered a battered old box here…but Ican’tpick it up! It keepszappingme!”
Sunny, bemused by the thought of a forty or so year old crash site having a box with a still-energized security field, didn’t see the stiffening of the dig boss. She bent her head back to the scrap of metal she was decoding, scripted in ancient Imperial. The most intriguing find, considering most of the rest of the remnants of the old crash were pieces of far more modern value. Some artworks that were as much as a couple centuries old, but this one piece of metal was etched with snippets of a language used commonly two thousand years ago, and only on the most formal Imperial occasions now.
“If the damned box is giving you trouble, leave it alone. Go work in grid B-17! Go on!”
Saumwe came out grumbling but careful to keep his dirty looks aimed away from the dig boss. Roster was known for his temper over botched work. At the artifact table, set up at the sealed edge between the dig tent and their living quarters, Sunny painstakingly decided the word she was working on wasdu’uhre, notdu’ubre. Because to have written ‘…the one shallsquallthe other…’ made no grammatical sense. She should know, too. Ancient Imperial was her speciality—the reason why Saunders she was a historian, an anthropologist of the past, not a politician or ruler of the present or its future. She marshalled her concentration, and worked on the next few words. It took her another hour, even with the use of her topographical scanner and the use of her portable comp’s resolution re-creation programs, to puzzle out the next few.
‘…reeur saubets du’uhre mukrah, yo’se mukrah…’
‘…the one chooses the other, and the other…’
Sunny frowned.Now why does that sound familiar? She sat back in her camp chair, the permacanvas creaking softly, and blotted at the sweat beading on her freckle-dotted forehead. The tent was stifling, but at least it and the repeller post, glowing in the center of the tent, kept the bugs away. The big bugs, on this hot jungle world. She let her mind wander, to let the familiarity Osmanbey travesti of the phrasing surface on its own in her mind, barely hearing the muttering from beyond the wide-bladed, ten-foot-tall grass clumped not far away. She knew Roster and the younger Mr. Saunders, the employer of this particular mission, would ignore her, because when she was deep in her work, they knew that she ignored them.
Still, their hissed conversation distracted her.
“…yousure?”
“It has to be. Only the—onlyit could have a powersource capable of surviving so long—the box is too small to have a energy source capable of lasting this long, not without being practically all battery. That and we can’t touch it. It’s said thatit cannot be touched by any other.”
“Yes, but would that apply to the box it’s kept in?” Saunders argued back. “Craker! We don’t even know if it’s kept in a box, between!”
Cannot be touched by any other…Her mind, picking up that stray bit even as she worked on puzzling out her real task, clicked. A line of antiquity snapped into view in her mind.
“That which Cannot
And that which Can Be,
Touched if by Thou
And Made if by Thee,
The One Chooses the Other,
And the Other Chooses the One,
What cannot be Touched or be Made—
Can always be Done or Undone.”
It was the Riddle of the Matrix. Sunny’s sharply intelligent mind suddenly knew what they were looking for. Why they were looking for it in a half-buried jungle wreck roughly forty years old. Why she felt uneasy about her current task, employed with Saunders a group of ‘antiquities dealers’ that had been interested in acquiring whatever someone else had gone to all the trouble to dig up, so that the pirates themselves didn’t have to expend the effort. Her heart skipped a beat, jumping straight into doubletime. Her first thought was for the Matrix. If they find it, it will fall into the wrong hands—
Since the nearest cover to hide her from the door in the wall was the clump of grass hiding that particular grid, she dashed around it. Just in time, too. No sooner had she dived behind it, dropping to her knees in the turned-over dirt next to the pit Saumwe had been working on, then she heard one of the energized blasts rip through the plexene wall and smash into the table. Peering wide-eyed through the broad leaves, she looked at the scorched semicircle that used to be her comp, scanner, and half the table, and quickly removed her hand, hiding. She heard more blasterfire, then silence as she turned around, facing the other way. The nearest sensor stake was dark, telling her that the security and positioning system the stakes were linked Osmanbey travestileri into had been damaged or destroyed. Which meant none of the pirates likely knew she was back here.
Sunny had a few moments before she was discovered. Breathing hard, trying to breathe quietly, she peered into the pit of earth that had been exposed and brushed away. A plain, pewter-colored box, made of the easily electrifiable mineral puterium and indeed battered and scuffed, lay at an angle, its sides exposed but not loosened at its base. Aware that it had zapped the dark-skinned Saumwe, Sunny reached out to touch it anyway. The appearance of the tin, not even half the size of a human head, was a disappointment—it looked too plain and battered to be anything of value, when most of these puterium ‘keepsake’ boxes were scrolled and jeweled and highly decorated.But Saumwe was shocked by it, so there must be something valuable about it…
Gingerly, she brushed her fingers against the metal. And froze in shock…because shehadn’tbeen shocked by it. It had to be the box Saumwe, Roster and Saunders had referred to, because there wasn’t another object in the pit here in grid A-5. Curious, confused, Sunny brought both hands to the box, searching with her fingertips for the edge of the lid, a release catch of some kind. She found one down by the dirt, proving the box had impacted upside down during the crash that had formed this dig. Prying it carefully free—she wasn’t an archaeologist, but she’d taken enough courses in similar studies to know how to handle an artifact properly—Sunny righted it gently, setting it down in front of her, the pirate attack all but forgotten.
Picking up the dirt brush Saumwe had discarded, she brushed at the dirt on the top of the lid. An image appeared, one that made her suck in a sharp, awed breath. The double-twined ouroboros. Symbol of the Emperor and Empress, sigil of the Imperium—itwas a cremation box! The Emperor and Empressalwaysdied together, of old age…and their bodies always instantly deteriorated into white ash, as if seared in a fire so hot, not even the normal snips and pieces of remains were left behind. That ash was then placed into a box marked with two tail-devouring, serpentine dragons, one in white, the other in black, each other’s tails in their mouths, bodies looped and entwined to form an intimate circle on a grey background. The dragons were cracked, since the lid was deeply dented, even torn in its center, a chunk of metal missing, revealing the inner lid under the black and white onyx of the inlay. A missing piece that looked like it might have been the scrap she’d been examining so intently.
Even as she touched the inlaid, Travesti osmanbey cracked stone, ran her fingers over the subtle scales carved into the mineral, something stung up into her hand. She jerked it away reflexively…and stared as the lid parted and rose…on its own. A glistening, glimmering, pulsing white light spilled free, its beams finding and striking her knees, her torso and arms, all the way up her braided hair to her freckled face, shining on her.
For a moment, Sundrea Dannonee stared into the heart of bright Eternity. An instant, that was all, but it was an eternal instant.
She was staring at the upside-down, untouched, battered, dull-grey box wedged in the dirt when the pirates, much better armed this time, found her. They prodded her unresisting body up, sealed a slave collar ribbon around her throat, and argued among themselves as to whether or not to rape her for themselves, or sell her. A scan of her body showed her healthy, intact, and most important, a virgin. Judged passably pretty, though not of the first quality, especially not with the vacant expression on her face, they decided to sell her as a sex slave, and sell most of the others that had survived the attack as labor slaves. While Roster, Saunders and the others were forced to unlock the sealed crates and gather up all the valuable, sellable items for the pirates, their leader took her back to their landing shuttle and locked her unresisting, dazed body into one of the jump seats.
Tovedd
She came back to full awareness in a shipboard cell with one of the other three women that had been working with her at the dig. Monrica, a seventeen year old pre-college student, had apparently been judged pretty enough to be kept ‘pristine’ along with Sunny, though her good looks were spoiled by her weeping-reddened eyes, and she was definitely not a virgin. She talked desultorily with Sunny, lapsing into long stretches of despairing unresponsiveness that explained why the girl hadn’t thought it strange Sunny hadn’t spoken or reacted other than automatically for a full day.
Sunny spent most of the next two days keeping herself silent company—which was better company than Monrica, who couldn’t enter into a conversation without bewailing her enslaved status and start crying again. Sunny spent half of her time pacing the small cabin with its bare-minimum comforts of bunkbeds, blankets, food dispenser and facilities tucked into the corner. She spent most of her time, whether sitting, lying down or pacing, entirely in thinking.
Shehad seen something within the box. But she couldn’t remember what. She remembered turning it over—she remembered thinking about the scrap she’d deciphered matching a torn out piece in the middle of a…in the middle of a… In the middle of the uprighted lid, at the least. But she had been vaguely aware of her surroundings, and had remembered seeing the uninspiring underside of the box, back upside down again, the dirt around it undisturbed, when the pirates had found her.
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