Dr. Delecta, Al Hamra and Olivia returned to the camp by lunchtime, and sat down with the rest of the team to eat a quick meal of reheated rice and dispenser chicken shwarma while they waited for the battery on the tabula to recharge. Once the meal was done they set to work on the tabula. Here Lavim Tamm was helpful – although it was not his, he and the other dig workers had been given a password to activate some basic functions of these devices, and he was able to login and give them access to a few basic programs. From that account Siladan thought he might be able to slice his way in to the root and gain full control, but as he was preparing to do so he noticed that there was a remote camera application, and that this small daemon included footage from the dig’s last day. He showed the timestamp to Lavim, who confirmed that was likely the morning everyone died, and refused to stay and watch.

  The camera view showed the edge of a wide cave, lit by standing lamps and busy with the activity of several people against the nearest wall. The camera had obviously been set to record their efforts, which focused on a frieze of interlocking tiles that they were slowly and methodically destroying. Three people worked on the wall, digging at a central point, paying little heed to the ancient tiles that they smashed and discarded as they worked. One of them was Lavim Tamm, who reached into a hole in the wall as they watched and drew the statuette from within, covered in dust. He was just examining it when suddenly two men just out of view started arguing. The content of their dispute was unclear on the recording, disrupted by echoes in the cave and the clatter of breaking tiles, but soon one of them rushed into view, yelling back at his colleague and then vomiting just behind the line of workers. His colleague followed him into the camera’s view and also began vomiting, while the men at the wall stopped working and began to complain to each other, Lavim among them and still holding the statuette.

  The video kept running. One of the diggers asked if something was coming, and they began to act terrified and confused. After perhaps a minute of this growing uneasiness the man who had been working closest to the camera pulled a pistol from beneath his jacket and pointed it at a man in the distance, near the far wall. He yelled “You can’t stop me! I will not fail!” and shot him three times. The other members paid this no mind, however, turning instead to look in the opposite direction, one yelling “Sarcofagoi!” before they all began to run towards the camera and the cave exit beyond it. As they began to move a dark, unidentifiable shape emerged from nowhere and stabbed a massive spike through the chest of the shooter, making him jerk up into the air and throw his gun and tabula to the ground, along with a cube that fell out of his coat. Moments later a nearby woman, backing away in horror, suddenly shivered and twitched and then died as her neck stretched impossibly long and her fingers twisted and convulsed. People screamed and ran past the camera, the dark shape dropping its victim and chasing them out of view. For a few seconds they heard gunshots and more screaming from behind the camera, and the scene became still, the only sound the slow gurgling chokes of someone just out of view of the camera, dying as his own neck swelled up and cut off his breathing. The dark shape did not return.

  Siladan replayed the video, this time focusing on the man who had fired the gun and pausing regularly. It appeared that before the horror began he was fiddling with something in his coat, probably the cube, and about ten minutes before that he was sending and receiving messages on his tabula. He had obviously done something, summoned something or unleashed some monster from within the cube.

  “I want that cube,” Siladan announced into the silence that followed the second playing of the video, and the horror it showed. “There’s more in that cave than just Lavim’s statuette.”

  “He dropped it there and died before he could escape,” Al Hamra said. “But he had some plan, didn’t he? Doing something with his tabula and coming into the dig with a gun.”

  “A thief? A saboteur?” Olivia asked. “Lavim would know who he was.”

  “We can’t show Lavim this,” Dr. Delecta responded firmly. “No! He’s fragile enough without seeing this. We should go and investigate. Once we get his tabula we can find out who he is and what he was doing.”

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  “There’s a monster in there,” Olivia pointed out. “Are we sure we want to do this?”

  Siladan replayed the video again, pausing it at the point where the dark shape emerged from the shadows. “This?” He asked. He sped forward to the last scene, where the woman’s neck suddenly stretched. “That did this?”

  “Yeah,” Olivia replied in dry, stiff tones. “The thing that magically stretched that girl’s neck. What is it?”

  “I’d say it was a Sentinel,” Siladan guessed, zooming in on the horror of the woman’s neck. “Portal builder technology. They’re set to guard tombs and lost vaults. Triggered by unknown conditions, and said to have the power to warp flesh.”

  “Nice,” Olivia commented. “You want to go in there with it?”

  “I think it was triggered by the box,” Al Hamra said. “Some kind of Portal builder technology, maybe. Either that guy didn’t know, or he thought it would disrupt the dig and he could get out before it got him. Big mistake.”

  “Siladan, you said the statuette was a Firstcome artifact,” Olivia turned to Siladan, “And Lavim said the dig site was a Firstcome ruin. Why would there be a Portal builder monster in a Firstcome site?”

  “Good question!” Saqr said, rounding on the archaeologist. “It doesn’t fit!”

  Siladan shrugged. “Sometimes the Firstcome put their burial places in Portal builder ruins, to take advantage of their superior tech. As far as we know the Portal builders disappeared tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago, but their ruins still stand intact in some places, which means they’re resistant to every environmental challenge. The Firstcome sometimes buried relics or people in the same places, assuming that they would never be destroyed by the elements. And they sometimes took advantage of Portal builder guardians.” He shuffled in his seat, rising up a little and shifting into lecture mode. “There is a famous Firstcome ruin in Tarazug, a largely unexplored red dwarf system in the Miran Chain, that was established in the ancient halls of one of the best preserved and most extensive Portal builder ruins, which are called the Portal Annex because they’re believed to be somehow connected to Tarazug’s famed Empty Portal.” He looked around the group, waiting for recognition of this miraculous archaeological site, but finding only blank faces, continued. “That’s a Portal that no longer works, and is built on the surface of the third planet. Some researchers believe it was an early Portal builder experimental site, while others think they may have had some technology to move around the planet itself using the Dark Between the Stars, which they either abandoned because it was unstable or which was lost long ago, perhaps decayed by the planet’s gravity well. The Order of the Pariah believe that this Portal was actually used by the Portal builders not for travel but to communicate with great beings in the Dark Between the Stars, and that it is connected to the downfall and disappearance of the Portal builders themselves. Some even say that this is th-“ Seeing Al Hamra doing a small looping motion with one hand, Siladan broke his monologue and rushed to the end. “Anyway the Portal Annex is part of the Omran Stone Ruins, and it is filled with nasty traps and guardians, Sentinels and the like, but most of the artifacts within it are Firstcome. The general idea is that they used its permanence and deadliness to protect their own relics.”

  “So they’re just piggy-backing on Portal builder sacrilege, or whatever,” Adam summarized for him, and Siladan nodded.

  “But they yelled Sarcofagoi,” Saqr reminded them. “Could it be that? I don’t want to deal with them, you can’t touch them. And the team were arguing with each other, the guy shot someone else, it’s classic Sarcofagoi behavior.” Saqr, like everyone who grew up in space, was familiar with the legend of the Sarcofagoi, incorporeal spirits from the Dark Between the Stars that used Mystic powers to sow discord between people, tricking them through paranoia and dissension into making fatal mistakes or even killing each other, then taking physical form to feast on the bodies.

  “True,” Siladan agreed, “But that thing was big, and it killed someone itself, Sarcofagoi usually don’t do that. A Sarcofagoi would have been happy to just eat the guy who was already dead. And the malformed neck is not Sarcofagoi.”

  “Do they work together?” Olivia asked. “Some kind of shadow party, Sentinel and Sarcofagoi?”

  “Never heard of it,” Siladan said, and shrugged. “But creatures of the Dark… who knows?”

  “Sarcofagoi is consistent with what the Sogoi said,” Dr. Delecta pointed out, “About the spirits of the dead. They can look a lot like that.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Adam told them. “I can kill a Sentinel. If it’s Sarcofagoi they’ll try to make us kill each other. But they can’t touch me. And if one of you start acting out of line, Al Hamra can stop you.”

  They looked at Al Hamra, who shrugged. “Soldier’s got a point. I can use my, ah, curse. Stop you doing whatever stupid thing you’re about to do. And they aren’t invisible. We’ll know if we need to be careful. Let’s go.”

  With that he stood up, the meeting dismissed, and they began their preparations for an afternoon trip to the dig site.