At the far end, they sealed the vent behind them and doffed their masks. A sharp, sugary smell hit Mica's nose—cans of neon-colored drinks with names like "Zero-Hour Energy" were crushed into the mesh catwalk like an aluminum carpet. The sealed cave held the same air pressure as the outdoors but the concentration of oxygen was higher inside, so much so that the room was ringed with signs that said 'GROUNDING STRAPS MANDATORY / FLAMMABLE ATMOSPHERE'. Mica winced. That was fucking reassuring.
"Welcome to the greatest archeological discovery of the past two centuries." There was a pained edge to Fredda's smile. "Take it in. We're not gonna be seeing much more of it."
She guided Mica down a metal stairwell down to an old tiled prayer chamber that took up the bulk of the site. A ring of ironstone columns stretched towards a pale circle of light in the roof, but cut off in mid air as if decapitated.
"Oops, watch your step!"
"W-Woah." Mica stuck out her arms to steady herself. She'd nearly tripped into a shallow, inscribed depression in the floor, circular, about the diameter of one of the base crawlers parked in the corner of the room. She wondered for a second where those vehicles might've entered or exited the site; the massive, modern bulkhead cut into the far wall was a likely candidate.
Fredda pulled up a seat at a plastic desk covered in notes and textbooks, shoving papers onto the floor so she had enough room to open her laptop. While it booted, she turned and shouted towards the door. "Shufen! Did you see anything!"
On a catwalk above the door stood a lanky, black-haired student in another labcoat. It looked like she'd been monitoring the situation out a small window just behind her. The girl curled her fingers into a megaphone and yelled back. "Yeah! There's a dogfight or something!"
"What, she's sending more students?!"
"Yeah, I think our Lin's lost it! I dunno if we have much time!"
Fredda tapped Mica's shoulder and made off towards the door. "Wait here, kiddo."
"Wait, what do want me to—"
"You said you wanted a radio? Try that one. I can't seem to ring the bridge, but maybe you can do something about that."
That was foreboding. That had indeed been Mica's idea, but the way Fredda put it didn't inspire much confidence. Between a pair of broken stone finials tagged and wrapped in plastic, she found an older ruggedized tuner, plugged into an infrastructural antenna above the site. Mica didn't bother plugging the headset in. She'd know if her fears were founded just from the speaker output.
Her stomach turned. A wall of harsh, unnatural noise belted out of the device—heavy jamming on the frequencies it could reach. The radio on her Arrowhead would've been capable of channel hopping around it, but well...
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"No luck!" Mica yelled over her shoulder.
Fredda didn't reply. She and the other boffin were ducked beneath the window, arguing.
Shit. Mica wandered aimlessly about the site, kicking stones and discarded energy drinks out of her way. The most prominent thing was the shallow depression in the middle of the room; it looked too clean, as if something had been removed recently. Two concentric rings of ideograms were carved into the periphery. Although she didn't understand the dialect, the radicals she did recognize made her think it was the inverse of whatever had been taken away.
The girl tucked her head beneath her shoulders and flipped surreptitiously through Fredda's notes. A translation of the text was scrawled onto a piece of printer paper in thick black marker. Clippings from the scholars' tremendous dictionary curdled into a thick web of connections around the words, sprinkled with '?'s and 'check's, the debris of long deliberation that coalesced into the final translation:
We hold it self-evident that only those of noble blood are fit to rule over the common breeding.
All this work for that, huh? The wording was a little different, but it was the same phrase you found printed en masse on icons of the Emperor from tack vendors, next to bundles of incense or His favourite tea. It made sense, though: the passage was such a common refrain that they had to have gotten it from somewhere.
Below that, however, was a translation of the inner ring.
We hold it self-evident that only those of noble blood are fit to rule over the common breeding.
Thus when He came to us, we rejected Him.
...what. She'd never seen that part before. It was a little depressing for an icon; maybe that's why?
"Mica!" Fredda called her all of a sudden. "Get over here, and bring the grenade launcher!"
Mica nearly jumped out of her skin. It felt accusatory; she felt like she wasn't supposed to see that. But all she could do now was trudge up the catwalk where Fredda crouched with the other boffin, one Shufen. Another Tian Lung, her face rather gaunt next to Fredda's puffy jowls.
"Look, over there."
Shufen pointed out the window, careful not to raise her head too far over the sill. Her overlong black hair came down in clumps that reminded her of a nasty bedtime story. But unlike Fredda, she smelled clean, or really like soap; the two scholars were repulsive in their respective ways.
Mica pulled herself up to the sill until her eyes were just above the edge. A scattering of Federalist soldiers milled about a base crawler, parked on a strip of pavement about half a li out from the door. On the bed of the crawler, half-covered in tarpaulin and held down with truck straps, there was a massive green disc; the positive of the negative in the floor of the dig site.
"...the Epitaph of Jade," Mica surmised. "We need to get that to the Academy, right?"
Fredda and Shufen nodded in sync.
"Me?" Mica pointed between her collarbones. "You want me to get you to that crawler? With this?" She raised the grenade launcher she'd never used. "Do the Feds know we're here? How much prep time do we have?"
"First—I can't say for sure, but some of them came by with a battering ram earlier. As for the second—see for yourself, kiddo."
Fredda handed Mica a pair of binoculars and pointed towards the Academy, where a dogfight was well underway. There was a deep blue glow in the belly of the disc, which faced away from the setting sun. If she zoomed in, she could see red dirt swirling up around the edge that touched the red soil.
The Academy's engines were spooling up.
"What the fuck?" Mica said indignantly. "They're leaving us behind?"
In lieu of a reply, Fredda gripped Mica's shoulder with the flat expression of someone who was asking the impossible. Shufen glanced around bashfully before grabbing the other one. This was weird. Mica felt like she was suffocating.
Fredda made a circle with her fingers. It put her in the mind of that sphere of darkness from earlier—that strange House Gift.
"They'll never see us coming."