Gesto Chen couldn't stand the quiet tension of the Zimorax argument and so toiled in the rain to build the base camp. By the end of day two, she was bringing down a mallet onto metal pegs for more of the flooring, each blow came with a shriek of fury like Thor himself. She hated women fighting, women were so rare in her culture now. She thought about the genetic engineering that was slowly eroding free-will of sex and gender into agender asexuals who required genetic artisans to forge a hatchling. She was not against these things in theory or praxis, but the drive for a levelling equality rather than equity. The governors would rather no one was unique or needed assistance, everyone would be independent and anything that caused inconvenience was terminated, or edited.

This is what they found when they came upon the event site.

Of course the first thing was for Lt. Castillo to relieve her of duty and order to her to report to Dr. Chen for a psychological evaluation. Dr. Chen respected her enough to not immediately slap a mood patch on her, but did make it known she would if necessary.

That is a private thing and not plot relevant so I'll…

Is this the first time I've referenced a plot? I meant of course, it is not relevant to these entirely accurate and historical accounts.

Meanwhile, a tour… actually, it's not all that impressive. A lot of flatpack environment shelter, all white-grey and pastel green and blue. The medical… chamber was more white and green, with the green crescent iconography everywhere. Just in case it got lost, you know who to return it to. The mess hall was nothing special, benches, a kitchenette. Sleeping quarters were austere and militaristic. The concept of a recreation quarter was not taken into account, the assumption was that the outdoors was a good and healthy place to be when relaxing. No one accounted for heavy rain.

'Like an English summer,' said the Doctor dryly to no one and for no one but herself. She wasn't entirely sure where that thought had come from, she hadn't spent that much time on Earth, although she did think about it frequently. Somewhere to retire.

The hydroponics farm was a single, long chamber. Nothing more than a greenhouse with three rows. The research labs had two rooms, one filled with the analysers and whatnot, the other room, benches and cabinets of stationery and data pads. How dull. Oh, and waste produce is collected and dissolved into its mineral matter and recycled into the water, the waste of that waste is contained—as little contamination into the planet as possible.

After the rain, came sun. Despite everyone needing to recover, they had nothing to do and went to their duties.

Gesto, Diana and Dr. Zimorax didn't leave the hover craft, they did not look at the city, but they could see beyond the trees, some faint structures. It beckoned to them, the academics, a lost city, a people never known to have existed, a puzzle to work backwards from. The most untainted X to solve for.

So, on the second day after the base camp had been set up, three days after Gesto's little outburst, the sun came and lighted these beckoning towers of a sandy yellow stone, well-weathered and mottled, presumably, with some vegetation. There weren't many in tact and five could be seen from the base camp.

Further, over a ridge, the city opened up to them. Tall buildings, narrow streets, bushels of vegetation dappled in clusters of various blooms. The mottling of the towers was this vegetation, some roots burrowed deep and cracking the foundation like a parasite toppling a giant, some vines and stems wrapping so tight as to hold a falling rock in place. The towers didn't vary too much in style, although as they surveyed the parameter they noted how the squat buildings, those wide without much height, shared a similar design. These buildings, too, had the integration of an obsidian-like stone, some as thin, decorative ridges along the faces, some as roof tiles, one in particular had a dome of black stone.

Again, surveying the parameter, denoting where a great stone wall had once been, they observed somewhere in there, deep in the heart of the city, was an open area.

City is a generous name for it. It is more of a town, or a township. Purely because of its upwards construction it could have housed around six to eight thousand people. However it didn't take up that much space. To travel around it was less than the morning. And going around it a second time to erect a barrier (cable tied around metal pegs) brought them to lunch time.

Dr. Zimorax asked if the Doctor was coming back with them, but she had disappeared. They just about caught a glimpse of her colourful frills disappearing into the forest area. By protocol, Hestamoloc informed Lt. Castillo.

Lt. Vanessa Castillo thought for a moment, then said it aloud, 'Suspicious. Keep an eye on her with your scanner.' She paused again to think, she was writing a report, almost like a log, but with less prose. 'If you can, keep an ear out for her. Let her wander though. She's capable of handling herself.'

Lt. Castillo went back to writing her report, explaining how Gesto Chen felt the tension of Dr. Zimorax and Diana in such a confined space overwrought her. Lt. Castillo didn't go into much detail about the city as there was nothing to gleam barring data about its parameter and visibility and vague structural features.

After lunch a team of militarists entered the city. Hestamoloc was left at the base camp with the academics as security and a commanding officer. Lt. Castillo didn't trust Dr. Matsumoto to know how to deal with unrest, and she gauged Dr. Zimorax to be the cause of it, if not directly then a catalyst.

What they mapped from the city initially revealed little. They approached from different openings in the remains of the wall—some were more clearly gates than others. It was only as they converged in the near-centre, the open space, did it occur to Aumegden to look again at the map they had composed. She displayed it to all of them.

'Straight lines,' she said, as if it explained everything. It did to Lt. Castillo, but everyone else was waiting for her to say more. Joshua was just trying to concentrate on what was in front of him. His head aches, his senses were confused, blurring and doubling like a migraine or intoxication. 'They are perfectly straight lines, and the buildings are perfect against the streets, only a few inter-connecting alleys have a bend or corner. The work it took to create that. You don't get those kinds of straight lines without intense architectural skills.' She paused and looked at them, looked at Lt. Castillo and thought better, then thought about her parents and was a little rebellious (for her perception of the current immediate intimidate social climate compared to the current generalised expansive social climate she was raised in) and expressed sincere emotions: 'Growing up in cities—on any hub world, or just a developed world—you never see a bend that isn't planned for, unless you go to the ancient sites of particular cultures, and even those cascaded from Old Earth humans—even Earthlings—are just imitations. You escape the city and go to towns that haven't seen a neural link network station, or refuse any modernisation and you can feel the bend in the roads. They knew the ground was older than them and couldn't take down a mountain, so walked around it. This is built like a modern city on a colonised world. Planned out to the smallest detail before anything has been built.'

'I'm impressed. You clearly haven't been idle in your precious and privileged years,' said Lt. Castillo.

'No. I have not.'

'Where did you pick up a degree in architecture?' asked Gesto Chen, only a little bitterly. Aumegden was the Diana of this… if the students are a quartet, the lower-ranking militarists are a tetrad with Lt. Castillo and Dr. Chen as a commanding dyad like Dr. Matsumoto and Dr. Zimorax.

'I'm rich, a genetically engineered and nurtured problem solver, and I have connections, what else was I gonna do?' Aumegden answered with a shrug.

'Who gets degrees any more? Most of my knowledge is just the neural link in my mind. My medical school was practical training and applications,' said Dr. Chen. She smiled at the memory.

Lt. Castillo wasn't sure if it comforted her to know that. She had been there when Dr. Chen preserved a comrade's brain as they printed a new heart and lungs and ribcage. She noted to ask Dr. Chen about her capabilities after an EMP strike.

'Your point, Corporal?'

'That was all.'

'That was all?'

'Yes sir. Inform the academics and they will go nuts.'

'I doubt. Corporal, I think you assume these people were primitive. Just because they did not escape the planet, doesn't mean they weren't sufficiently advanced. Peladon never developed space-travel technology, but was deemed socially advanced enough to join the galactic union.' Said the woman with Pelodian heritage and a very romanticised view of what happened. Though her point stood.

'That was my point sir. We shouldn't assume they were primitive and should assume from this level of sophistication that there may be Black Zones, perhaps knowledge arks. In a city of straight lines why is the centre so round?'

'Yes, but they wouldn't have it in the middle of the population. Black Zones…' Lt. Castillo pulled up a map of the area, she searched for the end of the ravine where the groups met. It was not remarkable in anyway to her, the ravine simply ended. On the marker of the ravine was a life sign with the designation for Dr. Ruth Clayton.

'How'd she get back there for fast?' asked Joshua.

'We took the long way. She cut through the forest.'

'What's she doing there?'

'Black Zones for… nuclear waste… some of them might require a stream of water. Assuming this society still needed some to drink from it would make sense to build dams for it.' Lt. Castillo's mind did something she appreciated and wished could happen more frequently: She panicked. Everything cleared, suspicions, politicking, duties, personal life all vanished until the sights were zeroed in on a course of action. 'Everyone, back to base. Now! Quick march.' She opened communications with the Doctor. 'Doctor Clayton, report back to base camp immediately, but not enter base camp. Remain within sights, but do not enter. Do you copy?'

'Completely.' She said it with a smile, she said it softly, but they heard the hardness. 'You wanna tell me why?'

'Doubling environment checks and safety pre-cautions.'

'It's not a Black Zone, or Cavity, or Death… Zone. Or whatever else they get called. I'm scanning it now.' Lt. Castillo did not stop her quick march back to base camp and made sure no one else did. Eventually the Doctor reported back: 'Yeah, no radiation signatures beyond background radiation and the usual temporal distortion. We're safe. The dam is just a dam.'

'Very good. Meet us back as base camp anyway, Doctor Clayton.'

'Yes sir.'

Aumegden was right, the academics went nuts for the mapping of the city. They came to similar conclusions about the advancement of the civilisation, although posited that as the city was so small and the flatlands so sparse, that it was a matter of necessity to build up and straight rather than let things happen. This was corroborated by the Doctor's information about temporal distortions. She couldn't be entirely accurate or certain (a lie), but it appeared that there were layers of linear time: At the dam, the carbon dating placed the rocks ten thousand years ahead of the similar stone in the city. With her instruments she mapped out four possible staggered waves of linear time. The city, the flatlands, beyond either of these to the east, and the ravine area.

'Can you tell how different?' asked Lt. Castillo.

'Oh yeah,' said the Doctor, charming in her arrogant shrug. 'Well, I don't know until I've been in the city, proper, but superficially, the city is the slowest to develop, the ravine the beyond, maybe even the rest of the planet, the fastest. The ravine developed slower than the farmlands. But if you're looking for exact rates of progression….' The Doctor shrugged.

'This could increase the density of population,' said Dr. Zimorax. 'Actually, how do we know it's farmland?'

'Flatlands often used in farming, and trace elements of vegetation in the soil in a particular pattern, very finite end for something natural.'

If you'd think they'd marvel at her versatility of genius, you'd be wrong. They all told themselves it was obvious and they would have thought to check. Although, Chitra did later point out that she was talking more like them now.

Doctor Zimorax continued her theorising aloud: 'If the farms could grow crops at a fast enough rate, then there would be enough food for many people in the city. Assuming they didn't have underground cold stores.'

'There was a cold store found, Doctor Zimorax. Or at least, a connected cave system in the south of the city.' Orlo brought it up on the map.

'Somewhere to start.'

The next day they split into two teams. The xeno-biologists (Dr. Matsumoto and Icrel) and the xeno-anthropologists (Dr. Zimorax, Diana, Orlo and Chitra). The uneven split of fields of study was rationalised that the militarists, with their survival training, and Dr. Chen, made up enough of a team for any research into valuable natural resources. It was mostly quadrants and taking samples with environment suits, Dr. Chen constantly monitoring everyone's vital signs. The anthropologists were given free reign of the city, as it was abandoned and easily traversable, Lt. Castillo and Captain .937 agreed they didn't need constant supervision.

Recall the buildings with the thin obsidian-like ridges? It was the first building Aumegden and Diana entered. The door was nothing more than a rotted plank on the floor, the hinges long since rusted to dust. Inside was a big room with an open ceiling that continued to open all the way up the four storeys. The openings were held in place with stone columns, on which were curved metal plates, in the centre of which was a dais.

Diana stood on the dais and swore just to test the acoustics. They reverberated, echoing only slightly, even to the broken roof beyond her words disrupted delicate leaves.

'I heard that young lady,' came Dr. Zimorax over the comms in a failed attempt at geniality.

'I think this is—'

Diana stopped and moved out of the echo chamber dais to the rest of the room, lined with stone pews. Aumegden above found the same and a storey above that, rotted wooden pews, only the nails remaining.

'I think I've found a parliament, or auditorium, or… what's that… amphitheatre! Orlo, if you promise not to sing either of those songs, you'd love it here.' Diana moved around, looking at the remains of furniture, only the metal remained intact, gold was in ample supply and there was bronze in sparse supply. A spectrometer revealed that the curved plates were brass. There was evidence of fabrics, a confusing tapestry hung over a wall, behind which was a wooden chest, with a gavel inside. Diana figured it was a holy relic, or of cultural value, something to silence crowds in the auditorium. Along the wall it depicted people with halos in various actions, they were humanoid, in one it appeared a goddess was giving the people reeds or something.

Above, Aumegden listened to Diana's small movements. She listened to the way the sound moved around them. Distantly, she could hear the others. She wasn't designed or even trained to have a good ear, it was just something she developed. She stayed there a little while, this place had the same feel as a curved street, it was not meant to be that way, but it just became.

Elsewhere, Dr. Zimorax, Chitra and Orlo were carefully looking through the buildings. They were certain they were houses based on the upper storeys. However, the ground floor often reminded them of a market, or shop. Unable to help herself, Dr. Zimorax pulled a clay jar from the self, it had writing on it, she opened it and the dried powder inside was slightly rotted and smelled like it, but there lingered a perfume. Chitra followed her lead and found one containing petrified biological matter. She felt how easily they could be crushed, and had the idea that crushing them would produce the scent, or powder, but she dared not, despite how tempting it was. Orlo was below, the first building they had found with an underground room. It was cold, not just cool, but cold. Inside were huge barrels, clay, wood and metal. He ran a protected appendage over the surface, they were rough and clearly handmade.

'A lot of gold,' remarked Orlo, but they didn't hear him, too absorbed in the gold pots containing spices and perfumes and bio-matter. He repeated again over the coms, he waited a moment to be acknowledged, and when he was not he added: 'Has anyone else found a lot of gold?'

They had.

It is known gold is not useful, except in societies that do not have the capacity to harvest asteroids but still have electronic technology. Most move on to the platinum-group metals found in asteroids when they can. However, it has been noted by other historians like Mary Viner-Monroe, that gold is often used as decorative element, except by the Cryons on Telos.

Unfortunately the abundance of gold had romanticised them a little. They have found a lost world with hoards of gold and ancient rites.

Speaking of dark and ancient rites: The black dome. Inside the building the thin slits of windows were covered by heavy curtains. Every room, every corridor, no light was permitted. Although the curtains did have hooks to hold them back as well as sconces for candles or possibly torches. Examining each room, it became clear that part of the rooms were used to prepare the dead, except the largest room, the one under which the dome sat. It had no echo and to its furthest wall was a doorway, with scans showing it lead to an underground chamber. A mausoleum. Above the door was a face of stone, maintain throughout. The face was feminine in appearance to the humans, with one half quite beautiful and the other melted away, rotted, scarred and marked.

This alone was enough for the xeno-anthropologists, but then they found farming tools, then a mine with tools. But what truly took all curiosity was exactly as they had all been dreaming of but dared not actually think. True treasure, something beautiful for its artistry and bewitching for its mystery. In the black domed mausoleum in a room covered in unintelligible tapestries was a crown, sitting on a pedestal. It was made of bronze and set with small gemstones.

The best (and worst) part was, that being around it made the observer hunger for it. Subconsciously they would move towards, being observed, they would shift their body weight subtly. Even if it took hours to reach, they would do it. They needed it, and it needed them. It screamed out to be used and worn. Every minute spent in its proximity the hunger doubled.

On the third day Dr. Chen had to apply a high-dose calmness mood patch on Hestamoloc and Gesto after they had fought to take it.

Even the Doctor, disarmed and stunned Lt. Castillo (although not before she got her own in), so she could take it. Her hands were almost on it, when she stopped and remembered who she was. She ran out with Lt. Castillo.

The next day she, the Doctor, went in with a medium-dose mood patch and perception filter. A superficial examination revealed nothing, and she dared not do more than look while she felt in control of her mind. It was hard to tell if her natural curiosity was driving her to wear it and examine it like that, cut to the chase as it were, or that was the crown making her want it. She set the perception filter on its highest settings and ran from the room, feeling the last desperate clawing of the want.