When Lio turned the locator wand on, it started beeping immediately. He nudged it toward the rocks, but it was a useless effort. Whatever the wand had found was beyond those rocks. And he had an awful feeling Ravi was about to put his foot down on further exploration.

"Wait," Jossen's gruff voice broke the disappointed quiet. "Aziri, hand me that lantern." He stumped down the steps with the light in hand, and peered at the rocks, selecting one of the smaller ones from the rubble. "These are phyllite."

"I, uh, think we finished that rock collecting commendation task, Subal," Duhar said.

Jossen snorted. "Yes, I know that, Duhar. I meant that Opalina is all sandstone, this tunnel is sandstone, and these rocks are phyllite." He looked at Ravi with a furrowed brow. "Can't have been a cave-in if it's completely different rock from the rest of the tunnel, right?"

"But then how did the rocks end up blocking—" Teres began uncertainly.

Lio whirled around and stared at the pile. "They were placed there! And we need to move them!" He dropped the wand and lunged forward, grabbing at the pile.

"Hold on a fucking second, Lio," Ravi said. "Jossen, are you sure none of those rocks are sandstone?"

"Yes, Com. Color doesn't match the tunnel rock, either."

"Okay. Then we need a system for removal. But..." Ravi sighed. "Look, these are your free hours. No one is required to participate. This could take a while."

"We should make a line to pass the rocks out," Orvaska said.

"Yes! Everybody, give Lio the lanterns so he can put them along the tunnel wall," Yorune said. "And get close enough that you can pass easily. Whoever is in the main tunnel, just set the rocks in a row against the wall." There was a flurry of shuffling and a multitude of lanterns held out to him. Lio wedged them along the stairs. He caught Ravi's eye as he did, and the com gave him an exasperated smile. Of course no one was wandering off for free time as if they were a normal crew. Everything about Opalina was far better than boring old normal. His heart might burst for love of all these people.

It did indeed take a while. They made progress, but the rock pile seemed never-ending. Each layer of stacked rubble revealed a new one. The only hopeful bit was when Jossen pointed out that none of the rocks were very big. Another sign that someone had put them all into the tunnel, the same way the crew removed them now. Lio doubled his speed at the thought, sweat soaking down the back of his uniform. A glimpse of his holowatch told him Ravi was about to pack them all off to their quarters to sleep. He reached for the next rock and knocked another loose accidentally.

The rock teetered, fell inward, and disappeared. Lio stared at the tiny, dark gap it had left. If there were more rocks beyond, there should've been nowhere for it to go. "We're almost there," he shouted, startling the line.

He worked with renewed vigor, Jossen at his shoulder. They tore from the roof down, feverishly passing rocks off to waiting crew behind them. Bit by bit, the dark gap at the top widened, and then they were batting rocks out of the way like cobwebs. The remainder of the pile clattered down into a small mound, easy enough to walk over. Lio watched a single shard of phyllite bounce down more steps, into the dark.

"We can go through!" he cried. His shout, magnified by unseen stone, rebounded back to him, the sound pulsing away down the unknown stairs. He could still hear the traces of his shout. Major echo space. The old storeroom must have been large. He scrubbed his hands on his uniform and groped for a lantern, as the rest of the crew gathered at the lip of the tunnel.

Ravi hopped down the steps. "We have about ten minutes before lights out, and this can wait until—"

"Com!" It was Jossen who broke in before Lio could. "We've got to at least take a peek!"

"We did just spend free hours passing rocks to each other. Could we push lights out back just a tad?" Rosareen wheedled. Yorune was already shoving her way past people to get a lantern. She held it up expectantly toward Ravi. Everyone else crowded in the doorway fixed hopeful gazes on their com.

Ravi glanced around and then groaned. "Fine. A few extra minutes." Lio made no effort to hide his grin, even when Ravi gave him a narrow eyed look. He swung back to the stairs, waiting only until everyone had grabbed their lanterns and lights, and scrambled over what remained of the rock barrier.

The stairs were long, but shallow. They weren't going very much deeper into the mountain. Lio kept his eyes on the ground, his heart in his throat. The tunnel around them looked very much like the main tunnel in Opalina, but it seemed to swallow up the lantern light like something hungry and devouring. Behind him, the steady scrape and crunch of the crew walking was reassuring.

"This is just like the final hide-out ambush in Subterranean Attack-Force Five," Duhar whispered. "So cool."

Light pooled from Lio's lantern, glowing wider as he hit level ground. The walls of the tunnel veered away into the dark. They were in the old storeroom, and it was cavernous. Lio lofted the lantern high, half-expecting to see stalactites and giant bats to complete the cave theme. But the ceiling of the room was worn smooth like the rock that formed the slot canyons.

Lanterns bobbled around, pushing back the dark as the crew spread out a bit around the perimeter of the room. The ceiling and walls were perfectly smooth, but the floor of the room was interrupted by large upcroppings of flat topped rocks. They looked like miniature mesas, scattered around the space.

"Not many places to hide things," Jossen said. "Lio, try the locator thingamajig."

As soon as he powered up the wand, it beeped steady as a biometrics monitor. He swept it back and forth across the ground, and over the slabs of rock jutting up in the middle, but the beeping never increased speed to tell him he was getting closer to his artifact. It didn't help that the cavern itself made sound shadows of the noise, as if there were twenty different wands in the room instead of one. He made two full circles of the space before jabbing the power off. Looking up, he realized the whole crew was watching him. "I...I'm sure there's something here," he said.

Yorune was the first to nod. "I think we might need more sensitive instruments to find it, Lio."

Teres sidled up to him and nudged his arm. "The room is pretty cool on it's own."

"Seriously. The walls feel like they've been sanded down," Rosareen said. "Or like water hollowed the room out." She spun toward Ravi. "Com, if we get lights and ventilation down here, can we use it?"

"We'll have to see," Ravi said. Lio could feel the com's gaze on him as he drifted aimlessly along the wall, but he refused to meet it.

"These rocks are better than the crates in the lounge," Duhar said, sprawling across a particularly large stone in the middle.

He resisted the impulse to snap the stupid spider wand. Discovering a potential second lounge was not a prize. He'd been so sure. Aziri and Teres both moved closer to him, as if they could sense his disappointment and frustration. After all that, after the whole crew had followed his frenetic lead, they had nothing. He couldn't expect people to keep believing in him if he gave them no reason.

"It is interesting," said Aziri, brushing his fingers over the wall, "that it's so much nicer than the tunnel upstairs. It's like—" He pressed his palm to the wall and blinked. "Ground shapers. Orvaska, you said that Vashyan text was all about the Mastali being able to...to shape rock, right?"

Orvaska nodded, and then looked at the nearest curve of wall, his eyebrows lifting sharply.

"You think this whole room could've been made by the Mastali?" Rosareen asked.

Lio caught his breath, staring at the wall as if it might speak, excitement fountaining back into his blood. It was almost as smooth as glass. He had never thought to look at Opalina's construction records, but he needed to get his hands on them. This room must've existed before they built the rest of the outpost.

"I don't know about that," Jossen said. "The wand thingamajig is supposed to pick up on metal alloys. And there are a lot of ways to wear down sandstone."

Duhar rolled around on his stone chaise. "Yeah, but Subal, it'd be so cool if this were—" A sharp crack and a rumble vibrated through the room.

Lio whirled as Duhar tumbled to the floor, shards of rock bouncing around him and a huge puff of reddish dust swirling in the light. Lio's stomach lurched up his throat.

"Duhar!" Ravi sprang from one side of the room, Teres from the other, and then everyone was inadvisably charging into the dust to gather around Duhar, who was coughing horribly.

"'M fine," he wheezed. Lio, shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the crew, stepped back as Ravi dragged him out of the dust cloud and crouched in front of him.

"Are you hurt?" Lio blurted. Perhaps it wasn't such a good idea to bring the whole crew into an unknown, possibly Mastali-carved tunnel when he had no idea what might happen.

"Nah, just...I thought that rock was, uh...steady as a rock." He laughed, and hacked up a lungful of dust.

"Fuck, that scared me—" someone said, and then there was another groan from the already shattered rock. A great slab of it sheared away and crumbled to the ground. There was still a huge chunk of it standing, but from the newly ragged corner, something glinted.

Like metal.

He lunged toward it, brushing grit away from the silver. More rock came away as he did. As if it wasn't really rock, but some rock-like substance plastered over something else. His throat was so tight he couldn't breath.

"What the—" Aziri spotted the metal and scrambled over to him, and then everyone, including Duhar, was peering over his shoulders and more hands were picking at the rock, chunks of it falling away to reveal a sharp, metal corner.

"Sandstone shouldn't just fall of like this." Jossen gulped.

"I don't think it is sandstone," Lio whispered. He flipped the locator wand up and used the handle to jab into the stone, working more pieces loose. The crew helped him, yanking away more and more, flinging it behind them. Someone moved the lanterns closer, and Lio was shaking so much he had to pass the wand over to Orvaska, who could do a good deal more damage with it. The sandstone illusion was coming away like clods of dried mud.

What was beneath looked like a solid metal table. But his scrabbling fingers crossed a surface that was smooth in some places, bumpy in others, two long grooves crossing it vertically. Three parts of a whole.

"Fuck, it looks like a screen on this side," Aziri said, breathless.

"One over here, too," Rosareen said, from the opposite end of the metal slab.

Duhar seized Lio's arm so tightly it hurt. "Lio. What the...fuck. It's...that's a complete nav console for a sim. I have a piece of the console set...it looks just like this!" He scrubbed his already dusty sleeve across the section they'd cleared, and Lio saw it. Wide palm screens, and indentations for circular keys—Duhar couldn't be right, but somehow, he was.

"This is a simulation console?" Teres yelped. "Are you kidding me?"

"It's not just any console, Teres," Duhar gave her a wounded look. "This the Storm Harvester motherboard, and finding a complete one is—"

Orvaska, hammering at the one corner still encased in rock, froze with the wand raised next to his ear. "Storm harvesters. That is what the Vashyan text called the Mastali."

Lio's head was spinning. "Duhar, are you sure it's the same console?"

"Yeah! I mean—" He tilted his head, face scrunched in a worried frown. "Kind of. It's the same layout, but this looks...bigger. Might be more complicated."

There was a short silence, in which Lio felt as if he something were sliding right past him, close enough that he could feel it and taste it, but couldn't quite see it clearly—

"Holy shit, did we just find a Mastali nav console?" Aziri whispered.

"I don't think so." Yorune was stooped to the ground. She nudged one of Lio's numb feet aside, her fingers tracing the seam where the rock met the metal. "I think—Orvaska, may I borrow the stick?"

She took it from him and rose, a lantern in one hand and the wand in the other. She walked all the way across the room. In front of the far wall, she set the lantern down, and took a step back from the wall. Then she gouged the wand into the rock and jumped back amid a second dust explosion.

"Yorune, what the fuck—" Ravi's shout cut out as the dust cleared.

Lio's knees buckled, and he caught himself on the edge of the nav console. A jagged strip of rock lay in pieces at Yorune's feet, dust hazed the light from her lantern, but as it cleared they could see a glittering silver patch peeking from beneath the rock wall. The whole room. It was the whole room.

He was going to puke. Distantly, he was aware of Ravi's hand on his shoulder. "Are you okay?" His voice was rough with worry, warm breath close to Lio's ear. "Lio?"

Yorune let out a hysterical, high-pitched giggle. "He's fine. He just found a buried lightship."