The inspector kept right on his heels as they descended. Ravi bit the inside of his lip when he heard voices and spotted two spots of light against the far wall. Yorune and Lio were crouched low, chipping away at the rock wall, working right through lunch. The crew had made a lot of progress during the morning, and the stripped-away rock revealed a massive swath of metal expanding in all directions across the wall. It seemed to emanate its own silvery glow alongside the light from the lanterns.

He nearly reached them before he realized that the inspector wasn't with him. Turning back, he held up the lantern a little, and saw Tarik poised on the last stair before the room, his eyes huge. Ravi's stomach sank.

"Who're you?" Lio snapped. He stood in front of the wall with a scraper in one hand. Probably ready to fight Tarik with it.

"Lio." Ravi put a warning in his voice. "This is Tarik Sarrel. He's here from the ziggurat." He nearly added, "Don't be a dick," but maybe Tarik deserved a little of his own haughtiness reflected back at him. Goddesses knew Lio was capable of it.

Tarik hovered over the nav board that Duhar had lain across. He waved his hand at Ravi, throat working around a squeak. Ravi brought the light and the toolbox closer to him, and the inspector rushed to open the box with clumsy hands. Yorune and Lio came to peer over his shoulder as he shuffled through tools and removed what looked like a long, black spike with a handle. "Stand back," he ordered, sounding winded. Ravi had to yank Lio backward a pace.

The spike emitted a high-pitched whine. A click from the handle, and a blue-white electric circle shot out where the spike touched the metal table. The charge raced outward like a wave, before it dissipated on the luminous metal.

"Highly conductive," Tarik muttered. He swapped the spike for an ugly metal tube with a trigger hold like a laser rifle.

"Don't—" Lio sounded as if he was the one about to be tested.

"If it's a true Mastali alloy, this won't make a mark. Just heat it a bit." Tarik pulled a bulky, rigid glove onto one hand and positioned the instrument in the other. A bright, violet-edged flame flared at the narrow end of the tube, and Tarik held it against the metal. It hovered there for almost a full minute, but when he flicked it off and set the tool down, the table looked untouched. He pressed two glove-protected fingers to the metal, waited a second, then looked at the glove carefully. Where the glove had touched the metal, it glowed faint pink. Tarik nodded and looked up at Ravi. "This is definitely not an old hov part."

"Great," Ravi said. Even to his own ears his voice sounded hollow.

The inspector galloped to the metal patch of the wall to repeat the tests. It seemed the same as the metal that formed the nav table, except the heat glove didn't light up at all after Tarik blasted the flame against the wall. He repeated the test in the same spot at least three times, his frown deepening every time the glove came back the same dull grey color. On a fourth test, he held the flame in place for a few minutes and gingerly touched the wall. The glove still reflected no heat.

"Strange," he muttered. He moved to the edge of the metal patch, where the rock overlapped it. Ravi checked his holowatch. Any minute now, Jossen would reappear with the rest of the crew. He almost sighed with relief when Tarik began to slowly put away his tools, glancing up at the wall the whole time.

"Com Endessen," the inspector said. "I'll need you to send away the recruits for our discussion."

Even Yorune looked a little frosty at the dismissal, and Ravi interjected hastily, "Why don't we go to my office, then." Ideally before Aziri showed up and ripped into this guy. He hustled Tarik past Lio's glare and back up the stairs. The inspector dawdled in the tunnel, and Ravi stood impatiently in the muster room doorway, holding it open for him.

True to form, Tarik examined all the chairs and refused to sit in any of them. Instead, he paced around the muster room table. "When did you make this discovery?"

"Last night." Ravi held in his resigned sigh. "So...it is a real Mastali artifact."

"Artifact is one way to put it," Tarik muttered. "It is certainly something."

He hesitated. "My recruits think it's a lightship."

Tarik's face was impassive. He made a full loop of the room before he spoke again. "I am not convinced that that room is a lightship." Before Ravi could press him to clarify, he launched into an interrogation about everything that had happened the previous day. He went through it twice, Tarik recording every word onto his holowatch, and when he finished with his notification to the Archcom, the inspector opened the toolbox again. A bunch of tools thudded onto the muster room table.

When Tarik stood up from the box, he'd strapped a huge, clear sheath over his face. He hoisted a hefty cutter with a wheel-like blade, powered it up and sliced into the nearest wall.

"What the fuck are you doing!" Ravi yelled over the noise of the grinding blade. He was far enough from where Tarik was cutting that the spewing rock shards didn't come too close, but he could see that the wall wasn't crumbling the way the false sandstone downstairs had. "That's real rock!" he shouted. "And you're fucking up my muster room!"

To be fair, the muster room wasn't exactly a gleaming exemplar of a command center, but it had been a shitshow when he first found it. He'd spent days working to get it to even this shade of respectable. Taking a random-ass chunk out of the wall was not helping.

Tarik applied some kind of chiseling machine next, and worked around a lopsided, jagged triangle until he pried a thick shard of rock from the wall. He blew dust out of the gash he'd made, and then examined the bit he'd removed. Placing the shard into a plastic bag and tucking it away in the toolbox, he glanced up at Ravi from behind his dust-spattered mask. "Do you have a conference screen to contact the Archcom?"

Ravi stomped into his office and powered up the desk screen. "Best I've got," he said, swiping a call line open. "The imager doesn't work when the weather is bad, but please don't chop it to pieces."

Tarik awarded him a withering glance. "Historical research suggests that Mastali lightships were meant to carry full crews, stores, and tech for decades of travel. That room is not big enough to be a lightship—"

"That doesn't explain why you're hacking everything apart."

Tarik held up a hand and finished. "It appears it may be part of a lightship, not the whole thing."

He frowned. "Then why did you—"

Tarik bared his teeth. "Go look at that wall, Com Endessen."

Ravi stared at him. Slowly, he trailed out of the office and back around the muster room table. Rock shards crunched under his boots as he approached the wound in the wall. The rock was thick, layer after layer of the sandstone making a muddy reddish shadow of the space Tarik had cut. Ravi inched closer to stare into it. From the depths of the hole sliced into the wall, bright silver winked back at him.

"Fuck," he whispered. If the muster room was encased in that strange metal too...Opalina didn't have a lightship buried beneath it.

It was a lightship.

Reeling, he stumbled back to the office in time to see Tarik sitting in his chair and greeting Archcom Huseda over the screen. Her gravelly voice filled the office. "Sarrel, I hope you know that you just interrupted a call with one of the Suzerain's Commissioners. This better be good."

"Apologies for the urgency override. But I assure you, it was warranted, Archcom. I'm here with the Com who made the report, and...for once, the report may have understated the actuality." Tarik did the teeth-baring thing again.

Huseda let out a throaty chuckle. "Whatever you found, Com Endessen, it's the first thing to impress Tarik in twenty years. Spit it out Sarrel, I've got to get back on the call."

Tarik folded his hands primly and took a deep breath. It looked as though he were savoring it a moment. "Opalina Outpost appears to be a Mastali lightship inside a mountain."

Silence.

"What?" Huseda's voice crackled.

"Large amounts of the Mastali alloy are certainly present in the room Com Endessen reported. And historically, the Mastali have been known to rock-cloak tech that they left in the Fennec region." Tarik explained the storeroom situation, describing the rock layered over the metal, and then went off on a long tangent about the wall not demonstrating typical thermal conductivity before Huseda cut him off.

"You know my background isn't with the Enlightenment branch, Sarrel," she grumbled. "How extensive is the alloy in the outpost?"

"I've only checked two rooms so far, Archcom. Both have alloy walls concealed beneath rock, although the upper level rooms appear to be more deeply coated in sandstone."

"Holy fucking Little," Huseda murmured. "This...if this is real, it's...I don't even know what it is." There was a rustle over the line, as if she were sinking away from her desk. But then her voice boomed through the office, suddenly twice as loud. "Tarik, your recommendations?"

"I think a full excavation would be best. I don't know whether we're dealing with fragmented pieces of a lightship, or a—" he gulped and shook his head, marveling. "We might have a complete, intact lightship here. Either way, we need to bring in the top Enlightenment crews. Likely some from outside of our region."

"Goddess, if this is interregional, the command jurisdiction squabbles are going to be a nightmare," Huseda said. "Alright. Tarik, you stay there. Com Endessen, I'll send hovs for your crew. Have them packed and ready by morning-nine tomorrow."

Ravi clutched the edge of the desk. "Packed and ready for what?" he asked.

Tarik arched an eyebrow. "Obviously, a full excavation requires the outpost to be empty."

"You're...removing the whole unit?"

Huseda answered before Tarik could. "Endessen, I know this is a shock, but if this thing really is a lightship, there's no way to avoid a shit storm. Your crew will be temporarily relocated until we know exactly what the plan for Opalina is. We'll set up a camp at the base of the mountains for you. Temporarily," she repeated, stressing the word.

Temporarily was just a stop on the way to permanently. His mouth seared dry. Walking out of Opalina the shitty underground outpost meant his crew would probably never set foot on Opalina the miraculous lightship ever again. They were going to be destroyed.

"Can we be assigned to excavation?" he asked. "If we're just down the mountain, we'll still be the closest crew available."

"Is your crew one of the foremost Enlightenment units in Suzerain Aureli's territory?" Tarik asked nastily. Ravi almost punched him into the office wall.

"Zip it, Serral," Huseda thundered. Then she spoke in a normal tone to Ravi. "I'm not sure we can swing that, Endessen. Crews are going to be battling to get involved in a discovery like this and...I'll admit you've made improvements, but your crew doesn't have much of a track record. But I'll look into it."

A muted "Thanks," was all he could manage. Huseda and Tarik launched into more detailed planning, but Ravi didn't stick around for it. Leaving in the morning meant he needed to go find the crew now. To tell them. That he'd...lost the whole fucking outpost.

Ravi walked out of the muster room, closed his eyes, and leaned his forehead against the uneven rock that formed the tunnel. There was nothing he could say that would make it better. All of them would be furious. Lio would be beyond that.

He took a shuddering breath and turned down the hall to the storeroom stairs, trying not to think about what he needed to say. Trying even harder not to think about the fact that the first person Lio was willing to give more than a night to, maybe, possibly, his whole heart to, that was the person who was about to rip a lightship out from under him.