be soon so
long as he hasn’t discovered something more interesting from your
last mission. I’ll let you know as soon as he tells me.”
“ Then know I’ll be over with
Stephanie.” Abdul confirmed he heard with a drop of the
chin.
The doors opened again on level eight where
most of the research and labs were held. About a kilometer’s walk
away Oliver found Stephanie’s secondary researching area, knocked
three times and called out. “It’s me, Oliver.”
“ Come right on in!” Said a
soft feminine voice as the door slid open on its own. Inside the
room sat Stephanie Menann, a voluptuous woman of average height.
She had long blonde hair braided down to the small of her back and
large blue eyes. She sat at a desk finishing the last few bites of
a meal Steven and Visor had brought.
The Hunter and eagle sat off to the side near
the Drake, Sparky. From snout to tip of the tail Sparky was ten
meter’s long, had an arrow shaped head, mossy green scales, brown
and orange flecked eyes with a catlike slit for a pupil, thick arms
tipped in curved talons and two pair of wings. The wings were
situated above the shoulders and just behind the hips. A long neck
was exceptionally supple and a thin tail could act as a whip so
long as he didn’t decide to use a maw filled with sharply curved
teeth.
The room was where the expert archeologist
Stephanie did her work on items too large than her normal room
could hold. Off to the side was a clear door that led to a
contained clean room where the fifty three barrels they salvaged
sat. The containers originated from the wrecked Solarian battleship
before the group needed to make a hasty exit after a Keptl Goliath
arrived. On the other were many shelves holding other ancient
artifacts, but the nearest standing shelves were mostly empty aside
from more Solarian Star-sabers, a generic term to describe the
ancient weapons, many of which weren’t swords at all. There were of
course swords, but also lances, flails, shields, bows, maces, axes
and so on. On another shelf were strange black cubes that hardly
reflected any light from a smooth surface. Each length Oliver knew
them all to be nearly exactly five centimeters long. And each one
was identical to the next, even in weight.
“ Hello everyone.” He hadn’t
forgotten how to greet a room from lesson’s Sparky taught about
proper and polite socializing.
“ Welcome back to the land of
the living.” Stephanie responded warmly before taking a drink and
pushing the remnants of a meal on the desk aside. “Let’s get right
to it, Oliver.” She patted the vacant chair beside her and his bulk
consumed it. Sitting on the table were three black cubes and a
salmon colored Star-saber dagger in a stand upside down so it
didn’t cut through the table under its own weight. She lifted her
pen scanner and an oval crystal similar to the one she had given
him which also rested in his pocket. She gave the voice command and
it made a holo-screen. “Show analysis on the Solarian cubes we
found.” And the screen cut to another visual rotating the image of
a cube. “Oliver, as you can see I’ve determined each cube’s very
atoms are packed so tightly they cannot vibrate and is why I need
to wear gloves. They suck the heat right out of my fingers. I near
got frostbite, but oddly they don’t steal heat from the air around
us” She showed the white rubbery gloves off. “I found out the hard
way since you and Steven kept yours on after cleaning them and
putting on the shelf. The thing is, my scans cannot detect where
the heat it stole from me went. They are so dense they can’t be
cut, but all weigh no more than two hundred and twenty six point
eight grams when they should weigh an excess of ten million kilos
at such density. They are as dense as your own cutlass and the rest
of the weapons and made of the exact same metal I’m coining as
Voidium. Has a nice ring don’t you think?”
“ Why not.” He chuckled. Void
being his new last