Right now, I’m just trying to tie all the threads together, pull on them, and see if a book forms. I rather hope that it will. I’m also rather aware that I’ve not done nearly enough to describe the planet our heroine is on. I really should have been doing that throughout the book…
One nice thing about flying to Luxor Base is that you almost don’t have to navigate at all. All you have to do is spot the statues, and aim for a spot between them. You barely need the homing beacon, although I made sure that I was properly receiving its signal. You always need to take extra precautions on a dead world — particularly when it was murdered.
The statues I was aiming for were seven hundred high and carved out of the local stone: one man and one woman, facing each other, each with one hand triumphantly raised to the sky, and the other pointing to the ground. I do mean ‘man and woman,’ too: some of the species we’ve exhumed out here don’t look anything like us, but the One-Eighteeners were pretty damned close. If you squinted, you could almost believe that they were just odd-looking humans.
Or maybe not. Something had carved deep furrows into the faces of the statues, making it impossible to tell what their features were originally like. We know almost nothing about whatever it was that turned the Confederation into the Tomb Worlds, but judging from the rubble we’re pretty sure it hated every sapient creature in it with a monomaniacal passion.
Now here we were, camping in the ruins, all the while wondering whether one day it’ll be our turn. We try not to think about it. And we really try not to think about how we’re not thinking about it.