Cheating, a little: I actually wrote this yesterday. But today was complicated.
We followed the almost-path of gorvines all the way to the Dig site, to absolutely nobody’s surprise. Well, I know I wasn’t surprised, and I assume the Anticipant couldn’t be. If Oft had any sudden revelations, he didn’t talk about them.
He was the first one to notice the regular sets of discoloration on the walls, though. “More places for torches,” he grimly observed, and I didn’t blame him at all. The Scouts had been here for a reason, and it involved the Erebus Dig. I tried not to think about the implications of that, and I definitely didn’t try to think of the suggestion that the Scouts were making this trip in the dark. It would have been a beautiful morning anywhere else in the world, and I absolutely did not want to be here.
Navigating this place at midnight sounded like a great way to court a heart attack.
From my last visit I remembered that there’s not much of the Dig aboveground. The topside part of the planetary defense center or storehouse or whatever the inhabitants used the place for before their Last Stand had been broken down to gravel, making the area look like a Jeffersonian parking lot. That was there, and still stubbornly free of any vegetation or even moss.
What was different was the primitive elevator centered over the Dig shaft, camouflage netting still draped it to hide it from the sky.