What the Looter Left
Session: 2020-02-11
The last account ends with a torpedo in flight. The next one his notes keep begins on Absalom Station, with a limousine.
What happened in between is not in the records. Whether the torpedo struck, how the Iron Rictus was broken off or broken, and how the sick among them were tended, I cannot tell you. I will not guess. The order is strict about this with novitiates, and I am still one.
What his notes do say is short. Eoxians got their cargo. Then: Limo to Embassy.
So the package went where it was meant to go. They had carried it sealed out to the quarantine zone and back, through all of it, and in the end it was handed over without comment. Taeon recorded the delivery in four words and moved on to the drive.
At the Embassy, someone explained the battle to them, or explained it away. His note is careful to say whose claim it was: Corpse fleet is a military, they're not going to hold grudges. After that, in parentheses, he added one word of his own: (supposedly).
— I have read a great many of his notes by now, and that is the sharpest word in any of them. He did not argue. He wrote it down and put it in brackets, where he could find it again.
Then the talk turned to the Drift Rock, and his notes get longer and lose their order, the way notes do when the speaker is going faster than the pen. Before the hangar, where they found the ship, there had been a room full of alien code. Its equipment was meant to run a control room. It had backup power. It belonged to a weapon system based in space, and the technology was ancient. That, they were told, was why the Drift Rock mattered so much, and why so many hands had reached for it. His notes add that the captain's log spoke of finding this thing out in the Drift.
He had walked through that room. I think he noticed this. He had been inside the mechanism before anyone told him what it was.
From the Embassy they took a taxi to Starfinder HQ. Somewhere in that visit he wrote 3 genders (him, her, and they), and nothing around it says whose, or why. I leave it as he left it.
At HQ the symbols were recognised. His note reads not first time, and then, the bad news. The bad news was a name: Halqueem Zan. Beside it is a number, 300, which I take to be years. The note does not say.
Zan's finds had been donated to a university of xeno-archaeology and anthropology at Cabarat, on Castrovel. His notes could be read there, and his site could be visited. The Society's view of him fits in one line, and Taeon kept it whole: a buffoon and a hero. His techniques were rubbish. He was, the note says plainly, basically a looter / treasure-hunter.
The Observances have a Reading for those who come to a place after someone else has stripped it.
Note the hole where the root was pulled.
Do not call it empty. The soil remembers the shape.
Note the cut stems, and how they were cut.
A careless hand leaves more behind than it takes.
Note what grew back, and what did not.
Do not curse the one who came before you. Read them.
They were in a hurry. You need not be.
Their haste is a map, if you are patient with it.
The trampled path still leads somewhere.
Walk it slowly, and step where they did not.
So kneel. So look.
What the thief dropped is also a record.
— the Observances, from the Readings on Succession
Novitiates find this Reading too forgiving the first time they hear it. I did. It does not forgive the thief. It only says the thief is a source, and Halqueem Zan, by the Society's own account, was a poor digger who left his finds where people could look at them.
His notes end with the rules. Different planets have different regulations. Zan's site was on the Ukulam continent, and things had been updated since his pillaging. The land was now an environmental protected area.
He wrote that last phrase out in full, which he did not always do. The protected places of Castrovel were his own country, and the records have him in them before, in a memory he could not place. I will not make more of that than he did. He wrote the phrase out and went on to the next line.
The next line is a name and a dash: Whaloss - contact. Nothing follows it. It is the last thing he wrote that day: someone to find, on a world he knew, about a man who had taken what he wanted from it three hundred years before.