Megafauna
On the the third day, the dig revealed something.
One had to admit, the dig was a disaster in the making. Vague in aim, poor in funds– two professors and a handful of bored students (coerced into joining through bribes of the better grade variety). It was always said there was a precursor village on the site, hundreds, thousands years ago. Suspicious natives stayed off the land, claimed it was cursed.
Tierra Isolata, they called it.
Bartertown College’s Historical Society went there anyway. Two days’ worth of hard riding, under a waning, autumn sun. The seasons come fast and strange in these lands, where one week the sun beats on, an immense burning disc in the sky; the next it dies, shrinks. The nights are glorious, moonless, lit by the sheer intensity of the galaxy overhead.
“Now I get why they call it the Milky Way,” Bethany had remarked, dreamily, during the usual, dreary, biscuit and tinned gravy supper.
What had the professors hoped in finding at the site, as their students set up field squares and sharpened their trowels? Companies were always prepared to pay handsomely for artefacts, true – for encrusted gears and pieces of engine, clay shards vibrating in extinct harmonies, what one supposed to be jewellery. Eisenbaum was part of one such trip, at the Nonesuche, back in ’45. SteamCo rewarded his team well for what was explained to be a millenial valve-and-piston arrangement, that dig’s biggest find.
By the second day everyone was prepared to stick a trowel down Eisenbaum’s throat if that made him stop about the goddamn Nonsuche. Even the gastrornids disliked him, snapping whenever he got close.
On the dig’s third day, everything changed.
Archaeology is a slow, tedious process, where one slowly, carefully, digs and polishes and scrutinises. Patience is of the essence. Macintire was surprised he’d hit what looked like a bone fragment so quickly, not at this shallow a depth. But find he did, and the rest went on to look, as surprised as he was.
As his dusting and scraping went on, it was clear something wasn’t normal. As everyone joined in, what was thought to be a fragment grew bigger and bigger. The atmosphere at camp got electric. Even the birds appeared excited, somehow.
Five days went on, before they could ever realised was found. They’d all seen something similar, if in smaller scales.
It was but the beginning of tips of a vertebra of immense proportions. Its neural spine, the bone’s topmost part.
“I’m no biologist,” Professor Rosen said, finally, “but this… fossil could go on and on. We need… machines for this.”
“How big could it be?” Bethany asked.
Silence. Eventually, Eisenberg stepped in.
“Who knows? Size of an engine. Size of a house. Even bigger…”
His eyes gleamed, even under the weak, waning sunlight. Like everyone else’s.
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