1. Talia

"This place," I announced with satisfaction, "is cursed."

Beside me, Juliette rolled her eyes.

"You can't just call everything ‘cursed,'" she said. "That's not a useful category."

I grinned and gestured around us with my flashlight. The stone walls, black as the darkness of space, cracked with age and long-ago violence, drank in the light. Against that, the inky darkness of the hole in the floor barely stood out. Another step and I'd have tumbled down, breaking a limb if I didn't break my neck. Juliette's keen eyes and fast reactions saved me, again.

"Looks pretty cursed to me," I told her. "Which fits the legends."

I should know. I'd found this place by following folk tales and records stretching back into galactic history, stories about a place from which no one returned. The ruins of a civilization that fell before humans got the hang of sharpening sticks.

Which was exactly what we needed to save the planet.

Tulla II wasn't a true dead world, not yet, though it got closer by the day. The wind, arid and hot, blew across a continent-sized desert. No plant life survived anywhere within a hundred miles. No animal life remained at all, making it a perfect candidate for terraforming.

Three years ago, Taverner Terraforming bought the rights to reawaken the planet and replace its existing ecosystem with our own. In a few decades, what remained of the native ecology would be gone, taking Tulla's rich history with it.

"I suppose Taverner's board will see it as a curse," Juliette conceded. "The Republics won't let them wreck the planet, not with a find on this scale. No one takes a risk with Ancient tech. They might brush a few minor finds aside, but this is a fucking jackpot."

She was trying to convince herself as much as me, but everyone knew big corporations like Taverner got away with a lot. As seriously as the United Republics took the laws around Ancient tech, I didn't want to rely on their objectivity.

Fixing a rope ladder to the flagstones of the corridor, I threw the rest over the edge. It hit stone a level below, clattering, and I paused, looking down into the dark.

"Should we report this first?" Juliette asked. I didn't need to look, I heard the grin in her voice as she threw down the gauntlet. "We're supposed to wait for permission before we risk disturbing anything else."

"The point of this is to save Tulla from being landscaped into one more McPlanet," I said. "The more we document, the better our odds, right? If we let him, Waterman'll keep us sitting on our hands until the terraforming engines fire up. Our report won't have reached Earth yet, the reply's at least a week away."

Before she could argue, I swung myself down onto the ladder and yelped. The edge of the hole was deceptively sharp, biting through my glove and into the palm of my right hand. I hissed in pain and tried to ignore it as I climbed down the ladder. My curiosity had gotten me worse wounds than that, and I wasn't about to concede defeat yet.

As soon as I reached the bottom and looked around, I forgot all about my injury. The room was vast, and better preserved than the rest of the complex. Strange, repeating patterns covered the walls. Writing, I realized, as my eyes caught a few symbols I recognized. Those were in some of the oldest languages I'd heard of, and barely understood, but I thought I saw the word for ‘danger' in several.

One wall, opposite the rope ladder, was different. No writing here, just a giant set of doors, and in front of them, a dead alien. And what an alien it was. He was, because the figure was naked and most definitely male. I blushed, looking away from the evidence.

Recording everything, I studied him. Blue skin gleamed under my flashlight, and I did my best to take an objective look. Humanoid, muscular, and big. Powerful muscles beneath strangely textured skin that called out to be touched. Crystals emerged from his skin on his arms and shoulders, spikes growing out of him almost organically. They gave him a dangerous air, not that he needed any help to look menacing, not with his size and build. Standing, he'd be seven feet tall at least.

He looked alive, aside from his stillness. There was neither breathing or a pulse, but no sign of death, either. No wounds, no sign of illness or anything else to explain his death, but he'd been lying here for at least ten thousand years. Even the Ancients couldn't build stasis fields that would keep someone alive this long. Probably.

Biting my lip, I pulled off a glove and reached out with one hesitant finger to touch his bare skin. Stupid? Yeah. Something about him drew me in, though, and my curiosity wouldn't let go.

His skin felt warm, dry, and oddly smooth, a fascinating texture. Nothing like a human but delightful, and not dead. I had no rational reason for it, but as soon as I touched him, I knew that this alien, this Ancient, still lived.

Glancing down along his motionless body, I bit my lip as my gaze neared his cock. Everything alien had to go in the catalog, including alien dick. That's the lie I told myself. Science be damned, I'd have taken a look no matter what.

What I saw shocked me and made my cheeks burn. He was massive, even in proportion to his build, and crystal nodes emerged from his dick in a pattern that looked purposeful. I couldn't help wondering what they'd feel like, but whether he was dead or sleeping, I wasn't about to touch an alien dick to find out.

No. Definitely not.

"Hey, Talia." The shout echoed through the room, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. "What are you doing to that poor alien?"

I'd completely forgotten Jules was with me. My face heated and I jerked my hand back, glad that my body blocked her view of where I'd been reaching. My eyes widened as I looked down at the smear of blood I'd left on the aliens' chest. What's wrong with me? How did I forget I'm bleeding?

I've been called a daredevil, been told my risk assessments are laughable. That's more than fair, but I've never been so distracted by a find to bleed on it before.

Thank god, Jules wasn't paying that much attention to me. Her focus was on her scanner, and she pointed it past me toward the great doors. Glad that she didn't see my blush, I turned to look at what had captured her attention.

Set into the doors were four large earthenware jars. I'd missed them in the gloom and with the alien to look at, but now they pulsed with an inner light, they couldn't be more obvious.

They could contain anything. Antimatter, hostile nanoswarms, mind-controlling insects? All were possible in Ancient sites, and careless xenoarchaeologists risked more lives than their own. I backed up hurriedly, bumping into Jules.

"Is that…are those hyperwaves?" she shook her scanner as though that would make the readings make sense. It didn't help. "Okay. Fine. He's connected to whatever's in those jars through hyperspace. That totally makes sense. Yep."

I looked over her shoulder. What she said was crazy, but it wasn't wrong. Somehow, the alien was generating hyperspace channels to the four containers. That ought to be impossible, even the smallest generator was six foot long. The alien was big, but not that big.

Warily walking forward toward him, I tried to understand. I'd hardly taken a step when I stopped with a shrill yelp.

Jules was beside me at once, a small pistol appearing in her hand as if by magic as she looked around for the threat. "What? What is it?"

My finger shook as I pointed at the ‘dead' alien resting on the stone, and my mouth wouldn't work right. I'm not sure I said anything in any intelligible language, but Jules swore and swung the pistol around to cover him.

His fingers twitched again. No longer as still as the stone slab beneath him, tremors ran through him, muscles coming back to life after thousands of years. Jules kept her weapon pointed at him, though I wasn't sure that tiny weapon even qualified as a threat to the massive warrior.

"Tell the others," I hissed at her. "Go, they need to hear about this."

"Yeah, so we'll tell them all about it." Juliette's voice hardened to a growl. "I'll cover him. You get up the ladder and I'll follow."

"Fuck off, you know how slow I am at climbing. One of us should stay and document this, right? You're the athletic one, you go first."

The alien's hand lifted from its place on the bier, trembled, and dropped back down. Juliette swore under her breath, then scrambled up the rope to the tunnel above, taking a quarter of the time I'd need. I kept my eye on the alien, my heart pounding as his chest rose and fell, his already powerful body hardening, muscles flexing as he stirred. Lying motionless, he'd looked like the sexiest man I'd ever seen.

Moving, he was fast becoming the sexiest god I could imagine.

"Hey! Talia! Don't stand there drooling over your Ancient boyfriend, get your ass up here before he skins you alive." Jules never was one to pull her punches, verbal or otherwise. I moved back to the foot of the rope ladder but shook my head.

"No way I'd get up there before he catches me. I'm going to watch and take notes."

"Fucking idiot academics," Jules snarled, as though she wasn't a xenoarchaeologist post-grad, same as me. "Fine, I'll cover you from up here."

"No, you get to safety. We can't both stay here and risk our lives, or no one will know what happened to us."

Somehow, Jules's silence was more profane than any amount of cursing could have been, but she went. A scramble of feet on stone, running footsteps, and she was gone. I was alone.

Alone, apart from the blue-skinned mountain of muscle and crystal rising from his bier.

I hope I haven't made a terrible mistake.