It was beautiful. He had been forced to remove quite a bit of hull plating to remove the object from valve one and he was now admiring it where it lay in the sand fending of warm rays of light with its shiny, metallic, surface. The object was circular in shape and Victors sensors measured it to be exactly 95,78 centimetres in diameter, and was slightly bent in the middle so it resembled a cupola. Curious markings trailed on the edge of the object and he guessed it was some sort of text and took a few caps of it from different angles that were sent directly to his onboard personal archives for later study. A bronze coloured stone peeked out in the sand a few metres away and he walked over to it and picked it up. It was a ventifact, a stone shaped by the combination of windblown sand and a lot of time and he identified the rock type as a katarite, a very hard stone that was used in the base of tall buildings. Even this exceptionally solid stone couldn’t stay unaffected by the sand as it had been shaped into a geometrical figure with smooth sides. Such a stone was rare and Victor found it to be curious that this hard stone had been reshaped but the ancient cupola had not even after thousands of years in the desert. He peered out over the dunes and saw an agitated cloud of blistering sand to the west and consulted his sensors about the coming weather conditions and it advised him to get inside if he didn’t want to be buried alive by the oncoming storm and be discovered by a passer-by a thousand years from now, and taken as an ancient artefact himself.
‘Shut all vents and hatches,’ he said but did not get any response from the computer. ‘Shut all vents and hatches,’ he repeated but still got no response. ‘Shut all vents and hatches,’ he roared and the computer finally responded by beginning to close all openings in the excavator vehicle. Sometimes he just wanted to break the computer by bringing down his fists into its core systems, but he never got that far. It was not reasonable as his small moment of satisfaction by destroying the machinery was outweighed by the hours of hard labour it would take to repair it afterwards. Besides, if he would demolish something every time his machinery failed to operate correctly, he would not have any fists left to bring down upon them. Back in his vault he placed his ancient finding on a workbench but did not proceed to study it, instead he climbed down to the cargo hold as he remembered something. He had found an object similar to this approximately three months ago. As he put in a commando on a nearby console, the storage crate that the other cupola was placed in appeared before him, trough shifting of the broad shelves where he stored his artefacts. He picked it up and it had similar markings on its edge and some kind of hinge at one side. He now knew what it was.
