Year 248 P.L. Rychter Calendar
Coordinates: 52.3°S; 77.2°W
Site Designation: Scraegar Labyrinth, Incident Site, Codename: [REDACTED]

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By the pissing Everflowing River, it was hot down here.

Ivy dragged a sleeve across her forehead and puffed and exhaled, taking a moment to catch her breath. Growing up beneath Rychter's two baking suns, she was no stranger to a bit of heat, but even for her this was pushing it. Letting herself dangle in the harness, she extracted a hydrocube from the front pocket of her engineering vest and popped it into her mouth, crunching down as she surveyed the cavern.

The place swarmed with engineers from her unit – the 15th E.C. Armourer's Platoon out of Brekka – some of them hunched over survey equipment, some working at prefabricated map displays, others tinkering with cutting lasers and checking cables, while dozens more dangled like spiders all around the immense void beneath the earth.

Ivy herself hung from one of the harnesses, currently carving rock samples out of the artificial cavern walls. Below her, a thick mesh of armour-netting had been placed. Far below that lay a bubbling lake of magma seeping from Rychter's deep core. It turned the whole place into a piss-damned furnace.

"Drown me," she muttered as she started winching herself back down to the main plateau with her latest load. Despite the heat, she had no choice but to wear the rugged engineering cadre overalls, complete with helmet and heavy padding for her knees and elbows. Safety first, as one of her colleagues had remarked bitterly.

"Comin' in a little hot there, boss," advised the engineer waiting at the edge for her.

Ivy frowned, slowing her descent until she swung into the arms of the young man who guided her booted feet onto the uneven rocks of the plateau. Huge metal support struts had been painstakingly driven into it to hold the war-shattered surface together. Barely six months ago this cavern had been a battleground that decided the fate of a world.

At least, that's what everyone thought back then.

"Thanks," she said once the engineer had untangled her, clapping him on the shoulder. She tugged the helmet gratefully off of her head, shaking loose her sweat-tangled locks of brown hair. Then she hitched her pack of samples up onto her shoulder and set off.

Ivy trudged into the stabilised plateau centre, where an array of pre-fab diagnostic stations had been set up to sift through the deluge of data coming in from the investigations. People flowed back and forth, voices jabbering, radio operators swearing as they tried to get their signals to navigate the labyrinth of crags above their heads.

Striding through the engineers, scientists and surveyors, were guards from Brekka's infamous combat support cadre – better known as the Blackwaters. They wore sheathes of unmarked grey armour and carried long rifles. One of them saw her approaching and peeled off of his patrol route, flashing a smile, a canteen of water hanging loose in his long fingers.

"Corporal Shanklin," he addressed her, tapping two fingers to his forehead in salute.

"Getting all formal on me, Specialist Vannigan?" she replied, smirking as she slid into her seat at one of the stations. She returned the salute, before swinging her sample pack up onto the table. "C'mon, Kelso. Lose the dam in your river, would you?"

"Some of us like a little formality," he chuckled. "But alright, Ivy. Quite a haul you've got there."

"Oh, you know me, hardest worker of the bunch." Ivy looked at him and cracked a wink.

She was thankful that the simmer of awkwardness – on account of the fact she was romantically entangled with Kelso's younger brother – had abated over the time they'd worked together in the dig site. Big brother Vannigan was a long-limbed, shaven headed young man who'd worked his way up through the combat support units until the Blackwaters snapped him up. He proved to have a sneakier mind than she would have guessed. It certainly didn't run in the family, for which she was thankful.

"So how's it coming?" Kelso asked between glugs from his canteen.

"Slow," Ivy replied, waving a hand towards huge crates of unprocessed material. "The battle pulverised a lot of the stuff we would have wanted intact."

"Yeah, tell me about it." He grimaced. "I got an earful from Colonel Hackley over that one."

"Lady knows how to yell, I'll bet."

"You have no idea."

"Well, she's not wrong. It's a miracle there's anything left to salvage in here." Ivy sighed, pawing at the holographic display of the data pad sitting in the diagnostic station's cradle. It flickered into life with a series of colour bars, percentages and workflow estimates. Gibberish if you'd never seen them before, but they painted her a dreary picture.

"Half the good stuff got pounded to dust, and half of what's left is in that lava flow." She spread her hands apologetically. "We're collecting all the samples we can get from the undamaged walls, the tunnels and the plateau floor, but it's going to take time."

Truth be told, that didn't bother her unduly. Ivy was no stranger to hard graft. This place had secrets to yield and she would dig them out.

Not so long ago this chamber had been infested by a strange race of gigantic arthropods – "Crawlers", as the human military affectionately dubbed them. Their discovery had been as abrupt as their annihilation, with only scattered pockets still left to bother the Southern badlands, but in the aftermath of the battle one thing had become disturbingly clear.

No arthropod diggers had shaped the cavern, or the passages leading down into it.

Someone had put the Crawlers down here.

Now it was up to Ivy and her team to find out who.

"I've asked for more specialist lifters from Crescentscar," Kelso told her, as though trying to make up for the destruction. "I know it's slow going. To be honest, I think some of the folks back home are trying to forget about this little piece of the puzzle."

"Can't say I blame them for that," she chuckled bleakly. "Wasn't bad enough to have the Scraegans, then these crawling bastards. Now it looks like might have knocked down somebody's zoo. Enough to make your head spin, isn't it?"

"Not yours, from the looks of it."

"Yeah, well-," Ivy broke off at the sound of a rumble that echoed through the cavern. The ground beneath her feet suddenly shook and she swore, grabbing the desk to hold it steady. A clattering of small rocks fell from the ceiling and the cavern walls.

Around her, guards and team leaders started barking orders, and men and women in harnesses fought to steady themselves. A torrent of swearing rippled through the cavern and Ivy joined them as she caught her box of samples before it went crashing off the edge of the diagnostic station. When the tremor subsided she shot Kelso an irate glance.

"A little early, don't you think?" she growled.

He straightened up, having the good grace to look sheepish. "Sorry, coordination's still a little rough around the edges with our new friends." Clearing his throat he stepped back from the table, stuffing his canteen into his belt and swinging his rifle around.

"Alright everybody," he bellowed, dragging the eyes of the work crews and guards toward him. "Screw your spines back in, eh? So we're a little ahead of schedule. That doesn't change the plan. I want every one of you on your best behaviour – no itchy trigger fingers. Remember, we're all friends now."

A reluctant murmur of understanding passed through the group, closely followed by another, closer tremor. Ivy scowled. Friends was a pretty generous word to apply to the native population of Rychter. The human colonists had been fighting a bloody war with the resident Scraegans for decades – a war that simmered into an uneasy truce not even a year ago.

Ivy was far from the only person who wasn't quite there yet. Around her both guards and members of the science team exchanged wary looks, and she could see plenty of open safety catches on the guns.

But she thought of Ryke – brave, crazy Ryke Vannigan, who she loved with every inch of her – and remembered that all that animosity could be overcome, if it had to. He was a Hunter-Killer pilot, trained to kill, but he was the one who helped humanity take those first tentative steps towards stopping the war that had consumed their existence for longer than she'd been alive.

She would at least try to follow his example. Taking a deep breath, and trying to quash the instinctive surge of fear in her gut, she stood, turning to her fellow engineers.

"You heard the specialist," she shouted, flicking a thumb at Kelso. "Nobody's gonna ask you to kiss them. Just lock it up, and make sure the gear's secure for arrival." She clapped her hands together once, the sharp sound echoing through the air. "Move it!"

A frenzy of activity erupted as the members of the expedition followed her commands. Kelso shot her a wry smile and a nod of thanks, before moving off to direct the members of his security team.

Ivy swept up her data slate from its cradle and exhaled sharply, bracing herself for the coming encounter. The first of its kind – an exchange of knowledge with a race of beings they could barely even communicate with. This could all get really, really messy.

The tremors subsided and a measure of calm slithered through her. One thing it seemed that the Scraegans already understood was that tunnelling straight into this chamber was a very bad idea. Even though they moved quickly beneath the rocks and sands of Rychter, they always surfaced well beyond the entranceway, approaching on foot.

That didn't serve to make them any less imposing.

She stepped forward with Kelso and the other team leads, moving to where a great sloping ramp of rock climbed to the main entrance tunnel. It gaped like the maw of a giant underground beast, illuminated by temporary work lights, and she could see them trembling faintly. Heavy footfalls echoed out of the dark, accompanied by growling, bass barks.

Despite all her good intentions, Ivy couldn't stop herself from offering a prayer to the Riverlords when the first of them lumbered into view.

The Scraegan pack made for a fearsome sight. Twelve of them formed a wall of towering bipedal forms, protected by thick plates of brassy armour, with fur bristling through the joints. Most of them had large, deep-throated cannons lashed to an arm – furnace cannons – the standard armament of the Scraegan foot soldier. Ivy knew in excruciating detail the kind of damage those weapons could cause.

Some hauled equipment along in their wake – huge sandstone coloured slabs that housed the enigmatic Scragean tech. Ivy's eyes lit up on those cases, curiosity tremoring through her. She'd only seen videos of it in action, and she was itching to get a first-hand look, no matter how she got it.

Ivy breathed deep, trying to ignore the battering of her heart in her ribcage as the Scraegans approached. She could feel the crackle of unease in the air from the human research team as the great beasts began heaving their gear into place, spreading out as their leader loped towards the human representatives.

It was the first time she'd found herself face to face with an Alpha, and it was a nerve-wracking experience.

The thing was big enough to generate tremors just by walking. A huge male, the Alpha formed a hulking mountain of fur and muscle, standing easily twenty feet in height. Its shovel of a head was protected by a skull plate thick enough to deflect high calibre rounds, coal-dark fur was visible between its iron-coloured armour plates. Although this specimen wasn't carrying the distinctive furnace cannon of the warrior caste, Ivy had seen first hand the kind of carnage a Scraegan could cause with those blunt claws.

It turned big, black eyes on her. The great head shifted to look down and its nostrils flared. Behind it, the other Scraegans picked out places to unfold their equipment, grunting and barking to each other in their impenetrable dialect. She could see more than one member of the research team twitching visibly as the newcomers installed themselves dangerously close to human work stations, as though they were unaware of them.

Swallowing hard, she turned back to the Alpha. It looked to Kelso; back to her. The lead technician in their group punched in a command to the broad slab of a data slate that she carried and a strange, snarling bark echoed out of its speakers. A recreation of a Scraegan greeting; at least the best approximation the blackwater linguists had managed to come up with.

The Alpha dipped its head slightly in acknowledgement, letting out a faint bass grumble from the back of its throat.

Gulping down her fear and, Ivy forced herself to look up at the great shaggy beast, meeting those impenetrable eyes. Holding up her diagnostic pad, she wiggled it in the air and managed a nervous smile.

"Wanna compare notes?" she asked.

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