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

II

Ivy could feel it in her gut. Something was wrong.

She hadn't heard from Ryke since his abrupt disappearance on their vid-call. While she was used to him having to rush off – a Hunter-Killer pilot didn't get a lot of down time – he normally kept her in the loop, even just with message.

But out here, deep underground and a hundred miles from any kind of human settlement, there was nothing she could do. Kelso promised to ask around, but who knew how long it would take for him to get an answer. It gnawed at her, making it difficult to sleep, invading her mind whenever she had a spare moment.

So she threw herself into her work.

Zipping up her Engineering Cadre overalls and buckling on her knee, and elbow guards, she clambered into the tight climbing harness, checking all its fastenings were secure. Sighing heavily, she ruffled a hand through her locks of brown hair, then swung on her heavy pack, feeling the reassuring heft of the gear held within. A set of blast goggles hung around her neck at the moment like the world's clunkiest fashion accessory. She scooped up her helmet and stepped out of the makeshift barrack tent, out into the sweltering heat of the plateau again.

The mountainous presence of the Scraegan team hit her like a physical thing, impossible to ignore no matter how many times she saw them this close. They stumped around from place to place, examining their bizarre machines, tracing the scorched lines in slabs of smooth stonework. She'd taken a close look at one once, but it didn't mean much to her. Right now she decided to leave the job of interpreting to the Blackwaters.

Ivy had to stifle a chuckle though, as she saw a couple of the Blackwater officers gesturing in frustration at one of the looming Scraegans. Their large data slate was doing its best to recreate Scraegan speech patterns, but something was obviously getting lost in translation. The Scraegan – a blocky, iron-furred brute – snorted bad-temperedly and flailed one set of blunt claws at the console, then back at its own slab of a display.

It's a miracle we made it this far, she thought.

"Heading down again, Corporal?"

The voice wrenched her attention away from the squabbling specialists. She glanced to her right to find Captain Kenyatta striding towards her at a diagonal, aiming to cut her off before she could reach one of the abseil lines fixed into the plateau edge.

"Yes, ma'am," Ivy replied, swivelling to salute without breaking stride. Kenyatta saluted back, though she could see the lines of concern on the other woman's face. Kenyatta had been Ivy's commanding officer since she joined the Engineering Cadre – a brawny woman with dark skin and a thick tangle of dreadlocks.

"Be sure your hydros are topped up," the captain advised. "Can't have one of my best engineers passing out at the end of a rope."

"I'm all loaded up." Ivy tugged on the strap of her gear pack. The thing was loaded with all the tools she needed for carving samples out of the rocks, all lashed to her body harness.

"Don't be down there for too long, alright?" Kenyatta's tone lost some of its levity. "You've clocked a lot of hours down in that pit this week already. Medics say we need to pace ourselves and rotate shifts, alright."

Ivy reluctantly came to a halt, knowing that the order was coming. She turned to face Kenyatta, standing to attention.

"At ease, Shanklin." The woman waved a dismissive hand. "I'm not here to chew you out."

"Then what can I do for you, ma'am?"

"Just need to check that your head's all screwed on straight, that's all." Kenyatta fixed her with an accusing glare. "Got anything you need to say to me?"

Ivy shook her head. "No, ma'am."

"Then what's gotten into you? You're living down in that pit right now. I don't want to order you to take a break, but if you keep this up I'm going to have to."

"Ma'am, I promise you, I'm okay," she said firmly. By the River, she didn't need this. "There's just a lot going on in the world right now. With the Scraegans here, and the Crawlers somewhere out there-,"

"And your boy Vannigan right in the middle of it all?"

She stiffened. "That doesn't help."

"I'll bet." Kenyatta nodded sagely.

"But I can do my job, ma'am."

"I know you can, but I don't want you killing yourself to do it." Captain Kenyatta clapped a hand on her shoulder. "Tomorrow, you're off duty, alright? Just for a day. Take a beat, recharge. We've got more than enough personnel cover the shifts."

Ivy smiled sadly. "That an order?"

"Only if you need it to be, corporal."

Then she turned and walked away, leaving Ivy in a conflicting boil of emotions. Anger bubbled up the most – anger at the implication that she couldn't handle what was going on.

More anger at the fact that Kenyatta might have a point.

"Drown me," she spat under her breath, twisting and marching over to the support frame she'd picked out for the day's excursion. The young man attending the station intuited her black mood, and he didn't bother with any pleasantries, instead just hooking her harness up to the pulley system of heavy-duty climbing rope that now spider-webbed its way across the canyon walls.

"Thanks," Ivy murmured, but before he could reply she was swinging out into the void, sliding along the reinforced wiring with the ease of an expert. With the autogear on her harness, she directed herself away from the other engineers, nibbling at the wall like birds.

On the other side of the plateau the Scraegans had an entirely different apparatus set up, being far too bulky to swing themselves around on ropes like their human counterparts. Long, gossamer-thin spines of metal pierced the wall from a series of their stone contraptions at the edge. No-one quite knew how they worked, but they seemed to be probes of some kind, digging through the rock. She'd tried to get close to one of them, but the Scraegans using it had angrily shooed her away.

Ivy wasn't about to pick that fight.

So on she went, finding a virtually untouched portion of wall more than fifty feet from the nearest other engineer in her group.

Having to concentrate on swinging herself around, shimmying up and down, finding makeshift hand and footholds, and burying new ones into the rock face kept her mind busy. The heavy-toothed boots gave her purchase as she moved, looking for a likely spot.

So far they hadn't found much of anything. Parts of the cavern looked to have been sculpted by machinery, but the destruction caused by the atomic blast made it difficult to discern what might be natural, or just plain old explosive force.

Eventually, Ivy spotted a patch of smoother stone, ringed by a ragged edge of rubble, as though other parts of it had been shaken loose by the detonation. Clambering and winching herself along, she jammed her feet in position, buried a pair of anchor clamps into place, and started cutting.

The world boiled on around her. She lost track of time as she scanned and sliced away at portions of the rock, every now and again repositioning the anchor clamps to get a better look. A dozen small samples of rock disappeared into her pack as she went, some that she was pretty sure would tell them nothing new; others displaying strange foreign trace elements that didn't belong in the badlands. She didn't know how much of that was residue from the battle, or some chemical left behind by the Crawlers, but information was power – at least that's what the Blackwaters told her.

But after more than an hour of distracting herself, something strange appeared on the screen of her portable scanner.

Blackness. A void beneath the rock face.

She frowned. Taking a beat, she steadying herself in her harness and crunched down on a hydrocube, wiping sweat from her eyes. Then she looked at the scanner again.

The little screen showed the same thing. A foot or so of rugged stone, and then... nothing. But not an empty space. Just something the scanner couldn't identify, and couldn't penetrate.

"What in the Everflowing?" she murmured, cocking her head to one side. Mind churning with possiblities, she swung herself closer, digging one of the anchor clamps into the nearby rock face to hold herself in place. She leaned in close, staring at the spiderweb of cracks that infested the stonework.

Where the natural rock of the cavern wall had been shattered by the blast, she could see something dark beneath. Craning her neck and leaning awkwardly to one side, she tried to get a better look. Through the shadowy cracks she thought she could make out something smooth, but it was difficult to tell.

Hooking her second clamp into place with one hand, she shoved her blast goggles down over her eyes with the other. Then she brought around her cutting torch. About a foot long with a flat, smoke-blackened nozzle, it could generate enough head to slice through a tank hull. Thumbing its activation switch and setting a white hot flame blazing.

With painstaking care, Ivy started slicing away layers of rock, letting the fine dust disintegrate and fall into the magma far below. It took a few minutes before she was able to carve a few inches deep, working carefully so as not to damage whatever was concealed beneath.

When the last of the rock dribbled away, she found herself looking at something that looked metallic, a deep blue, so dark it was almost black. The are she'd cleared was maybe six inches square, but it looked like there could be more if she kept working. Her jaw worked from side to side, unease beginning to creep up her spine.

Against her better judgement, she reached out.

With a finger and thumb, she pinged the surface.

It was totally solid, and she didn't hear even a faint echo from within to indicate it was hollow. The noise just died. When no alien booby-traps sprang forth to incinerate her, Ivy placed a palm against it.

It felt metal, not quite cold, but cooler than the surrounding rock despite the residual heat of the cutting torch. She let her fingers creep across it, feeling for any imperfections and finding none. Totally smooth, totally impenetrable.

"What are you then?" she muttered to herself. A few more adjustments of her clamps and she had herself positioned square on to the black metal. Ivy puffed out her cheeks, exhaled a deep breath, and began gently cutting away the rock to the left and right.

Keeping the torch on low power, it was painstaking work, but she kept at it, sifting more and more rubble away until eventually she found the edges of the thing. Ivy shut off the torch, shoving her goggles up to take a better look. It was a few feet across, wider than she was, and there was a very slight curve in its surface. She dug her fingers around the edges, sweeping away some of the loose rock.

Confusion reigned in her mind. Looking around, Ivy realised no-one had noticed her and she didn't know if that was bad or good. She didn't quite know what to say. She'd never seen anything quite like it. Even the humans on Rychter didn't have structures like this.

Steeling herself, Ivy shoved the goggles back into place and fired the torch up to full once more. There was one sure way to get some answers. Narrowing the burn-point, she tried to slice a tiny chunk out of the edge of the strange metal.

The surface glowed red at the touch of the flame, but when she moved it, there wasn't even a scratch. In seconds the glow ebbed away across the surface. Ivy blinked in surprise; brought her hand close.

Just a whisper of heat.

"Son of a bitch," she whispered, peering so close her nose was almost touching the metal. Some kind of heat diffusing alloy, she guessed. Certainly not anything built in Brekka, that was for damn sure. And not Scraegan either.

The implications made her shudder. She rocked back in her harness, just staring for a moment and trying to decide if she really had just found the thing that was going to turn the whole history of Rychter upside down. The rumours of why they were here rang in her skull. A search for aliens. Someone else who'd beaten the human race to this world, but for some reason not stuck around.

Was she, Corporal Ivy Shanklin, really the one who was going to prove it.

Swallowing hard and licking her dry lips, she slid the torch back into its holder in her belt, and instead brought the scanner up again. She held it close, seeing the same impenetrable nothingness right in front of her. How had they not seen it before? Did the rocks here somehow mess with their gear, concealing this thing. She'd found the edges from side to side but...

Ohhhhh-kay.

Ivy moved up and down. Directly above and below her, the scanner was able to pierce through the thinned rock, and she could see that the structure extended well beyond the length of her body.

With her heart smashing in her ribcage, Ivy started winching herself up, scanning and scanning as she went, finding more and more chunks of black nothing right in front of her. Sometimes she paused to clear away a few more layers of rock, and after another half hour of painstaking work she realised she'd ascended almost thirty feet from where she started.

And the metal thing was still in front of her.

Ivy let her head rock back, staring up towards the arched, cracked ceiling. Whatever she'd found, it seemed to climb all the way up – a great dark monolith just beyond her reach.

"By the Watching Lords," she breathed.

Then she decided that she'd seen enough. Tapping her helmet, Ivy opened the comm. "Captain Kenyatta? This is Corporal Shanklin. I'm working grid 6212."

"Go ahead."

"Err... ma'am, I think you'd better come take a look at this."

"What've you got?"

"I'm not sure, ma'am," she said, brushing her fingers over the cool metal. "But it's something that really shouldn't be here." 

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