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

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The tunnel was a lot wider now.

Ivy raised her goggles for long enough to wipe away a film of sweat from her forehead, before sliding them back into place and letting the cutting torch burn again. More rock disintegrated, and even more of the tunnel revealed itself.

Capicza, Captain Kenyatta and two other engineers joined her in the new excavation site, plunging into the rock face to unearth even more of the obelisk. Several meters back from the surface of the cavern, they'd broken through onto a platform of the same dark material – not quite metal, but too smooth and gleaming to be pure stonework.

The long spine that formed part of the cavern wall still pulsed at regular two minute intervals, sending out those gentle, gentle tremors that made her increasingly uneasy. Ivy was finally forced to admit that not a single person in their group was ready for what they'd unearthed here.

More than that, it seemed like the Scraegans were just as shocked by the discovery. She remembered the faces of the Alpha and its cohorts as she and Kelso tried their best to explain what they'd found.

Thankfully, Scraegan eyes worked as well if not better than humans, and visual aids went a long way to speeding up conversations. According to Kelso some eggheads back at Brekka were trying to craft some kind of rudimentary sign language that might bridge the current language chasm, but that was a long way off. Right now, they had to make do with vids, a lot of ridiculous gestures and a handful of badly pronounced words and phrases that each side could attempt to speak.

When the message about what they'd found did get through, none of the Scraegans looked particularly happy about it. Although Ivy still found the great beasts very, very frightening in close quarters, part of her still longed to get a closer look at those machines, to crack open the mysterious fiery tech of their age-old foes and she just what made them tick.

Being an engineer wasn't something she could switch off.

"Ma'am?" Capicza piped up nervously, working with one of the heavy cutting torches a few meters to her left. "Think I've got something."

Ivy shut off her own torch and shoved her goggles up onto her forehead as she turned to look. Kenyatta squirmed between bodies in the narrow space to join the other engineer.

"Lay it on me, Private."

Capicza eased his slight body aside and pointed at a piece of the wall. It took Ivy's eyes a moment to adjust to what she was looking at, but when she realised what it was, a jolt of excitement shot through her. A thin sliver of blue-white light speared out of a tiny hole in the rock – light coming from something inside the cavern.

"Drown me," Kenyatta murmured. Ivy and the others shuffled over to join them, leaning in over the pinprick of light.

"Must be some kind of chamber on the other side," Capicza said. "We got a scanner?"

"Right here," Ivy said quietly, slinging her torch across her back and tugging one of the scanners from her tool belt. Thumbing its activation switch, she placed its flat back against the rock face.

The screen shimmered in the gloom of the tunnel for a few seconds. Then the display firmed up and Ivy exhaled as low, steadying breath, trying to make sense of the readings.

The machine showed the layer of rock in front of them, but beyond that, there was a strange mishmash of rocky clumps and the black void of nothingness that it couldn't classify. But as well as that, there was something else that made her heart beat faster.

Empty space.

They still hadn't been able to cut out a portion of the black material for examination – Ivy didn't know how strong the stuff was, but it could stand up to the Engineering Cadre cutters on full power. She suspected the force required to actually break it would be more than they could safely supply without bringing the whole cavern down on top of their heads in the process.

"It's all ... mixed together," she said, brow furrowing. "There's a layer of that material along the base, then rock formations, and the scanner's reading empty space in between."

"Capicza's right. It's a room," Kenyatta murmured, craning her neck to examine the scanner. "Look at the outline – that's too regular to be a natural formation."

"So what do we do?"

"We knock." Kenyatta eased back, motioning the engineers to move aside and swinging her own heavy cutter to bear. "Everybody stand back."

Capicza and the others quickly shuffled away, but Ivy couldn't bring herself to move more than a few, shuffling steps. She slipped her goggles down into place as the torch flare, slicing another thin film of rock away around the blip of blue light.

More blue spilled into the tunnel.

Kenyatta worked with an expert's hand, the bulky cutting torch sweeping in deft motions back and forth as she carved away pieces of the rock face. More cracks appeared; chucks of cracked stone clattered across the temporary metal plating of the tunnel floor.

After a couple more minutes of work Kenyatta had carved a thin gap in the rock face wide enough for a person to slip through. On the left another rib of black material emerged, like some kind of supporting strut, but there was empty space beyond.

Ivy edged forward, trying to get a better look. With their heads a couple of inches apart, both she and the captain peered into a gloomy chamber, riddled with spurs of rock, as though it had overgrown like a stony jungle. A flat floor made of the black material stretched out in front of them, and Ivy's eyes widened when she saw the glimmering lines of cobalt blue that tracing slim paths across it. More ink-dark supports rose at regular intervals, bending gently away from them and disappearing into the darkness.

"Salter, you and Halberson head back to the plateau," Kenyatta said quietly to the other two engineers in the passage. "Get some temporary lighting and support scaffolds, and bring them up here."

"Ma'am," Salter replied, saluting and casting a wary glance at the gap before shuffling off back down the tunnel, Halberson close behind. As the pair receded into the distance, Ivy leaned forward, her head almost through the opening as she examined the room.

"You want to do the honours?" Kenyatta asked.

She nodded. "Yes, ma'am."

"Then lose your pack. You won't fit through with it on, and I'm not about to risk cutting a bigger hole until we can rig up those temporary supports."

"No problem." Ivy shrugged off the heavy gear pack, handing her cutter to Capicza, who looked positively nauseous. She smirked and gave him a reassuring clap on the shoulder, before turning back to the aperture.

"Be careful," Kenyatta cautioned.

"Copy that." Ivy breathed deep, placing herself in front of the gap. Taking a few seconds to steel herself, she twisted herself side on and slid into the chamber.

It was warm inside, but she could feel something like a gentle breeze sifting through the open space somehow. The black floor was completely solid underfoot, and her boots made muted clumping sounds as she walked, thumbing the activation trigger of her torch to add extra light to the eerie blue.

She took a few more steps, turning slowly to examine the room. Large parts of it were obscured by cragged tangles of rock, but the blue glow from the floor lighting ebbed off into the distance all around her.

Ivy licked dry lips. The place was a lot bigger than she'd expected. Lowering herself into a crouch, she looked more closely at the spines of blue light running through the floor. Her brow furrowed and she cocked her head to one side as she brushed her fingers over one of the lines.

The surface was totally smooth. No ridge or depression to indicate some kind of light fixture. Looking left and right, she could see that the lines formed a spoke-like pattern, all aiming inwards.

She took a moment, closing her eyes and trying reorient herself. Being underground and cutting narrow paths through the rock was a disorienting experience, but she mentally retraced her steps, to position herself in the great vastness of the cavern. Those spokes were aiming back in towards the main spine she'd discovered days ago.

Power flowing to something.

"By the Everflowing River..." she heard Capicza gasp.

Glancing back, she found that Kenyatta had entered the chamber too, with Capicza close behind, his eyes so wide they looked like they might pop out of his skull. Even steel-nerved Captain Kenyatta looked astonished by what they'd found. Their torches swept across the space.

"Well, whatever we were looking for," Kenyatta murmured. "I'd say that we found it."

"What is this place?" Capicza turned on the spot, sending his torch beam spearing off into the dark, further out into the underground world. In his other hand he held up a scanner, sweeping back and forth. "It goes on for..." He shook his head. "Scanner doesn't read that far."

"We need a long range seismic up here," Kenyatta said, turning to Ivy. "What do you think?"

"The lights," Ivy said, her voice trembling with anticipation and excitement. "They're flowing towards something – to the main mast in the cavern wall." She indicated one of the lines with her torch. "Towards whatever's sending out those pulses. This whole place is operational. It's like some kind of facility."

"Yeah, but who's?" Capicza put in. "Ain't ours, and it sure as shores ain't Scraegan."

"That's what we're here to figure out." Kenyatta moved carefully through the room, touching the black supports with a gentle hand. "We'll pull the main dig teams and get them in here. We'll excavate this place from the inside out."

"Something this size," Ivy answered. "Cap', that'll take weeks for us to do on our own."

"I'm aware of that."
She hesitated, biting her lip, before forcing out the words. "We need to tell the Scraegans about this. They could help us. They're natural diggers."

Kenyatta's jaw tightened. "Maybe."

"Maybe? Ma'am, with all due respect, what's the point of us working with them if we're not going to use the one thing they can definitely do better than we can?"

Capicza nodded. "She's right, Captain. Would save us a lot of time and legwork. If we can get them a map to work with, we could work the inside, they could excavate the outside."

"I'll see what we can do." Kenyatta stood there for a moment – Ivy could almost see the implications of everything they'd discovered flooding through the captain's brain.

Eventually she tapped her earpiece. "Excavation team – DS-1?"

"DS-1 – Excavation team. Go ahead," Kelso answered with surprising quickness, as though he'd been sitting by the radio waiting for their call.

"We've found... well, I'm not sure what we've found, but I think you're going to want to see it for yourself. We're about fifty meters deep into the southern cavern wall and we've found a room."

"A room?"

"Some kind of big artificial chamber. It looks like the cavern sort of... grew around it. It's made of that same material. And there are lights on."

"Bloody Lords," Kelso murmured.

"Yeah, tell me about it." Kenyatta edged passed Ivy, moving with painstaking care as she examined the space. "We're going to need a lot more time and a lot more people up here." She paused, glancing back at Ivy.

Ivy nodded.

"And we'd better tell the Scraegans what we've found."

"Everflowing – any other day of the week, I'd say take all the time you need, but right now I'm going to have to tell you to hold off."

Ivy's eyebrows shot up in surprise and she couldn't stop herself blurting down the comm. "Hold off? Kelso, did you not hear what she said? We've found something here – something big!"

"I understand that," he snapped. "But you need to wait – at least for the moment. I need you and Captain Kenyatta to join me at the main operations tent. Now."

She glanced at Kenyatta. The woman frowned, shaking her head and tapping her earpiece.

"Negative, Specialist. We only just made entry. We need to-,"

"Captain, I'm not asking," Kelso said in a much firmer tone. "We have a situation that needs your attention. I'll fill you in when you're back down here. Out."

"Hey-," Kenyatta's face twitched with anger, but the comm was closed.

"Everflowing is that all about?" Ivy muttered.

The captain gave a bad-tempered snort in response. "Guess there's only one way for us to find out." She turned to Capicza who was still nervously swivelling back and forth, casting his torch light over the room. "Stay here – when Salter and Halberson get back with the gear, get the lighting and support scaffolds rigged up."

"Y-yes, ma'am." Capicza cleared his throat and saluted.

"And by the Watching Lords, don't touch anything, eh?"

"Not a chance," he chuckled nervously. "Tell them to hurry up, will you? This place gives me the creeps."