Wonderment.

Fear.

Astonishment.

Suspicion.

Where to start? Ivy didn't know how she should feel as she walked along the smoothly machined valley floor towards the vastness of the transmissions spire. The thing soared upwards though the shaft out of sight, and she couldn't look at it for more than a few seconds at a time without feeling a surge of vertigo.

Seismic mapping confirmed that it did indeed run all the way up to the surface from the depths of the Scraegar Labyrinth. Given their current depth, that meant the thing was more than two kilometres tall. It was so thin it didn't look like it should stand up on its own.

There was something wrong about it that she couldn't put her finger on. Something that just defied human engineering principles.

She tried to focus on other details, examining the solid black surface beneath her feet as she walked, and trying to get her head around the kind of excavating gear you'd need to hollow out something like this. Rychter's human population had made a lot of strides in digging and blasting technology, given the conflict with the Scraegans, but even with the best equipment Ivy knew of it would have taken years to carve out a chamber like this.

Maybe the original builders had had that kind of time. They were still trying to figure out how to cut a sample of the material out without resorting to explosives that might destabilise the entire cavern, but right now that was someone else's problem.

"Everflowing," Capicza murmured, walking alongside her and trying unsuccessfully to sweep his torchlight over the exterior walls. The structure was so big that he couldn't look more than twenty feet up before the light paled into insignificance. "Who do you think put this here?"

"Drown me, how should I know?" She gave him a thump on the arm. "That's what we're doing down here. To get some answers."

At the head of the engineering team, along with Kelso and a pair of Blackwater specialists, she walked straight up to the entrance of the great tower. Up close the spine looked a lot less fragile, its structure easily fifty feet across and made of the same black material as everything else in this place.

At least on the outside.

A great door greeted them, a massive not-quite-circular thing. Maybe an octagon or a decagon, but it was difficult to tell because the dark material it was built of all seemed to blend together. It was big enough for a Scraegan to walk through upright with ease – certainly not built by anyone or anything as diminutive as a human being.

Ivy tried not to think about that.

On the far left of the massive structure, a circular recess pulsed with blue light, and she could see one of the strange control levers embedded there. Abruptly she changed course towards it, and came to a halt frowning, her torch aimed at the mechanism. She could grip it with both hands if she needed to – albeit a little awkwardly.

"Think that'll open this?" Kelso enquired, leaning in for a closer look.

"See anything else that looks like a door handle?" Ivy shot him a wry smile then nodded to Capicza. "Keep your light on this, will you?"

With his torch fully illuminating the recess, Ivy reached out and snaked her fingers through as many of the multi-holed grips as she could. Then she tugged, hard.

Nothing.

She tried again, and felt the lever edge just a little bit, but it felt like trying to lever a Hunter-Killer up into a loading bay. Letting out a snort of annoyance, she beckoned Kelso.

"See if you can get a grip of this thing," she said, allowing him to edge in alongside her. He didn't ask any questions; didn't argue. He just reached out and got as good a grip as he could.

"Ready."

"Okay." Ivy puffed out a breath. "On my count. One. Two. Three."

They both pulled and she strained with all her strength, gritting her teeth and spitting a curse between them at the effort.

"It's moving," Kelso growled, his arms shaking.

She felt it a second later, and then heard the faint rasp of scraping stone-metal. Her heartbeat quickened and she pulled harder, leaning back and trying to use her bodyweight to get as much leverage as possible. Excitement was beginning to get the better of any fear she might have had. She wanted to know what was behind this door.

Together they hauled it down, down, down until it wouldn't go any further. She didn't feel any kind of tell-tale clunk of a lock disengaging, but a moment later the huge door split in half and started to retract to the left and right.

She had been expecting some kind of creaking or groaning – something to match up with her instinctive sense that this place was incredibly old. Instead, all she got was a strange kind of hissing sound, and her nose twitched at an almost putrid smell that briefly filled the air.

"Drown me," one of the guards muttered, covering his mouth.

"Maybe some kind of hydraulic?" Kelso ventured, stepping back from the control and staring as the doors opened.

Ivy shook her head, she smell quickly forgotten as she jogged over to the entrance, panting from her exertions. She looked inside and her jaw just slammed open in amazement at what she found there.

The thick walls they could see were just the shell. Within the tower, staring them down like they were looking at the altar of an ancient god, was the transmitter itself. It shone a burnished cobalt colour, far brighter than anything around it, its structure comprised of endless coiling rings of gossamer-thin metal wrapped around a needle of blackness.

A pulse of transmission shook the ground beneath her feet, and this close to the mechanism itself she felt it a lot more than they had in the control room. She saw the coils light up in succession before fading.

She craned her neck and looked, following the pulse of blue up, and up, and up until it was lost to sight.

"Woah..." Capicza's gasp said it better than she ever could.

She blinked a few times and refocused, taking a step over the threshold, dimly aware of Kelso and his guards moving up with her, rifles raised as they crept into the tower base. She moved in with them, and slowly the rest of the team filtered inside, wide-eyed and awestruck.

In front of the coils of transmission was a quartet of consoles with the same strange control mechanisms, and they were looking in on a slightly raised platform, upon which stood a sphere.

That was what it looked like – sort of – constructed of a silvery metal with easily a dozen bands all linked together to form a hollow chamber more than fifteen feet in diameter. Within that chamber, a forest of metal strands filled the space, linking up to small, disc-like sections seemingly at random.

She walked slowly towards it, ignoring the two Blackwaters who went scuttling ahead of her, guns sweeping left and right for threats that didn't materialise. The glare of the transmitter made her shield her eyes with one hand as she peered at the strange construct.

"That's a heck of a paperweight," Ivy said as she clambered up onto the platform to get a better look. Capicza and Kelso moved up to join her, while the other technicians and engineers fanned out to the consoles, and towards the base of the transmitter, following the power lines.

Kelso raised an eyebrow, his rifle half raised as though he thought the spindles of metal might come alive. "Somehow I think it's more than a decoration."

"Yeah, probably." She started moving around the edges, trying to make some sense of the tangled blizzard of metal. It was like staring into a ball of string. She squinted, and her eyes started to hurt. It was so different, such a departure from a human brain's idea that she struggled to make any sense of it.

"It's a map!" Capicza exclaimed suddenly. "Riverlords, Shanklin, it's a bloody star map. Look at it!"

She scampered around to his side of the sphere, still feeling nothing but confusion as she stared. Following his pointing finger, she saw a flat disc part way along one of the spines. It didn't look any different to the others though.

"I don't see it." She glanced at him. "It's just another little disc."

"Yeah, I know that, but put it all together, Corporal, and you'll see." He looked kind of giddy now as he started sidestepping around the thing, one hand still thrust out, pointing. "Didn't you take basic astronomy?"

"No, I didn't, because I was joining the engineers and not a bloody stargazing tour," she snapped back. "Now what in Pissing Rivers are you talking about?"

"Read a book once and a while, eh? Count the discs."

"There are twenty-six," Kelso interjected. "And?"

Capicza looked at them despairingly. Then he pointed at the great, glowing presence of the transmission tower. "That thing is spitting a signal out into space, isn't it?"

"Yes?"

"Well, then what do you think they'll have a map of? Our system has twenty-six major bodies: nine planets and seventeen moons. This thing's got twenty-six discs arranged just like a damned solar system."

He started moving around pointing out a cluster of four discs, one big and three small. "That's got to be Beloph – big fat gas giant with three big fat moons that go with it." Then he kept moving, pointing and blurting out names. "Which makes this one Gaddeel, this one Pearl and this one..." He stopped and pointed. "And this one's Rychter."

Ivy squinted. It was about a third of the way out from the nominal 'centre' of the thing. About the right distance Rychter would be from the twin-suns at the system's heart. The other names pricked old memories from her school days, and she slowly began to realise that Capicza might have been onto something.

"What about the suns?" Ivy asked. "There's nothing in the middle?"

"Well you can't build a base on the sun, can you?" Capicza made an irritated gesture to their surroundings. "Maybe they only mapped the places that were of actual use."

"I think he's right, Ivy," Kelso said with a thin smile. "And it would make sense, given what we think this place is."

At that moment, another great pulse roiled through the structure. Ivy spread her feet to keep her balance as the ground vibrated, but a flare of blue caught the corner of her eye. She twisted unsteadily on the spot to look for the source.

As the tremor of transmission died she saw one of the spindles of the map glow for a few seconds and her eyes widened. It ran from Rychter straight to one of the other discs, before the glow speared off at almost a right angle towards a point right at the edge of the sphere. There was a disc there, a small one, with just a few of the spines connecting to it.

"Capicza," she hissed, grabbing him by the shoulder and hauling back around to join her, pointing furiously. "Which one's that?"

"I... err." He shook her hand off and peered closer. "That's got to be Wink."

"Wink?"

"Yeah, I... well I didn't name the bloody thing. But if I'm reading this thing right, it's got to be. Right out on the edge – just big enough to be a planet."

"Yeah." Ivy looked at the blank little disc, the anxiousness beginning to creep over her again. "And just important enough for someone to want to send a signal there."

*

The plateau was bustling with fresh activity after their latest discovery. Ivy and the team rotated out six hours later, leaving Captain Kenyatta and a fresh team to continue examining the tower. They came back to the plateau with a lot of new footage, a lot more questions, but with a definite sense that they were chipping away at the mystery.

Wink.

The icy little planetoid orbited right on the periphery of the local system, snared just enough by the gravity of the twin suns. She didn't really know much about it beyond that, and even Capicza couldn't tell them much. It was blisteringly cold and unable to support life. It barely had an atmosphere at all.

But someone, sometime, had decided that they would build the biggest transmitter Ivy had ever seen, and start shooting messages out to that little slice of nowhere. That meant there was more to Wink than any textbook could tell.

"You think Vannigan'll be able to make them understand?" Capicza grunted, slinging his feet up on a chair and cracking open a bottle of scorch beer. "I mean, showin' them underground maps is one thing. That's what they know, but this?"

He handed the beer over and opened a second. Ivy reached forward to clink her bottle with his and took a long gulp before replying.

"I have no idea," she said flatly. "I'm just glad that's not our job."

Capicza grimaced. "Yeah, you and me both."

"I mean, Wink's just a dead rock, isn't it?"

"According to all the books." He shrugged. "But it's not like I've ever been there to check." Then he looked at her. "You think they even know about ... you know, space? The Scraegans, I mean? Will they even know what he's talking about?"

Ivy pursed her lips, thinking. Then she took another drink, and continued thinking. She'd never really thought about that before. Did the Scraegans have a concept of anything beyond their underground settlements and the sand-blasted surface of Rychter?

Looking across, she could see them gathering beyond the tents, gathering where Kelso and the other specialists would be preparing the best explanation they could. She knew the beasts were intelligent, but she simply couldn't picture a Scraegan looking at the stars the way a human did.

Was that just her own immovable bias?

"I think," she said slowly. "That if they didn't think about the stars before, they did once we arrived on this planet."

Capicza nodded glumly. They lapsed into silence, trying to wrap their brains around the whole affair. Ivy found it tough to think of there being something else out there. Rychter had been ... Rychter for so long, just them and the Scraegans, that she'd just gotten used to that being her universe. With war becoming a way of life, thinking about other worlds – other things that might be out there – was too much.

Now she didn't have a choice and it made her head hurt.

So she drank, and thought of Ryke. Thought of his scent, of his skin under her fingers, and of the fantasy of seeing him again soon. The pleasant dream where he just walked out of that tent, took her by the hand and led her back to Brekka – to home.

That time would come. She kept reminding herself of that. But until it did, both of them had jobs to do, and important ones. Ivy drained the beer, and tossed the empty bottle to Capicza. He snatched it out of the air with a lazy gesture, and tugged a fresh one from the cooler beside his chair.

She was reaching out to take it when something blew the command tent to pieces.

Ivy didn't truly register what had happened – not at first. She simply reacted to the horribly familiar sound of a furnace cannon blast.

In an instant she was out of her chair, and she tackled Capicza to the ground behind a nearby ledge of rock, sending beer bottles shattering across the stone. Fire flared within the cavern and debris flew in all directions. People were screaming, and she heard the thump-thump-thump of mounted guns. A squeal of panic erupted from her mouth as something hot ricocheted off the ledge, scorching her shoulder as it careened overhead.

Following the flight of the piece of debris, she recognised a piece of armour plating from one of the Blackwater armoured carriers spinning wildly through the encampment. It collected one unfortunate technician on its lethal flight, killing the woman on the spot and hurling her corpse off the edge of the plateau.

"Drown me!" Capicza screamed, covering his head with his hands. "What-?!"

"Stay down!" Ivy risked peeking up over the ledge to try and figure out just what was happening. Had they signed their own death warrants by sharing the information about the spire? About where it was sending its signal? Did the Scraegans know something about this whole mess that the humans didn't?

What she saw was utter pandemonium tearing through the camp. Men and women sprinted back and forth, some frantically grabbing weapons, others hauling injured comrades through the haze of smashed rock. The sear of furnace cannon shots stung her eyes as they screamed across the plateau, but even with the shock of what was happening she could see the shots weren't coming from within the camp itself.

They were coming from the entranceway. Ivy looked up and her eyes went wide with horror at the sight of a veritable hoard of Scraegans – easily fifty or sixty of them thundering down the broad ramp, cannons boiling with every step.

At the head of the charge was the rogue pack leader, its striking flame-coloured fur and wildly ad-hoc plates of armour lashed across its massive body impossible to mistake. Ivy watched in part horror and part astonishment as it brought its great black stone club crashing down on one of the Scraegan warriors from the dig site.

The Scraegan went down howling, and the pack leader stepped over it, bellowing something in its fearsome, guttural tongue. Raising the club high, it roared out a challenge, the noise echoing up through the cavern like a rolling storm, and making Ivy's ribcage tremble. Its furnace cannon boiled as it charged, rising to send a blast into one of the prefab tents.

Bodies and machines flew in all directions.

Another bellow ripped through the dig site, and she saw the Alpha that had been here watching over them come trudging into view. It swept its big axe back and forth as it crunched its way through smoke and debris. The warriors of its pack coalesced behind it, furnace cannons charging and throats opening to unleash a chorus of challenges.

The members of the intruder's pack replied in kind, as they charged.

It took Ivy a couple of seconds to fully comprehend what she was watching, until the two groups of Scraegans smashed together with earth shattering force. The packs blasted at each other at point blank range and their huge weapons starting swinging. She couldn't quite believe it. Some locked jaws with each other, jostling and clawing with their massive paws as the strained for supremacy.

"Oh, by the Watching Lords," Ivy whimpered, grabbing Capicza by the scruff of his overalls and wrenching him upright. "Let's get out of here!"

And she started running as a Scraegan civil war ignited all around them.