Lanto's felt like his whole skull was starting to ache. His eyes had been straining over the logs from the Nautilus for days now, looking for signs of... he wasn't even sure what. Anything that might match up with the discoveries being made beneath the vast warrens of the Scraegar Labyrinth.

So far, they had a handful of anomalies logged from the Nautlius' scans of the planet on its initial approach, hundreds of years ago, but nothing that indicated the existence of any other intelligent life – let alone the Crawlers and their mysterious masters. He expanded the search, examining the initial scans of Rychter, back from Old Earth – a time and place that was a thousand years and hundreds of billions of miles from the ground beneath his feet.

But now the latest reports from the team at the Scraegar Labyrinth had shed a new light on their search. He'd re-read it a dozen times, and examined the bizarre image of the alien star map several times more, trying to really get his brain around it.

Without seeing the place firsthand it was difficult to make the mental leap, but he forced himself to try; just to accept the grainy images from the dig teams as proof of what they'd found. So far the information had been passed to him through delicate channels, with Aurelia and his old acquaintance, Minister Yanfoukis. It appeared the two were well entrenched in their hunt for saboteurs in Brekka, but that hadn't stopped them from keeping an eye on wider proceedings.

Thank the Watching Lords for people like Yanfoukis, he thought. Sometimes he felt like a link in an ever-weakening chain of sanity on this furnace of a planet.

What the teams had found there made was frightening in its complexity, but they may also have finally given him a solid lead on narrowing his search.

"Wink." Lanto let the innocuous little word pinball around in his mind for a few seconds as he sipped his coffee. "They're sure?"

"It's an educated guess," the archivist answered, tapping a finger against the data slate. "But it seems a sound enough theory, given the design of the mechanism. I've cross referenced against several different maps, from the Nautlius archives and from the handful of maps that our own astronomers have put together. It appears to match up – if you look at it the right way."

Thaniakas handed him the slate and Lanto examined it. He was no cartographer, and the sphere formed a bewildering tangle of wires despite the high resolution image. Thankfully the researchers had annotated the thing with the apparent planetary positions, and he squinted and tilted his head he could see the similarities.

"Alright. So, Wink, what do we know about it?"

"Original surveys from Up River didn't show anything unusual," she answered, shrugging. "A standard planetary body, if a little on the small side. Four thousand kilometres in diameter, freezing surface temperature, atmosphere of mostly nitrogen, with methane and hydrogen. A few other trace elements." Thaniakas tapped a finger against her chin thoughtfully.

"Those surveys are almost a millennia old," Lanto countered. "We have no real sense of time scale on how long the Crawlers have been here, or when that structure was built. Perhaps whoever built it came after the original surveys."

The archivist nodded. "If they did, the Nautilus may have recorded any anomalies when it passed through the system."

"We've been looking in the wrong place," Lanto chuckled. He put the data slate down, leaning back in his chair and clasping his mug in both hands, a faint spark of triumph igniting in his mind. "All this time we've been focusing on the sensor readings taken of Rychter and its moons. We should have been looking out there."

"Everflowing," Thaniakas muttered, sagging back into her chair.

At that moment there came a crisp rapping on the door that Lanto had come to recognise all too well. He cast an irritated glance back over his shoulder as the door rasped open, and in marched Lieutenant Almar Nastassos, his two guards in tow as always.

"This is not a good time," he grunted before the man could speak.

"Sorry to interrupt, sir, but I've got an urgent message from the Commissariat," Lieutenant Almar declared, standing to attention, his chin held high. "The Planetary Affairs sub-committee-"

"Whatever it is, it'll have to wait." Lanto waved a dismissive hand to the soldier before turning away.

"Sir?!" Almar's voice leapt several notes into shrillness.

"It will have to wait," Lanto repeated irately.

"But-,"

"Shut up, Lieutenant, and stick around. You might find something illuminating in what we're about to do."

To his surprise, Almar stopped talking. The man exchanged a baffled look with one of his subordinates, then relaxed his stance, clasping his hands behind his back. Lanto waited a moment until he was sure the interruption had been quashed.

"Alright then." He shook his head, basking briefly in the moment, before straightening up and nodding to Thaniakas. "Pull everything from the sensor logs that so much as breathed in the same void as Wink. Let's see if the Nautilus saw anything."

Thaniakas's fingers rattled over the keyboard at a frantic pace. The screens in the Nautilus' sensor archive blinked and flickered. An array of readings appeared on the screen, each one showing a different scan of Wink from various distances.

At first it didn't look like there was much to see, just an unremarkable rock floating in an unremarkable piece of space. But as they got closer, Lanto spotted the specs of black on the blue sphere of Wink.

Spots of nothingness. Things the scanners couldn't identify. The archivist brought the scan from the closest pass the Nautlius made of the planet up onto the biggest screen, and it was then that Lanto felt an unfamiliar chill of fear shoot right up his spine.

"By the Watching bloody Lords," Thaniakas breathed. "There's a drowning city out there!"

He nodded slowly, leaning to take a closer look. With one hand he brought up the scanner displays from the Brekkan teams working beneath the Scraegar Labyrinth on a tertiary screen. Wink's bland little surface was littered with pinpricks of blackness, mostly concentrated in the northern hemisphere.

"Magnify," Lanto said quietly.

The main screen zoomed in. He glanced at the other screen for a comparison and then back to the surface of Wink. His fingers curled with discomfort when he saw that the shapes picked up by the Nautilus matched the profile of the base beneath Rychter.

Far too much of a coincidence. There was only one conclusion to be drawn.

"So that's where the signal's going," Lanto said. "Our mystery guests have been very industrious."

Thaniakas let out a low whistle. "You think they're abandoned? Like the one on Rychter?"

"Abandoned?" He glanced at her. "When you leave your house, are you abandoning it?"

"I... well, no."

"And if you weren't coming back, you wouldn't leave the power on." He tapped a finger against the other monitor. "The Rychter facility is still functioning. And I'd swear on the Everflowing and every aching bloody bone in my body that those ones are too."

"Why wouldn't anyone have looked at this before?" Almar murmured, swept up in the magnitude of the moment.

Lanto shrugged. "They were colonists, coming here. What were they supposed to think? All they'd have seen were a bunch of anomalous readings on a dead rock they didn't have much interest in anyway. Their priority was starting a new world on Rychter, not chasing ghosts."

Thaniakas looked at him. "So what do we do?"

"That's a very good question. Now," he said, twisting his chair back to face Almar. "What does the Commissariat have to say that's so damned important, Lieutenant?"

*

Lanto fumed as he stared at the intelligence report Nastassos had thrust into his hands. The rest of the committee were gathered in Rubicon's war room, and beyond the sandglass behind them the gears of the city's war machine were already grinding into action. Crisply uniformed officers barked orders, screens came to life and a massive map display in the centre of the room shone with a three dimensional image of the southern barrens.

The report was short, but said all that it needed to to spur his colleagues into action. It was a Brekkan distress signal, supposedly from the team at the dig site.

EMERGENCY TRANSMISSION. AUTHENTICATION ALTAR-00145875. SCRAEGAN ATTACK UNDERWAY. EXTRACTION REQUESTED. REPEAT SCRAEGAN ATTACK-

Its abruptness leant credence to the idea of a sudden assault. There wouldn't be time for much else if the Scraegans had decided to wipe out the humans in their domain. Accompanying the brief message was a log from long range seismics showing the rapid movement of several Scraegan packs just minutes before the message had been sent.

"We received it three hours ago," Xanthus said, watching him carefully.

"It doesn't make any sense," Lanto muttered, grinding a thumb against his chin in thought.

"It makes perfect sense," Nastassos rumbled. "The Scraegans lost patience. The Brekkans shared too much with them and made themselves surplus to requirements. With the information they've gleaned the Scraegans don't need them anymore."

"Oh no?" He gave the other minister an incredulous look. "You think just because they found a signal being shot into the void that's the end of it? That they don't see anything else worth pursuing."

"You're assuming the Scraegans actually care where the Crawlers came from," Jungaat interjected. "We helped them destroy the nest. That may be all they really wanted."

"Then why let Brekka send a damned expedition down there?!" Lanto shot back. "Why bother letting us get this far in the first place?"

"I don't know. Maybe they simply needed to bide their time they were ready to strike back at us. We've been expecting retaliation for the bombing of the Liaison Post. This may be it."

"Maybe, maybe, maybe – to the rapids with your maybes!" He tossed the data slate carelessly onto the table in front of him, his composure evaporating. "All of you are ready to launch another war on a maybe." His eyes narrowed in suspicion, flickering from the slate to Nastassos. "How in the Everflowing did you even get this report? That's a Brekkan command authentication – no one sent it to us."

Nastassos treated him to a nasty smile. "You're not the only one with friends in Brekka, Minister."

That made Lanto bristle, and he knew what was coming next. As inevitable as the tides.

"I take it this means you're upping the timetable?"

"We're back at war, Minister," Xanthus told him, her voice like iron. "I don't want to denigrate the importance of your research into the Crawlers, or what you've found, but this takes precedence."

"But we've finally got something concrete!" he exclaimed. "Proof that the Crawlers came from off world. That someone put them here. You all saw the scans."

"You found a bunch of dead facilities on a deader rock," Nastassos growled. "By the Riverlords man, put your feet back on the ground. There is a war unfolding and you just want to...ignore it?"

Lanto twitched. "I'm not ignoring anything, but you are. Wink is a lifeless husk. Whoever built those structures there came from outside this system – it's the only explanation."

"None of us are disputing your findings," Minister Miatt said, turning his weather-beaten gaze on Lanto. "I would like to get all the same answers as you, but we cannot do it while the Scraegans remain a threat."

"He's right," Hadriana agreed. "Once the Scraegans have been removed, completely, as a threat to us, we can turn our resources outwards again. We can give you what you need to launch a proper investigation, instead of being stuck down in the halls of that relic."

Something about this made Lanto's skin crawl. Most of the others had been spoiling for a fight for months, and now the Scraegans had furnished them with fresh provocation. It just felt too convenient – if war could ever be such a thing. There was so much missing

But he couldn't fight the logic in Miatt's words. Maybe it would be better to stop digging his heels in against something he had no chance of stopping. Maybe he could help put an end to this, quickly and decisively, and then force the eyes of Rubicon back to the stars. Without the Scraegans to fight they could stop dumping vast sums into weapons and instead build powerful telescopes, sensor arrays, maybe even a vessel of their very own to reach back out into stars.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

So many maybes. But he didn't have anything else.

Eventually he inclined his head to Miatt. "Very well. Though I will insist that Archivist Thaniakas and her team continue their work."

"I have no objections." Nastassos waved a dismissive hand.

"In which case, I will not stand in your way. Has Brekka's commissariat been notified?"

"They have?"

"And?"

A shrug. "They have yet to respond."

"So," Lanto said, letting his eyes wander from face to face around him, "we are proceeding without the formal consent of Brekka's ministers?"

"We do not need their consent," Xanthus replied icily. "The army leaves, tomorrow. Minister Nastassos, I assume your preparations are already underway?"

"They are."

"Then go see to them. I want no delays. Minister Hadriana, send word to the other Commissariat Assemblies and order them to mobilise. We're putting an end to this, forever."