Before the Away Team was dispatched down onto the central pod-tier of the city, NeeSharim unleashed her swarm to sail the skies of the thin atmosphere enveloping Lobarth Ceryndum. One hundred sparrow-sized, crescent-shaped sky-drones made from unglazed, lustreless liquid metal fanned out like a stream of raindrops from the underside of The Glide's hull. The aerial probes were not launched from out a hatch or docking bay opening, but were instead a homogenous, eutectic super-lattice that sloughed off from the mighty vessel under their own independent power, each droplet pre-programmed with telemetric commands and recognizing themselves to be responsive to the data-gathering mission of the liquid mass as a whole. Catching the heaving, billowing breezes skating across the decaying city's skyline, the drones probed the vast topographical parameters of the eerie metropolis for signs of life and population density, for energy expenditures beyond those necessary to support humanoid or mammalian life forms, for known varieties of technological weapons systems, for unshielded computer network activity beyond the operational animation for life support and utilities, and for anomalous mechanized activity indicative of defensive/offensive wartime preparations.

Nothing. It was a like the metropolis was in torpor, hibernating, revealing itself to be little more than a dead zone.

Waiting.

"I've got organic life forms, three pockets of sixteen, with very, very low body heat signatures, indicating they're either shielded or in-stasis, ... or aliens unlike any we've yet encountered ... and none of them appear to be in-motion," NeeSharim had said.

"What the hell is going on down there?" Mune'stahr had pondered aloud. The question had been rhetorical. He had known no one could yet provide him an answer.

"Not enough data yet to form a working hypothesis," Pylott had answered. "We'll find out soon enough after we go in."

"The centermost geographic district in the city is laid out like a pentagon circumscribed by a pair of concentric circles," NeeSharim had pointed out to the team composed of Pylott, who took the point, Poli'Artta Ranzireth, and Neuronia Syngulareus. "All avenues and boulevards radiate out like spokes in a wheel from the trio of columnar buildings clustered here...," the autonomous synthetic A.I. avatar had pointed at a 3D holographic schematic-projection of the targeted area, "...and there are four visible exits that lead to the foundational support-stalk's elevator tubes on the outer skin and down to the waterside docks. There's also an open area resembling an aero-platform that could be used for quick air-born vehicular egress on the eastern tower off from the concave-shaped plaza there. I think that, tactically, it would be best to target that plaza as the team's landing zone."

Klauvane Tregg's broad face had reflected his confusion at NeeSharim's dissertation. "Why aren't we going for the obvious anomaly in this picture? There's what looks to be a very large bio-organic craft, some kind of cyborg thing adapted from a huge marine echinoderm, at the foot of a stalk at the far side of the city. It's obviously a ship of some sort, probably the flagship of this Fellmanghul's naval fleet, if he has one. Wouldn't it be likely he'd keep any hostages aboard that ship? Why aren't we targeting it?"

"Precisely because it's obvious," Pylott had said. "If anyone were to consider coming to rescue the Paranescience leader and her coterie of royal diplomats, then Fellmanghul would be foolish not to use such a craft as a ruse and a lure, presenting a rescue team with a near-irresistible probable target. There's likely to be a full tactical assault force waiting aboard that ship to spring a trap on whoever comes for the Queen. And on the off-chance her rescuers survive the trap, she won't be aboard ship -- the mission would be fruitless. She'd logically be kept elsewhere so Fellmanghul doesn't risk losing his bargaining chip."

"It's what I'd do," Mune'stahr then commented, nodding.

"Oh," Tregg had said, suddenly embarrassed at revealing his ignorance of battlefield strategy.

"Listen," Mune'stahr had then said, turning to fully face his friends and companion as the team gathered at the inter-deck transport tube just off the mezzanine perimeter of the Bridge. "We've gathered a fair amount of urban geophysical and architectural data, but that's all pretty superficial data for staging an Away mission. You know that. There's still way too much we don't know about who or what may be alive and wandering those streets and boulevards. We don't know anything about a possible militia presence or about robotic defenses, autonomous or otherwise, and we've got to keep the shiftship out of targeting range of possible skyward-directed artillery. Bluntly put, you get into serious trouble down there and backup is going to be a long time coming for you. We don't have the full story here. Do not trust anyone or anything... Queen Infernyya Rebekkon is a homicidal tyrant and a ruthless despot. She's a criminal.  We don't owe her any loyalty. If we can prevent this Fellmanghul freak from killing her, then fine. But if the risk is too great, write her off. She's not worth dying over."

"You're not talking to a novice, Mune'stahr," Pylott said. Her voice had sounded tight. She was uncomfortable with Mune'stahr's naked display of concern for her. The timing was bad and the situation even worse. She had to concentrate on the mission. There would be other times for the mercenary and her to address the intricacies, and the depth, of their growing personal connection. She then qualified her comment to soften her words' rough edges.

"I realize our recon is woefully incomplete, but we took an oath to stand for what's right, to protect and fight for those who don't have the power to do so themselves. Just because that oath isn't to any one kingdom or government doesn't make it less binding. Back when we were troopers in service to the World-Father's Extraplanetary High Frontier Extrasolar Naval Fleet, we did some unconscionable things, bad things, simply because we were told to. Back then, the words of that oath didn't mean as much because we were puppets to the Hegemonic Emperium. But, since we've embarked on this new journey in a new universe, things are different. Here, in the Ventriculum, we stand for something. Yes, the Queen of the Paranescience is a monster, but we don't allow her to be arbitrarily tortured and murdered by other tyrannical monsters by passing personal moral judgment. We don't do things like that anymore."

"Just make it back here in one piece, okay?"

Pylott had then nodded, avoiding eye contact with her tall, muscular partner so as to not succumb to sentiment.

"What're the parameters of our roving range? And what kind of a time-frame are we looking at?" Pylott had asked as she'd fitted a pair of micro-form factor portable generators into her field kit.

"Range is northeast by southwest, moving counter-clockwise. Your time-frame? Quick," Mune'stahr had said. "We want you in and out before anyone can raise an alarm."

"Sounds good to me," Poli'Artta had remarked sardonically out the side of her mouth.

"Yeah, well you make sure you watch yourself," Klauvane Tregg had paternally chided her. "Unlike others of this crew, we're not soldiers. We're out of our depth here and everyone knows it. Don't take any unnecessary risks."

The Hexabreed warrior had solemnly added her assent to Tregg's remarks. She stole a sideways glance at Neuronia Syngulareous as the Argossyan Naval Commander had easily checked the status and preparedness of a three-lobed backpack containing portable energy pods, assorted medical supplies and climbing gear, signifying her obvious familiarity in the use of such equipment.

Soldiers. Hmmpf!

The Present, a mere handful, given the fluidity of Time as a concept inside the Ventriculum, of moments later...

Neuronia Syngulareus and Poli'Artta Ranzireth had both been uncomfortably surprised during the team's physical preparations for extra-vehicular field excursion. NeeSharim had strolled over to each of them and given them intolerably cold stares of appraisal, a gaze wherein her alien machine intelligence no doubt disassembled them from head to toe, measuring them, that extended beyond anything they'd expected even from a socially awkward mobile Artificial Intelligence.

The intelligent ship's avatar had then fitted them each with an individually tailored Environmental Support Mobile Articulation Exo-Carapace, what Pylott had referred to as "ESMAC" armor, through the projection of a micro-filament rendered webbing that had enwrapped and coated each of the women's bodies. The nano-liquid metal weave had draped weightlessly across their flesh and even covered their existing clothing with uncanny accuracy, becoming a solidified grayish silver envelope, while maintaining its remarkably supple flexibility.

The ESMAC armor possessed a nano-thin, vibra-layered cocoon-sheath covering their bodies inside the armor. That layer was for dispelling the intense after-effects from the powerful physical impacts of projectile weaponry and from explosive blast waves that could strike the exterior of the exo-armor. The suit had the additional protection of contiguous torso suspension that would serve to arrest any possibility of violent over-torsioning from external forces that could threaten tearing their bodies apart.

But NeeSharim made it clear to the Away Team that the exo-armor with which they were equipped was not the same as a full-on battle-suit. The armor was designed around usage in situations where stealthy reconnaissance was the prime mission focus. The suits were not supplied with reactive Delta Cannon smart-weaponry capability or with photon-bursting, wave-packet projectors. Aside from multi-muzzle light-autocannons, the armor mainly enhanced their native physical strength and reflexes by a factor of seven and provided them augmentation for their humanoid tactile senses, like thermal scanning functionality on their forward-looking imaging sensors, proximity motion-radar for infantry combat-mode, and Rampager anti-personnel auto-repeater pistols. The hand-held sidearms had extra-large sickle magazines that spat out armor-piercing, rocket-propelled, plasteel-tipped spindle-capsules that could smash through titanium alloy with little effort. That ammunition was made even more deadly by an additional lethal characteristic: each projectile carried a seventy-five thousand volt electrical charge.

Even still, Pylott stressed extreme caution to her comrades. They simply didn't know what they would encounter down on the streets of the ghostly city.

The trip down from The Glide and onto the cityscape surface was as uneventful as could be expected, given the fact that exa-orbital ship-to-surface travel from the mighty shiftship employed the technology of gravitational veloci-streaming as a mode of transportation. Veloci-streaming involved encapsulating and compressing the physical matter composing whatever payload there was to be transported into a single digitized packet of reduced mass in a gravity field. That packet was then fired off along a coherent beam of electromagnetic energy following an existing locational frequency beam to its pre-selected targeted destination. Unlike the most popular theory proposed for matter teleportation, gravitational veloci-streaming did not require the matter payload to be disassembled into particularized atomic components dependent on re-assembly once it reached its destination. And that would take a prodigious expenditure of power. Besides, organic matter did not react well to that: if one were to essentially disintegrate a living thing, stream the flow of atoms across a physical distance and then reassemble it with the expectation it would still be alive, then one would likely be very, very disappointed. If the process were to work at all, since re-assembly would be a prodigiously complicated process to get right, then what would appear at the intended destination would be a copy or a clone, a replication, of the original organic creature -- and it probably wouldn't be alive. But using already existing electro-gravitational forces, forces the payload, organic or otherwise, was already subject to, to whisk away an object from one place to another, was a simple re-architecture of applied natural physics.

On their arrival within the city, Keeshura Pylott and her companions found Lobarth Ceryndum to be a troublingly quiet place.

The mostly deserted municipality was a poorly illuminated, decaying and neglected urban panorama where boxlike shadows stretched long across cracked and pitted boulevards.  Abandoned vehicles, some of them wheeled and some fitted with now-broken tank treads, built in differing configurations and sizes, littered the winding roadways, sitting tarnished and corroded along the street curbs. Dust and ash, the detritus left by the passage of Time and from the aftermaths of several old fires, had accumulated along the streets in piles high enough to hint at the longevity of the silence and inactivity cloaking this district of the city. Even what little atmosphere there was hovering over the city tasted old and anemic. Pylott and her companions could only guess at how widespread the plague of emptiness truly was and how long it had inflicted itself on the sprawling, modular metropolis.

Conversation felt out of place, disrespectfully intrusive amid such dull lethargy.

The hushed stillness compelled Lt. Commander Syngulareus to cautiously ask aloud, "Where are all the people? What happened here?"

No one replied.

The eeriness of the elegant and aesthetically resplendent cityscape was oppressive and nerve-wracking. They had the sense they were being watched by something intelligent and malevolent, but whoever or whatever was observing them eyed them in the same coldly dispassionate, merciless way a hungry serpent eyed its mammalian prey, a reflection on the watcher's inhuman origins. The group descended a cracked and crumbling masonry stairway for its short length leading down from the minaret-bracketed plaza where they'd first touched down to the debris-littered mouth of a large, rambling boulevard lined on either side by tall street lamps that resembled the graceful necks of preening swans. Pylott and her comrades could see that in its heyday, lost in the distant past, Lobarth Ceryndum had been a grand and impressive city of wealth and sophistication. No more. Now it was an abandoned charnel house littered with the bones of both its technological advancements and its dead populace.

From the nearest shadows they suddenly heard something, a voice, giggle softly. It was not a sound of amusement. There was an undercurrent of pain in the sound, pain and hopelessness. The sound ended in a choked sob. It was a sound of something insane no longer able to maintain its silence.

Pylott abruptly held up her fist in a sign for the team to stop moving. They waited. The sound did not repeat itself.

"NeeSharim, do you read?" Pylott whispered into her armor's communicator collar mic-jack.

"I am here."

"What was that? Did you catch that sound? We heard something. Are you picking up any signs of life nearby? Any movement?"

It took only a pair of heartbeats for NeeSharim to respond, but to the Away Team, it felt like several minutes had passed.

"Recorded playback does not, repeat -- does not, reveal any discernable organic vocalizations, either random or directed. At this moment, you and your team are alone down there. I show no motion other than your team and no recognizable organic life signals at all," The Glide's autonomous A.I. replied.

"Do you have any anomalous readings in this vicinity?" Pylott pressed.

"Define 'anomalous'," NeeSharim replied. "This is Lobarth Cerryndum and I have no baseline against which to compare what would be 'normal' and what would not."

"Damn."

The group resumed their careful journey, even more watchful of the gloom and shadows that before.

They had walked only a quarter of a kilometer to the southwest, an unanticipated slog inasmuch the atmospheric pressure over the city felt light and unencumbering, and, according to the wrist-mounted readout on their armored exo-suits' instrumentation, didn't bear down on them. Yet, despite their armor's mechanically-enhanced cyber-frame musculature, the trio felt slow and weighted down, like they were strolling knee-deep against the push of a rising, incoming light tide of fluid. They advanced through the streets with their weapons systems on full activation, long guns unlimbered and aimed ahead of them, the lance-like sensors along their shoulders receiving and recording atmospheric data. They experienced a few brief, intermittent moments when it felt as though their mental processes were muddled and disorganized, but they were able to quickly shake off those effects with a simple adjustment of their extra-vehicular armors' protective enviro-shielding. They concluded that there was something about the feathery air in Lobarth Ceryndum that did not nourish their organic metabolisms and they opted to activate the breathing lenses in their armors' helmets. Shortly after that was when they encountered what looked to be a child, a thin and angular pre-teen, dressed in a loose-fitting, neoprene hazardous environ-suit. He was sitting crosslegged on a precariously balanced pile of weathered and tattered, grime and oil-smeared plastic debris. The child's human-appearing face was partially occluded behind a visored ventilator mask fitted with dual respirators.

When he saw the trio, his robin's egg blue eyes widened behind his transparent visor. At the sight of Poli'Artta Ranzireth he gasped audibly and blinked in slow disbelief.

"What are you? Are you real?" he demanded past the ventilator mask's mouth piece, a mouthpiece which was an array of vertical slits cut into a convex block of rubberized material. The mouthpiece muffled made his young voice, making it sound hollow and ghostly.

"Travelers, explorers," Pylott offered in response. "We've never been this far out away from Authoritarch-regulated territories in the Flow..."

Not being sure of the child's motivations and allegiances, Pylott chose to respond vaguely, but peppered the response with small truths that presented no threat and provided no specifics.

"You sound human... ARE you? Are you real?" the youngster again demanded.

"Of course we're real. Why wouldn't we be?" Pylott said calmly, working to make sure her approach friendly and unthreatening.

The young man's eyes locked on Neuronia Syngulareus' exposed network of metal implants and flesh-inscribed circuit-board scarring.  He blew a nervous breath loudly past his mouthpiece.

"Because you don't bear The Mark. You're not a member of the Quantifaq," the young man said. "Is she even a human or is she a Skin-Mekk?"

"She's neither. She's simply an enhanced human being. Not having the Mark -- Is that a bad thing? And what's the Quantifaq? Are YOU a member of the Quantifaq?" Pylott asked.

The child laughed at that question. It was a bitter laugh born of anxiety and hurt. He stood, unfolding his reedy figure with slow grace, and the group could see that he was heavily bandaged around his middle torso. There was a substantial red stain on the dirty gauze wrap layered over his suit, but it looked dry. He held a trembling hand over the bandaged area and shook his head animatedly.

"The Quantifaq is the group that is the Vamfyrr's herd-collective, his source of food," the child said. "That's right..., food. And the fact that you don't know anything about it means you're aliens, strangers, and that means you're doomed. You won't know how to fight him..."

"Maybe you could help us with that..." Neuronia Syngulareus said, speaking for the first time since the exchange began. "You sound like someone who's seen some bad things, like someone being hunted. It sounds like you could use some help. We could do that, we could help you."

"That's not going to happen. No way. You're in Lobarth Ceryndum and no one gave you clearance. That makes you all invaders. You don't belong here," the child stated, his voice resembling the crusty baritone rumble of an old man. "That's going to make him angry. No way I help you with anything. When the Vamfyrr gets angry people get killed. They die in ugly ways, screaming... I can't be anywhere near you. I have to go...!"

"Wait, wait... !  You don't need to run!  We're not going to hurt you!  You asked if we were 'real'.   Why would you ask that?"   the Argossyan Lt. Commander asked.

The young man looked at her as if she were hopelessly brain damaged.  "Because he's a Cyonik.   He's a Vamfyrr and a Cyonik.  Don't you know anything?"

NeeSharim's voice suddenly crackled from out the transceiver headphones built into their exa-armor's communication collars. It seemed startlingly loud following the low-pitched, muted conversational exchange the trio had just experienced.

"Crusader-Sergeant, WHO are you talking to?" the Synthautotron demanded, an unusual urgency to her vocal tonality. "Pylott? Can you still hear me? Who are you talking with? Listen to me, there's no one other than you and your team there...! Do you hear me? You're not speaking to anything or anyone registering on any of our probes! Get away from that location – NOW!"

The wash of ashen, mercury-colored light surrounding Pylott and her comrades flickered while shadows danced at the edges of their vision.

Something the size of an industrial grade meat-locker, a thick dark thing roughly shaped like an exceedingly large man, suddenly stepped out onto the boulevard... its long, bullet-shaped head was crowned with a halo of indigo-hued cinders and its face hidden by a curtain of dark blue flame.

That was when the first of half a dozen murderous Manifold Predators, each easily a metric ton of muscle and bone, came roaring from out the dusky gloom, moving like steel-taloned, diamond-fanged lightning...

                                                                                            ***