The robe was loose, meant for a body wider and shorter than Miles’, but that was an advantage in some ways.

Its sleeves came down to just past his wrists, enveloping his hands if he let it, and the hem hung just above his knees, protecting him from the waist down without restricting his movements, or more importantly, without costing him easy access to the pockets of his cargo pants.

The mage merchant who'd given it to him had promised him that it was armor, for all that it just looked like coarse light gray fabric, and it had passed the few tests he'd been able to inflict on it with a pen knife. He'd been given it for free as a sweetener on another purchase, so he could hardly complain, but either way, it seemed like a solid defensive upgrade to canvas and cotton. If what Brisk had said the previous day about Ialis was true, then he might need it.

The robe had come tangled up with a dark brown belt; a length of synth webbing studded with maglocks and carabiners. Strapping that around the outside of the robe had solved any issues that the baggy extra fabric around the chest might cause.

Miles had polished a section of his berth’s wall into a kind of mirror, and he paused in front of it, looking at his reflection.

He’d changed a lot in the short period since he left Unsiel Station, and not all for the better.

His short hair was messier, with no real reason or motivation to care for it. His eyes looked tired, and only because he was tired. Sleeping well on the narrow, lightly padded bunk was a skill he was still mastering. He’d kept up with his grooming on the ship — washing, shaving, laundry — but he’d failed in little ways at different points, momentary lapses that had added up to a rougher appearance than he was used to. He looked like he’d just spent a week on a long-haul flight, and his particular journey wasn’t even close to over.

Outside in the corridor, someone with override permissions hit the access switch for his room and the door started grinding open.

Miles turned to look at the door, watching as the panel slid open to reveal Brisk leaning against the door frame.

He hated that Brisk could just come in whenever he wanted.

“Still preening?” Brisk asked. “You know the weave doesn’t care how pretty you are.”

Miles checked his robe, checked the pockets of his pants, and pulled his slim backpack over his shoulders. He was bringing every useful item he owned with him for this. He had his index, his comm, a few food packets, a Devon Springs branded plastic water bottle he’d brought all the way from Earth, and his folding knife, all stowed away in the pockets of his cargo pants. The pack was empty, but he thought he should bring it in case he needed to carry anything.

Brisk was also dressed for an excursion. He was wearing his scaled pants and the translucent breastplate of the previous day, as well as a harness of leather-like straps and pouches buckled tightly around his chest and shoulders.

Miles glared at Brisk as he left the room, closing the door behind him.

Brisk set off walking, and Miles followed. From the direction, they must have been heading towards the bridge.

After a few seconds, Brisk spoke, his tone unusually casual.

“Say, you’re adult for your species, right?”

“Yes. I’m nineteen,” Miles said, feeling caught off guard and suddenly worried.

Brisk looked uncharacteristically uncomfortable for a second, then unstrapped one of the pouches from his harness. He passed it over to Miles without a word.

Miles took it, turning it in his hands, then popping open the flap.

Inside was a small, sleek pistol, about the length of his hand, made of silvery metal. The pouch was a holster, he realized. He pulled the pistol out, turning it to catch the light.

The design was sleek, reminding Miles of the aesthetics of the Starlit Kipper itself, with smooth, demure curves and an almost biological look. The handle and trigger looked adjustable, capable of extending and changing angles to fit a variety of hands, but this one was already sized for him. He tried holding it by the handle and found it warm and comfortable in his grip.

“It’s a striker,” Brisk explained. “A laser concussion gun. Non-lethal civilian model. It’s simple. Just point and shoot. The switch turns it on and off, and the slider on the side changes the power. I want you to keep it on low until you learn not to point it at anyone you like — or at me.”

Miles looked at the gun again. He familiarized himself with the controls, the switch, the slider, then slipped it back into its pouch. The pouch had clips that had connected to Brisk’s harness, and Miles used them to attach it to his belt at his back.

“Don’t expect it to work miracles, but at top power, it’ll knock even someone Torg’s size around.”

“Thanks,” Miles said.

Brisk seemed uncomfortable. He didn’t reply.

***

Ialis was huge in the viewport; a sphere of dark green and gray, stippled with a thousand pinpricks of white and golden light.

There were oceans down there, inland seas of green-black liquid that pressed the borders of crawling fractal coastlines. The areas of dark green he’d seen earlier on the hologram turned out to be vast forests and swamps. The clusters of artificial light were cities, mostly clustered around the impact site that Brisk had mentioned, with a few off in the far reaches. Ialis had no native population, but the Ialis Corporation had invited the cultures of the spiral to settle there after discovering its value.

For most of the time since Miles had boarded the starlit kipper it had been alone in space, but now it flew towards the planet as one small vessel in a busy sky.

There were clear aesthetic themes in the other ships coming and going from the planet. Some were like the Kipper, aerodynamic organic shapes that looked like they could have been patterned on the alien versions of ocean creatures. Other ships were almost the opposite, bulky, angular vessels constructed from green-black cubes of cluttered metal.

There were ships that were just long silvery rods, others that were clusters of glass pods joined together by a network of energy, and some that reminded Miles of human space engineering; bulbous rounded hulls with awkward-looking little wings.

Miles gawked when he saw what looked like a wooden sailing ship pass them heading in the opposite direction, sure that magic must be at play there.

As the kipper groaned around him, he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d picked the wrong ship.

Sellen was frantically operating her pilot station, the dextrous corners of her body sweeping one way then another, adjusting calculations written out in alien characters and striving to keep the ship out of the path of larger vessels in what was apparently a chaotic and unmanaged airspace.

The entire crew was assembled on the bridge, mostly standing around, or floating, in the case of the captain.

Trin was wearing his normal pink jumpsuit, but a few of his pockets were bulging with new equipment, and he was holding a device that looked like an archaic cellphone; a brick with a small screen and an elaborate antenna. From the wires and bare circuitry running along parts of it, it looked like it had been stitched together out of spare parts.

Someone had armed Torg. The giant black crustacean was holding a two-handed ax in their two right pincers, and some kind of thick-barreled gun in the left pair.

Miles had his magic, his index, and the weapon Brisk had given him, but he still felt dramatically underequipped.

The ship’s energy shields blocked all sensation of movement on board the Kipper as it descended, and there was no competing gravity from the planet, so the descent was smooth. There was no need to sit down or strap in, but standing unsupported while a planet rapidly expanded in the viewport left Miles feeling an intense sense of vertigo.

“Brisk,” the captain said.

“Captain?”

Rhu-Orlen was silent for half a minute, before asking, “Have you explained the environment?”

Brisk let out a breath, then turned to check Miles, Trin, and Torg were all present and paying attention. He raised his voice slightly as he began speaking.

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"The background environment in the dungeon has some unusual properties."

Miles nodded to himself. Every world that fell down to the spiral brought some of its native space with it. Earth had collapsed with a comparatively large amount, about three thousand million miles worth of spacetime, but others bowered with more or less. That space would have whatever properties the world's original universe possessed. It was why messages to Earth still took days to reach it, even when instant communications were common everywhere else in the weave.

"Time. Time runs faster when you're down there. It starts off barely noticeable, but the deeper you go, the sharper the gradient gets. You'll go in, spend an hour, and when you get out two hours have passed."

Time dilation, Miles thought. Like a black hole.

From the point of view of the rest of the spiral, time inside the dungeon would be running more slowly, but to someone actually down there it would be like the rest of the universe was speeding up.

"Space as well. From up here, it looks like a sphere, but each level as you go down has the same total area as the one above. It doesn't make a difference for moving around, but the geometry messes with resonance comms. There's no messages in and no messages out."

Not exactly like a black hole… Miles thought, adjusting how he thought of the planet.

"The third thing to worry about is that it's infinite. Or that's the theory. It goes at least three times deeper than it should be able to from the size of the planet, and scans from inside say that's just the greanal's horn."

Uhhh.

"When we land we'll have some paperwork to do, then we'll be put in a queue. An hour after that we'll be inside. The rooms on the top levels shuffle around every 4.3 hours, so that's our window. It gets more dangerous the deeper you go, but our target's only on the seventh floor, so we should all get out alive."

Miles and Trin looked grimly serious at that. Miles was only just really starting to process that it might be deadly dangerous down there. He wondered whether it would be worth jumping ship before getting paid.

“Are you coming with us?” he asked Brisk.

“Yeah. I’ll be our team leader. I act as a fusilier.”

If Brisk was going in himself, then it wasn’t as if they were being thrown into the meat grinder. There had to be a good chance they were going to make it out, both because they’d have Brisk looking after them, and because Brisk didn’t seem the type to risk his life on a bad bet.

What Brisk had said about the seventh level caught Miles’ attention.

“What is our target down there?”

Brisk and the captain shared a look, as much as it was possible to share a look with a featureless sphere. The captain faced Brisk for a couple of seconds, then turned away. Nobody answered the question.

A minute later they were hitting the atmosphere.

***

Green.

The surface of Ialis was green. The ground was covered in an all-encompassing moss, as thick and wild as any grass back on Earth. There were trees, bent and crawling things that spread their roots above the ground. Instead of leaves, they were covered in green-black hairs that stretched out beneath the bright star this place used as a sun.

It was nothing like Earth, but it was green, and there was wind, and there were the smells of water and damp life. The homesickness Miles felt was almost a physical object, sitting like a stone in the pit of his stomach. He missed the forests of home. Pine boughs and mushrooms, possums, squirrels, dew on the grass.

A wormlike sapient twelve feet tall emerged from the structure up ahead, crawling towards them. As soon as they were clear of the building’s roof, they straightened up, continuing to crawl on the bottom quarter of their body, but with most of their length held high, swaying back and forth slightly as they snaked across the moss.

Elongated trunk style body type. Organs are probably distributed. Maybe a central heart?

Miles risked pushing his Eyes of the Emigre away, hoping no one would speak while his translation magic was down, focusing his attention instead on Eyes of the Altruist.

Luminescent shapes faded into view over the sapient, and Miles realized he’d been completely wrong. Or rather, his Tier 1 Healer primer had completely misled him. There was actually a fairly standard cluster of organs at the extreme front of the creature, with the rest of its length dedicated to what he assumed were bands of muscle and not much else. It was more like how his primer described a short trunk species, just much longer.

The wormlike sapient was wearing a long tube of fabric that covered it from close to the top all the way down to just short of where it was in contact with the ground. There were small black buttons closing the garment up the front, and where it terminated at the top it flared outwards in a dramatic collar. They didn’t seem to have arms, or any kind of manipulators at all.

As the sapient drew closer, Miles noticed they had a row of four eyes running vertically down the front-tip of their body, all focused directly on them.

Brisk started speaking, and Miles quickly switched back to his Eyes of the Emigre, hoping he hadn’t missed anything important.

“—and be polite. Gilthaens are one of the oldest cultures on the spiral, and they live forever. Make this one’s life hard and they’ll remember it for a dozen lifetimes.”

Miles filed the species name away, Gilthaen.

The sapient reached conversation distance, then bowed.

“I am Consul They-who-share-ground. To you, I am Consul Thunis. Are you seeking entry to the artifact?”

“Consul, yes, we are,” Brisk answered, speaking in an unusually polite tone.

“There are terms of entry that govern entering the artifact. A fee is charged. This fee covers the management and maintenance of the artifact. There are restrictions on entering and leaving, which must occur according to a schedule, and in accordance with others who wish to enter. When within the artifact, visitors are bound by a code of conduct—”

“We are aware of the bylaws of Ialis and agree to them,” Brisk said, interrupting the Gilthaen despite his earlier instruction to be polite.

The Consul didn’t seem to take offense to the interruption. If anything, they seemed to expect it. They bowed again, then swayed precariously as they turned around and began shuffling back toward the structure.

Brisk started walking after them, and Miles, Trin, and Torg followed.

The architecture of the Ialis Corporation seemed to favor large, airy spaces that were open to the outdoors. Dark metal structures with ceilings but no walls, with elegant curved skeletal supports that rose fifteen or twenty feet in the air to hold up the corners of curving metal roofs. The ground inside the structures was just the bare earth and moss of the planet, and furniture was sparse, consisting of rare benches and computer terminals hovering seemingly unsupported several feet above the floor. They seemed more like pavilions than buildings, and while nothing Miles knew from Earth matched up, the curving ceilings evoked images of ancient Japanese castles, with sweeping supports and elaborate overhangs.

The Consul escorted them towards one of the buildings. As they approached, the horizon beyond seemed to vanish, as the ground gave way to the edge of a massive crater.

The closer they got to the structure, the deeper into the hole they could see, and while the first step of it looked like the typical brown of rock and dirt, below that the edges glinted with blue-white lights and reflective metal. It was as if someone had taken a densely packed building and cut out a massive scoop. There was evidence of vivisected rooms all along the inner edge of the crater, some massive, some too small to make out.

The Consul led them into one of the open-air structures. Inside, small tech drones moved around, drifting as they idled, occasionally leaving the building and returning a minute later.

Consul Thunis took their details, entering them into a terminal which they interacted with seemingly just by touching it with the tip of their body. Brisk paid the fee, but Miles didn’t manage to catch how much it was.

“It is stipulated that all teams wishing to enter the artifact must be accompanied by a healer,” Thunis said. “The Ialis Corporation can provide you with a Tier 4 healer for the duration of your visit at the cost of twenty-thousand standard exchange notes.”

“Consul, we understand. We have our own healer,” Brisk said, slapping a hand down on Miles’ shoulder.

Miles was busy filing away the fact that a Tier 4 healer could make twenty thousand seln for just four hours of work. Then he started wondering what his real value was on the open market. His crew salary was a thousand seln per spiral standard month. Was the gap between Tier 1 and Tier 4 really that high? It was something he’d have to research later.

“Please present your accreditation,” Consul Thunis said, apparently addressing Miles.

Miles pulled his comm unit out of his pocket and opened it to the certificate he’d been sent following his assessment. He held it up to the sapient.

Thunis bent down, curling their body until their face was only a foot away from Miles. They peered at the screen, their eyes clicking wetly as they blinked.

This close, the sapient had a smell like dry earth, and Miles could have sworn he could hear indistinct whispering coming from them.

After inspecting Miles’ credentials they rose back up.

“That is in order.”

Thunis did something with the console, and one of the drones appeared. It approached each of them individually, painting each member of the group with a beam of light that left behind a blue stripe on the shoulders of their clothes, or their carapace, in Torg’s case.

“For identification,” the Consul explained.

When the drone reached Miles, it painted the stripe, but then moved to his chest and drew out an additional symbol as well. Miles pulled the front of his robe out, trying to get a look at it, and finally getting his Eyes of the Emigre to trigger and present him with a translation.

The symbol meant healer.

“Please board the platform. It will bring you into a priority queue with other visitors to the artifact,” Thunis said, sliding toward the edge of the building. “Do you have a preference for your entry location?”

“D7,” Brisk replied.

“That is in order.”

The four of them left the building to stand on the platform.

The ringed disk lifted into the sky, almost knocking Trin to the ground with its sudden acceleration, then started slowly descending into the crater.