It took more than an hour to close in on the crater wall.

They’d seen other groups on the way, maybe a hundred in total, all floating on their own platforms like dandelion seeds drifting through the air.

As they descended, the different layers of the interior had been easy to make out.

Each level looked to be about half a kilometer thick, though only a few of the torn-open rooms used that entire height. The rest of the space was full of intricate circuitry, pipes and vessels, storage tanks, and areas that were simply unidentifiable.

It was more than a planet-sized space station; it was a vast and unknowable machine. And it had apparently dropped here completely uninhabited.

The queue of parties wanting to enter took the form of a spiral of platforms, turning slowly as the lowest disk would drift off to its chosen entry point. Most of them had gone to the first or second level. Brisk’s decision had their platform dropping down kilometers to a point on the seventh level.

Their entry point was a simple metal room, hangar-sized, with dull metal walls and a high ceiling set with pale blue lights. The room was bare, and already looted, with sections of broken pipes and wires where it looked like equipment had been torn out a long time ago.

The ground that the platform set down on was dusted with the green-black moss of the surface. Water marks streaked down the walls closest to the opening, evidence of rain damage, and there was a bitter metallic rust smell over the entire space.

Brisk was the first to step off. “This is the threshold. Past this, the danger starts. See anything unusual, tell me. Ask before you do anything, and stay in formation. Trin first. I want a warning of any warm bodies or movement. Keep us on course, but ask before making any turns or opening any doors. Torg, back Trin up. You see danger coming for him? You run in first and ask questions later. You’re the exception to the ask-first rule. Miles, hang back with me. Back the others up, but ask before you run in to heal anyone. I’ll be supporting the rest of you with long-range fire from the back.”

He unslung the rifle from his back as he spoke, checking various settings on the weapon before putting its strap around his neck and shoulder and holding it ready.

Trin began walking towards the door on the far side of the room, a twenty-foot-high rectangular doorway that could have been a hatch for unusually tall vehicles to pass through, or a door for spindly giants.

“How do you open?” Trin asked. He ran a mid-paw over the surface of the door, then checked the wall at the side for an access panel. There wasn’t one, but there was a burnt-out hole with a few wires protruding from it.

“You’ll have to bypass the controls,” Brisk said, as if it was something both obvious and easy. Miles wouldn’t have had any idea how to start.

Trin brought up the boxy device he was holding, pressing the physical keys that dotted the front panel until a matrix of waving lines appeared on the screen. He brought the antenna close to the mess of scratched-out wiring in the wall, then adjusted the settings.

His head-flaps shifted as he worked, rising at random in small movements that he didn’t seem to be consciously aware of.

After about a minute, he grabbed a handful of wires and started touching them to something inside the wall. On the fourth try, the hole emitted an ugly murmuring sound, and the door opened half a meter upwards.

“Is weird tech,” Trin said, pulling back from the ruined panel and resetting his device. “I don’t get what’s in these wires.”

Brisk moved up to the gap under the door, crouching and peering through, his rifle moving to stay pointed in the direction he was looking.

After a minute, he said, “Okay. Door protocol. Torg first, then me, Trin, then Miles.”

They all filed through in that order, crouching low to pass under the door. Torg had to drop to all eight limbs and scurry through. Trin only had to duck.

The room beyond the door was large, about a hundred meters square, with a ceiling that stretched about twenty meters above them. It was in good repair, in comparison to the damaged room they'd landed in. There were two other doors at the far side, as tall and narrow as the one they'd entered through, and the control panels for them were intact, black rectangles set flush with the metal walls.

The room was set up as a warehouse, an open space in the center and metal shelving all around the outside. There was even a cargo lifting arm hanging from rails that crisscrossed the roof.

The shelves were dotted with weirdly normal-looking metal crates. Some even had text and logos that recalled brands Miles had seen on Delatariel Station. None of the images were exactly correct, and when Miles stared at the labels to try and read the text, none of it would translate, as if it wasn’t written in a real language at all.

“Someone storing things here?” Trin asked.

“I don’t think real people put any of this here,” Miles said.

“It does this all the time,” Brisk said, bitterly. “We think it scans nearby space for patterns, then the autofabs that make the rooms repeat them. The rooms shift constantly."

“What’s in the boxes?” Trin asked. He looked like he was about to go start prying them open.

“Junk, usually. Stuff that looks like real tech, but doesn’t work, or doesn’t do anything. Stocks of alloys made with random metals. Useless. Sometimes you get a real find, but that's not why we're here.”

"Why are we here?" Miles asked.

Brisk gave him a hard look, before turning back to the room.

"Trin, have you got a heading?"

Trin checked his device and then pointed off to the right.

They made their way through the open room to the right-hand door. Trin had wired the previous one back to life, but here Brisk pulled a small rod from one of his vest pouches, a triangular prism about the length and width of a finger. He touched the prism to the black screen and lights flickered behind the glass.

Text briefly appeared on the screen, this time in a language that Miles’ Eyes of the Emigre could translate.

It simply said, YES.

The door made a thunking sound, then slid upwards, this time opening about eight feet.

They passed through according to their formation. As soon as Torg was a few steps into the next room he stopped.

Click-click-tick, Torg said. ‘Air taste animal.’

“Smell?” Brisk asked. “You can smell what?”

Tick-clack. ‘Animal. Creature.’

“Is anyone’s translator getting that?” Brisk asked, annoyed.

“He can smell animals in here,” Miles said.

Brisk glanced at Miles and then looked around the room.

This room was similar to the last, a large space that looked like a warehouse. The shelves here were more densely packed, rows and rows just feet away from each other, with no open spaces or clear sight lines.

“Trin, are you getting anything?” Brisk asked.

“I can’t look two things at once,” Trin answered, sounding annoyed. He fiddled with his sensor device, then spent a minute scrutinizing the screen. His head flaps twitched as he worked, some lifting up all the way. “It says no motion.”

“What about heat?”

Trin muttered something too quiet for Miles’ magic to translate, then fiddled with his sensor again. “No heat. Just us.”

“Fine. Everyone keep your eyes open. We’ll get to the other side in formation, then look for the door.”

They set off the room, with Trin in the lead and Brisk at the back.

When they'd been moving for long enough in silence, Miles let his Eyes of the Emigre fade, focusing on his Eyes of the Altruist instead. He had the thought that maybe the magic would let him see through walls.

It didn't, but when they were halfway across the room, he did catch sight of a cluster of luminescent shapes he was pretty sure shouldn't be there.

On a shelf thirty meters to their left was a collection of crates. Three of them were covered in the luminous shapes that Eyes of the Altruist normally only painted over biological organs.

They weren’t particularly complex organs. Each box had a cluster of round shapes, each about an inch across, all about an inch apart, but he’d only ever seen shapes like that on living creatures.

Undifferentiated organs. Unitary body plan? he thought.

Miles mentally marked the crates, then switched back to Eyes of the Emigre.

"Brisk," he said, keeping his voice low.

The Hurc came to a stop next to him.

"I think there's something alive over there."

"Where? How?"

"I have some diagnostic magic that's triggering on the crates."

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Brisk peered in the direction Miles was looking, curious.

"Which ones?"

Miles pointed them out and Brisk quietly called to the others, bringing everyone back to stand together.

"Trin," he started. "What's your heat read on those boxes?"

"They're cold."

"Colder than the rest?"

"Oh. Yes."

Brisk raised his rifle and dropped to one knee in a firing stance.

"Be ready. When I start shooting they'll come for us."

"What will?" Miles asked.

Instead of answering, Brisk opened fire on the closest crate. He fired four times, the rifle ringing in his hands like a snapped guitar string.

Each shot elicited an answering screech and where they hit, the shelves were painted yellow with splashes of blood. There was no apparent damage to the crate, despite it being the obvious source of the blood.

The two other boxes Miles had identified launched themselves off the shelves, never changing in appearance as they slid across the floor towards them accompanied by the sound of claws rattling on steel.

Brisk fired two more times and clouds of yellow mist bloomed behind the next closest crate.

Miles remembered his own weapon and drew the pistol on the last crate. His first shot went wide, the weapon humming and trembling in his hand, but the second landed with a slapping sound, sending the metal box spinning away through the air.

It landed on its side, and Brisk put a final shot into it, casting a smear of yellow blood out behind it.

"Cloak roaches,” Brisk said with disgust, looking around the room. “They mess with your senses, make you think they're something else. Do you see any more?"

Miles quickly switched back to Eyes of the Altruist and scanned the rest of the room, then let it fade.

“No. I don’t think this lets me see through the shelves or crates, though.”

“Keep it on. I want to know if you see anything like that again.”

“I won’t be able to understand you while I’m using it,” Miles said.

“That’s fine. I’ll get your attention if anyone says anything important.”

They continued crossing the room, finding a series of five doors set at different points. Brisk asked Trin a question, who worked on their scanner before replying. Brisk said something else, pointing to one of the doors. Trin looked worried, then turned to start poking the black panel.

It was weird watching the two of them speak without any translation. They weren’t just speaking to each other in different languages, they were using entirely different families of sounds. Trin’s voice was a musical mix of murmuring and sighs. Brisk’s was more like a gurgling bark that had very little variation from one word to another.

Trin worked on the panel for a few minutes, bringing up and manipulating screens of alien text. Eventually, Brisk lost patience with Trin’s inability to bypass it and used his rifle to shoot the screen out. After that, Trin was able to activate it by doing something with the torn internals.

This time, the door only lurched open a few feet. Beyond it was a nearly featureless white corridor, going straight for a while, before bending right.

Brisk said something that Miles didn't need a translator to know meant 'come on'.

Everyone had to crawl to get through. Torg had to squirm under the door on his front. When they'd all squeezed through, they continued on.

Brisk had said that the rooms of the planet shuffled themselves every 4.3 hours. The time on Miles' comm told him they'd been inside for about half an hour, but Brisk had also said that time moved more slowly the deeper someone went into the structure. Was the shuffle on the surface time schedule, or the altered schedule of their local time?

Brisk had them moving with haste, but not with panic. Miles had to assume that the Hurc knew what he was doing and that he wasn't about to get them stuck down there while the rooms rearranged.

The corridor seemed like a normal passageway at first, but oddities soon started appearing. Occasionally the corridor would make a turn, but they were always at odd, obtuse angles, sometimes turning nearly back on itself. There were sudden changes in elevation, sections where the passageway would drop away at twenty-degree angles or more, and they'd all have to carefully shuffle down, hoping there wasn't an even steeper drop just around the corner.

They passed stairways that went nowhere, sized for gaits twice as long as Miles’. The lights set in the ceiling appeared at seemingly random intervals, a cluster of five right next to each other, then dozens of meters of darkness, then four lights, then ten meters, then one, on and on. They passed through a section of corridor that was carpeted, a dull orange fabric with geometric patterns, then a section where the walls and ceiling were carpeted. There were never any branches or side doors, just one long, unbroken tube that at times felt more like an oversized ventilation shaft than something people were meant to pass through.

Their formation broke down as they traveled the passage, and Miles found a chance to speak with Trin.

"Do you know what we're looking for?" Miles asked him, switching back to his Eyes of the Emigre before Trin could answer.

"Signal," Trin said, holding his scanner so Miles could see the screen. "Brisk gave me a frequency. Don't know what it is. Maybe a comm."

"I thought comm signals didn't work down here."

"They work on the same level. Not through levels."

"If it's a comm, can you call them?"

Miles didn't get an answer. They rounded the corner onto a scene that froze them in their tracks.

Fifteen meters down the corridor, something had knocked a hole out of the wall. Sheet metal had been worn fatigue-white and then torn open, the sides peeled outwards. Inside the hollow space behind the tear was a pipe that had been given the same treatment.

There was no obvious sign of the culprit, but scattered all along the passageway were twenty or more motionless metal crates.

Just on the other side of the crowd of innocuous boxes was another door, this one open a crack, with damage to the exposed edges.

Brisk hurried up to join them.

"Are those what I think they are?"

Miles shifted his attention to Eyes of the Altruist. Clusters of small oval shapes sprang up over nearly all of them.

"Twenty are. One's just a normal crate."

Brisk said something, then caught Miles’ attention. Miles switched back to Eyes of the Emigre.

“Okay, I can understand you.”

“I was saying, twenty in a narrow space should be fine,” he turned to start addressing the others. “Torg, get set up at the front with your cannon. Use the ax for any that reach you, but don’t engage otherwise. Miles, take a stance with that striker. Maximum power. If any get past Torg, knock them back. Trin, get behind me.”

They all moved to take up their positions according to Brisk’s instructions.

Miles pulled the striker from the pouch at his back and adjusted the slider, pushing it all the way forward, then flicked the safety switch to turn it on. It hummed as it powered up.

When they were all in position, Brisk spoke.

“Torg, start us off.”

The rifle Torg held in his left two pincers went off with a booming crackle. A visible bolt of red energy lanced out down the corridor, colliding with a row of four crates and instantly turning all of them to yellow mist. The crate illusions vanished like popped soap bubbles. Fragments of black-yellow flesh went scattering across the walls.

The rest of the crates started moving as one, sliding down the corridor like boxes on an industrial conveyor belt.

The crate at the front leaped at Torg, who intercepted it with the edge of his ax. It went down, rolling away across the ground, leaving a trail of yellow behind it.

Brisk was firing continuously, a repetitive bass guitar solo. Torg fired off a shot every few seconds. Miles had to discharge his weapon once, when a crate launched itself past them heading for Trin. He pointed the weapon, fired, and a whip-crack of energy sent the crate flying away to impact a wall. It left a smear of yellow against the steel and didn’t move again after it landed. Brisk had said the striker was non-lethal, but he clearly had to take that with a grain of salt.

By the time a minute had passed, the corridor was painted yellow and only a few of the crates were left intact. The four of them stared at the mess for another minute, waiting for something to move, but it seemed like everything was dead.

It had been a loud, violent, dangerous couple of minutes, but they’d come out of it unscathed. It was easy to see how if they’d been less well-armed, or if they hadn’t realized the danger, it could have gone very differently.

Finally Brisk declared that the corridor was clear and they started walking forward through the mess.

Trin hopped out from behind the group up to walk beside Miles.

“I saw you shoot the gun,” Trin said.

“Yeah,” Miles said. He lowered the power on the weapon back to minimum, switched it off, and dropped it back into the pouch at his back.

“You kept the thing away from me.”

Miles wasn’t sure where Trin was going with that. He assumed it was an attempt at a thank-you and tried to brush it off.

“Yeah, of course.”

Brisk reached the doors at the far end. Instead of going to the terminal, he pulled out a small curved rod from one of his pockets, unfolded it into a kind of pry bar, and wedged it in the gap between the doors.

He gave it a sharp pull, and the doors opened an inch. He kept working at it, and after a few seconds, he had the doors open wide enough to step through.

Miles and Trin passed the real crate on the way there, a solid metal box with a seam around the upper edge. This one had a black panel built into the top, similar to the ones that controlled the doors.

Trin kicked it as they passed, apparently satisfied when it made a dull thudding noise.

Brisk had already passed through the doors, and Trin was the next, darting through ahead of Miles.

As soon as the Eppan was through the doors he froze. He started making dry retching sounds, like a cat trying to bring up a hairball.

Miles came up behind him, nudging him out of the way. When he stepped through and saw what was in the room beyond, he felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise.

It was a slaughter. Blood in three different colors decorated the walls. There were torn body parts scattered across the floor. The air was heavy with scents, sweet, sickly, chemical, so thick he could almost taste them on his tongue. The remains were the bodies of sapients, dressed, armed, and completely eviscerated.

Brisk stood over the carnage, picking through the ruins with indifference. He was already holding a blood-stained comm unit and was kicking apart a pile of refuse with the toe of his boot.

He knew this would be here, Miles realized.

Brisk must have been expecting something like this. He had the frequency of one of the comm units, which meant he’d known these sapients.

“Who are they?” Miles asked.

Brisk took a break from searching through the wreckage to look at him.

“You wanted to know what happened to the old team,” he said. He pointed at one set of ruined remains after another. “Lancer. Scout. Grenadier.”

Disposable.

Miles felt sick. He hadn’t liked Brisk from the start, and he’d felt useless nearly every day since he’d joined the crew, but he’d never felt so dangerously disposable.

Had this even been the Kipper’s original boarding team? Or was it just another anonymous crew, hired at stations that wouldn’t remember them?

Miles’ eyes found the corpse of the sapient Brisk had labeled the grenadier. It had been a female Hurc, dressed in heavy plates that hung from straps across her chest and back. They hadn’t saved her from being torn in half, legs pooling in one place, torso in another.

A glint of light caught his attention from the bloodied ground at his feet. It was a small gemstone, lying on the ground in a pool of spilled guts, pale red, with two black charred fractures, like holes in a rotted tooth.

He’d seen something like it before. The crystal that the mage at Delatariel Station had sold him. Only this one was covered in blood, having fallen out of a corpse. An awful suspicion pricked at him.

“Was she a mage?” Miles asked, his eyes locked on the gem.

“You can tell that?” Brisk asked, glancing up. “Yeah. She was a front-line fighter, but she had an index, like you. She only knew a few little spells. Useless, in the end.”

The merchant on the station had fed him the remains of another mage. Without seeing this scene of death, Miles might never have found out.

Miles was snapped out of his thoughts by Trin, speaking with an unusually weak voice from the other side of the room.

“This one alive, I think.”

Miles snapped his head to look in that direction. Eyes of the Altruist fell into place, and the fading lights of a living creature’s biology appeared over one of the ruined bodies.