Deschane had Ven cover for him at the Mapping Agency before he left that morning. She was to say that he’d gone to confer with the main cartographer’s office to discuss standardization of the filing system; as alibis went it was as mind-numbingly boring as the poor suffering adjutants had come to expect of the navigator.

He hobbled down the alleyways of the bottommost galleries of Mound Shakka, grabbing at the walls for balance as he tried to make do without his crutches. He’d topped up on morphine for the pain was wearing a plaster ankle brace inside his oversized boots.

Deschane’s injuries were healing well. He estimated that in a few days he could walk unassisted. Which was fortunate, given that the cobbles were slick with stagnant pools of groundwater seeping up from the reservoir below. Shakka had hit maximum occupancy years ago, the engineers forced to bore and blast their way deeper into the foundations to make room. Now all that separated the bottom dwellers from a watery grave were a few meters of gneiss rock. The resulting subsidence where the water table met the rotting wood shanties meant that malaria and dysentery ran rampant through the slums.

Deschane kept his cycler pistol handy in the waistband of the civvy denims he’d worn to blend in. He kept a weather eye on the gangs of feral youths who haunted the entrances to every lane, their small, quick hands always ready to slip into unsuspecting pockets.

No one gave Deschane any trouble, however—one look at his hovering trigger finger was enough to keep them honest. Men in hard shell hats clomped out of their hovels, leaving their hollow-eyed wives and children as the work gongs summoned them to another shift in the mines, a clattering funicular carriage lowering them into the shafts a dozen at a time. The luckier ones headed up towards the fungus gardens near the central feeder towers. These were the porous lungs of the settlement which not only helped regulate internal atmosphere, but were also where most of the food was grown.

The very richest of the farmers donned their expensive sealant suits to work on the terraces carved into the exterior slopes of the mound. Agriculture on the surface was a high-risk, high-reward activity, especially now that the rains had gone and left the daggergnats to spawn in their thousands. The swarms that hovered just outside musket range could leech a man dry in seconds if given the chance.

Then again, even the interior of the mound wasn’t safe from the other type of bloodsucking scavengers that preyed on civilians.

The army recruiters were out in force this morning. Deschane had always hated them: fat men in slovenly uniforms that hung around the chop-suet stalls and shoved pamphlets into people’s faces when they were trying to suck down their melted lard and salted rice porridge. He’d never forgiven them for all the promises they’d made to him all those years ago, the same lies they were peddling right now:

“How can you stand eating that slop every day, son?” one called out, “Sign up for the line infantry and it’s three square meals a day, plus extra rum ration.”

“Forget those sissies in the line infantry,” another swooped in, “You look like a big strong lad! Why don’t you give the grenadiers a try?”

“Who are you calling lad, dipstick?” was the outraged reply of a brawny redhead in farmer’s overalls, voice several octaves higher than it should’ve been.

“Oh! Erm, sorry ma’am. Didn’t see you there. But the offer still stands!” the recruiter rallied, “The grenadiers would be glad to have you. The pay’s nearly twice that of a common soldier.”

“And how much is that?”

“Twenty-two carbos a month.”

“How bout that,” the girl sounded impressed, “For twenty-two I’d fall in so quick you’d see me red-shifting. What’s the catch?”

“How’s your throwing arm?”

“Better than yours, lardass,” the woman bragged, rolling up her sleeves to show a set of shoulders like small boulders.

“Then the only ‘catch’ is when you’ll start tossing live grenades down those Amit bug-hole. They’ll be doing all the catching then, that’s fer sure!”

That got a snort of laughter out of the ginger. She reached for the recruiter’s pen to sign on, and she wasn’t the only one. Deschane turned away in disgust. He’d heard it all before.

Everlasting glory for the first man through the breach. The Amits were on the ropes, teetering on the verge of extinction—why not help give them a shove on their way down? Every comrade a willing martyr, every skirmish a victory. There would be a lot of martyrs from this place before the war was won.

Most of the inhabitants of Shakka were freckled, blue-eyed locals, though Deschane did see some fellow Ulysseans in the crowd, the curly brown locks of their hair setting them apart from the rest. Well, that and the scarlet armbands which designated them as foremen and senior technicians.

It was only natural, Deschane thought. You needed men from the core mounds to really get things done. Natives were good workers, but required a firm supervision to meet the monthly quotas.

As for the native he was supposed to meet today, Deschane didn’t know what to think of him yet. All the signs pointed to Sec-Com, the Security Committee which handled internal threats to the Fleet. Was all this just an elaborate trap laid for him by Colonel Leelan and his cronies in the brass? Were they onto him? Deschane’s budding anxiety proved justified only moments later when a strong hand seized his elbow from behind, yanking him into nearby alleyway.

The navigator’s response was immediate. Unable to reach his pistol with the tight grip on his arm, Deschane turned on his heel and executed a tight spinning backfist. Though he was striking blind and off-balance he felt a solid contact, the bony edge of his forearm chopping with the back of his assailant’s head and knocking him off. Deschane drew his pistol, cocking the hammer so that the five loaded chambers rotated with a loud click and pressing the snub-nose into the man’s cheek.

“Alright, you got me!” Nong said, reaching for the sky, “That was my bad!”

“Galloping galaxies, man! What were you thinking, sneaking up on me like that?” Deschane fumed.

“In case you were followed,” the tribesman chuckled, “We had to lose them somehow.”

“I wasn’t. I took precautions.”

“Well, you can’t accuse me of being too careful,” Nong gently nudged the pistol out of his face and dusted himself off, “Not when we’re this deep into the game. Shall we?”

The tribesman had shucked his outlandish garb and put on a miner’s outfit almost identical to the one Deschane wore, with one exception: a purple armband emblazoned with the crossed pick and hammer of a district director. Deschane flicked a finger at it, said disapprovingly:

“I thought the whole idea was for us to be inconspicuous.”

“I’m the Commissioner of Mining for the Occupied Territories. People will recognize me eventually.”

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“You told me you were a geologist,” Deschane protested.

“I started out as one, but they promoted me. People skills—I’m told that I have them.”

“I wouldn’t have guessed it,” Deschane said, still somewhat peevish.

“Officially I’m just here to make an inspection of Mound Shakka’s copper mining operations. Command just loves it when us savages come crawling on our bellies to learn from our betters. It’s your cover I’m worried about, navigator. Doesn’t it hurt, walking around without your crutches?”

“Of course it hurts,” Deschane muttered through a clenched jaw, waves of pain radiating from the ankle that he’d just managed to twist all over again, “Let’s just get this over with.”

Thanks to Nong’s indiscretion they managed to skip the line for the funicular entirely. The miners took one look at the tribesman’s armband and parted like the waves before the prow, eyes lowered and backs hunched in an effort to make themselves as tiny as possible. As a commissioner he held the power of life and death over every one of them, though you wouldn’t have guessed it from the way Nong was grinning at them, an uncle come to visit his favourite nephews.

“Carry on, carry on,” he said indulgently, “Pretend like I’m not even here!”

The miners did exactly that and let the two have the carriage all to themselves. An operator fed the guttering motor a jerry can of canefuel and they started down.

“Why didn’t you just tell me you were a commissioner yesterday?” Deschane said after minutes of silence broken only by the rattle of iron chains, “I would’ve taken you seriously from the start.”

“Wanted to see the kind of man you were,” Nong confessed, “The priests of the Chaplainage claim that all men are equal, but this does not bear out in practice. If I had presented myself as another one of your superiors you would’ve just shut up tighter than a clam. That’s the funny thing about people. We like to pretend that we’re above the Amits, but when you get right down to it our society is just as caste-based as theirs. Lock two men in a cell together for a month, and if they haven’t murdered each other by the end of it, you’ll find that they’ve divided the place right in two.”

“One can relate,” Deschane replied, his irritation returning as the tribesman went into another one of his long lectures. He could feel the ambient temperature climbing with every meter they descended. The sweat was making his fresh scabs itch like the devil.

“Very droll, navigator. But I was just getting to the core of my thesis. Humans create order where there is none. Over time, our civilization tends towards greater and greater expressions of organization. Not so long ago we were lobbing rocks from trebuchets and besieging each other’s mounds as often as we did those of the Amits. There used to be eleven distinct human cultures on Arachnea, all competing for the same dwindling resources. Today there is only one: the Fleet.”

The funicular shuddered to a halt as they scraped the bottom of the mineshaft. Deschane grabbed onto the rails to keep from toppling over and hissed:

“I didn’t come all this way for some half-arsed lecture on the human condition. What’s your point, Nong?”

Nong looked positively scandalized at the interruption. No doubt he’d been planning his little speech for some time. He took out a pair of electric torches and held one out to Deschane, saying stiffly:

“If you’ll please come this way.”

The commissioner led Deschane into a narrow borehole dug horizontally into the side of the shaft, the wide beams of their torches throwing long, stalking shadows across the ceiling.

“Here it is,” Nong said as they came to a dead end, shining the circle of yellow light at the blank wall, “The one secret that threatens to undo us all.”

Deschane frowned. All he could see was a pile of dirt. Several layers of dirt, to be fair, neatly stacked atop the other and each a slightly different shade of brown or orange than the others. Seeing that Deschane was unimpressed, Nong produced a geologist’s clawhammer and began to chip at the layers as he explained:

“Do you remember what I told you about the law of superposition?”

“The deeper the layer, the older it gets. Simple.”

“Good. Then what we have here is a summary of mankind’s entire history on Arachnea. These three meters of soil and the strata contained within them are windows into the past. Not that far into the past, though. Only a few thousand years, a geological blink of an eye. The fact is, we haven’t been on this planet very long at all. The reason these young strata are all the way down here is because a fat slab of them slid down during an earthquake—Mound Shakka sits atop a shear zone, you see.”

Nong hacked at the lowest layer and pried out a jagged stone shaped like a teardrop. He handed it over to Deschane and shone a light on it, saying:

“Familiar?”

“It’s an Amit axe head,” Deschane replied, easily recognizing it.

“Four and a half thousand years old,” Nong said. He dug into the layer just above it until his clawhammer struck something with the loud plink! Nong brushed away the sods to expose a twisted heap of lime green bronze.

“Human work. A frying pan. Forged two thousand eight hundred years ago.”

And in the strata above that Nong picked out another Amit tool, this time an awl made from antler and bone.

“So the Amits retook this mound not long after,” Deschane said, “So what? We’re the ones who hold it now.”

“Please bear with me.”

Nong continued his work. In the next one they unearthed fragments of a human skull. The area inside the right eye socket was fused with spidery etchings of gold-hued metal that ended in fibrous roots that stabbed inwards into where the occipital lobe would have been.

“This civilization had working eye implants,” Nong told Deschane, “Some sort of mind-machine interface. Can you imagine that? Some of the skeletons we found were more metal than man. But even that didn’t save them. In the end they only lasted six centuries.”

Nong started digging at the one above it when Deschane put a hand on his shoulder and stopped him.

“Let me guess. Amits again?”

“It’s a pattern,” Nong nodded, confirming it, “Our antiquarians identified four distinct human civilizations in this geological formation alone, all of varying levels of technological advancement. All of them were more primitive than the Fleet as it exists today, save for one which was so far beyond us that their power rivalled that of the progenitors. All of them conquered this mound from the Amits, existed here for a time, then were completely eradicated.”

“By what?”

“We don’t know,” Nong said simply, switching off his electric torch and plunging them both into an impenetrable murk, “Both we and Fleet Command believe in this cycle of eradication. The disagreement lies in the interpretation of the data. Command believes that the Fleet has always existed ever since the moment that the ancestor-gods bequeathed Arachnea to us with their dying breaths.”

“To them, all these repetitions of the cycle are just part of one continuous chain of the Fleet’s development, a sinusoidal curve with upswings and downswings. The periods of Amit inhabitation are simply periods during which the Fleet temporarily collapsed due to internal tensions. Their theory is that disunity, mismanagement of resources and civil war hurled us back into the stone ages, not the Amits.”

Deschane could understand the logic behind that. Militarily speaking the Fleet was quickly outstripping the Amits. Ever since the discovery of powder weapons the army had won the majority of large-scale surface battles against its subterranean foe. As a species the Amits lacked the necessary cohesion to wage the kind of total war that the Fleet was capable of waging, marshalling the industrial might of the entire species to mount campaigns of genocide. Each mound was an isolated colony that fought alone or even competed against its neighbours for forage.

“But you don’t agree with their assessment?” he asked.

“No, we don’t. Our interpretation is that these cycles are culturally distinct and have nothing to do with each other. Each time the catastrophe stuck, humanity as a whole underwent a hard reset and had to start all over again from nothing. In which case it follows that we are not the authors of our own destruction. Something else is.”

“And your proof?”

Nong waved a hand at the layers of strata and told Deschane:

“Prota’s team discovered that this fossil record is completely absent at Mound 13 and the far-flung outposts along the front line. There is only one conclusion to be drawn from that: none of the other cycles have ever expanded this far north as we have. But if the external threat is real, then it is out there waiting for us beyond the hills we know.

“And the Fleet is walking right into it,” the navigator finished for him. Curse it all, but he’d known this himself as a gut feeling that he’d never admitted aloud. An existential dread that he’d felt in his gut ever since he’d seen the extent of Mound Euler from a distance, a cruel and obscene obelisk raised by the will of Arachnea, eternity laughing at the futility of life itself. It was the real reason he had tried to stall the offensive for as long as he could. Out there in the silence of the green one could not escape the certainty that there existed forces far beyond the ken of mortal man, forces which had laid low the progenitors at the height of their glory and before which the Fleet could not stand.

“What would you have me do?” Deschane asked.

“What you Pathfinders do best, sirrah. Find the threat and kill it, before it’s too late.”

“If what you say is true, then this thing has a habit of making mincemeat out of all mankind. How could I possibly make a difference against something like that?”

Nong pressed something into the palm of Deschane’s hand and strode back up the tunnel, saying:

“The gods provide, navigator. The gods provide.”

Shining his torch at it, the navigator saw that he was gripping the tiny Divine Engine once again. Deschane clutched it tight amidst the darkness and held to his heart. And just like that, Deschane knew what to do.