Maybe it was just the eternal optimism of a fool—hope springs eternal, and all that—but Rene found that he wasn’t very worried about the coming rendezvous with destiny. But the simpler explanation was that his primitive mind was taking comfort in an old superstition.

Every pathfinder knew ‘65 Syngman Bc’ by another name: Brahe, the northern sentinel. At certain times of the year the planet shone brighter than any star in the night sky. When all the other constellations appeared dim and uncertain behind the thickening clouds, Brahe was always there to lend a helping hand, guiding lost explorers back to the safety of their mounds or warding them away from the Amit-infested realms. Rene considered the planet to be his personal lucky charm.

Exar had them return to their compression capsule and strap in for the second half of the journey as the shuttle swung about and used its main drive plume to rapidly decelerate, Rene squirming uncomfortably against the constant strain he felt from head to toe.

When the crystal displays went transparent to let Rene see Brahe in all its beauty, he actually choked up with emotion.

The gas giant wore russet-coloured bands around its ample curves, some turning with and others against the rotation of the globe itself. Sandwiched between them like scoops of ice cream were the perpetual storms whipped up by the counter-rotations of the bands. The dozens of moons clinging to the skirt of dust and vapor encircling Brahe’s waist were mere specks by comparison. In a few hours they came up on Po Chai herself rising slowly over the bend of the planet’s horizon, a slushy snowball with only the faintest halo of an atmosphere.

When the shuttle angled up its nosecone to begin re-entry procedures, Rene clenched his stomach and prepared to lose his lunch, expecting the same ordeal he’d experienced in the Divine Engine’s safety pod. But this landing went far smoother than expected. The thin atmosphere meant that the shuttle exterior registered only a slight increase in temperature as its heat shielded belly and nose cleaved through into the main body of air. Now the shuttle waggled its wings from side to side as it went into a series of S-shaped banking turns, using the scant wisps of water vapor to help slow down. Finally, the jet nozzles roared into life and they sped over an arctic desert that stretched as far as the eye could see, the smooth whiteness only broken by plunging morasses between the ice sheets and farting geysers that sent up fountains of snowflakes that vanished twinkling into the void.

They spied the first man-made structures at the south pole, dour grey squares and rectangles sunk into the ice at perfectly spaced intervals to form a checkerboard pattern. The shuttle executed a flawless vertical landing atop one of these structures, landing gears settling down on the pad with a hollow thump. Only then did compression capsules relax their hold on the two passengers and allow them to sit up.

“Well that was a bit anticlimactic,” Rene said, unstrapping himself so he could stand and do some stretches. He was leaning forward to touch his ankles when the ice on either side of them jumped up and swallowed them whole, the ancient landing pad plummeting through the subsurface. Rene’s forehead slammed into his toes and he folded like a cheap suit, collapsing in a heap on the floor.

“My back…” he moaned, climbing back to his feet while clutching at his lumbar, “…my back…”

“Aw, shoot,” Exar scolded him, “You just had to go and ruin that perfect landing I just made by giving yourself a sprain, didn’t you?”

Zildiz grabbed him under the armpits and hauled him back upright.

“Come on, Fleet-man. You’re about to seek an audience with your gods. At least try to look presentable.”

Rene was nonplussed. Was that her way of being supportive? It was the closest thing to pleasant behaviour that she had ever exhibited.

The pad was lowering them down a vast shaft, a pair of cyclopean doors sliding shut over them and plunging everything into darkness. The searchlights mounted on the front of the craft pierced into the gloom and they stared out into a caves of stone and steel, a storage depot that was stacked to the roof with a haphazard staircase of corrugated container crates, storage tanks, wheeled vehicles, bales of wire and junkyards worth of trash.

Rene heard a howling vortex of wind ripping outside the shuttle, powerful enough to tip over some of the crates and send them tumbling around like oversized dice. The tumult died down and Exar announced:

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“The hangar bay is fully pressurized now. Atmospheric composition is nominal. Bit of surprise, considering that this base has definitely seen better days. We can step outside now. It’s quite safe.”

The ramp came down with a soft sigh of pneumatics and they all climbed out, Zildiz in front and Rene limping along behind, Exar tucked under his arm. The moment the Gallivant’s foot touched the hangar floor a shrieking, metallic voice assailed them, echoing through the cavern and threatening to pop Rene’s one working eardrum:

“Unauthorized access. Crewmen, identify yourselves!”

Overhead lamps flickered on and bathed the hangar in sterile orange fluorescence. Rene and Zildiz froze in the act of debarkation, glancing all around them for the source of the audible assault. Something squat and bulky trundled out from behind a stacked pyramid of barrels, an indescribable fusion of mechanical components Rene mistook for a runaway train that torn up its own tracks.

It rolled up to them on a set of grinding treads that made up its lower body, an unstoppable chassis whose motions reminded Rene of a centipede or myropod muscling its way through the undergrowth. A low suspension and wide frame gave it the ability to support the staggering number of armaments fitted to its upper half—the damned thing looked like it was carrying enough firepower to level Mound Euler all over again.

Rene saw quad-linked cannons fitted with drum magazines, arms burdened cycler guns whose multiple barrels spun with eager whines, fat launchers filled with rows of miniature rockets, spinning bandsaws and snipping shears attached to tentacled appendages, an enlarged version of the laser designator he’d used to set off his traps—and these were just the weapons he could understand.

But the most frightening part of this dynamo of destruction was draped over the neck of the upper torso, a desiccated corpse of a man who’d apparently been flayed and vivisected at random, organs replaced with gurgling tubes, snapping pistons and servos where tendons and joints had once been, a thicket of wires digging into his eye sockets to mate with the goggling lenses that had been riveted directly into its chrome-plated skull.

If that is the true face of my god, Rene thought with revulsion, then I’d like very much to cancel my reservation for the afterlife. Even the savage Zildiz took a fearful step back at the sight of the automaton.

“Crewmen,” it blared once again, “Identify yourselves or face immediate sanitation.”

Sanitation? Somehow Rene didn’t think it was threatening to give them a warm sponge bath. But it had called him a crewman—that had to mean something, right? He reached for the sky and said in a wavering voice:

“C-crewman Rene Louvoture, assistant navigator, 9th Battalion, 3rd Pathfinder Regiment! Reporting for duty, sah!”

He snapped a salute and held the pose, marrow quivering like jelly in his bones.

The flayed thing swivelled its chassis around so that it menaced Zildiz directly.

“Crewman Rene, your designations are unfamiliar. You have brought an immunocompromised vector into this quarantine zone. This calls for immediate sanitation.”

It brought up its withered arms and levelled a snouted battle rifle at the Gallivant. Before he knew what he was doing, Rene threw himself in front of Zildiz and spread wide his arms in supplication, yelling:

“Mercy, blessed ancestor! Mercy! She is my prisoner. I brought her here for information, to help the Fleet in its struggle to liberate the surface of Arachnea. She is of incalculable value to the war effort.”

Servos whirred as the flayed man on the chassis cocked his head to one side thoughtfully. It slung the rifle over its shoulder and stroked its lower jaw with the clicking digits of one hand, tugging at an unkempt growth of salt-and-pepper chin hairs there.

“Understood. You are not compromised yourself, crewman Rene?”

“Sir? Oh, no sir!” Rene dusted himself off just to be sure, “I’m as clean as whistle.”

Yes Mama, I washed for supper, Rene almost blurted out, remembering in his extreme agitation the times when his parents would box him around the ears for leaving dirt under his fingernails after a shift at the fungal gardens.

The flayed man’s goggles emitted a burst of flashing lights just like the ones Exar had used to diagnose Rene and Zildiz, and the pathfinder got the distinct sense that he was somehow being turned inside out.

“In accordance with catechism 4, we trust but verify. You may submit yourself and the prisoner for decontamination. Unless of course, you have something else to declare?”

Rene took a moment to rap on Exar with his knuckles, hard. Why wasn’t the sphere saying anything? He was a servant of the progenitors, surely he knew how to address this abomination properly! But Exar remained inert—for all intents and purposes he was just another piece of trash in the junkyard.

“No,” Rene said, “I have nothing else to declare.”

“Then what, pray tell, is that?” the flayed man spat. One of his man’s lenses cast a strange purple beam behind Rene and Zildiz, illuminating the shuttle itself. Where the strange beam fell, Rene saw a line of previously invisible footprints leading from the underside of the ramp to the caverns beyond. The pair of them looked underneath the ramp and saw a huge sack of Leaper silk fixed to the aft section of the hull, hemolymphic slime oozing out of a tear in the sack like pus from a weeping cyst.

“I…I don’t know what that…how could it have?” Rene began, but his words shrivelled up in his throat as the flayed man pointed every piece of its arsenal right at him.

“Squeaky clean?” it snarled with a wet leopard growl, “You’ve collaborated with the enemy, crewman. You snuck an infiltrator unit in through our defences, you’ve compromised the last bastion of all mankind,” the bandsaws and shears tenderly brushed Rene’s bare skin, “For that, I’m going to grind you up and shit you out!”

So much for my lucky charm, thought Rene.