They followed the prisoner down the concrete stairwell, level after level, deep into the cold rock. Rann soon lost count of the flights. The intermittent rumble of the bombardment above grew ever more faint. They passed branching tunnels that vanished into pitch blackness beyond the feeble illumination of the stairwell lights. Darkened doorways, which they approached with guns raised in fear of ambush, opened into barren storerooms and dilapidated bunkhouses. By torchlight, they saw traces of the complex’s former inhabitants – half-eaten meals in a cramped canteen, full ashtrays, a laundry with neat stacks of folded uniforms. But not a living soul, save for a few rats scurrying for the corners.

“Where are your lot?” Wace demanded of the Salvator, when they stopped to rest on a shadowy landing. Geddan and Iva had gone to piss in an abandoned side corridor. Wace was keeping the prisoner in his gunsights. Rann seated himself on a worn concrete step, checking the action on his rifle. The bleeding in his mouth had slowed to a trickle, though his stomach still ached terribly from the beating. The bruises would be spectacular tomorrow.

“Not here,” the officer replied icily, standing with his hands cuffed in front of him. They’d searched him thoroughly before beginning the descent, mindful of the suicide belts and hidden blades for which Salv diehards were infamous.

Wace snorted. “They’re all dead, aren’t they? You’ve sent out all you have.”

“You have no idea what we have, darkskin.”

“You have a mountain full of dust and a few conscripts hiding in bunkers. We have a hundred thousand men who want some payback for Taalo’s Ford and Indeleon. How’s it feel, being the last of the Salvators?”

“I am not the last, and Indeleon was nothing beside what will be coming for you.”

“I’ll tell you what’s coming for you, you murdering piece of shit. The fucking gallows,” Wace snarled.

Rann looked up from his rifle. “No chatter, Wace.”

“There’s nothing down here, sergeant. Let’s hang him from the railings and go back up. There’s still fighting to be done.” There was an edge of challenge in Wace’s tone.

“We have our orders. We’re keeping on. That’s final.” Rann held Wace’s gaze until the other man looked away. Then he flicked his eyes to the prisoner. “Unless you’re lying to us. In which case I’m happy to let Wace string you up.”

“I will show you what’s in Chamber One. Not that it will do your kind any good.”

“How much further?” Rann asked, as Geddan and Iva returned from the darkened corridor.

The Salv shrugged. “A hundred metres, perhaps.”

“The climb back up will be fun,” Iva said sourly, crouching to tighten her bootlaces.

“The sooner we get to the bottom, the sooner we can report back. And haul this one in for Dauman.” Rann stood up from the step and shouldered his rifle. “Let’s move. Wace, keep him in front. Geddan, Iva, watch behind us. Any movement, tell me right away.”

The air grew palpably colder with each flight of stairs they descended. There were no more empty corridors and gangways branching off the stairwell, just raw concrete walls boxing them in. Rann kept looking up at the shaft soaring above them, the flickering lightbulbs stretching away to a vanishing point in the narrow gap between the flights. He had a dizzy sense of just how deep they were. If something happened to them down here, they might never be found; one more missing squad among thousands. The fearful animal part of his mind was straining to go back up, to the light and air.

“Sergeant, look,” Iva said as she reached the railed edge of another landing. She sounded disquieted.

Rann walked over and looked down. The bottom of the stairwell was now clearly in view, more brightly lit than the levels above. Where the steps finally reached the floor, the grey concrete ended abruptly. The floor itself was a glassy, dimly reflective black, like unpolished obsidian. It was oddly clean, without grime or scuff marks, even though the stairs themselves were worn and stained with use. In all his years of storming Salv bunkers and fighting street-by-street through fortress towns, he had never seen such material.

“What is that stuff?” Iva asked him.

“I’m not sure. Looks new.”

“It isn’t,” the prisoner said, with more than a hint of smugness. “It’s been down there some time.”

Rann looked sharply at him. “Is this where the rest of your people have gone? Remember what I said before. Any sign of an ambush, you die first.”

“This chamber has been evacuated. I haven’t lied to you, heretic.”

“Move,” Wace said curtly, his rifle pointed unwaveringly at the Salvator’s back.

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They made their way down the last few flights. The stairwell ended in a long high-ceilinged hall, built entirely of the black material. The terminus of the defunct freight elevator was off to one side at the foot of the stairs, cut into the sheer wall, its concertina-grille doors closed tight on the empty concrete shaft. The electrical cables bracketed to the walls of the stairwell extended out past the final step to snake along the gleaming floor. Some of them powered the heavy-duty portable lamps that lit the hall. Others led off to the far end, where two tall steel barriers had been raised like hingeless doors. A diffuse yellow glow was visible in the narrow gap between them, blotting out whatever was on the other side.

Rann stepped down onto the strange black surface. It was hard as marble, unyielding and flawlessly smooth, yet his mud-encrusted boots did not slip or slide on it. Looking ahead, shielding his eyes from the glare of the lamps, he noticed that the barriers at the end of the hall were supported by heavy angled pillars, as though to reinforce them against some mighty impact.

But the reinforcement was on the wrong side to hold back intruders from above. These barriers were designed to keep something in.

“You didn’t build this place, did you?” Rann said, unease growing in the pit of his stomach.

“No. We found it,” the officer replied sullenly, pacing along ahead of them at Wace’s gunpoint. “We sank the elevator shaft through the surrounding rock, and built the staircase, but this chamber was here already. It was revealed by geological soundings, before the war.”

“What was it? A mine?”

“There aren’t any mines on the Rock,” Iva put in, marching beside him. “Never were. Just some fishing villages, before the Salv butchered them all.”

“No mine’s got walls like this,” Geddan said, squinting down the hallway with a faintly troubled expression.

“Very perceptive, for a Forester subhuman,” the officer sneered.

Geddan cocked his rifle’s action in a slow, deliberate motion, without looking. “Say that again, Salvator,” he said calmly.

The Salv’s mouth twitched, and he scowled impotently at the floor. Rann might once have rebuked Geddan for threatening a handcuffed prisoner. That time was long past. At least he could trust the big man to have a measure of self-control. Wace was a different matter.

The five of them walked down the hall, stepping carefully over the winding cables. Their footsteps echoed off the walls. The buzzing lamps threw their elongated shadows onto the gleaming black surface, a procession of giants.

When they were halfway to the steel barriers, Rann heard Iva gasp in surprise. He looked back, frowning, and saw her staring down at the glassy floor in disbelief. It took him a second to notice that their bootprints were vanishing behind them. As he watched, the smears of mud and grit slowly melted away into the black surface like sand into water. The hallway was left as pristine as before.

Geddan stamped his foot experimentally, shaking off more chunks of dried earth, which quickly vanished in turn. “I’m fucking seeing things,” he exclaimed.

“No, I see it. It’s real,” Rann said.

“It absorbs stray matter. A self-cleaning mechanism of some kind,” the Salvator said tonelessly.

Iva prodded one of her fading bootprints with her rifle. Instead of sinking into the surface, the muzzle clicked sharply against it. “How...?”

“It is selective. Metals and polymers are usually not affected, but the material resists being cut. We tried piercing it with powered drills. It hardened itself enough to break the drill bits.”

“Then how did you build the elevator shaft? The stairwell?”

“Heat. We used heavy chemical torches, shipped in at great expense. The material had to be burned for days to destroy its regenerative capacity. The fumes caused much attrition among the labourers.”

“You mean the slaves,” Wace hissed.

“War is war. It has its requirements.” The officer looked back at Wace with a thin smile. “They should have been thankful. Through labour, we gave their lives meaning.”

“You’re very lucky the sergeant wants you alive, Salv.”

“Can your sergeant not speak for himself, darkskin?”

“If you call him darkskin again, I’ll let him shoot you,” Rann said evenly.

At that moment, the floor of the hallway moved underneath them. It was not a large movement – a downward shift of maybe half an inch – but it made them all stumble and stop in mid-stride. The lamps and cables clunked softly as they settled into new positions. Other than that, it was curiously silent; there was no grind of rock or shriek of steel.

Geddan had his rifle pressed against his shoulder, scanning nervously from side to side. “He Above, now what?”

“The chamber adjusts itself, the seismologists told me. If the mountain shifts or the bedrock slips, the material reconfigures to fill the gaps. I imagine it’s noticed your bombardment destabilising the slopes above us.” The Salv spoke as if this was the height of impoliteness, as much a personal affront as an act of war.

Iva shook her head. “That isn’t fucking possible. How can it know? It’s not...alive.”

“Its machinery is woven with sensors, tuned to the appropriate stimuli. There is a numerical language that governs their operation. Our experts had begun to decrypt it, when you invaded our island.”

“Salvator. You’re going to tell me the truth, right now,” Rann said tersely. “What is this place? What’s through there?”

“If I told you, you would not believe me, heretic.”

“Tell him!” Wace snapped.

“Our salvation,” the officer replied simply.

Rann fought down a rising, sickly dread. “Wace, send him in ahead of us. If he tries to run, or if you see anyone else in there, shoot him. Understood?” He was addressing the prisoner as much as he was Wace.

“Yes, sergeant.” Wace jabbed the Salv between the shoulderblades with his rifle. “Move, you fuck. Slowly.”

With the prisoner leading, they closed the distance to the barriers. The glow coming from the other side turned out to be another set of electric lamps, fed by the twining stairwell cables, shining out into a greater darkness beyond.

The squad passed between the barriers in a widely-spaced single file, guns at the ready. If they were going to be ambushed, Rann knew it would be now.

The hallway opened into an immense, echoing cavern of the glassy black material. The sheer walls soared up to a flat, featureless ceiling fifty or sixty feet above, and stretched off two hundred yards or more on either side. The other end of the room was so far away as to be invisible, darkening into an impenetrable black beyond the reach of the lamps. It might have been half a mile, or five miles. The air was cold enough to raise goosebumps. It was like being inside a gigantic coffin.

There was nobody within. No scientists tending to a thrumming atomic reactor, no barricades manned by hard-eyed Incorruptible. But the cavern was not empty. Rann’s eyes adjusted as he passed the row of lamps, and then widened in shock as enormous, looming shapes resolved themselves in front of him.