Prologue - Monsters in the Deep

Year 204 P.L. Rychter Calendar

Coordinates: 51.3°S; 76.9°W

Site Designation: Scraegar Labyrinth

Craggy, steep-sided walls soared up on both sides of the column of vehicles that traversed the gully floor. Six bulky haulers with bulbous front wheels and fat, broad track sections at their rear trundled onward, carrying forty intrepid souls into the unknown. The further they plunged into the depths, the more distant the searing heat and brightness of Rychter's twin suns became. It was still hot down here though, the narrow trails compressing the heavy air into an oppressive cocktail that left the human explorers short of breath and constantly on the brink of dehydration.

But they pressed on nonetheless.

Bryas Karvonen's expedition team had encountered the twisting, towering maze of crags and canyons five days ago as they delved into the deepest reaches of Rychter's southern hemisphere, further than anyone before them. Two centuries had passed since the colony ships first landed on the desolate planetoid's surface, and now, in spite of their inhospitable new home, the humans were thriving.

From a half dozen settlements in the relatively temperate northern climes, Rychter's new residents had spread, further and further, gouging their presence into this world in spite of the dust storms, scorching heat and volcanic eruptions. The most recent jewel in their crown was the city of Brekka, a large settlement that now sprawled over a rugged plateau that formed the gateway to the north. It was from there that Karvonen and his companions had set out two weeks ago, officially hunting for fresh settlement sites; for mines, quarries and geothermal extraction sites.

Unofficially, Karvonen and his entourage planned to journey as far south as they could, outstripping any other expedition on Rychter. There were bragging rights to be had here, and the leaders of the prospecting convoys had long engaged in healthy competition, all desperate to find something that would cement them in the history books.

As he looked out of the crawler's narrow armoured window and gazed at the barren walls of rock, Karvonen decided if they didn't find something soon in this desolate region he would have to give the order to turn back. The original orbital scans from over two hundred years ago dubbed this place the Scraegar Labyrinth and he had to concede it had been aptly named. Thick with heavy metals the passages of the labyrinth interfered with the crawler guidance systems, and if they pressed on much further they might not be able to find their way back out.

"Road forks into three tracks ahead, Doc," Hesse warned from her seat in the crawler's cramped nose cone. She craned her neck to look back into the passenger compartment. "Come take a look."

Karvonen rose from his seat and shuffled his way along the compartment. He was a big man with a thicket of a beard and a shaven skull, and in his set of loose-fit beige overalls he looked more like a miner than an explorer. Stooping slightly to not bang his head on the crawler's low ceiling, he made his way to the driver's station, leaning in over Hesse's shoulder to scan the road head. Sure enough, he could see the branching paths a few hundred yards distant.

"Got a scientific method for this one?" Hesse joked. A practical, unflappable woman with a close crop of blond hair, she'd driven the crawler through far more treacherous terrain than this, but in the dark unknowns of the Scraegar Labyrinth he was glad to have her steady hand at the wheel. He cast his eyes over the displays for a moment, and then pointed.

"Scans show the right hand passage slopes deeper than the others," he told her.

She leaned her head to the left, taking a slurp from the drinking hose built into the headrest. "Into the belly of the beast, eh?"

"Nothing quite so dramatic." Karvonen smiled thinly. "But there's certainly a better chance of finding a mineral load deeper in."

Hesse glanced up at him with a smirk. "Save the hard sell, Doc." She took another drink, and then picked up the mouthpiece for the convoy's short range comms. "Roller One to all vehicles. Veer right on my lead."

Crackled acknowledgements filtered back through the speakers from the other drivers, and a few minutes later the train of vehicles sloughed to the right, their mounted lights carving a furrow in the shadows as they descended deeper into the labyrinth. Darkness closed in around them as they turned out of sight of Rychter's suns and Karvonen found himself giving a silent prayer that the Riverlords were watching over them.

A superstitious tradition of course, but it still made him feel a little better.

He paced the passenger compartment impatiently, checking and rechecking readings between sparing drinks of brackish water held in vast tanks in the vehicle's belly. The other members of his team monitored seismic stations, geological scanners and viewscreens fed from the outer cameras peering into the gloom.

Maybe twenty minutes after they made the rightward turn he felt a faint tremor in the metal beneath his feet, something a little more forceful than the rumble of the crawler engine. Karvonen looked sharply up at the driver's station, but the geologist at the seismic station, Akiyara, waved him over.

"Doctor, we just registered a small spike in seismic activity," the man said, nodding at his screen. "A tremor."

"Here?" Karvonen's brow rose incredulously. "This is supposed to be one of the planet's most geologically stable regions."

"It was minor." Akiyara shrugged, scratching his short stubble of black hair. "But definite."

"Any explanation?"

"Too small to be tectonic activity." The man pointed to a row of red indicators on his display. "But there's a trail of them, maybe five kilometres south of us."

"Let's hope they stay there," Karvonen muttered. The expedition had gear to deal with most eventualities, but if a quake blocked off their route back it could take days to cut their way through.

The convoy edged onwards. For nearly an hour they crawled their way carefully through the canyon, scanning and taking small samples as they went. Three more times Akiyara registered the minor seismic anomalies, fluctuating in distance – some less than a kilometre away while others were detected far deeper into the labyrinth.

Within the sturdy crawlers, Karvonen and his colleagues felt no disturbance, however, so they pressed on with one wary eye on the seismic readings. The passage sloped ever-deeper and the walls arched up around them as canyon became tunnel. The oppressive weight of millions of tons of rock began to bear down on the mind of every person in the convoy as they descended into this subterranean world.

They still hadn't found anything of note, however. The mineral lodes detected were nothing that couldn't be mined from much safer, closer sites and there was nothing in the structure of the surrounding geology that suggested they were likely to find anything else. But, just as Karvonen's patience was starting to run thin, the vehicle suddenly lurched to a halt.

He glanced irately up at the driver's station and opened his mouth to issue a stinging rebuke.

"Doc, you better take a look at this," Hesse called before he could say a word. Frowning, he scuttled to the front of the compartment to join her.

"What is it? Why have we stopped?"

"Take a look." Hesse pointed straight ahead.

Karvonen looked. The powerful lights of the crawler speared through fifty meters of darkness before striking something solid. Golden light spilled over the obstruction and he cocked his head to one side as he examined it. It spanned the entire width of the tunnel and he could see it was a massive slab of pink-red stone, but more interestingly, it seemed to be utterly flat.

Even more than that, even from this distance he could see that there was some kind of carving inlaid into the face of it. Whatever it was, it was not natural. Someone, or something, had put it there.

"Drown me," he muttered with a smile.

"What do you think it is?" Hesse asked.

Karvonen looked down at her, a twinkle in his eye. "I think it looks an awful lot like a door."

*

Temporary work lights illuminated the area around the barrier and members of Karvonen's team scurried back and forth, setting up mobile scanning units and unloading excavation gear. Four of them set to work with bulky, high-powered cameras to photograph every inch of the surface with painstaking care. Security personnel armed with squat-barrelled shotguns stood warily around the perimeter, their unease palpable.

Karvonen stood with the senior expedition staff in the centre of the tunnel, facing their discovery. The vast slab towered twenty meters high and thirty across, completely blocking the passage. Emblazoned upon it was some kind of hideous snarling head, a creature crafted with excruciating detail that no natural process could explain away. His eyes widened in amazement and he took a step back to take a better view of the mural.

Carved with intricate care into the solid rock was a head roughly triangular in shape, with a shovel-like snout and a bizarre double-jaw hanging down in an other-worldly gape. Intricate scales had been worked through the snout and on the four parts of its lower jaw a forest of teeth had been etched. It didn't seem to have any eyes, at least in this sculptor's impression. Wreaths of what looked like flame coiled up around both edges of the mural, ringing the beastly head.

"Now what in the Everflowing do you suppose made that?" murmured Mallock, the expedition's lead engineer. "The detail of this thing..." She shook her head, her box-cut of black hair shimmering with the motion.

"It could be a splinter settlement?" Akiyara suggested. "A group that broke off from the main colonisation effort?"

"We'd have found some trace of them before now," Karvonen said, shaking his head. "And even if it were, why would humans create something like this?"

"So you're suggesting...?"

"Unless you have a better solution?" He cast a pointed glance at the geologist.

"Indigenous life." Mallock let out an impressed whistle, stepping forward with her own flashlight in hand to take a closer look. She crouched down at the centre of the enormous visage, tipping her head sideways. "There's no seam here. It looks to just be a solid wall."

"It might retract up or down."

She shrugged, standing back up. "Possibly. But I'll say that this carving would have taken precise tools, and to move something like this there would have to be machinery. Whoever put it here had to be the product of some kind of intelligent civilisation."

"We've been on this planet for two hundred years," cut in the lanky head of biology, Braithwaite, adjusting the thick goggles that rested above his crooked nose. "There's been no sign of intelligent life. Not from the first orbital scans that took us here to two centuries of colonisation and exploration. It doesn't seem feasible."

"And yet here we are." Karvonen turned an impatient glare on the man. "We are the first to move this far south. Perhaps whatever culture left his behind never moved into the northern reaches."

"This is all supposition," Akiyara interjected before Braithwaite could respond. "We need to run our tests. We can argue about the results when we have them."

"The preliminary scans show that this slab is only about a metre thick," Mallock said. "If we really want answers we'll need to cut through it and see our friends were hiding. It's just stone – we have the gear to carve through it easily enough."

Karvonen scratched at his thick beard with one hand as he considered their options. On one hand he was loathe to damage such a magnificent example of what had to be alien architecture, but on the other, if they couldn't find out what was beyond this barrier then the whole endeavour was for nought. He sighed heavily, one foot tapping against the solid tunnel floor.

"Alright," he said after a moment. "Get whatever equipment you need, but this must be done delicately. I don't want to damage the mural any more than we have to. We'll return with a larger team and have it reassembled for transport. I think something like this would make for the beginnings of a museum back in Brekka."

"That's a hell of an opening exhibit," Mallock chuckled, then she turned away, signalling to members of her team to follow her.

It was a further half hour before Karvonen was satisfied that they had collated all the data they could from scans, pictures and tiny rock samples from the edges of the mural. With this done, Mallock's team set up the three heavy mining lasers carried by the expedition. Mounted on a bulky tracked units, each one was a fat, cone-tipped cylinder two meters long and they rumbled them into place, one in the centre and two flanking to either side.

In theory, Mallock would be able to cut a square section out of the centre of the wall that they could lever free, leaving a path large enough for the crawlers to pass through. She spent another couple of minutes consulting with her operators, checking the laser alignments and power settings to be sure they didn't unwittingly damage the structure of the slab they would be cutting free.

"We're ready," she confirmed, turning to Karvonen expectantly.

He slipped his tinted goggles down over his eyes and nodded once. "Do it."

A low whine throbbed in his ears as the lasers powered up, their power cores fizzing with cobalt blue. Mallock glanced around quickly to make sure everyone nearby had their own goggles in place to mitigate the brightness, then gave the order to the operators. The first line of searing light spat out from the central laser, piercing the massive slab and quickly boring a hole barely a few millimetres across. It started to sweep to the left, slow and steady.

Then Karvonen felt an unmistakable rumble beneath this feet. The laser jolted and the beam skewed off course for a second before the man operating it was able to slam its shutdown button. The quake continued for several seconds before dying away.

"Doc!"

All eyes turned at the sound of Hesse's shout to find her hanging out of the crawler's cabin, a worried expression on her face. "Those seismic readings we were seeing on our way here? They've started up again – a lot of them."

"Where?" Karvonen demanded, a feeling of unease swelling in his gut.

"Everywhere! And they're getting closer!"

His mind raced. They'd tracked the seismic anomalies for hours and there was nothing that close to them. Could the laser have somehow triggered an event? He didn't think so – the machine wasn't even pointed to the ground. They'd barely started their excavations. But another tremor rattled his bones nonetheless.

"We need to get out of here!" Braithwaite shouted, already starting back towards the crawlers. "This tunnel could collapse at any moment!"

Karvonen opened his mouth to reply, but he was cut off by a sudden, screaming crash of metal and rumbling earth. He could only watch in disbelief as the crawler at the back of the line was flipped nose over tail, before slamming to the ground, vital systems shattered and dust blooming all around the impact point. Cries of alarm rose up around him and he tried to think. This couldn't be happening. He had followed all the steps, done everything diligently. This shouldn't be happening!

"Doc, we've got to go!" Hesse screamed from the crawler cabin, just before an impact slammed into the vehicle from beneath it. The crawler's heavy frame was tossed sideways, flinging Hesse from the cabin and dashing her body against the solid rock of the tunnel wall. Karvonen started moving towards her, human instinct overriding his attempts to reason out the problem.

Before he could reach her something burst from the ground beneath his feet.

Something huge.

Karvonen fell backwards with a yelp, rock and dirt showering him. He coughed and spluttered in shock, scrambling backwards to get away from the thing. Panicked screams filled the air, mingling with the crunching roars of breaking earth. Dust clogged his vision and he heard the low bark of shotgun blasts.

He looked up to find an enormous, shaggy form plunging out of the smoke. His eyes went wide and his mouth opened to scream before a snarling head appeared, staring balefully down upon him. A bestial roar from the depths of the River itself shook him to his soul, then a fur-covered fist bigger than his torso swung down, pulverising his body into the tunnel floor.

The bone-shattering force of the blow left him in a mangled heap and he knew he was dead. Blood bubbled up in his mouth and he coughed through ruptured lungs, watching through hazy vision as the behemoth turned contemptuously away. The screams, roars, crashes and explosions all muddied into a single impossible whorl that he no longer had the will to fight. Blackness descended.

Doctor Bryas Karvonen died.

And his expedition team died around him.