CHAPTER EIGHT

"Achernar?".

"Alright, Amanda".

"Banshee?".

"Still alive...barely".

"Holborn?".

"Yes, ma'am".

"Lyra?".

"Here too. That's all of us, I think".

"Still plenty of wolves howling. Wolves. Get it? Because we're-", Holborn started, but the transmission went dead. A Ghost's voice came through in his stead.

"I thought it would be better if you didn't have to sit through this one, Guardians. He's still trying to explain the wolves joke".

"Good looking out", Amanda chuckled into the fireteam channel. They had all survived the opening engagement. She wasn't sure how many the fleet had lost. Fireteams were still running down the list, checking names.

She probably didn't want to know. Later she would pull up the casualty figures on her viewscreen and sift through them, looking for anyone she knew.

Later.

Dotting the Moon were fifty Hive facilities, ominous citadels that were either as inactive as long-range scans belied, or else shielded by some device unknown to the City's defenders. Twenty Guardians were to be dispatched to each of these installations to establish a perimeter, and eventually to breach and secure them.

Amanda and her fireteam had been assigned to the Ocean of Storms, a flat expanse of grey rock studded with grim mountains that rose unexpected like ramparts from the basalt plains. Their forward operating base was a pre-Collapse outpost, serving as the headquarters for the three hundred Guardians deployed to this region alongside the Band of Wolves.

The base had been abandoned centuries ago, bright hope decayed into dust and meteor scars.. A comms tower dominated the base, and two kilometers northwest was an old fusion coil accelerator, the titanic machine once used to hurl cargo across the solar system.

The core complex around the tower was designated as the rendezvous point for all the Guardians operating in the Ocean of Storms. In the case of an overwhelming enemy presence, all three hundred Guardians in the region would pull back here.

If the Hive knew they had been defeated in orbit, they showed no sign of it. In the hours between the fleet action and the landing, the Moon remained dead. The enemy installations remained lifeless, their mausoleum doors sealed shut.

The leader of their detachment, a Titan named Varen, assigned Amanda and three others to keep their jumpships in the air, running recon and providing fire support if the enemy decided to attack them while in the field.

So Amanda spent three days circling their target, a ghostly citadel thirty-seven kilometers from their headquarters at the moonbase. All the while, her detachment worked to surround it and establish a tight perimeter, half a klick out from the target.

Poking from the ribs of a low grey mountain like a tumor on the skin of the world, its iron walls were carved with glyphs that burned the eyes and made the skin crawl. It was all angular outcroppings and jagged towers, as if cut crudely from the rock itself. Lit with corpse-light, ghastly radiance that shrouded as much as true darkness. The fortress bled corruption.

Trenches were dug around it, a Guardian placed every hundred meters or so. A double watch was posted in front of the gates, wrought-iron doors that towered ten meters high, decorated with binding chains. Lyra and Holborn had gate duty.

On the fourth day, the earthworks were completed and the sixteen Guardians on the ground were in position. Amanda and the other three pilots ran regular air patrols over the area, never straying more than fifty klicks from the target.

The plan, Varen informed the group over the comms, was this; to wait one week after landfall, at which time they would crack the target open themselves. From there they would secure the entrance, moving into the lower levels and clearing them. If resistance proved overwhelming, one of the other detachments in the region could rush to their aid.

In three days, they would have to breach the Hive citadel and take it, room by room.

Amanda never thought she'd say it, but she was getting tired of flying. One hundred forty-four hours of patrolling the same endless expanse of rock, and she was starting to get bored. Her and the other fliers worked in shifts, three in the air and one resting, rotating every four hours. The last week of her life had been nothing but catnaps and stale rations.

When her Ghost had dipped into its joke archive to try and lighten the mood, Amanda had to restrain herself from putting a bullet in the thing. Apparently the Traveller, in its infinite wisdom, had no sense of humor.

Halfway through the seventh day of their watch, while Varen was still grappling with how best to breach the stronghold's walls, her comm crackled to life. Achernar had opened a private channel.

"Amanda?". The Awoken's voice was cool and lyrical, edged in inhuman aloofness. "I'm hearing this...scratching noise underneath my section of the trench. Sounds like frying bacon. My Ghost can't get a fix on it. Could you fly over, run a scan".

He waited a moment as she corrected her course, before amending, "It's probably nothing. Shoddy ditch-digging is all".

Her craft rolled left and pitched back, turning around to head back over the fortress and Achernar's section of the trench. With Amanda's hands busy on the sticks, she issued commands to her Ghost.

"Grab me an ERI of that section of the trench. Drop some pegs as we fly over, run a telluric current through them. I wanna see what's going on under there".

The Ghost did its best to nod, bobbing in the air and blinking its single blue eye before disappearing to do its duty.

The "pegs" she was referring to where essentially tiny missiles with a payload of electrodes, tipped with boring drills. These were guided down to the target area, where they bored into the ground and buried themselves there. When the electrode was exposed to a current, it measured the transient response of any subsurface anomaly - conducting or otherwise. It was, essentially, a cave-mapping tool.

Amanda's Phaeton screamed over Achernar's position, before turning and passing once again so her Ghost could get the read on those pegs.

"Ghost?", Amanda queried.

The tiny white construct bobbed in her cockpit for a moment, humming, its eye cycling and blinking.

"Odd. Must have laid the electrodes incorrectly, maybe they didn't bore. It's like I'm getting a...a reflection of the trench, its inverse. Recommend we make another pass, try again".

Amanda did, swinging back around and dropping a second set of pegs.

"Still getting the same read", the Ghost spoke, synthetic voice colored with confusion. "It could be...but no, it couldn't be".

"Well, don't keep me in suspense", Amanda spoke through her flight mask.

"The only explanation I can think of is that there's a tunnel, running right under Achernar's trench. But that still doesn't explain the noise he's hearing. And nothing natural is going to run that straight".

Amanda's heart skipped a beat.

"Nothing natural. Meaning, it was built".

The Ghost blinked. "It could have been dug by colonists. Same ones who built the moonbase".

"Eight hundred years ago. In the exact same location and exact same shape as the trench he dug three days ago". The Ghost was silent at this. "I'm calling it in", Amanda said, already patching Varen in on the radio. The Titan answered immediately. "What's the situation?".

"Achernar, Warlock on my fireteam, saying he has some noise under his trench. I dropped some pegs, and it's looking like there's some kind of tunnel right below his position. Thought you'd want to know".

There was a long pause, static hanging in the air of her cockpit.

A click sounded in her ear, and another layer of background noise was layered over the first. Light breathing, the click of heels on stone.

Then Varen's voice was back. "Alright, I patched in Achernar. Could you repeat that again, for his sake and mine".

Amanda did, this time rattling off the specifics of the readings she had taken, allowing Varen and Achernar's Ghosts to process the information and come to their own conclusions.

When she finished, there was another silence. Achernar broke it.

"Varen, if you want, I can blow it open and check it out. I've got a few det-packs. More than enough to get in there if its only a few meters down".

"Just four meters. One charge would do it easy", Amanda added.

Varen's link went dead for a few seconds, mulling the idea over in his head. Finally he spoke. "Do it. You've got an entrenching tool? Dig a hole about two feet deep, drop the charge in there. Set it for two minutes, give yourself plenty of time to get clear".

A click of static was the only affirmation Achernar gave before killing the comm link and going to work.

There was only a moment's pause, however, as instantly her comms lit back up. It was Varen again, this time on the squad-wide channel.

"Listen up. Achernar reported in some noise under his section. That's section seven. Amanda's in the air right now, she ran a scan. Looks like there's a tunnel running underneath the trench, at least a part of it. Could be active. We're gonna crack section seven and see what's down there. That means everyone on alert. Dresden, I'm pulling you from thirteen and adding you to Holborn and Lyra on gate watch. That door so much as creaks, I hear about it. Understood?".

Nineteen yes sirs were his reply, four muffled by flight masks and the dull roar of engines at the periphery of hearing.

Anxious minutes passed as Amanda flew the same patrol pattern she'd flown for days on end. Achernar had yet to say anything. Finally, while flying over the trench, she witnessed an eye-biting bloom of explosion, tiny bits of rock spraying the surrounding area. Achernar was crouched thirty meters away, a boulder between him and the detonation. Already he was picking himself up, heading towards the crater with long, loping strides.

"Charge went off, Varen. Amanda was right, there's a tunnel down there. Dark, too".

"Alright, listen up", came Varen's gravelly voice over the squad-wide. "Sections five, six, and eight, head over to seven. The four of you get down in that tunnel, check it out. If you encounter resistance, do not engage, just pull back out to the surface. Everyone else, hold position. And Achernar, patch your HUD cam through to the squad".

Another chorus of yes sirs. Amanda turned over control of her ship to the Ghost, pulling up the squad video feed on her aft viewscreen. She flicked her eyes away from her console to watch the tunnel from Achernar's eyes.

Achernar kept his gun trained on the hole. The darkness yawned beneath him, seeming to stretch away into the planetoid's core. There was something intangibly off about the tunnel, something he couldn't quite place...

He tore his eyes from it, hearing the dim scuff of boots. Achernar hadn't noticed the approaching Guardians until they were nearly on him. The software in his helmet did its best to magnify the sounds outside, but the near-vacuum meant that everything sounded mute and distant.

The four of them took up positions around the hole, weapons levelled on the gaping tunnel entrance. Flashlights clicked on, casting harsh illumination into the dark below.

The walls of the passageway were bored from the bare rock, porous grey stone carved without artisanship. That said, it was perfectly straight, hugging the trench. Not natural. Chips of stone scattered the floor, already swathed in thick dust. It had been tunneled recently.

"I'll take point", Achernar offered, shouldering his rifle and crouching down on the crater slope, sliding down the loose rock and shale into the cavern.

There was noise at his back. The other Guardians falling in behind him.

At the bottom he sprang to his feet, sweeping his rifle left and right. The flashlight, fixed to the gun's barrel, shone over the lightless passage.

Nothing.

No, not quite nothing. Something. Pulling and pushing at the edges of his mind, like surf at sand, tugging at his consciousness. Whispers just beyond his hearing. Something.

He looked over his shoulder at the other Guardians, holding up two fingers and gesturing for them to go left. Achernar and the rear Guardian would go right.

They crept across the rough-hewn rock, rapidly losing the visibility provided by the opening they had entered through. Only meters from the breach, the light was gone.

"You feel that?", asked the Guardian behind him. He was a Hunter, emerald-cloaked, his visor burnished orange. Every few seconds he would turn around, pointing his gun down the empty tunnel. The other pair had all but disappeared.

Achernar nodded, his own restless breath dominating his hearing. The walls pressed tight around him, forcing the Awoken to stoop lest his head brush the ceiling. The tunnel could barely fit two men side by side.

"Yes. They were here, I think. Recently. If not now", Achernar replied.

A few more claustrophobic meters, and then there was a scratching noise. It became a low rumble, felt as much as heard. Sounded almost like frying bacon.

"Careful, Guardian", his Ghost warned drabbly.

Then the side of the tunnel behind him burst open in a shower of rock, and his helmet cam died in an inferno of static and white noise.

A bit long, but I hope you liked it. Lot of work went into making this readable, so hopefully you guys thought it was readable. Remember to forget to follow!