The tunnel was much shorter than the one they had taken to the transit hall; after around a hundred meters, the tunnel grew out into a long cavern with entrances carved into the walls in tiers, along with ramps and walkways so one could access the dwellings beyond the entrances. While the encroaching ice had narrowed the entrances, they were still not covered. Leela and Tycho peered into one of the first they encountered, and saw what they recognised as a living space; a bed and a table, as well as numerous tools and items of alien design. All were carefully stored away on racks or in workspaces, covered in ice and frost. Whatever covering the bed had once had was gone, leaving time-blackened wood underneath the ice. Whatever had happened, the occupant had left in a hurry. They examined a few more dwellings along the wall of the tunnel, but found much the same. Tidy spaces abandoned to the ice.
"Maybe they lost the ability to keep the ice away from their near-surface dwellings," Tycho ventured after their third investigation, "And retreated further below-ground."
"Wouldn't it be colder down below?" Leela replied and picked up a hammer-like item that had not yet been fully encased. She had barely lifted it off the ground before the wood turned to dust. The hammerhead cracked as it landed on the ice.
"It would be more insulated from the elements, and from space." Tycho said.
Here and there among the ice-covered dwellings they found covered buildings set into large alcoves. Large bowls sat on stone platforms connected to a centrally-placed furnace of some description. A stack of rotted firewood sat forgotten in a corner. Metal hatches in the floor, rusted through centuries ago, gave way beneath Leela's boot to reveal storage compartments. Encased in yet-more ice they saw plants and fruits and meats of unknown kinds on shelves. Leela wondered at the sheer scale of the abandonement of these people. Their retreat from the surface must have been urgent indeed for them to abandon entire storehouses of food and wood, not to mention racks and racks of tools in their homes.
After a couple miles of tunnel they encountered a ramp built into the floor, heading down into the abyss below them. With no lights it was utterly black, and even with Tycho's searchlight they could not see when it ended. For a moment Leela felt a wind blowing from the tunnel, rattling the tools hanging from her belt.
Tycho spun in place, pointing his searchlight back up the tunnel they had come. "There, there it was again!"
"What, what was again?" Leela said and peered down the tunnel.
"The noise from earlier, I heard it."
Leela glanced at her Ghost. Maybe being so far from the Traveller really was affecting him, because she was sure she had not heard anything. "What did it sound like, then?"
Tycho was silent for a long moment before replying. Something about his tone quashed Leela's doubts. "A shuffling, like some huge beast, almost too big for this tunnel, and a sniffing. It can't have been too far away."
Leela jammed a beacon in the ice and put a foot on the stairway that had been built in the side of the ramp. "If it's too big for the tunnel, it won't fit the stairway. Let's hurry up before it catches us, then."
It took a moment before Tycho joined her on the way down.
Leela was grateful for the handholds that had been built alongside the stairway, for it was fairly steep. The shuffling noise that Tycho had heard had not been heard again since they left the tunnel, but by now they had walked so far down the stairs that the faint light from the tunnel was only visible as a pinprick above them. Tycho's searchlight led the way in front of them, warning them of the cracks in the ice or when it had covered the steps too smoothly for there to be any grip. For those, Leela had to use her rope and ice-pick as an impromptu grappling hook and lower herself down until she had footing again. They still had not seen any signs of life, nor any corpses. The ruins had been completely abandoned.
After about an hour of descending the ramp levelled out onto another tunnel, this wider and taller than the habitation level above them. Across the tunnel they could see the ramp continuing into the darkness below.
"Let's check this level out," Leela said and groaned, "My legs can't take another minute of those stairs."
Tycho made no complaint, staring off to the left and down the tunnel.
"What is it?" Leela said, sensing her Ghost's preoccupation.
Tycho scanned a moment longer before replying. "I can't shake those sounds. It's like I'm still hearing them, but they're not coming from where we were."
Leela glanced at the darkness, seeing nothing of note. "Maybe this level is still inhabited," She said and turned back to Tycho. "Is that device ready?"
Tycho turned to her, momentarily confused. "Huh? Oh, yes. It's ready for use. Mind, we haven't really tested it yet."
"Scared?" Leela said with a chuckle.
Tycho scoffed. "Hardly, we just can't be sure it'll work. Mysterious Golden Age tech has a spotty record."
"What's the worst that could happen," Leela said and, jamming another beacon into the icy floor, began walking towards the wider end of the tunnel they had found, "It doesn't work or it translates what we said as an insult."
Tycho followed her but did not reply. The tunnel widened even further after a few minutes of walking, opening into an enormous cavern. As vast as the transit hall they had found earlier, this space was more spherical and not as affected by the ice as the rest of the tunnel. Evidently it had been carved out of rock, the marks of their tools and machines still evident on the ceiling. The floor had been smoothed out, and increasingly decorated as they neared the center of the space. Leela recognised some of the scenes they had seen in the hall, but the buildings in the cavern took her attention. Buildings lined the walls, climbing the rock-face even until it began to slope towards the ceiling. They could see no lights or fires or any signs of habitation in them.
In the centre of the space was another building, far larger than any they had seen so far. It was elliptical, with a curved roof. For a moment, it looked to Leela as if an egg had been cut in half and laid on its side. Towers jutted from the roof, their origin out of sight from the ground. Panes of coloured glass or ice had once depicted scenes, but now most were shattered. Of those intact, Leela only recognised one; a pale sphere illuminating the world. The entrance was in their direction, dark and ominous, a wide threshold with no door. A feeling of dread came over Leela, sliding over her like treacle. The darkness seemed to press down on her and for a moment she felt the chill of the icy cavern right through her suit.
Tycho broke her out of it. Her Ghost slid silently in front of her and shone the searchlight into the entrance, revealing a mundane corridor scarred by time and neglect. Pushing the gloom from her mind, Leela followed Tycho into the structure. The interior had largely been saved from the ravages of the ice, constructed of a marble-like stone with black veins that grew thicker and more numerous as they neared the centre. Ice glinted in Tycho's searchlight through an elliptical hole in the ceiling, reflecting down upon an object in the centre of the space.
Tycho slid forward through the air and hovered in front of the sphere. It seemed not to have been cut from marble like the rest of the structure, and was instead shaped from ice, with not a blemish, crack or uneveness to be seen with Leela's naked eye. The spherical object hovered above the ground by a few metres through no visible means, the floor underneath it the same marble as the rest, shot through with the black veins.
"Must be a symbol for the Traveller," Tycho said as he floated around it, scanning it from several angles, "Though I don't sense any machinery or Light."
Leela looked around the space, at the openness of it, the arrays of seats, the aisle. It reminded her of the old churches and temples she had seen while exploring Earth.
"Does the Traveller usually leave something behind?" Leela said and turned back to Tycho. An unease had fallen over her again, stemming from the black doorway behind them. She ignored it as best she could.
"On every planet we know it visited before Earth, yes." Tycho said and finished a scan.
"It must have landed somewhere else then, and the creatures built this temple here in its honour." Leela replied, one hand on the grip of her pistol, wishing she had done more training with it before leaving Earth.
"I would assume it landed up on the surface, but the ship's scans didn't show anything unusual." Tycho said, then turned towards one of the far walls. "What are those symbols on the wall?"
Leela told herself to calm down and followed his gaze. A series of symbols had been carved into the wall then picked out with some red dye. They ran along the entire length of the wall, in half a dozen lines. Here and there they had been worn away by age or by the elements, but much of it remained. She realised that she was uneasy; the sensation had come over her since entering the temple-structure, and looking at the symbols carved on the wall accentuated it. She would be hard-pressed to put a finger on why she felt that way, but something about the symbols on the wall pressed it down on her.
"Let's have a closer look." Tycho said and left the ice-sphere behind. Each symbol in the series was the size of her palm, if not bigger, and varied wildly in complexity. One of the few symbols she recognised as repeating was a sphere with something like waves coming off of it. It came up multiple times in each line.
Tycho hovered close and initiated a scan, a green beam that traced the contours of each individual symbol, sometimes passing over one several times before moving on.
"Is it working?" Leela asked after a few moments of silence, her growing unease smothered by a spike of curiosity.
Tycho glanced at her, the green beam still playing over the symbols. It had passed over perhaps a tenth of the length of the script. "The text must be damaged, because the translator's having a hard time. But it has cleared some of it."
Leela grinned and looked at the mass of mysterious symbols, not that they would be mysterious for much longer. "What a marvel, I'm so glad you found it."
"We found it, Leela. Together." Tycho said and turned back to the wall. He began speaking again, his usual tone replaced by something more machine-like.
"We Came– It when We were but Larvae, Unfit to– dust. In Its– were Made into Us." The machine-tone faded again.
"That's all I have so far." Tycho said. He sounded almost tired.
Leela nodded. "The first part, does it say they came to the Traveller?"
"It sounds like it, but we don't have the full text yet," Tycho said, "But then, humanity came to the Traveller too. You found it on Mars."
"I suppose that's true." Leela conceded.
"I'll run the whole thing through the translator, then when we have the full text we'll go through it." Tycho said.
Leela looked at the sphere again. Why had the Traveller come to this icy hellhole of all places? It was more an engorged comet than a planet, even smaller than Pluto and even more remote from the Sun. It hadn't even featured on the few pre-Collapse star-charts that she could find, and she only learned of its existence through a jury-rigged combination of Fallen and Golden Age-tech. She grinned for a moment as she remembered Tycho's nervousness around the sparking device she had cobbled together. If the Vanguard had found Leela in their hangar with their tools, she had no doubt she would have been thrown over the Wall.
Her remembrance was cut short as she noted a sparkle on the ice-sphere. It must have caught some of Tycho's light. She stepped closer and placed her gloved hand on the surface of it, and to her surprise felt heat. The sphere, despite seemingly being made of ice, was warm enough to be felt through her glove. As she retracted her hand, a glowing outline was visible on the surface where her glove had made contact. She glanced around her and saw Tycho focused on a line of symbols on the far wall. With a guilty grin, Leela turned back to the sphere and carefully removed her glove. The cold of the cavern hit her instantly and she could see the tips of her fingers reddening as blood rushed to heat them. Wasting no time, she pressed her naked hand to the icy surface and felt that heat again. It warmed her whole body in a moment, giving off a pleasant warmth that she had not felt through her suit. It was so pleasant that she momentarily closed her eyes. A pressure on her hand caused her to look again and she gasped in surprise; the ice had shifted, melting under her hand and flowing around to trap her fingers. The warmth that she had found so pleasant was now gone, replaced with a biting cold. Dropping the glove, she put her gloved hand to the ice and pulled, trying to free her hand. As she applied her strength, the ice shattered and threw her to the ground. Leela cried out for Tycho, but found that she could not understand her own words. She tried again and again the sound was different, incomprehensible. She looked up at the broken sphere and found it gone, replaced by a tightly-wound band of strands. As she looked, rapt, the strands began to unwind, spiralling outward like a flower blooming. Dread bloomed from within her chest, a terrible fear of what could loom within those strands. She reached out, in a wan hope, to stop the unravelling, but as she moved her hands, the air thickened around them, moving like treacle around her limbs. She swept her hand to escape the thick substance, and saw the wall to her right fall away, as if blown away by powerful winds.
She cried out for Tycho, for she could not see her Ghost along the broken stretch of wall. Her gaze was drawn back to the sphere of unravelling strands, for a shaft of light had penetrated where the strands were most unravelled, and Leela knew that whatever was within that sphere was close to escape. She opened her mouth to scream and–
A cry of pain rang out.
"Ow." Leela cursed and looked up. Tycho was back, hovering in front of her with a mote of Arc energy.
He approached to jolt her again but she raised her hands to ward it off. "Stop it, now's not the time." She cried out and pointed at the sphere. But when she looked, she simply saw the ice. There were no strands, no light. Only the faint reflections of Tycho's searchlight.
"Are you okay?," Tycho asked, dispelling the Arc mote, "What happened to your hand?"
She rose to her feet and looked at the sphere, confused. "That's what I was gonna ask. Why is the ice back?"
Tycho looked between her and the ice-sphere. "Back? It's been here the whole time, Leela. I was looking at the glyphs on the wall when I heard you screaming."
She remembered that, shouting words she had not understood. "What was I screaming?" She asked, not looking away from the sphere. She dared not touch it again. A stabbing pain in her hand reminded her to put her glove back on; the skin of her hand was blue and red, and when the inner lining of the glove touched her skin she had to bite back a cry of pain.
"Here, let me heal that." Tycho said and infused her with Light, restoring her hand. She could move it again, and the pain began to fade quickly.
"I didn't understand your shouting," Tycho said, then added, "and I didn't think to apply the translator."
Leela grunted and made a fist with her hand. Maybe it didn't matter, maybe she had just been so surprised and scared that she hadn't used words. "Tycho, could you scan the sphere again?"
Her Ghost did as asked, Leela grimacing every time the light of the beam was reflected on the surface. "Nothing, just like last time. It's water ice, no residual Light or Darkness. Just ice." Tycho said and turned towards her. "What happened?"
Leela looked down at her hand. "I touched the sphere and it felt warm, so I tried taking off my glove–"
"You did what!?" Tycho exclaimed, but Leela kept going.
"- And when I touched it, the heat was enough to ward off the cold. In fact, my whole body felt warm. But then the ice melted and trapped me. I couldn't get away, but then the sphere broke and there was something inside and–"
Tycho interrupted her again. "Inside? Leela, the sphere is empty, it's not even hollow."
"I know what I saw." Leela replied with a glare.
"Did you find anything more in the texts?" She said, trying to change the subject.
Tycho looked at her for a moment longer then turned back to the wall. "I'm almost done, just a little longer."
"I'll go outside then, call me when you've finished." Leela said and turned for the exit. Again she felt that pulse of dread, but told herself to ignore it. Out of Tycho's searchlight, the cavern was dark. Here and there the ice reflected the light playing inside the church, but beyond that there were no lights in the deep. Despite her experience, she wanted to be alone for a moment, so Leela reached for the flashlight in her belt and headed for the wall. Buildings lined the sides of the cavern, all angled towards the structure in the centre. As she walked, she tried to imagine this scene before it had all been abandoned. The creatures were a blurry shape in her imagination, fed only by the stylised images they had seen in the transit hall. In her imagination, this space was brightly lit, the uplifted creatures milling about till the peal of a bell draws their attention to the central structure. The rows of seats fill out one by one until the space is packed, the attention of the crowd focused on the icy sphere, the surface cracking and melting away to reveal a tightly-wound band of strands.
Leela buttons down on her thoughts, bringing them back to the present. Again the darkness around her pushes down and a chill settles on her skin. On an impulse she flexes her hand, but the pain is gone now. Being a Lightbearer definitely had its perks. Her flashlight reached a curtain hanging from the door ahead of her. She pushed on it, but the icy cold of the cavern had made the cloth as rigid as rock. Glancing around her, Leela raised a boot and kicked. It only takes a few attempts before something snaps, dropping the rigid cloth to the floor in a clatter. She can hear it echoing around the space, and a moment later her comms-unit chatters.
"What was that noise? Leela, are you alright?" Tycho's voice.
"I'm just fine, Tycho, I just forced a door. I'll contact you if I find anything interesting." She replied and played her flashlight over the interior of the building. The first room looked like a workspace; a wide table stood by a far wall, tools arranged neatly in racks on the wall. On another wall was a representation of the Traveller much like the one they had seen in the transit hall earlier. Leela took a picture with the camera she kept on herself, then continued further inside. Another room held a metal pod, shaped like an egg split down the middle. Clearly the upper part had once been hinged so it could open, but the relentless cold and ice had devastated the hinge, and the segment lay rusted on the floor. The final room was the most interesting; the rock used for the walls was black, rather than the off-white of the rest of the structure. A raised platform of stone, presumably an altar or shrine, stood in the centre of the room, holding a sphere of veined marble. Narrow items stood on either side, bereft of purpose and meaning by eons of time, but the sphere was clearly# reminiscient of the sphere in the church outside. As she raised her flashlight, scenes played out on the walls around her, picked out with slim segments of ice or marble. Some were like the ones in the transit hall, but not all. One depicted a black void, the white sphere of the Traveller in the centre. What made Leela stop and examine it closer was that the image had something protruding from the sphere, something that looked like a three-fingered hand or claw.
Had the Hive found this planetoid? Was that why the Traveller had left? Another image showed two spheres, one emitting great rays of light, the other depicted in the same veined marble as the orb in the centre. One was clearly the Traveller, but what was the other? And which was which, for the Traveller in the transit hall had also shone with light. While she could not put a finger on the why, Leela did not get the same impression from this.
She pulled out her camera to snapshot the decorations on the walls, the flash from her camera momentarily disabling her nightvision. As she moved to stash her camera away, the floor began to rumble.
She heard Tycho over the comms. "Leela, be careful, it's a–".
The audio cut out. The rumbling increased dramatically, knocking Leela to the floor and causing an ear-shattering din. Leela's helmet reduced the audio feed lest her hearing could be damaged. Ignoring the pain where she had hit the floor, Leela scrambled to the doorway of the shrine, aware of the general advice for when inside structures during earthquakes. Planetoidquakes, she thought with a brief smile, but any humour quickly dissipated, smothered by a knowledge that much of the planetoid was composed of ice, ice that could easily shatter under the duress of a quake. A ravine could open underneath her at any moment, dropping her into an abyss.
She reached up to her comms-unit. "Tycho, Tycho, come in." But she heard nothing but static.
She heard a crack behind her and turned to see the marble sphere fall from its platform and smash on the icy floor. The veined stone crumbled on impact as if it was an egg-shell, spilling something, something that shimmered, that had been hidden within the stone. Leela had little time to ponder what it could be, for another rumbling passed through the chamber. She looked around her; if the shaking got any worse, this place could well be her tomb. Better to be in the larger chamber, where Tycho might find her. She turned and sprinted through the workshop, the carefully-arrayed tools scattered onto the floor, and out through the door to the plaza.
The plaza was a mess; the quake had damaged many of the buildings positioned on the walls of the chamber, spilling their structure and their contents onto the ground. The central structure had lost one of its walls, the massive length of stone cracking in half and tumbling into a ravine that had opened in the floor. Through the fresh hole, Leela could see the icy sphere hovering in the centre, untouched.
"Tycho!," She called out, "Where are you?" She looked about the space for her Ghost, illogically afraid that his shell had been struck by some falling chunk of ice.
Tycho soared through the air till he was at her side. "I'm here, Leela, right here. Comms aren't working, they're being jammed somehow." Another crack echoed through the chamber.
"We shouldn't stay close to the cavern wall," Leela said and hurried on, "Something could fall on us."
The pair hurried to the centre of the plaza in front of the temple structure. The quakes were continuing, but by now most of the more fragile structures had already collapsed along the cavern wall, creating an unholy mess but relieving some of the din that still echoed throughout the space.
"Did the planetoid exhibit any such quakes during observation?" Leela shouted, kneeling down on the floor to avoid being knocked over by the shakes.
"No, nothing," Tycho replied, "I'll run a quick scan, see what I can–"
Tycho was interrupted by another ice-shattering rumble. Leela's audio was cut again as a ravine split open in front of them, crossing the entire width of the cavern, cutting them off from the temple structure. As Leela's audio returned, she could hear the ice creaking and shattering underneath them, and worried whether they were about to be plunged into the abyss.
Then the nature of the noise changed, until Leela could not be certain what she was hearing. It was as if the ice was screaming, roaring. The ravine was lit up from beneath by a blast of light so powerful that, for a moment, Leela could see clear through the ice that covered the cavern walls and the contours of the ravine beneath them. It was deep, far deeper than she could discern. Then there was a burst of chaotic movement, as a multitude of strands cleared the lip of the ravine and streaked towards her, the light growing stronger as whatever the strands came from was about to emerge. Leela stumbled backwards, her scream echoing around the room.
The light dimmed as quickly as it had come, and the cavern was plunged into darkness and stillness. The quakes had ceased, at least for the moment.
"Leela, are you alright?" Tycho exclaimed and hovered down to her.
Leela looked at the ravine. The strands were gone, as was the light. The cavern had turned from the remains of a cozy village into a scrapheap in a matter of minutes. She could still hear echoes of the quake, and of her scream, around the room.
She stood up on shaking legs. "I'll be fine, I just thought I heard the ice crack underneath us. The ice is far deeper here than I thought."
Tycho looked at her for a moment longer, then turned back to the ravine. "That burst of light certainly gave us a better idea of the scope of this place."
"What about the stuff that came out," Leela ventured, "The strands?"
Tycho turned back to her. "Strands? I just saw the burst of light."
"Must have been a trick of the light, then," She said and took a deep breath to calm herself, "Don't worry about it." Why did she keep seeing them when Tycho could not? Was a hallucination?
"We should return to the surface," Tycho said, "If there's another quake like that, we have no guarantee that the next ravine won't be under our feet, or that the planetoid won't crack entirely."
Leela looked around the space until her eyes fell on the new ravine. Tycho was being sensible, she knew that, but she did not want to turn back. Something was going on here, something beyond what Earth could offer. Sure it was dangerous, she wanted it to be worth the risk.
"I want to know why the Traveller came here, what it did and where it landed," Leela said and turned back to Tycho, "And we saw nothing on the surface that hinted at an answer."
"Leela, there could be another quake at any moment. It's too risky." Tycho said.
Leela put her hands on either side of Tycho's shell, as if she was cupping a face. "I don't want to turn back, not now."
Thoughts of the Traveller brought her mind back to the shrine she had found inside the now-damaged dwelling, and how the marble sphere that symbolised the Traveller had shattered on the ground, revealing something glimmering within. Her interest sparked, Leela looked around the ruined walls until she recognised a section of it.
"Where are you going?" Tycho called out and followed her, playing his searchlight over the wall.
"I saw something inside this dwelling, but the quake prevented me from looking closer," She replied and pushed a section of rubble aside, "And now I'm hoping the place hasn't collapsed entirely."
"Leela, don't, it's not safe!" Tycho exclaimed, but to deaf ears.
When the building did not immediately shift, Leela stepped tentatively inside, careful not to push on anything or to step without proper support. The workshop was a mess, much like the plaza outside. A block of rubble had fallen into the sleeping area, crushing the egg-like bed. The shrine had not survived without damage, but the centre was clear. The segments of the marble sphere lay where she had last seen them, as did the shining object. With sure steps she passed over the debris and scooped it up, keeping a tight hold on until she was out of the building and in the clear space again.
Tycho looked on, curious, as she opened her fist to examine the object. It was a clear crystal shaped somewhat like a two-sided spike. It was unclear if it had been consciously shaped as such or if natural forces had done it, for the edges were sharp and jagged. It reflected the light from Tycho's scanning-light in a curious manner.
"Whatever it is," Tycho began, "The scan can't determine it. Its structure is unlike anything in my database, and I'm not even sure my scan is actually reaching its core."
"Is it something from the Traveller?" Leela asked, turning the crystal around in her hand.
"If so, the crystal is devoid of any Light. Darkness too, for that matter. It carries no paracausal charge that I can determine."
"I wonder if other dwellings have similar crystals." Leela said and looked around the devastated chamber. If so, they had no way of finding them. It had already been wildly unsafe venturing into the damaged dwelling. Next time she tried a stunt like that, she could well be buried under a ton of ice and rubble.
"I would scan, but I can't be sure what to look for." Tycho replied and looked away from the crystal.
When Tycho was silent for a moment, Leela returned to other matters. "You were going to run a scan earlier, before that ravine opened. Finish it, and let's see what we find. Maybe it'll tell us about further quakes." She took half a step back.
Her Ghost looked at her for a moment, then turned its eye to the ground. A beam of light played out from his shell and over the cracked ice, reflecting the light in a hundred directions. Below the ice they could see the original floor of the cavern; decorated slabs of stone, interspersed with pits. That seemed unnecessarily risky to Leela, but maybe the denizens of the planetoid were more agile than humans. Their dwellings implied they were larger, maybe half again as big. She looked around the cavern again. With their dwellings in a heap of rubble now, she wouldn't be able to learn much more about them from here.
Tycho spoke up, startling Leela. "Could that be? No, surely not."
"What, what?" Leela asked. Her hand had instinctively reached for her pistol.
"I sense movement down below, far below, and it's enormous."
"How enormous?" Leela asked and looked at the ice below her feet, as if she could see it for herself.
The light stopped and Tycho gave the unmistakable impression of surprise and confusion. "Oh, it's gone."
"Gone?"
The light played over the ice again for a moment. "One moment it was there, and now there's nothing. There must be interference from some source, but I don't sense anything that should cause another quake. No tectonics, no volcanic activity. It's possible the creatures live far further down and caused the quake, but I can't sense anything from here."
"Well," Leela said and forced herself to calm down, "If you sense movement again, gimme a shout, will you?"
"Noted." Tycho said and hovered to her side.
