Using the same ramp that had taken them to the church plaza, Leela and Tycho continued their descent. The ramp too had been damaged by the quakes, but it remained functional, with only the occasional ravine requiring traversal beyond simple walking.

It was after the second such ravines that Tycho perked up, looking all around them and playing its searchlight up and down the tunnel. "A response!" The Ghost called out.

Leela stopped on her step and turned back towards Tycho. "A response? To what? From where?"

"Below us," Tycho replied, "There's a functional machine below us."

"How far? What is it doing? Can you interface with it from here?" Leela asked, barraging with questions.

"Far, don't know and no." Tycho replied. "All the ice and the twists and turns makes it difficult to gauge precisely, but it's a long way down. It's functional, but I can't tell what its function is. And whatever the machine is, it has no method of remote operation."

"So someone's down there operating it." Leela said excitedly.

"That would be one interpretation." Tycho said and turned to her.

"Oh, don't be so cynical." Leela teased and shooed him before turning back towards the ramp. It was harder than their first descent, because of the effects of the quake, but she could manage.

An hour later they reached an end to the tunnel; an abyss fell away before them, a hole in the ice and rock easily a hundred metres across, and deep enough that Tycho's searchlight showed only darkness. Leela was tempted to climb down, but even if she had had enough rope, she could not be sure which chunks of ice had been damaged by the quake and would fall under her weight. So they backtracked and went down the first side-tunnel they could find, descending in widening loops down the narrow tunnel.

"Talk to me," Leela said after a period of silence, "What else did the symbols in the church say?"

Tycho was silent for a moment. "Some of the symbols were damaged, so parts were blank or garbled, but for the most part the translator worked wonderfully."

The eerie machine-like tone from earlier returned as Tycho read out the translation.

"In Its Blind Grace We toiled and worked to make a World with Which to Venerate and Worship Our Creator, the one they call –"

Whatever the beings had called the Traveller came out as a garbled mess that Leela could barely comprehend.

"That symbol especially caused problems wherever it popped up," Tycho explained, "Either the translator couldn't understand it or the carver made a continual mistake."

Tycho returned to the reading. "In Its Presence, the Cold – Void Without is kept at bay, and Our – continue in Its Worship. One – when Our God returns to the Waking World, we Sikhaan – to Its Embrace, to Reside –."

"That's it, the rest repeats those segments." Tycho said.

"'When our god returns to the waking world'," Leela repeated, catching onto an interesting segment, "Maybe that's why the Traveller touched down here, of all places. It was running from the Darkness and needed a place to hide before continuing on to the planets of Sol."

Tycho did not reply, instead projecting an image onto the ice-wall. It was a sphere, with a series of waves or crescents emanating from its edge. "That is the symbol they used for the Traveller's name."

Leela stopped dead in the tunnel, the symbol projected onto the wall demanding her full attention. She knew it. She had recognised it at the time, but could not say why or from where or even what it meant, but she knew it. She had known it all her life, she realised with a sinking feeling. She felt the small hairs on her arms rise and a tingle in the small of her back. The darkness in the tunnel pressed down on her. It took her a long moment to realise that Tycho had stopped the projection.

"It resembles the mosaic in the transit hall." Leela replied, trying to regain her calm, then remembered the pictures she had taken in the dwelling. She was drawing the camera from its holster when she stepped over a large boulder in the hall and put her foot in something that could not support her weight.

"What's wrong?" Tycho asked, the concern clear in the Ghost's tone.

Leela had managed to keep her balance and retrieve her foot without tumbling into whatever hole she had just stepped in. "I stepped through something, we might not be able to proceed down this tunnel."

Tycho floated past the ice-boulder to see what Leela's foot had found beyond, and stopped dead with surprise. "Leela, you might want to see this."

Past the ice-boulder was a corpse, or a skeleton to be precise. Leela's foot had cracked through what passed for its rib-cage, but the elongated skull and mess of limbs looked to be intact. The boulder had missed the body entirely, but the ice was slowly claiming both boulder and skeleton.

Leela, having carefully passed the boulder, sat with her back to the ice-wall, staring at the body in silence. Tycho had run some scans of his own accord, but had not announced what he had found. Despite the disorderly state of the body, in her mind's eye Leela was imagining scores of similar bodies mingling in the transit hall or sitting in seats around the church from earlier. In the City, she had always been told she had an active imagination, and now she found some humour in how, even in her imagination, the creatures were now walking skeletons. Whatever had killed this one, the ice and cold had not preserved it.

"I wonder how long it's been here, alone like this." Leela said quietly.

"Do you want an answer to that?" Tycho asked, glancing in her direction while its scanner played over the body.

"You know me, Tycho," Leela said, her smirk hidden under her helmet, "I'm sure the City would love a time of day and cause of death, but I don't need the fine details."

"Well," replied Tycho and finished the scan, "This one's been dead for far longer than humanity's been aware of the Traveller. Like, millenia before Earth even called it 'Moon X'."

"So maybe the Traveller was here for a long time. Maybe the Traveller leaving is why this place is so frozen over." Leela said and skidded over to the corpse to get a closer look.

The skull was elongated with four sockets arranged in pairs over a fist-sized hole that Leela presumed to be the mouth. In the depictions these 'Sikhaan' had made of themselves, they had had a trunk. The spine looked much like a humans, except for thick, bony plates that would have run along the creature's back. The rib cage was long and narrow, even accounting for Leela's foot. Like eyes, the creature had four arms arranged in pairs down its flanks, the upper set terminating in claws while the lower simply ended with something like a little cup on the end. The legs were short with hoof-like feet, and Leela could not help but think of their form as ungainly.

"I would hope this is an unknown side-passage to these people." Tycho said after a period of silence.

Leela rose on her feet and looked away from the corpse. "Why do you say that?"

Tycho flicked his shell in the direction of the corpse. "Whoever this was and whatever killed them, they have been left alone long enough for them to rot away completely. Might not bode well for the rest of their civilization."

"I see what you mean." Leela said and looked down at the abandoned skeleton. "Let's take some photos and mark its location, then move on."

After some 15 minutes, the tunnel widened and merged into a cylindrical chamber, one that extended above and below further than Tycho's searchlight could illuminate. The chamber had numerous other exits, with every indication that the multitude continued into the darkness. In the centre was a metal spiral staircase, anchored to the wall with solid beams of metal. The quake seemed not to have touched this chamber, and when Leela put her weight on the staircase, it did not even creak.

"This shaft is incredibly deep." Tycho said while Leela planted the beacon.

"Could it be an emergency escape, or some maintenance shaft?" Leela ventured and stood up, prodding the beacon with her foot to see if it was secure.

Tycho started a scan, but soon gave up. "I can't reach the top nor the bottom from here."

Leela raised an eyebrow. "That's unusual, last I kept track you could reach for miles."

Tycho shook his shell as if shaking a head. "I can sense the machine far below, but I can't sense anything else down there. If I didn't know better, I would think it was floating in space."

"Could it be?," Leela asked and walked to the staircase, "Floating in space, I mean."

"Then the planetoid is hollow, and our orbit scans indicated nothing of the sort."

"Let's go down and see for ourselves, then." Leela said and put a foot on the staircase. "Are the beacons working?"

Tycho sent a beam of light into the beacon Leela had planted at the end of the tunnel. A series of lamps lit up on the beacon's chassis. "Connection all the way to the surface. It's not as strong as I would like, but it's there."

Leela and Tycho descended, walking down the staircase that neither creaked nor shook under their weight, despite the quakes that had devastated the caverns above. After ten massive flights they looked through a large doorway and saw a familiar-looking tunnel. Entering, Tycho found the signal of the beacon they had planted leagues above them, and here the quakes had not damaged the tunnel as extensively. Here and there they saw cracks, or enormous ice-boulders that had broken away from the ceiling, but they could follow the ramp down into the abyss.

After an hour on the ramp, it flattened out. A large elevator-platform was visible through the crust of ice, and the doorway before them was twice as tall and wide as any they had seen before that point. Beyond was a chamber that dwarfed the church-plaza they had found earlier; an enormous cavern that stretched far beyond their searchlight's range. Here the ice had been kept at bay; it crept from the entranceway in tendrils, but never ventured more than a few metres. The same veined marble that they had seen in the church-plaza was everywhere here, in flagstones and buildings in the distance.

Leela found herself breathing as quietly as she could, as if the very air of the space was inviolate. The quakes, however, had not given as much care. Ravines had opened in the marble flooring or in the ceiling, and some of the buildings ahead had collapsed. There was a central pit in the plaza, but Leela suspected it had not been created by the quake. The cavern was so enormous that simply walking from the mouth of the ramp-tunnel to the nearest structure within took them a quarter of an hour. They saw no living beings anywhere in the space, but they had clearly been here once.

The first structure they reached had collapsed, but it was so old that it could have collapsed before the quake. The stones were not of the veined marble they saw on the floor, but rather simple grey stone, roughly worked. Once, it had possessed a domed roof of some sort, supported by four pillars. Its roof had collapsed inward, smashing another ice-sphere; the chunks of it were still on the ground surrounding the structure. Its surface was covered with runes, too old and weathered for Tycho's translator. As they crossed to the other side of the structure, their suspicions about the structure's collapse were proven; underneath the rubble they saw parts of another skeleton, its quadruple arms outstretched. Of the rest, even the head, there was no sign. One of the finger-bones crumbled to dust at Leela's touch, so they left it where it was found.

The structure was one of many circling the central pit, and soon they arrived at the lip of the pit. Around its edge were decorated stones, each with a symbol carved on its surface. Leela recognised the symbol immediately; it was the symbol the beings had used for the Traveller. Leela had felt uneasy about it earlier, but now she felt fear. Her breath began to fog up the interior of the helmet and she could hear her heart beating, beating faster. She couldn't say why she recognised it, or where from. She was sure she had not seen it before landing on this planetoid, but her mind refused to elaborate.

Tycho stopped dead in the air. "There it is again." The Ghost said.

"What, what is again?" Leela said and took a step away from the pit, a hand dropping to the firearm on her waist.

Tycho indicated the direction of the pit. "Movement, something vast below."

Tycho had barely finished talking before a shiver passed through the rock around them. The pit lit up from below and a pillar of light shot up from the pit into a similar opening in the roof above. Leela shouted in surprise and jumped back.

"What is that?" She shouted. She had one hand on the grip of her pistol, but she had no idea what she could do with it.

"Whatever it is," Tycho replied, "It is neither Light, nor Dark. I can't find any trace of either."

The blast of light died away as quickly as it had come, and was replaced by a sound from the pit, or rather the deep abyss below.

A roar came thundering up from that abyss, a roar that nearly had Leela turning and fleeing. It triggered instincts in her that primeval man would have related to lions, or other predators that roamed the savannahs from the birth of their race. Only this was older, far older. She barely registered that the roar had faded away. Somehow it still rang in her ears. She turned to Tycho for support, for anything, but her companion was frozen in mid-air, neither eye nor shell moving even an inch.

"Tycho?" Leela said, her voice barely a whisper. She reached out and touched Tycho's shell, and the Ghost animated again, looking down the pit and then at her.

"What happened, buddy?" She asked. She kept from looking down the pit herself. She knew it was stupid, but she did not want to see whatever was down there.

"Nothing happened," Tycho started, then seemed to shake himself, "I don't know, I can't remember."

"I think I've heard that sound before," Leela said and turned to the pit, studiously keeping her eyes on the edge, "I just don't know where."

"The machine from earlier, it's still running down there, and it's running hot." Tycho said and hovered back to her side. She felt relieved that he wasn't hovering over that pit anymore, as if a vast claw might reach up and just take him away.

"Maybe it's some kind of barrier generator, keeping whatever that is trapped?" Leela ventured, mostly to distract herself from thinking about whatever was below them.

Tycho's shell spun for a moment. "That doesn't match what I'm reading, but I can't discount it either. My scanner's acting up."

"Speaking of scanning," Leela said and knelt to the floor, "Does the edge of the pit mean anything? To me it's just the same symbol repeating, but maybe the translator could catch something."

Tycho hovered down and played the green scanner over the repeating slabs that lined the edge. Tycho worked in silence, leaving Leela alone with her thoughts in the vast space. The light and the roar had faded, but she found she could not divert her thoughts from it. She could not say they were familiar, but still she felt she knew of them. An unnerving feeling had stolen over her from the gloom, a sensation of being watched by a predator stalking her from a bush, unseen. Her back tingled and she could feel small hairs all over her body stand on end. Not for the first time since entering the planetoid she felt pressed by the darkness all around her.

A noise in front of her startled her and made her jump back.

"What's wrong?" Tycho said and turned towards her. The scan was finished.

"Nothing, the darkness just made me jumpy." She replied sheepishly and walked over. "Find anything?"

"It just repeats their name for the Traveller, like a chant." Tycho then repeated the jumble of sounds that the symbol translated to.

Leela repeated the jumble, mulling the sound over in her mouth. The sounds of it flowed strangely and she had a thought that she would never truly be able to speak it properly, if it was a word at all. "Sounds like nonsense to me. Maybe the symbols are damaged?"

Tycho turned back to the slabs. "If so, they are all damaged in the exact same fashion."

Leela looked past the slabs. "I wonder what's down the pit."

"It extends at least as far as that shaft we found earlier," Tycho replied, then added, "My scans can't find the bottom."

Figuring that there was nothing more to find by the pit, Leela turned and began to make her way around it to the other buildings in the cavern, when she heard a sound behind her. A snarl, deep and throaty, of an impossibly-large creature right behind her. For a moment she was sure it would be over there and then, taken by this creature hiding in the dark.

Then she dived forward and, flipping around in mid-air so she could land on her back, firearm ready in her hands. She landed hard on the ice but kept her aim.

But there was nothing. The cavern was as empty of life as it had been when the two of them entered.

"Tycho, did you hear–" Leela started and looked at her Ghost lying on the ground.

"Tycho!" She shouted and ran to him, scooping him up from the ground and holding him close. The shell looked to be intact, but she could see no sign of the lights that doubled as Tycho's eye. Her panic rising, she reached out with her own Light, searching for him. There was a flicker there, the smallest mote of Light. Whatever was going on, Tycho was still alive, for lack of a better word.

"Don't scare me like that." She said, so relieved she could hardly stand. But Tycho made no reply, made no motion or indication that he had even registered it. Holding him close, Leela left the pit and headed for the tunnel entrance they had come from to return to the surface, willing herself to ignore the sensation of being stalked. The walk to the wall of the cavern was long, but Leela found herself increasingly confused and anxious as she approached the vast wall. She could see where the tunnel entrance had been; the edges were lined with decorated slabs of the veined marble with symbols carved into the marble.

But the actual tunnel was nowhere to be seen. Where they had passed less than an hour ago was a smooth wall of ice, so unblemished that one could almost believe it had always been there.

Almost. Leela stood in front of the walled-up tunnel in disbelief. Had the creatures snuck behind her and walled it up? Surely that was impossible, such a construction job would have been audible throughout the cavern, which was ignoring the question of why they would even do such a thing.

"Hello?" She called out and when there was no answer, she drew her firearm and banged on the ice-wall with the butt of it. Dully she registered that the sound it produced did not indicate a hollow space beyond.

The sensations from the pit came again so strongly that Leela spun in place, driven by ancient savannah impulses, sweeping the gun in front of her with her back to the ice. She could see her breath fogging up her helmet from within and felt sweaty. But despite her anxiety, the cavern was as empty as ever. With an effort of will, Leela stashed the pistol and took deep breaths till her body was under control again.

"Please wake up, buddy," Leela whispered to Tycho's dormant shell, "This is not a place to be alone in."

She explored the ice-wall in both directions but only found more ice, with no indications of other tunnels, not even ones that had been walled up. Devoid of options and unwilling to simply wait, Leela set out for the central structures again. She gave the pit a wide berth and arrived at the first of the structures an hour later. Tycho had not made a sound and she still clutched his shell to her chest. As she walked, she reflected that Tycho and she had always been together, ever since her awakening. Logically she knew she had existed without him before her first death, but it felt strange, like a memory of a dream that made no sense. This was the first time in at least a decade that she was truly alone. With a hollow chuckle, she looked around the desolate place she had to herself. The structures were magnificent and captivating, but the pit oozed menace, in a way she found difficult to quantify.

She was no stranger to danger, having faced her share of risk and combat. Fallen pirates, Hive ambushes, the tendril-light of a Vex strike-group. She had seen them all. Once she had attempted to explore the Moon, a century or so after the Great Disaster. A Wizard and its gaggle of Thralls had cornered her in an abandoned base, and she had only narrowly escaped death then. She could still remember the Wizard's magic seeping into the buildings, the palpable sense of hate and malice. This felt different, more pure. More savage.

The plaza held two more structures like the shrine they had found earlier. Both were in disrepair, but neither had collapsed like the first one, though she found no corpses in these structures. Their ice-spheres were intact, but after her experience with the one in the church, she kept her hands well away.

The structure beyond the shrines was different from any she had seen since arriving on the planetoid. One aspect was its scale; it could rival any structure she had seen on Earth, even the Tower of the Last City. Spires stretched towards the cavern ceiling and enormous ports and windows dotted its surface following a pattern or logic that Leela could not discern. The symbols that they had found all over the planetoid had been carved onto the surface of the palace as well, though with Tycho out cold, Leela had no way to translate them. The palace had been constructed of the same veined marble as the rest of the structures, with occasional elements constructed of some matt-black stone. An enormous gateway was open into the darkened interior, the road to it lined with an elaborate mosaic of inlaid glass. Leela recognised the scenes from the transit hall they had found when they arrived, the scenes of the Traveller's Light lifting these beings up from more primitive creatures. Here, there were other scenes as well. Another symbol was connected to the Traveller by a line, and from the symbol came rays that the beings worshipped.

Had the residents of the planetoid found a way to tap the Traveller's light and use it elsewhere, and so when the Traveller left, they were left without their source of power? Leela knew she could only speculate, but she thought about the machine that Tycho had mentioned, that perhaps that was it, the Light-tap that they had used. It could also explain why they could find no trace of Light nor Dark here despite the Traveller's stay.

"I'm sorry little buddy," Leela whispered and held Tycho close, "But I think we have to go deeper."

She wondered about the animal noises she had heard, the roars and the lights, but there was nothing to find on the plaza before the palace that spoke of any extraordinary creatures beyond the Traveller. Maybe the Hive had found this planetoid before them, and the remains of their expedition were trapped deep below them.

Leela stepped over the threshold into the palace and looked up to the ceiling far above her. The entrance was an enormous space, large enough to contain the church they had found earlier. Pillars were decorated with the symbols of their kind, with the only symbol Leela recognised being their discomforting symbol for the Traveller. The halls were empty, vast cavernous spaces that only amplified Leela's growing unease. At times she felt utterly alone, at other times she would swear something was stalking her. One time she passed a gateway and glanced through to see an endless procession of pillars, the hall itself stretching into darkness. She blinked, and in the dark spaces between the pillars she saw eyes. Of all shapes and sizes, a mad multitude that glared back at her. She stumbled backwards, but as she looked again, there was only gloom in the hall. Gasping for breath, she stumbled against a pillar and slid to the ground, hugging Tycho's shell to her chest and begging him to wake up. After what felt like hours, she stood up and returned to her wandering.

Eventually she found a gate that stood out from the others, as it was ringed with the Traveller-slabs they had found surrounding the pit. Within was something like an audience chamber; seats lined the walls and pillars, and a throne stood on a raised platform before a stairway that descended down into a space beneath the room. On the throne, Leela could see a skeleton like the ones they had found in the tunnel and the ruined shrine. This one was the most intact, being untouched both by falling rocks and careless steps. The hall seemed empty besides the lone skeleton, so Leela approached, one hand on the grip of her pistol, the other clutching Tycho's shell. The skeleton lay slumped in the throne, a metal rod or staff laid across the armrests of the throne. The staff was topped with a sphere of veined marble, polished to a mirror-sheen and carved with their Traveller-symbol.

Not for the first time, Leela wondered what calamity had befallen these beings to leave them in these situations. The tunnel she could understand; a collapse while alone, no one to find them. The shrine was a little weirder; if there had been a collapse of a religious structure, surely it would at least have been excavated and the body removed. But this was the strangest of all; a being clearly in a position of importance, left to die and rot on a throne in the middle of a grand palace, equally as abandoned. With those thoughts, she turned and looked at the stairway. It was centrally placed where all in the hall could see it. The Traveller-symbol had been carved on the first step before it began its journey into the darkness below. Perhaps they had lined the trail to the Traveller's resting place with these symbols, like a path of pilgrimage to where they had met their god.

Leela found their word for the Traveller again. It was a strange jumble of sounds, a combination that felt familiar, yet wrong on her tongue.

"W'rkncacnter." She mumbled. The Traveller. The Great Machine. She mused that it was yet another name for the enigmatic entity, but it felt different from the others.

The feeling of unease, of pursuit, passed over Leela again. It stemmed from the darkened stairway, the gloom oozing out of the hole in the floor like a palpable force. And it was warm, warm enough that she could feel the change through her suit.

"I know I should try and get back to the surface," Leela said, both to herself and to the dormant Tycho, "But I want to know."

With those words, she descended from the throne's platform onto the stairs and into the void below.