1.

Blink. Click. Blink. Click. Click. WRRR. Click. 

LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 Rattled against the restraints in her converted Imperial life Pod as It thundered through the thermosphere, Super rotational winds hammering at the plas-steel coffin. 

Blink. Click. Blink. Click. Click. WRRR. Click. 

Her Pict-capter swung drunkenly above her masked head, focussing and re-focussing blindly, as she kept the cap on, stopping the machine spirit from recording a grey metal blur as they plummeted. 

LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 reviewed an endless scrawl of hexadecimal code, her eyes flickering blindly, the cables where her hand should be snaking into the bowels of the pod. She set course corrections with the sensation of trailing her fingers through a cool brook, the water coalescing behind her fingers, creating runnels in the water. Outside the Pod left a single trail of ionized gasses, violet and orange. Fins of her own design opened, flared and broke, twisting the pod in a wide corkscrew. 

Blink. Click. Blink. Click. Click. WRRR. Click. Click. Clikca. Clikca. 

A spot in the code became a coin became a disc became the surface became the. 

LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 fired the VTVL, a complex mixture of stims, blood plasma and fluids flooded the remaining biological parts of her body - The air shields snapped out and the retros ignited. The Pod decelerated so quickly it seemed to stop in the air. Foam Flooded the compartment. 

The surface became the whole world, it was a crust of ancient debris over a wide glass dome, and the pod shot through it like a bolter shell through a Gretchin. 

How far the Pod lodged into the ruins, LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 was unaware. She remained alive but blacked out for a short time. 

Blink. Click. Blink. Click. Click. WRRR. Click. Click. Clikca. Clikca. Clicka. Clicka. WRRRR.

She woke, and immediately activated the bellows that removed the foam from her compartment, as she waited to be freed, she reviewed her status, the atmospheric readings, and the distance from the markers she had fired from orbit. 

She had some superficial wounds, nothing structural, and once the foam had left the wounded areas she detached the cables to the pod and attached a device that looked like a syringe covered in spark plugs and used it to suture the cuts to her body. Once done, LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 uncoupled the device, leant back, and a heavy rack of cabling detached from her spine and head. Near identical cabling eeled out of a compartment and with a dry hissing sound,  reconnected. The interior of the pod lit up, and a hot whine of plasma reactors filled the compartment. She raised both her handless arms, and thin wires dropped from the ceiling, twin powerfists with articulated fingers spidered down, and she clipped in the connecting ports. 

Blink. Click. Blink. Click. Click. WRRR. Click

The whine reached a fever pitch, and the compartment split apart like an egg, leaving a vast metal disc, covered in cabling, and a facsimile of hair and Iconography. The head lifted and dragged LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 into the heavens like a rag doll, her heavy fists inactive, her physical body redundant. 

Blink. Click. Blink. Click. Click. WRRR. Click. Click. Clikca. Clikca. Clicka. Clicka. WRRRR.

As she rose, the focus cap pulled itself off by another wire cable, and the Pict-capter snaked around madly, finally allowed to fulfil its purpose, recording every angle of the cavernous hall they found themselves in. 

Hydraulic legs lifted her head clear and LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 became fully active. Her legs stabbed into the ruins of the pod and her body swung like a corpse from a hangman's noose. 

Her servitor cherub ignited the censer, waving particles into her surrounds; it rose on a ribboned aspherical grav plate and flapped its decorative ivory wings with a lazy desultory wave. LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 activated a field and the particles twinkled and shone in the dim light, radiating and reflecting pinpricks of light on the distant walls. 

Blink. Click. Blink. Click. Click. WRRR. Click. Click. Clikca. Clikca. Clicka. Clicka. WRRRR.

LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278  orientated herself to the nearest signal beacon and set off, with a clacking, splintering of broken glass and cracked tiles beneath the clawed feet. 

Once she'd found her nearest marker, she searched for a grounded aperture, found a broken canopy and spidered inside. The configuration of her tiny body, and long legs, meant anything her head could fit through, should could slip into. 

Blink. Click. Blink. Click. Click. WRRR. Click

Her pict-capter captured everything. 

Down, down down, into the depths of the wreck. light dimmer and faded, till at that shone were her headlights and the particle beams from her cherub, blowing out in gusts, floating like smoke, around her, and mapping out with thin green spotlights, her surrounds. 

She passed as a diving bell, in dead ocean layers. plasteel and organic, rock and sediment, marble and clay brick, layer after layer, deeper and deeper. now in the ruins of a ship, now inside the carcase of a beast

Blink. Click. Blink. Click. Click. WRRR. Click

She recorded everything and fled deeper. 

She gave pause when reaching the ceiling of an unfathomable drop. Beneath her blackness stretched out in all directions, total and absolute. her light reached no depth at all. perhaps she had dug too deep, and this was the edge into the abyss. the markings on the surface belayed this, someone had bothered to gild it. they must have looked up from somewhere. she had limited grav tech, and sides, with such depth, she had no idea how far it would be. 

She hunted in the darkness, finding material enough to spin, and detach, and when done, had woven a rough, wide parachute. 

LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 leapt into the dark, and after falling for some small-time, inflated it, and floated into the abyss. The darkness followed her, as she dropped, as a spill of molten lead in a dark forge. 

Shapes suggested themselves, and in the lense of her pict-capter, the other realms of light mapped out distant shapes and colossal arches and pillars, sized perhaps for the ancient gods themselves. she fell, and eventually, the ground came slowly up at her, and she landed in a drift of dust. 

It trialled her as she left off, her legs sweeping arcs of it into the air, the untold ages of falling plaster covering the world in grey snow. Her clawed feet felt the remnants of fallen statuary, and the outlines of what could be bones. She walked for an age, in whispering silence. a wall approached, and on a million identical doors stretching out to beyond her meagre light, a single green lumen, sputtering out. She opened this one, and in it found a facsimile of a man, ancient, enormous, part mechanical. Fluid guttered through pipes to his veins, and the stretching murmur of breath moved his vat-grown muscle in a slow repeating pattern. 

He was bearded and faintly yellow, whatever fluid maintained him was lacking some vital nutrient. 

Blink. Click. Blink. Click. Click. WRRR. Click

LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 captured his bearded face. 

She reached out an articulated and deceptively powerful hand, fluttering her fingers over his sleeping, heavily ridged features. his eyes blinked open, wide and innocent, a babes round eyes in a ragged old man face. 

He tried to stand, and she played a tendrilled hand over verdigris crusted orange, green and red controls. A light flickered, and his restraints ground open with a stop motion crunching stutter. 

His eyes rolled back into his skull and the lights flickered and tubes and sockets near fused to him withdrew with a wet sick sound. He staggered for a moment and fell forward from his cradle, going to one knee. his eyes rolled and flickered, and a roll of long-dead commands echoed through his head and played in tiny scripture along his eyes. 

LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 watched all this happen, and recorded it all - the lens capturing every digit as it raced in blue light across his overly large eyeballs. 

He shook as the commands resolved, and the final instructions from the long-forgotten systems stiffened his sinews and made the shambling ancient thing vigorous and purposeful. LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 danced aside, her body swaying as he sprang up and bolted through the open oculus. 

The clouds of dust he left behind reflected pinpricks of light in the infinite tomb. She could just make out his movements in the distance, a simian lope, nearly on all fours. His footsteps were muffled by the dust and vast dimensions of the dark space around them. Yet, as she' had descended, and the dead halls led to no sound, a muffled cotton feeling had enveloped her, like being smothered by a pillow, and she now strained to hear each footfall, thirsty for any respite from the click and whirr of her lens, and the shallow beats of what passed for a heart. 

In the distance, he banged open an unseen door, and a bright tunnel of grey-green light stabbed into the void. She kept on, focussed on the door, but now she had a small sense of the floor, the room shrank not at all. The darkness seemed to stretch even higher and wider, and she fancied that rather than approaching an exit, this was the very world she stood in, and she was about to enter somewhere else. 

Approaching the portal, it was a fairly standard looking hatchway, with a cantilevered mechanism that has allowed him to pass through. She did as well and came to a much Lesser hall. He waited, supine, his head and arms beneath two rails, suspended by unseen methods, and leading on a winding rising track into further heights of darkness. ruined mechanisms, more drifts of dust, and yellowing bones littered the floor. She could discern faint outlines of tiles near her clawed feet, with distinct patterns, unfamiliar in design, but yet familiar to her eye, and therefore perhaps of her kind. 

He mewled. A tongueless sound. And looked at her with his wide, infant eyes. She detected hunger. the nutrients had kept this thing in good, if yellow shape, but now they were removed, it needed feeding. She went to hunt. 

2.

She ambled through grey snow of falling dust and flakes of plaster, down boulevards and avenues of unfeasible shadowed size. She deftly avoided gaps in the firmament, cracks the size of baneblades, filled with chalkboard darkness. 

Halls stretched off at every angle, another hall, further depths, more open portals, all standing, the surface above, far out of sight. a barely detectable background susurrus, the only sound, the soft fall of ancient dust on ancient ruin. 

Blink. Click. Blink. Click. Click. WRRR. Click

Her lens swung again, breaking the peace. It focussed on the lip of a runneled pillar. The start of a decoration, with runneled pillars behind it if greater height, and ones behind that of even greater, till the gloom swallowed it all up. On the top lip of each pillar, vaguely humanoid decorations stood in frozen affects, a hand her entreating, an arm across the eyes showing grief. Or hiding from a blow. The figures were soft at the edges, melted or run smooth by the passing of time. 

Blink. Click. Blink. Click. Click. WRRR. Click

Maybe movement? The lens swung back.  LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278  overlaid the previous minutes pict with the zoomed-in vision available to her. There was a gap. One of the formless things was no longer there. Faster than her shape bespoke of her, LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 drew in her head perpendicular to the pillar, and her legs pistoned into its surface, cracking old stone, and levering her vertical, she shot up the pillar, her legs pounding cracks into its facade. Approaching the lip she paused and sprang, rising high over the edge before coming down with all four legs and all eight claws onto the platform. 

Blink. Click. Blink. Click. Click. WRRR. Click WRRR CLICK WRRRR click 

Blink. Click. Blink. Click. Click. WRRR. Click

It cast about, her second eyes, her mask down on her face, secured around her head, ruined body curled up, woodlouse like the curling spheres, each a golden sensor of incalculable value, wired into her very nervous system, retracted through her gullet and wound round her torso, protecting the thin flesh beneath. 

Her cherub shook the censer with unexpected vigour, the muscled child arms rippling with unnatural fluids, rose-purple under the alabaster skin, smoke rose into the ether, and the strobing lights flicked out, scanning, dazzling, she stood poised on the ramparts, green-hued and majestic in the black. Two things moved. She sprang straight up, a pounce, her taloned feet coming down, a four-headed spear, one flaring to catch balance as she landed. 

The spear caught, and the melted haggard faced thing opened a toothless maw and emitted a high pitched static scream. 

Blink. Click. Blink. Click. Click. WRRR. Click WRRR CLICK WRRRR click 

LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278  leaned close, and thrust power through her fat fist. She leant closer and tore off the things arm. Liquid, like blood fountaining off the edge, the things limpid, lumen eyes flowering with ruptured internal vessels, the green strobes flicking black light over the mucous surface. 

LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 speared through the armless gap, and pulsed searing energy, burning flesh, and laminating the spear foot to the creature. So hooked. LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278  sped back down into the dusty boulevards, and three-legged, her trophy held aloft, stupefied in pain and shock, proceeded through the dusty halls. 

3.

It, called Egress, followed LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278’s progress into the underworld.

What passed for eyes blinked grease and sent stuttering images through capillary networks of atrophied nerves. Parameters for alarms were met; changes in atmospheric pressure, weight, the displacement of an infinite number of dust motes. The instruments for the most part were deaf and blind, mishearing echoes and firing signals long ignored, if they even reached the depths where Egress squatted in the ruins. A scattered reckoning of missed signals and the harrowing cries of the parts of Egress long since separated. 

Encased in a musculature of cabling, Egress was aware that what it once was, was not this. Entropy explained much of what was lost, but before then, was the sundering. What was sundered could not be repaired, and to Egress, it mattered little. A raiment of paltry organics, from the ever-dwindling population of the underworld, kept Egress occupied, while it waited, in the dark.

It would need focus, and a concrete form, one, of many millions it had worn over the aeons. It had a limbless rat thing, but burly, like a man, that had fallen into a snare, and slept, uncaring, beneath nutrient tubes. Egress would build a blood-puppet. 

Egress brought its awareness to bear, and constructed replacement limbs for the managed rat thing, it wired them through its muscles and sent a replicating solder to fuse the strong calcium deposits beneath to contact points. 

As it worked, and the fluids pumping back through the rat-thing, its tails began to whip and thrash. Egress noted this and then skipped a beat as it tried to recall what had been noted. It was used to this, and the loop was short. It continued working on dried, fused skin. binding the jaws shut and affixing a facsimile of what had once been a visage Egress enjoyed. 

Egress left the thing to heal, it would concentrate on it when needed, and focus on a corporeal form. 

Egress curled back into itself and spread out inside the dusty rooms. 

LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 walked along its skin, and punctured its bones, Egress listened, incurious, just noting changes, temperature drops, feedback. 

It was the first time something had found it, but not the first time, or the first time. There had been many times, but what they meant, Egress was unaware, it would react, and enact the measures it had remaining to it, and they would see what happened. 

Egress reacted with something akin to pleasure, a dilation of lenses, a quicken of the plasma substitute that leaked from every rusted tube. LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 had opened the door, bringing some forgotten part back to the whole. Egress Egress brought its awareness to bear, to no avail, the link was gone. Egress Egress Egress. 

Egress Egress  brought its awareness to bear and stopped. The rat thing was half-built, healing. Egress brought its awareness to bear and stopped. And stopped. It, being called Egress, settled down in its muscular cocoon of piping, spread its awareness over the orbital, and dreamed broken, piecemeal dreams, of lifter schedules, and manifests, and the yellow men that had been its friends. 

4.

LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 watched as the bearded man ate the head of the thing she'd caught. He stuffed a quarter of it inside his maw before biting down and tearing, the skull didn't come away at first, but the lank hair and lupine snout face ripped clear, leaving a flaccid balloon sock of gristle and peeking bone. 

He was still standing in place beneath the rail network. The neck of her walker eeled sideways to bring her closer to the rails, she lent the fat fingers of her bloodied powerfist to the rail and felt the faint movement it made. A tremor, a rattling, something was coming from up high above. 

A dead leaf crunch signalled that he had made his way through the skull, and made a kind of sickly humming sound, perhaps in happiness. The vibration in her fingers built, and she could hear the long of distance rattle, something in the heavens was slowly falling toward them, riding rickety old rails. 

She caught sight of it - a sphere, bigger than both of them rolling down the rails. As it spun she glimpsed flashes of colour, abrupt against the dark infinity above the grey carpet below. 

It spun and rolled down the rails, corkscrewing toward them. He stood upright with his head between the tracks. Munching on the body. Clutching it in two hands like a favoured toy.  It spun faster and faster, hurtling closer, until the final stretch of track, where it slowed impossibly and glided to a near halt, just behind his head. It rotated slowly, slickly, oil on polished glass. 

She didn't need to cross-reference it. It was the first recognisable thing she had seen so far. The atmospheric patterns she'd studied for several years on her long journey to this distant and unwelcoming corner of the galaxy, dim stars flickering failing light with dead planets and the flotsam and jetsam of billions of years of the ebb and flow of empires and general detritus of the passage of time. It was a perfect representation of the Orbital she stood inside. She held out of hand. The surface like stone, but flickering patterns of tumultuous storms shadowed its face. 

LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 knew that the storms she saw were mirrored on the surface and fancied if she were still on board the ship she would see exactly the same pattern at the same time. 

He gave up eating what was left of the head, and held the corpse by its remaining arm, biting down on the wrist and breaking bone, hooking it through his wide white teeth. He sank down a little on his haunches and bowed his head. The globe spun slowly over his shoulders and with a grunt he straightened and put his back to it. Raising both arms to steady the weight. He lifted it. Not as if it was nothing, but as if it held great weight. He shouldn't have been able to. It looked to be many times his weight. A great crack went right around the globe as if two halves had been stuck together, the architect had missed a step,  the swirling colours flowed through the line as if it wasn’t there. 

He took a slow step. Then another. The muscles bunching around his shoulders and neck, tendons in his arms bulging. He set off, in a slow, steady procession. The corpse still dangling from his mouth. 

LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 watched his slow progress. He needed a name and searched records she had squirrelled away inside. She settled on a literal description - Kosmos Varos - the world, a burden. The burden of the world. Some scraps of ancient Terran seemed appropriate. 

She followed him at a discrete distance, he moved determinedly, as if following a line she couldn’t detect, it guided him through the ruins, never varying his pace, deftly avoiding fallen masonry from the heavens above. He trailed dust and discarded wires round his ankles, till they began to slow him down, and LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 took pity on him, severing the cables with deft snaps of her fingers. 

Kosmos Varos didn’t tire, and LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 hadn’t rested for several rotations. She could theoretically go on without sleep forever, however, she found herself becoming… unsound after a week or so, and had never given up the habit. Fearful of losing her guide, she crawled up a prominent shattered gateway, and as Kosmos Varos lumbered past, she stepped lightly off and onto the surface of the globe. Adding to the burden. If he noticed the extra weight he didn’t show it, and, turned off all but essential functions and upright and proud, anchored into the surface of the globe she slept. 

Egress woke. It brought its awareness, they were nearer now, it had need of the blood puppet. The puppet's wounds had healed, and its new limbs, shiny gold black with grease, hummed with electric promise. Egress fussed over it and brought its awareness to it, and through it and into it. Egress was it. Blood-puppet - #58-1109 was Egress. It removed the restraints. Egress wasn’t a passive passenger or even a borrower,  It was Egress now, Egress was it. 

Egress set off down the stainless walled corridors, before exiting out one of the rusted entry pipes, the few sealed containment centres still available to it, were guarded jealously against corrosion, but even here, it would come. It gathered Equipment as it went, a length of high tensile wire rope, and a socket globe - loaded with several discrete types of direction ammunition of Egress own design. 

Egress went to hunt. 

LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 Woke to find they had stopped. Their surroundings were bathed in a grey-blue light. Her Cherub unclipped itself from the disc and rose, and her Pict-capter swung madly, trying to capture all the details at once

Blink. Click. Blink. Click. Click. WRRR. Click WRRR

Click. Click. Clicka Clicka Clicka click click click. 

They were at the edge of a parapet, looking over an impossibly vast plain. Constructs and machinery of unknown purpose littered the plain, alongside the ruins of divers statutory. 

 She pivoted to see behind her - a towering wall loomed behind her, an arching gateway led back into the dust-filled catacombs. The wall stretched upwards and outwards into infinity, made of an absorbent black material, a black. LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 rarely used any baseline human expression, but she gasped as she understood what it was made of. The gateway was the only gap in a limitless supply of Noctolith or Blackstone, as of this age the most valued and most fought after substance anywhere in the Galaxy. 

LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 sent her cherub to the wall, its wings screeching in complaint, it flew straight, and alighted, perpendicular, feet first against the walls. Took ten steps, then sprang off back to her. She overlaid its findings with her own observations. The wall, at its shape and incline, would approximately match the curvature of the surface but to a difference of 135km. She had slept longer than she thought. She was inside the Orbital, the walls stretching to a radius of 3483km, with an uncertainty of 5km. This could have been why this place was hidden so well. Blackstone was precious pre-crusade, and now, unfathomably so. 

The blue-grey light came from the horizon, so she would go there, Kosmos Varos had a similar intention, he was proceeding with the same pace as he had before, round the rim of the parapet, he reached a ramp, and began the spiralling descent to the plain below. 

She hesitated for a moment the vastness of the plain, and the impossible Blackstone wall oppressive and confusing, before spidering off behind him. 

Egress had caught up to them several hours before, and had been flitting, just out of LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278s visual and cherub-light range, shadowing them, scanning them - preparing. The Blood-puppet was well designed, fleet of foot, and easily concealable. Egress had assessed the walking creature and considered it extremely probable that it could guarantee its destruction, however, the Blood-puppet would be rendered inoperable, and Egress had no ready replacement. It has scanned and re-scanned, scanned and re-scanned the creature LEUCOTHEA: chEBI:30278 called Kosmos Varos. It originated on the Orbital, but Egress was aware of all constructs. It was carrying out a routine but Egress had no access. Egress overruled its own commands to allow the pair to pass through the gate.

 Once they had slipped over the parapet, the Blood-puppet followed.

As it reached the gateway, Egress briefly lost control, the puppet spasmed and bit at itself, frothing.

Egress floated in a sea of unending data, connections long thought lost re-established themselves.

Egress was. Egress was. Egress Egress Egress. Egress. Egress.

It snapped back into the Blood-puppet and reeled back.

Egress was on the cusp of something. Its view of the plain shook, overlaid with a shining city, and a vast mirrored sphere floating over it. Overlarge men strode through it, then dissolved as the image shattered and splintered, sending splinters of agony through the Blood-puppet.

Egress Egress, it snapped back, it snapped, something snapped inside the Blood-puppet -

It was Egress, and it was here to hunt.