Damn,she said. I think we can kiss the entrapment goodbye. The rest are waiting to see what happens.

It was to be expected,samuel replied. They are soldier-caste, after all. Bred for conflict. The breeders don’t need to impart chemical programs of tactics among them; such knowledge is instinctive.

The serjeant moved out of the shallow alcove which had been masking it. Ione was ordering the communication block to open a channel on the frequency the Tyrathca were using when both the soldiers fired their maser rifles. The beams struck the serjeant’s armour, almost overloading its energy dissipation web. She jumped, a movement enhanced considerably by low gravity and the suit’s augmentation. At the same time she triggered the EE charges she’d placed above each of the chamber’s entrances. Tonnes of rock descended in four separate avalanches, sealing the three Tyrathca in.

Ione climbed to her feet, and focused the suit sensors back. The jump had sent her soaring fifty metres down the corridor, barely avoiding hitting the roof. Small lumps of rock were spinning and bouncing towards her in lazy motions. The sensor disks in the refinery chamber showed nothing but a swirling cloud of dust, while the others showed the remaining Tyrathca retreating swiftly. They started to split up, vanishing down side corridors where there were no sensors to follow them.

The bad news is they’re operating a shoot-to-kill policy,she said. I guess they’re not curious why we’re here.

That’s to be expected,samuel said. You don’t evolve an entire caste devoted to aggression unless you have a great need for them. The Tyrathca social structure is based around a clan hierarchy, they are extremely territorial. And we’re violating their oldest piece of territory in defiance of their explicit instructions.

Yes. Well at least you know what to expect when they reach ring five. Now I’d better get out of here before they pop up from some secret passage and shoot me.

The control offices were a series of rooms bored into the wall of ring five, fourteen hundred metres from the spiral ramp. Simple open rectangles, plated in aluminium alloy, with the floor covered in composite. Each room was lined by bulky computer terminals, with twin rosette keyboards for Tyrathca fingers. The walls above them were covered by long display screens to project the arkship’s engineering schematics and navigational plot. To all intents and purposes, this was Tanjuntic-RI’s bridge.

According to the archaeology expedition there was less frost and ice inside, which had permitted them to reactivate several of the electronic systems without much trouble. The control offices were on an independent environmental circuit with a much reduced humidity level; and the airlocks were shut prior to the arkship’s final evacuation so there was no contamination from ring five’s damper atmosphere.

The archaeology expedition had known the sealed rooms were important; they’d traced the arkship’s internal communication network, and discovered the principal node was inside. With due respect, they’d installed their own hatches in the Tyrathca airlocks, as they had up in level one. There was no worry about atmospheric contamination any more, not with all the water frozen out. But they wanted to maintain the environmental integrity. This was the first human exploration through an artefact belonging to a sentient xenoc species; ethics was a paramount concern—even though the Tyrathca were indifferent to such matters.

So, Monica and the others discovered, was someone else.

The large titanium rectangles leading to the control offices had been reactivated and opened, swinging back against the chamber wall. Not only that, the safety interlocks had somehow been circumvented, allowing all three to be opened at once. The five suited figures stood in front of the opening, scanning round with their sensors.

“This has got to be it,” Monica datavised. “The human hatches are still here. The archaeologists didn’t install them anywhere else.”

“Has there been another expedition since the first?” Renato asked.

“If there was, then neither Earth, Jupiter, nor Kulu knew anything about it,” Samuel datavised. “I have to say that’s extremely unlikely.”

“In any case, why not just use the archaeology team’s hatches?” Renato asked. “We know they work. It must have taken a lot of effort to get these brutes open again.”

Oski stepped forward gingerly, using a hand-held sensor pad to scan around the airlock rim. “I can’t pick up any electrical impulses. But this was opened very recently. There’s still some very faint thermal traces in the surrounding structure. They probably had to warm the airlocks back up to their operating temperature to get them to function again.”

Monica resisted the instinct to whirl round and check the streets of the necropolis behind. Her suit’s micro radar was scanning constantly for any sign of local movement. But the arkship’s chill had somehow managed to stroke her skin through the armour. “How recent?” she asked.

“Within the last five days.”

“And not human,” Renato datavised.

“Why do you say that?”

“Obvious. If it was our species, they would have used the hatches the archaeologists installed. Whoever it was, they were too big to fit through them.”

“It has to be the Kiint,” Samuel datavised. “After all, they are partly the reason we’re here. Ione and Kelly were right, Lieria was interested in the Sleeping God. And this is the obvious place where information on it would be stored. They must have teleported in here not long after they left Tranquillity. And simply opening the original airlock is the kind of elegance I’d expect from them. We’ve seen what the Tyrathca do to doors that won’t budge for them.”

“Why not just teleport directly inside the control offices?” Monica asked.

“They’re extremely small on a cosmic scale. I’m guessing such an action would require impossible accuracy, especially over three hundred light years from Jobis.”

“Could be. Do you think they’re still here?”

Oski pointed her sensor pad along the short airlock tunnel. “It’s inert as far as I can tell.”

“And our time is running out,” Monica datavised. “Let’s get in there.”

The control offices were noticeably warmer. Suit sensors detected thermal concentrations around three of the computer terminals in the second room. “This is the astrogration centre,” Oski datavised. “One of our information targets. If we’re to get a fix on the Sleeping God’s location, we ought to find it stored in here.”

“Get started,” Monica datavised. The sensor disks were showing her the Tyrathca moving through the second level chamber with the biological reactor. They’d slowed their advance slightly since the diversion serjeant’s attempted entrapment, treating each chamber with suspicion, never allowing more than three soldiers inside together. Even so, they’d be at the spiral ramp leading to ring five in another fifteen minutes.

Oski and Renato knelt down beside one of the terminals, and spread out their equipment. Monica, Samuel, and the last serjeant quickly searched the remaining rooms, then went back out into ring five.

“We should backtrack a bit and lay some false heat trails,” Monica datavised. “That will give us a few minutes more.”

“I don’t think it will,” Samuel replied. “By the time they get here, it will be obvious to them that we came for the control offices. Diversions won’t work. We shall have to defend our position.”

“Shit, I hope not, because this is a tactical lost cause. They can come at us from all sides, and we don’t have a way out.”

“But we do have superior weaponry. Let’s just hope we don’t have to use it.”

“Fine. And now we’ve actually reached the mission target, why don’t we start thinking of a way out of here.”