The First Step chapter 4

"I think it must be, don't you?" I replied. "The size of the timescar, the density of the chronium, the chronoscript…"

They nodded. "Okay, I just wanted to make sure." They showed me a piece of scrap paper they'd scrounged from somewhere – most of the surviving paper we'd found had been too heavily printed for use, so any with spare space for writing on was precious – and covered in scruffy calculations. "So let's say five thousand years old, give or take?"

'The Time War' is a loose label for a conflict which might as well be considered unending, but in my time we typically use it to refer to a period of about a thousand years during which deployment of temporal weaponry was at its traceable height. Estimating the age of anything from that millenium with any precision is of course impossible. I had tended to think of the pit as four thousand years old, since chronoscript is reckoned a post-war phenomenon, but it made sense that it would have been dug much earlier and revisited in the wake of the worst of the fighting.

I shrugged and nodded for Yarbe to continue.

They said, "Well, I measured the average thickness of the chronium throughout the camps, the stuff on the roofs, I mean, because the ground is a bit different, it's about ten centimetres. So let's say two centimetres per thousand years. If you pace out the pit, it's five klicks across, close enough that they must have dug to that as the template. Stand at one edge and the elevation to the rim is just under fifty-eight degrees, so we're eight kilometres down."

I gaped at them. Trying not to say anything that would call my authority into question, I said, "Wait, how did you get these numbers?"

"It's just trigonometry, sir. Well, assuming that the pit sides are at ninety degrees to the bottom, at least," and here they gave a slightly embarrassed chuckle, as if I should understand the potential implications of that for their math, "I only really have the elevator cable to go on for that but I think it hung parallel to the wall. One side and one more angle, you can work out the other sides of the triangle. Between the bottom of the pit and the wall, I mean."

I nodded as if I understood. "But how do you know the angle? The fifty-eight degrees?"

"Oh, I kludged together a sort of sextant, sir." They shrugged. "Anyway, it doesn't really matter for numbers this big. Say the pit is eight klicks deep, eight hundred thousand centimetres. If it's chronium all the way down, and chronium forms at two centimetres a millenium, this place is – well, I guess I just mean the… the door – it's four hundred million years old."

If I had been staring at them in bafflement before, I can only imagine what my face became at that moment. I felt cold, the liquid cold of soaked clothing but on the underside of my skin. "Run… run that last part by me again," I managed. "Chronium all the way down?"

"Okay, most of the others have been thinking that the pit is dug through earth and bedrock, I think, but hear me out." We stood a dozen metres or so from the burgeoning fortress of couches, mattresses and cushions that the soldiers had assembled in the plaza, but Yarbe leaned closer to me like a conspirator nevertheless. "I went round the walls and dug some lateral holes. There's a thin outer coating of chronium that's like the stuff on the camp walls, vertically aligned, but under that it's just more chronium, and the crystals are flat, horizontal I mean. I think before the time war people dug this hole, the white stuff, the door, was just here getting slowly buried in chronium. For half a billion years."

While they explained I felt as if a vast weight was being lowered slowly onto my shoulders. I had had the thought even when we made our descent of the pit that we might be descending through unthinkable aeons of chronium. I could not have done the calculation to arrive at Yarbe's conclusion but I had felt it, I think, in the soldiers' refusal to confront the door in their games.

My mind closed protectively around the practicalities. "All these measurements of the chronium… when did you have time to do them?"

"It's taken a while, uh, sir," they said, sheepish as if recalled suddenly to a lingering trace of military discipline. "I just did a little bit whenever I could, if we were on a recce close to the wall, or just when I could get out for a walk on a rest shift."

"Have you told the others about this?"

"No, sir, I thought I'd better… well, I talked a bit with Vittar about what I was trying to do, but I haven't told them my conclusions." They glanced over at our camp. "I thought I'd better see what you made of it first."

I nodded carefully. "Keep it to yourself for now. I don't know quite what to make of it. Let me sleep on it."

My choice of phrasing proved ironic. I had intended simply to stall Yarbe from ever mentioning their conclusion – what benefit could come of scaring the soldiers with it? – but the longer I held the secret the more it stalked my dreams. I went back to ignoring or forgetting to sleep, as I had when first we arrived in the pit. Something about the place obviated whatever mechanism it is induces humans to need sleep, so this was not debilitating, but I did wonder what the soldiers made of my behaviour.

Our explorations continued. As we came to the outer reaches of camp one, where chronoscript warnings and notes were more common, and the tantalising almost-readability of the languages more pronounced, Dufore revealed they had been hoarding ropes that they had found as they went. They had experimented with a variety of knots and found ways, they insisted, to join the cords in sequence securely.

They showed us how they, with Nireba's surreptitious help, had tested the joins, binding progressively heavier weights and tossing them into the shafts along the edge of camp two. They had ensured their knots – which were certainly ornate – could withstand both sharp jerks and steady lifts of well over a hundred kilos. They had, they were quite open in saying, done their best to anticipate every objection I might have raised to their intent.

The total length of rope they had gathered, they said, was close to ten kilometres. It was only as I, and some of the other soldiers, gaped at this revelation, that they explained what they wanted it for. It was not, as I had wondered, something to do with ascending the pit walls. They wanted to descend the one excavated shaft in camp two that we had been unable to see the bottom of.

They gave their estimate of the depth they might need to descend to; we had, from the bottom of the steps, at the rim of the pit, been able to see the camps clearly. That was an eight kilometre drop, we all accepted as a rough estimate even without recourse to Yarbe's measurement. The camp two shaft was narrower than the pit, and perhaps the chronium glow did more to obscure distance in the tighter confines – but perhaps not, and the indistinct pink haze into which its walls vanished might for all we knew descend clear to Nine's dead core.

Dufore had built a carefully-thought-out anchor for the rope. They had pried loose a half-dozen metal rods from the scaffolding around the pit walls, cleaned them of chronium as best they could and checked them carefully for corrosion and wear. Then they had driven them deep into the chronium floor of the pit, which was a much thicker layer around the rim of that shaft for some reason, and woven a hundred metres of the rope tightly around them. Even six of us combined, at the full output of our cystems, could not budge the results so much as a centimetre.

They had even anticipated my stipulation that they not descend beyond sight, that we would pull them up as soon as I, placed as spotter on the shaft's edge, indicated I could no longer see them clearly. Though I felt mocked by the extent of their preparation specifically for my objections, I was powerless to counter their arguments.

So it was that they tied the rope through the spine loop in their cystem, and with Nireba, Jieruk and Yarbe paying out the rope, walked their way back over the smoothly-curving rim of the shaft and began their descent. As with any well-planned operation performed in the absence of enemy forces, the first part of the descent was anticlimactically boring. Dufore went slowly, kicking their heel cythorns into the chronium with each step. I began thinking, as Yarbe might, how long it would take them to descend as far as they had planned to.

Then something happened which I am sure I cannot properly convey the instantaneous horror of.

The rope went slack as Nireba played out the next length.

A shout of alarm issued from below as we rushed to the edge.

Looking down, we saw Dufore lever themself up to standing. Not on some invisible floor but on the wall of the shaft. Holding the now-slackened rope, they waved up at me.

You must understand that I am familiar with several technologies of artificial gravity, that these are commonplace in the navies in and against which I have served. I have even seen, in boarding actions against some of the stranger Affenstrin vessels, spaces in which artificial gravities are set against one another to allow some people to stand on floors that are walls to others in the same room.

There are reasons such arrangements are rare, though. The energy costs are prohibitive even by the absurd standards of the Affenstrin. The gravities are never perfectly-isolated; there is always a blurring effect, which is wretchedly uncomfortable to pass through. And all such technologies would be completely overwhelmed and ineffective in a true planetary gravity well.

Dufore stood there, their body exactly perpendicular to ours above them, their posture easy and relaxed. They walked back and forth, shouting up reassurances about the comfort of doing so, making a clear show of holding onto the rope for security. Twice I had to order the rope-holders to focus on their task as they began to creep forward to peer over the edge.

Down the shaft, Dufore experimented with the edge of the interacting gravity fields. There was a small boundary region, and apparently it was the stomach-lurch from crossing that, as much as the sidewards fall, which had startled them to shouting. They encouraged me to climb down and join them, but I declined.

They wanted to keep exploring, to walk along what seemed now to them a large tunnel, to see where it led, but I insisted on hauling them back up, promising that I would permit further, deeper-ranging descents. From the rim of the shaft we dropped loose weights, and saw them fall straight down until they reached the gravitic boundary, then swerve into the wall and skitter to a halt across the chronium there.

It will not surprise you in the least, I am sure, to read that the side of the shaft onto which they fell was the one closest to the door.

Dufore leveraged the strangeness of the shaft to advocate for more exploration of camp two, which we still had barely touched. Preferring this to delivering on my promise to permit another descent, I allowed it. I was correct in my guess that the outskirts of the camp would be largely similar to the outskirts of camp one; indeed it became clear that the most recent of the camps established to study camp two belonged to the same expedition as those at camp one.

Older, more central parts of the camp were distinctly different, however. The habitable buildings were different shapes, and connected by modular, enclosed walkways. The scripts and languages on the signs were stranger, harder to link to characters and meanings we knew. There were complex webs of electronics in the walls, every appliance networked, structures dedicated to ancient supercomputers standing separate from the residential units, their doors locked so we had to force our way in to some of them.

Perhaps because we could make less headway with the writings, but perhaps not, it seemed that there were more maps in camp two. We found an entire cupboard of framed map panels, a full set of scales at which the pit could be represented starting with a galactigraph, down to maps of Castevas system, flattened projections of Nine's surface – which almost seemed a joke, so featureless was the moon outside of this lone timescar – to detailed site-maps of the steps and the pit.

In one conference room, we found a wall-chart, tacked together from at least a dozen large sheets of paper. At first sight it seemed the graph of some abstract mathematical function, a stepped line curving downward from the upper left to a point in the middle at the bottom and then symmetrically back up to the upper right. The bottom of this splayed-out V had been circled with an arrow pointing to an inset, though, and the inset clearly showed a schematic of the pit.

The logical conclusion was that it was in some way a map of the steps. Annotations both printed and handwritten attested to measurements that in some cases we could recognise were specified numerically, though we could not tell of what. We could make no sense of the scale, which suggested that the steps dwarfed the pit by at least two orders of magnitude.

Dufore managed to unpin the whole chart intact and insisted on taking it back to our base to show to Yarbe. I fretted that we had nowhere to store it that would preserve it, but of course there was no weather to preserve it from. Spread out on the flat ground of the plaza, the chart was safe from everything except one of us falling over on top of it.

When they saw the chart, Yarbe went very quiet. I watched them carefully, remembering our conversation about the depth of the pit. They stood glaring down at the paper, arms folded, occasionally twitching as if trying to meet my eyes without the others noticing. Eventually, they pointed out that one set of printed labels corresponded to the number sequence they had partially deciphered on our descent of the steps. They left our camp without saying more.

The map lay there accusingly, unanswered. Dufore turned away from it and very deliberately walked back to our melange of furniture. Their cystem making the motions look effortless, they pushed a sofa and two armchairs into a loose 'V' arrangement, slid a large soft-topped foot-stool in between, and looked around. The others were watching with varying degrees of scepticism.

Dufore waved a hand in a loose circular gesture, ending in the direction of the seating. Ermsan glanced out in the direction Yarbe had left, then walked over and took a seat. I think I saw their leg twitch very slightly as they lowered themself into an armchair. Saffa, who had been standing on our periphery as she so often did, came forward as if to take a place on the couch, but stopped, hovering, at its back corner.

Gogi stopped next to her, and for a moment it felt as if the ineffable social momentum stalled, but Nireba took the other armchair, and Jieruk sat opposite them on the sofa. Dufore lowered themself to the end of the sofa, leaned forward with their elbows propped on their knees, and said, "You're on your way back from checking out a residential unit in camp two when your foot catches on something that bounces and skitters away across the ground. You walk over to it and pick it up. It's a loose power cell, a bit smaller than one of your fingers. What do you do?"

Jieruk and Nireba exchanged a puzzled look. Typically the game would start with sighting an enemy, though Dufore, when they took charge, had occasionally thrown in more obscure scenarios. Those often mystified the soldiers, to the extent that sometimes I found myself wanting to berate them for missing Dufore's obvious clues.

Before any of those seated could come up with a response, Saffa turned toward Dufore and said, "May I… join the game?" She still spoke Federation with a mellifluous Commonwealth accent, but her hesitation was clearly not born of struggling with the language itself.

The soldiers all looked at her, but when no-one raised an objection, Dufore said, "Okay, grab a seat." They waved a hand to the open space at the end of the sofa next to Jieruk. Then, with a wry quirk of their lips, they said, "What should we call you?"

Saffa was much smaller of build than any of us and there was generous space beside Jieruk, but for some reason she perched on the arm of the sofa, with her booted feet on its cushion, instead of sitting normally. "My name is Saffa." I have been using her name since I first introduced her in this report, but if my memory serves me correctly this was the first time we learned it.

A sort of embarrassed, under-the-breath chuckle went around the soldiers; Dufore laughed a little more openly. Smiling, they said, "Well, I think you know our names already, but I'm Dufore. Uh, anyway, the battery. What do you do?"

Saffa mimed holding the battery, turning it back and forth in front of her face. "I'm looking at the casing, is there any writing on it?"

"I walk up beside her," Nireba said, shifting themself forward on their seat. They looked around the group. "Gogi, watch our backs. Saffa, you found something?"

Gogi blinked and shook their head, but stepped forward. There wasn't really a spot left for them to sit, so they pulled the footstool toward themself and sat somewhat stiffly on that. I tried to remember if I had ever seen a soldier press-ganged into the game like that before, but I could see why Nireba had done so, and why Gogi had been their pick.

Saffa extended her arm across the group as if showing the battery to Nireba. To Dufore, she said, "I show it to Nireba."

Nodding, Dufore said, "It's a cylinder a bit smaller than a finger, uh, like I said. One end is flat and the other has a contact nub sticking up from it. There's a dull red strip running up one side of it, near the seam in the casing. There's a logo made up of a couple of words in large print, and then a block of smaller text in a simple font." They looked up at Saffa. "Can you read Alliance?"

She shrugged. "A few words."

That was about as much as any of us could read of the priests' script. I could see that Saffa's answer endeared her in some way to the soldiers, and wondered how they would have reacted if she had said she read it well. Dufore said, "You can't tell what any of it says, but it's modern Alliance, not one of these precursors," and they gestured out in the direction of the camps.

"What do you think?" Nireba asked Saffa, though they flicked a glance in my direction as they said it. "Probably left behind by the priest we saw, right?"

Saffa frowned at them, puzzled, her lips working without speech. She leaned her head to study Dufore's carefully-composed neutral expression, and then, clearly not finding an answer there, peeked at Gogi, who shrugged. Attention seemed to swirl around Saffa as she struggled, and I wondered if Nireba and Dufore had somehow conspired to test her.

"I mean, he wouldn't-" Saffa began, in Commonwealth before realising her mistake. She looked at Dufore again and said, in Federation, "I'm sorry." Then, to Nireba, "It has to be important, doesn't it?"

"Play the game, youngster," Ermsan prodded gently. Despite the care in their choice of tone, something in Saffa's posture stiffened. "What would you know if you found something like that?"

This was the part of the game that had frustrated me most as an onlooker, especially in Dufore's more obscure scenarios. The soldiers had adopted the convention somewhere along the way of ignoring that their story was being told, or directed, by someone. Dufore would drop obvious hints, sometimes clumsily so, and the players would chide each other to ignore them in favour of treating the story as real, which they never did in combat scenarios.

When Saffa continued to flounder, Nireba asked Dufore, "Where are we? In the camps, I mean."

"Camp two," Dufore began easily, then frowned. With where they were sat in the group, they faced towards the open plaza where we'd laid the salvaged chart out. Pointedly, they avoided looking out that way, face toward the floor instead. When they spoke again it was a touch quieter. "Near the chasm, where those shallow shafts are."

Nireba looked to Saffa again, but Gogi spoke up. "What is it- no, wait, I'm at the corner of the nearest building with my rifle readied but the safety on, trying to watch the approaches, so I call back over my shoulder, 'What have you found?'"

"It, uh, it looks like an Alliance power cell," Saffa said.

"Probably dropped by the priest we fought back then," Nireba said, their dismissive manner now clearly deliberately exaggerated. "Didn't we see them over this way a couple of times?"

"Why would they drop a battery, though?" Gogi said. "You mean one like they power their weapons with? We didn't see them firing, I don't think…"

Saffa asked Dufore, "What condition is it in? Any…" she hesitated, "'rust', is that the word? On it?"

"I don't think batteries rust, do they?" Gogi said.

"It's not technically rust but there are forms of corrosion," Dufore answered, then shook their head. "There's nothing, it looks brand new."

"How long has it actually been since the robefucker was here?" We all blinked at Saffa for a moment until we parsed the word she'd used, slipping a Commonwealth epithet for Alliance soldiers smoothly into her sentence in otherwise accurate Federation. "I've lost track of time completely."

"Who knows?" Nireba shrugged with an exasperated chuckle. "No working chronos anywhere."

"I thought you all had internal clocks. In your, uh… the tree thing?"

"They're mostly fried too," Ermsan said. "Only thing that was working was the nutritional record and we eat too much outside stuff now."

"Oh, uh." Again Saffa looked lost, but this time she rallied more quickly, "Wait, what about chronium, is there any chronium on it?"

"Nah, looks clean," said Dufore.

"What about power? Can we tell if it still has a charge?" Nireba asked, and that seemed to be enough to pull the scene together. Saffa and Nireba managed to talk their way to a method of testing the battery's charge, and Dufore led them gently into the search for another stray Alliance chaplain, this one hiding out in one of the inner complexes of camp two.

Saffa played the game a little differently to the soldiers, I realised. It wasn't just that she was inexperienced with the format; she had a distinct tendency to try to bargain or wheedle with Dufore's refereeing, an unwillingness to accept their authority. Dufore took it cheerily in stride, and generally it was not enough to be disruptive, but it did give the session a different rhythm to those which had preceded it.

In all it might have been one of the longest sessions of the game that I remember the soldiers playing, and after it their behaviour toward Saffa was noticeably warmer. She didn't often join in sessions of the story-game, preferring to offer observer comment as Ermsan generally did. But she sat with the soldiers rather than away on her own or hovering just behind them, and in turn they included her in other conversations, other games.

Saffa even began to accompany us sometimes on trips into the camps. Getting her in and out of the chasm proved difficult; the fifty-metre vertical jump we had all gotten used to was at the extreme limit of our cystems' capabilities, and when we tried to carry her, in our arms or on our backs, the acceleration was more than her unaugmented body could safely handle. In the end Dufore retrieved part of the rope they had used to descend the camp two shaft and set up a system by which we could haul Saffa up.

This new normal settled in over another indistinct period until, one shift, I was returning from camp two with Gogi and Nireba when Gogi chanced to look up, and stopped dead in their tracks. "Do you see that?" They said, pointing.

The pit rose above us to a clear circle of indistinctly grey sky, as it had ever since we first descended. Now, though, a dark fleck floated at what must have been very close to the centre of that circle. I could not tell how distant it was, but even without Yarbe's grasp of mathematics I knew that if it was as far away as the mouth of the pit, it had to be enormous even to be visible from the ground at all.

We hurried back to our base and asked the others to confirm that our eyes were not playing tricks. Dufore produced a pair of ordinary binoculars and passed them around. I watched the faces of my soldiers change as they each took their turns, so that I knew by the time the glasses came to me that I would not like what I saw.

At a magnification factor of a dozen, the speck in the sky resolved into an almost birdlike shape, a thin central body and large wings that, instead of tapering along their spread, widened like banners to odd, swirling outlines and tails. Even at that distance, there was a faint golden-orange flicker visible from the midpoint of the body, the unmistakable light of an Affenstrin star furnace. A Warmaker.

I am ashamed to admit that my immediate response was to panic. One of the misfortunes of my otherwise fortuitously long military career is that I have several times been part of infantry units deployed against a Warmaker. This is not the best way to fight Affenstrin. They are best fought with a fleet, or if one must fight them in atmosphere at all, with high-impact long-range armour.

Even if an infantry battalion is able to score a killing blow – and it is possible; Affenstrin shields can be overwhelmed, and within them is still fundamentally a human being – the energy released by the demise of a star furnace will scourge the land for kilometres in two or three directions struck almost at random. Victorious companies have sometimes been completely annihilated by the blast.

Only discipline and fear of how my soldiers would respond if they saw me cower held me upright as memories of those past engagements surged through my body. The awful sounds of concrete and steel boiling under the bombardment of weaponised cosmic rays rose in my ears, the helplessness of seeking cover from near-omniscient sensor arrays, the unspeakable humanity of a face framed by exotic-matter armour and glowing with tamed energy fields.

I tried to remember which of my few surviving soldiers had been present when my 24th Marine were scrambled to Sonyanger VI-b in the last days of the planetwide campaign against a trio of Warmakers. There, we had been largely in a reserve role, and the main force had enjoyed a spectacular and terrible stroke of luck when scoring its first kill, with the first dead Affenstrin's broken furnace igniting that of the second, who was nearby. We had suffered losses only in the withdrawal from the planet as its shattered crust had spewed enough volcanic ash to clog some of our dropship engines.

Of those who had survived the 24th's previous encounter with Affenstrin, the last other survivor beside myself had been Aranani. It was Gogi – who certainly had not been present for either engagement – who first worked up the nerve to speak. "What should we do? Can we hide?"

"Only if chronium offers some special protection from full-spectrum sensors," I said, hearing my voice quaver despite my best efforts. "They must already know we are here, anyway."

"We'll show up on thermal if nothing else," Dufore said bluntly. "Chronium's too neutral a background to hide us."

Saffa stepped forward to join the group. "Is there any chance they're friendly? If they know we're here and haven't fired yet?"

"Who knows what a planet-eater thinks?" Ermsan folded their arms. "You ever fought them before?"

"Not up close. Ship-to-ship, once." Which was another reminder that though she belonged to the Commonwealth, she could not have been a part of the force that had contested our planetfall on Nine. There had been Warmakers in that battle too, and only fortuitous manoeuvres by the Commonwealth carrier group supporting the deployment of the army that had shredded my dropships had prevented the Affenstrin sweeping us all.

Ermsan shook their head, upper lip twisted. "Not worth trying to reason with them. Never."

"I thought the same of you, once." Saffa's tone was flat, and I wondered at this surge of her old hostility. Did she really look more favourably on Affenstrin than on our forces? "What do we do then? We can't fight them. Or do your rifles…?" She shot me a hopeful look.

"Not a chance," I said, my chest feeling hollow. Our rifles are highly sophisticated and powerful, designed to be effective across a wide range of combat situations, but even under optimal conditions are accurate only to about two thousand metres. The Affenstrin was at that point clearly several klicks further away than that, and directly above us to boot.

For a moment no-one spoke. There was little in the way of movement or fidgeting, either. Gogi looked upward again. Vittar and Yarbe were absent from the group, as had been the norm for a long time, and my mind seized on them not out of hope but pure displacement. If I went to get them – and it had to be me, both to conceal their lab from the others and because I was the only one present who knew where it was – I would not have to helplessly confront the death descending on us for a little while.

I stated my intention and turned to go, but Ermsan moved immediately into my path, half as if to accompany me, half to obstruct. "We should stick together, sir."

"And present a single, unified target?" I said. "Better to scatter."

"It's not like our chances will be better alone," Saffa said, and despite her support Ermsan glared sideways at her. She ignored them, looking around at the motley encampment that had become our home. "I don't want to die alone. Not here."

The buzzing panic in the back of my mind tangled my attempt to mount a counterargument. Ermsan took charge and marshalled us along the bottom of the chasm rather than up where we could use Saffa's rope, reasoning that would keep us moving. From there, we circled around the pit wall outside camp three, weaving through the outflung legs of the various scaffolds in a futile attempt to convince ourselves we had cover.

Despite the odds, the soldiers had brought rifles. I was only dimly aware that I had brought my sidearm, its weight and bulk unfamiliar along my thigh. I found myself playing the role of scout; as the only one who knew our destination, I had to be the one to break cover occasionally, to hop up on a nearby permatemp roof and try to get a bearing to Vittar's lab.

This proved harder than I had expected. Vittar had said that they would set up on the roof of the unit, because they needed the light, and so I had thought to look for some improvised structure supporting salvaged cyleaves standing up from the roof-line. There were occasional aerials, but nothing as obvious as I'd hoped.

Many of the buildings had been opened, at least part of one or more of their walls cleaned of chronium, so I supposed that Vittar must have done some exploring of their own, independently of the rest of us. It was only when I saw a roof missing the silver-purple mottling of chronium that I was able to identify the lab we sought. Only that one, of all the structures in camp three, had had its solar panels cleaned.

This presented me a quandary. I had hoped that I could see, as we approached Vittar's lab, whether any of their experiments had been sufficiently macabre that I could not afford for the soldiers to see them. There was nothing to judge that question by. I could sense control of the situation slipping away from me as much in the puzzlement of the others at how I was conducting my recon as the approach of the Warmaker.

The Affenstrin seemed in no rush. I have seen their kind move, even through atmosphere, at speeds that would shatter any conventional engine. They have their own unique relationship to gravity and momentum. The Warmaker had barely grown any larger in the sky above us, though, even through what must have been half an hour or an hour of creeping and scuttling on our part.

Though I still felt a dread that ran deep into my roots, the passage of that time had bled away the frantic edge of my panic. Up on the roof of a cabin, looking across rooftops to where I thought I could see Vittar's lab, I should have felt exposed and vulnerable. Instead my attention was on handling my own subordinates, who huddled still in the shadow of the scaffolding some few dozens of metres away.

With hand-signals, I ordered Ermsan to stay put. They signed back a question, and I gave them a cursory response, that I would be out of sight only a moment. Before they could do anything, I set off at a run, almost toppling into the alley between that cabin and the next when my foot slipped on the chronium.

Reflex saved me, and the low, leaping stride we had all mastered for crossing the camp's rooftops carried me quickly to the bare roof I had seen. I dropped into a slide across the last top before it and then, braking with a bare hand, scraping my palm on the crevices of chronium crystals, dropped into the alley. Here was the wall I remembered us first cutting the chronium off, and the door we had found.

The door was broken from its frame, the frame itself blackened and distorted around the catch. For a moment a chill raced through me, then I remembered Vittar telling us that the Alliance chaplain had broken into their lab. Cautiously, I leaned across the threshold, but the room inside was dark. I called Vittar's name to no response.

The lab was deserted. I checked the two laboratory rooms on the ground floor, but much of the equipment was missing. There were signs, too, that the chaplain had done more than simply break in, broken glass on the floor and loose papers scattered across the furniture.

Freshly spooked, I made my way back to the outer edge of the camp, scuttling along the alleys and avoiding looking at the sky. In my haste I lost my bearings and emerged at least a hundred metres further around the circumference than I had started from, close to where the lift we had descended spread its four enormous cyleaves. I was glad to put my back to those to return to Ermsan and the soldiers.

The dubious cover of the scaffolding, and the gloom it offered, were little comfort. My voice wavered when I told the others Vittar was missing. I told myself I wasn't as unsettled as I sounded, but in retrospect I certainly was.

Ermsan suggested firing off a flare – we still had three left, having had little use for them since arriving in the pit – but I vetoed the idea. There was no telling what the Affenstrin would take as an attack, and whether they would pause or think twice before annihilating us if we so much as made them flinch. The soldiers' expressions, and especially Saffa's, suggested they did not consider this concern reasonable, but the practical question of whether Vittar or Yarbe would realise a flare was intended for them, even if they were outside to see it, won the point.

"Might they have moved closer to the-" Dufore said, jerking their head in the direction of the lift.

I don't think I flinched, but the question unsettled me deeply. Vittar had, after all, mentioned wanting to find the control centre linking the lift and its power source. "Why do you ask?"

"I thought you had them working on the lift?" Dufore sounded puzzled.

I tried not to mirror their tone. "No, they were to ensure Saffa's supply of food, and then test the rations we found for safety."

"So who cleaned off the cyleaves?"

The device that brings my words to you now is potent, and merciless in its extraction from me of things I would rather conceal. That said, it can only extract words that are in me to begin with, and I cannot truly name or describe the sensation that rushed through me at Dufore's question. It was clear from their posture that they meant not the cyleaves salvaged from our comrades' corpses but those attached to the elevator.

"Cleaned them off?" I managed not to stammer, but I could see immediately that the anxiety surging through me was spreading to the soldiers.

"You didn't notice?" I felt Dufore's effort to stay calm, to speak casually, but at the same time I felt condescended to, the embarrassed youngster that I have not been in a century. They went on, "When we first got here they were chronium-purple. They catch the light funny from over by the door, but they've definitely been turning green."

The cyleaves attached to the elevator shaft were a hundred metres high and hung much closer to vertical than horizontal. Even granting that cyleaves are surfaced in treated glass, from which chronium would probably brush off easily, how could two soldiers with no specialist tools have even begun to clean them? In the abstract it was another pointed reminder that our sense of the passage of time in the pit was badly distorted; in the moment, it was a disorientation too great to readily accommodate.

Ermsan took a couple of steps towards me, placing themself at my flank and turning to the group. "Sounds like we should investigate in that direction. Dufore, take point." Whether they stepped in intending to support my authority or supplant it, I still cannot tell. I choose to believe they meant well, even if, in a sense, that was the moment that my command came to an end.

I fell into the middle of our short column as we advanced behind Dufore, with Saffa to my left, deeper in the dark of the scaffolds. Nireba and Gogi were behind me, and Ermsan and Jieruk ahead. We stayed far enough under that we could not see the Warmaker.

It was not terribly far to the elevator, but the walk seemed to take a long time. We began to see buildings with patches of wall from which the chronium had been cleaned around the outskirts of the camp to our right, though none had clean roofs. As we approached them, the cyleaves came to dominate my peripheral vision so that I hovered constantly on the verge of flinching.

We could not actually see the elevator shaft from where we walked, as it was enfolded in the sprawling base of the scaffolds. I assume Dufore navigated us relative to the cyleaves, but it was not they that provided the indication that we had reached our destination. Instead, we came to a place where the chronium on the ground had been torn up in a ragged, deep channel, running across our path and off into the shadows to our left.

The trench was a metre wide, narrowing gradually to its bottom at least five metres down. Its sides showed the jagged edges of the cythorn cuts that must have been used to dig it, and distention where Vittar and Yarbe must have used their blades to pry up the chronium layers. The cut chronium was heaped messily on the far side of the trench.

Where it ran out from under the scaffolding, we could see the pale bark of the elevator's roots running in the trench's bottom. Perhaps my soldiers were heartened by the familiarity. For me it was by its very familiarity that the sight became disturbing. Indeed, I think I had been disturbed by the presence of Federation technology – our technology, technology unmistakably kin to the cystem rooted in my bones – since our arrival in the pit.

As destabilised as I felt in that moment, the sight was almost too much to bear. I felt nauseous, and had to resist the buzzing, staticky blur at the edges of my vision for a moment. While I am no cystem engineer, I know enough about the structure of our Crowntrees to recognise the different kinds of root, and this looked a lot like taproot, a major water vessel. Presumably it drew the water collected by the vast condensers above us to whatever central tank from which Vittar provided us water for washing and cooking.

It gave us a clear path to follow, though it led out from under our cover. Dufore crept into the open, binoculars trained on the sky, and reported that the Warmaker seemed only a little closer again. Saffa suggested once more that the Warmaker might bear us no ill intent, but I could not, in all I knew of their kind, countenance the idea. We set out to follow the trench, moving as infantry should, covering each other's flanks, hurrying from alley-corner to alley-corner. Saffa fell in with our order without disruption.

Twice we crossed places where the trench forked, narrower roots splitting off to the sides. A part of me noted, in that quiet way that our brains sometimes do when the main condition of our awareness is spiralling panic, the extent of the labour required to dig the ditch. Again, this was more than twice as deep as I am tall, and ran for at least several hundred metres through the outer belt of camp three. We saw nothing like an automated earthmover or even shovels, only the low bank of cut chronium layers. And of course the trench had not been there at all when we first came this way on our arrival in the pit.

Our scuttling brought us to a large, square building, at least four stories high. Apart from its size, little distinguished it from its neighbours. I remember noting that there was still a visible layer of chronium at the roofline, though in hindsight that must have been subterfuge on Vittar's part. The building had full power, so I suppose they had cleared most of the roof and left just enough chronium at the edges to disguise the fact. A door had been uncovered at the near corner, but none of the windows.

All of my dread coalesced around that door. In that moment I believe I dreaded it more than I have ever dreaded the door in the chasm. I stood frozen in total breach of military discipline as Dufore dashed to take up position on one side of it, then cleared Jieruk to cross and take up the other. Ermsan put their back to Jieruk's, covering the alley up the side of the building. I should have gone to double Ermsan but Saffa took my place smoothly and without hesitation. Her lack of reproach stung.

With Nireba and Gogi behind me, I became the protected noncombatant, pressing my back to the wall of the neighbouring cabin and with nowhere to look but up at the Warmaker. They were now something more than a speck, their wide-winged shape just about distinguishable to the naked eye. In a semi-conscious effort at self-mastery, I kept my sidearm holstered.

Dufore grounded the muzzle of their rifle to free a hand and reached to try the door handle. It turned, but from their position Dufore could not push it open more than a crack. Jieruk slid forward, also keeping their rifle down, and leaned into the door with their shoulder. It swung smoothly, to plain, yellowish electric light.

They called Vittar's name, then Yarbe's, waited a moment, and stepped gingerly across the threshold. In their body language was the conflict between their training and their feeling that we came to call on comrades. I wonder if they would have been so on edge if I had not been present, or if they too were feeling the strangeness of this confrontation with the familiar in so alien and ancient a place.

I could not see past them into the building, but nothing caused alarm before it was my turn to enter. In I went to a room not all that different from the first such atrium I had entered with Vittar, mere hours or days after we had reached the bottom of the pit. The style of the furniture was different, but the dimensions, always just a little too small for us, were similar. There were dormant screens and noticeboards overflowing with papers and warnings in scripts we could not quite read.

The only difference of import belonged to the door at the far end of the room, leading rightward, deeper into the building. This stood ajar, and streamers of yellow-and-black warning tape trailed from the sides of its frame, torn at some point to permit entry in contravention of their warning. Dufore had taken one of these tape segments and was trying to peel it straight where it had folded over.

I crossed to his shoulder with electric chills coursing my back. As I approached, they pulled on a section that came steadily loose, and a distended hologram struck my eyes with a feeling halfway between accidentally staring into a hot sun and the strike of a photoneural weapon. Dufore must have felt it too, for they flinched and almost stumbled.

I blinked away the afterimages and looked again at their hand. Chronoscript lettering seemed to jump at me as my eyes fell into the correct alignment for its effect, but the message was incomplete and thus I could not make out the full content of the warning. Chronoscript is an optical trick, and one must see the full message for all the contextual factors to add up in the right way – this seems to be the reason that chronoscript messages are always short.

What had discomfited me as Dufore unfolded the tape was a misfiring fragment of the chronoscript print. I looked away as they continued to work at it, watching them wince several times as more characters unfolded. It took a few minutes, while the rest of the soldiers milled about and Jieruk called out again for Vittar or Yarbe, to reveal the complete message: DANGER – DO NOT ENTER – UNCONTROLLED BIOHAZARD.

We did not have any protective gear for hazardous environments, and while our cystems do a lot to protect us from imbibed toxins, they do not interface directly with our respiratory organs at all. I found myself powerless to voice my crushing feeling that we should not go any further into the building, and did not speak while Dufore and Jieruk conversed with Ermsan and received permission to proceed.

Inward they went, calling again for our missing comrades. I wanted to remind myself that we had seen both soldiers only a shift or two before we first sighted the Affenstrin, and that nothing about this new crisis should have given any reason to fear for their safety in particular. Time was strange and alien in the pit, though, and their silence felt much older than it had any right to.

Down the hallway into which the door opened were more doors with torn warning tape. On these there were places where the frames were fringed with tufts of thin, straggly white tendrils instantly recognisable, on closer inspection, as root hairs of a plant. When we opened them, the rooms beyond had root systems sprawling all over the walls around whatever laboratory equipment was their focus.

This was wrong. I realise that, if you are unfamiliar with my culture and learning of it only from what I have written, you will not yet know this. But though we live in symbiosis with plants, we no more live in trees than do the Commonwealth or the Alliance. An intrusion of the cultivated trees we use for military equipment into ordinary living or working space would be unheard of, as strange and unfamiliar as the elevator had been in the first place.

And the root ingresses did not seem to be a planned feature of the building either. In a couple of places we could see where wall fixtures had been torn loose by root growth creeping between them and the walls. Vittar had clearly made some use of these rooms – there were neat stacks of salvaged rations on some of the workbenches – but they had not cut back very much of the roots.

Dufore went to the end of that first corridor and found a staircase, steep and narrow and stark in the electric lighting. They called up it again for Vittar, receiving no response. Yellow warning tape hung down the walls at three-step intervals up the stairs, torn or cut in much the way the taped doors had been. As a warning it was absurd, feverish, and yet the belligerents of the later Time Wars never used chronoscript lightly or without planning.

Ignoring that, for they certainly could not have failed to notice it, Dufore ascended the stairs. At the top was a small landing with a window and three doors, one to either side and one behind us, above the stairs. All the doors were fringed with root hairs and trailing chronoscript warning tape. The window was covered on the outside with chronium, its smooth, faintly glittering underside uncanny in its not-quite-reflection of the light from the electric strip in the ceiling.

The door to the right opened into another storeroom, while the one on the left stuck when Dufore tried it. They motioned for me to join them in trying to force it, but I managed to shake my head, stiffly, and they reconsidered. The third door, the one leading back inward to the building, swung open at Dufore's touch, without them turning the handle.

Behind it was a small receiving area, couches along the two walls to the right of the doorway facing a low, round table with an empty flowerpot in the middle. Corridors whose doors had yet more loose warning tape across their mouths led away along the left wall and from the far corner to the right. I found I could muster no mental map of the building, I had no sense of where we were relative to the door we had entered by.

The soldiers began to spread out, checking doors along both corridors. I would have instructed them to open only one at a time, but the situation had long been out of my control. I stood in that first room, my arms leaden and my brain cold and quiet, able to think only that it was exactly where I would have stood had I still been in command, and the soldiers must sense that and see the collapse of my authority reinscribed in it.

"Sir, you should see this." Jieruk's voice called not just me but everyone else to the door they had opened, halfway down the corridor to my left.

A repulsive, intestinal smell greeted us as we gathered around, almost the first strong odour I could remember encountering anywhere in the pit. The room we found ourselves looking into had been conspicuously cleared of roots, though we could see where they had damaged some of the furnishings. At the far end, halfway up the wall, was a single knot of coiled bark which looked more deliberately shaped, one tendril trailing up and through the ceiling.

For the most part the walls were given over to glass-fronted laboratory cupboards, some empty, some stacked with bottles, beakers and other paraphernalia. The worktops held not just ancient devices of indistinct purposes but also – again unlike other labs we had explored – constructions of flexible tubing, glass flasks and bulbs, and heavy-based stands. Fluids pooled at different levels throughout the equipment, a few distinctively coloured.

In the middle of the room, several workbenches had been pushed together to form a unified table about three metres long and a little over a metre wide. Their white tops were covered in a thick translucent plastic sheet, which was spotted here and there with flecks of something dark and red-brown, and gave off faint silver-purple sparkles.

On the sheet was a corpse.

I did a quick mental inventory, and in the moment found my memory struggling across a much longer temporal rift than I had realised. No head, the neck ending in a ragged, splayed mess of shrapnel damage. Abdomen an open cavity – the ring of forceps clamped to its outsides and holding it open were an obviously postmortem intervention, and actually the edges of that wound looked neat enough that they might have been a surgical incision. Ruling those out and trying to remember which of the soldiers had been the one to lose their head in Saffa's attack, I settled on Issor. I had helped carry their body to Vittar's original lab myself.

What lay before us, then, was as much my choice as could be attributed to anyone else. The stink almost certainly issued from the puddle of fluid in the laid-open stomach, or one of the slices in the intestinal tubing below it. There was a faint coating of chronium powder over the whole body. Though the uniform had been removed, there was no hope of hiding from the soldiers the fact that this was one of their unit, for the limbs of their cystem were clearly visible along the undersides of their arms and legs. Only the first blush of livor mortis showed on the undersides of their arms by the cystem roots.

"What… is this?" Saffa's voice was thready. I turned to find her standing beside me, her cheeks almost translucently pale. Her stare, wide-eyed, bored into the body on the table. Ermsan put their hand on her shoulder to draw her away, but she shrugged them off with a savage, full-body flinch.

"Sir, that's one of ours, isn't it?" Dufore didn't sound much steadier than Saffa. "Is this what you had Vittar doing?"

"The food. The, the syrup. Nectar. Whatever." Saffa was almost whispering. Before I could gather any wit to speak, she turned, grabbing at my chest, scrabbling first with one hand and then both until she could get enough purchase to take a handful of the elastic fabric of my uniform. With that she wrenched, swinging me across in front of her, sending Dufore stumbling as she slammed me against the wall at the head of the room.

Her face was very close to mine, even though I towered over her. Her strength was startling, the pressure she exerted on my breastbone almost painful. As I tell my story now I know that I could have used the support of my cystem and freed myself easily, but at the time I felt as physically overwhelmed as I had been psychologically.

Hissing through clenched teeth, Saffa spoke in Commonwealth. "Is this what I've been drinking? Is this what you've had her serve me?"

As if my cystem had locked up the way Pras' had before Saffa killed them, all I could do was shudder my neck slightly, side-to-side.

"Answer me!" She screamed, and I found myself looking down into the barrel of her sidearm. I heard rustles of motion go through the soldiers at the door, but there could not have been room for them to bring their rifles to bear.

"I don't know what this is," I stammered, in Federation before switching to Commonwealth that broke as I tried to explain. "The syrup comes from cyleaves, I swear it on the Crowntree that sheltered me."

"Did you know they were doing this?" Dufore's voice again, stiffly calm. "It was you and they who took the bodies away."

"I don't know anything about… this," I tried to gesture at the room but my motion provoked another fierce shove against my chest from Saffa. Her gun wavered in my face. "I don't, I swear it! They came to me… they came to me right after we'd captured you. They pointed out you'd need food and said they thought they could produce some using the cyleaves from… from our dead. That’s all I approved."

"You - were - feeding - me - corpses?" There was so much tension in Saffa's neck and jaw that her hiss had a wheezing undertone.

"No! They were not supposed to- the syrup is, I think it should be, it should be just photosynthesis and condensed atmospheric moisture." I tried to look at Dufore without turning my head. "That's all I authorised."

"What were they supposed to do with the bodies, then?" Dufore took a step closer, and now I could see clearly the rigid fury on their face. "Were we to have any chance to grieve?"

I waited, hoping Ermsan would say something to help extricate me, but there was only silence from the doorway. I had no answer for the soldiers, and clearly no ability to get Saffa to accept the one answer I could offer her. Still the pistol trembled only a handspan from my eyes.

Finally, trying to at least placate the soldiers, I said, "It was right after we had arrived in the pit. I had no idea how long we would be here, but the corpses could not stay so close to where we would camp. There wasn't time to make detailed plans."

"So you left them to do this?" Dufore turned to the others in the doorway, gesturing at the body. "You're seeing this, right?"

"I see the body, soldier." There was a stiff hesitancy to Ermsan's voice that suggested they at least wished they could see a path to regaining control of the situation. "What do you mean?"

"Hey!" Saffa shouted, waving the gun in my face again. In Federation, she snarled, "Someone is going to tell me-hey!"

She cut off as Dufore, without looking, snapped their arm up and grabbed Saffa's hand. I flinched away, hard, expecting the flash and crack of the gunshot, but Saffa exercised commendable discipline on the trigger and didn't fire. Dufore held her there with her wrist high above her head, their attention still on the other soldiers.

"Why hasn't it decayed?" Gogi asked quietly.

"Look closer," Dufore answered flatly. "See the chronium? That's not natural formation, it can't be. Vittar must have spread it."

"You mean-?" Gogi again, even more tentative than before.

Dufore turned to me, keeping a firm grip on Saffa but letting her down off her tiptoes, lowering her arm so her gun pointed at the floor. "They're preserving the body, aren't they? For what?"

My chance to answer was taken away by a commotion from the corridor outside. Vittar's voice shouted, "Get away from there! Get that door closed, that's a clean-room! Out of the way, get-" They cut off as they pushed through between Ermsan and Gogi and saw us.

I started to say, "Explain-"

Saffa wrenched her hand free of Dufore's grip with enough force to send them stumbling sideways into the corner of the table. The pistol came swinging up in a two-handed grip towards Vittar's face along with a hoarse screech from Saffa's throat. Reflex took over and I stepped forwards, wrapping my fingers around her wrists and putting my other arm across her back. I was quick enough to force her shot high, the blast of its discharge stabbing-loud through her incoherent words.

"Out!" I snapped at Vittar as Saffa struggled. "Back, all out!"

In a heaving, disorganised group shove, we all staggered out into the hallway. I was able to shake Saffa's grip on her weapon, and Vittar somehow snatched it before it could hit the ground. Saffa continued to struggle until we were back to that small receiving area, a tense, crowded circle of bodies. Yarbe must have arrived with Vittar, and stood in the doorway from the stairwell, a stricken expression on their face. Both of them looked haggard to a degree I had not noticed in their visits to camp, the electric light unkind to their faces. Vittar's uniform had a long vertical slice down the abdomen, just to the right of their navel.

"What are you doing in there?" Dufore said before I could take any kind of charge. Their voice simmered.

"First tell me where my food's been coming from," Saffa insisted, her tone hot. I still had her by the shoulder, though I doubted I could hold her if she really wanted to get free.

Dufore rounded on her. "Shut the fuck up. There's a desecrated body of one of our comrades in that room, your weird hangups can wait."

"Weird-? Fuck you," Saffa snarled in Federation, stabbing a finger in Vittar's direction. "She's been feeding me corpse juice the whole time we've been in this motherless place and-"

Only Ermsan's arm extended across her chest held her back, the sergeant grunting with exertion before saying, "Wait your turn. Vittar. Explain."

Somehow that stopped her, and we all turned our attention to Vittar. They looked around our circle, frowning but more with irritation than outright anger. "I needed some way to test all those rations you found." They looked at me. "You wanted to know if they were safe to eat. How else was I going to check how human tissues would react to them? I didn't exactly have much to work with to start off."

"Preserving one of our own, though?" Nireba spoke for the first time I could remember since we'd entered the building, their tone aghast.

"Do you want to eat or not? Gotta top up those trace nutrients eventually, you'd have died years ago otherwise." Vittar still didn't sound as angry as the rest of us. There was something chillingly placid in their demeanour – born, I suppose, of how long they'd spent using Issor's body this way.

In the moment, what I gasped was, "Years?"

Vittar turned to me again, the temperature of their voice rising. "How long do you think we've been here? I can only keep track because I have to know how much they eat," they pointed at Saffa.

"It's she," Saffa snapped, thrusting herself forward against Ermsan's arm again. "Am I supposed to thank you? For feeding me this?"

"Would you rather be dead?" Vittar switched to Commonwealth without breaking stride. "In this place? Centuries from your parents and your children?"

"I don't- Of course I want-"

"Then what other choice do you have?" Vittar demanded in Commonwealth and then switched to Federation, addressing the whole circle, "What other choice do any of us have? I kept you alive. All I did was what the captain said."

I felt Dufore's glare strike me. "So you did order this."

"I said test the food, the rations." Desperate, I looked to Vittar. "I didn't say you could…" I couldn't finish the sentence.

"Test them with what?" And now Vittar did sound angry. "I've had to rediscover organic chemistry from scratch to get this far. You'd all be dead of malnourishment if I hadn't."

"Preserving the dead, though…" Nireba spoke quietly, but with a flint edge.

"And if I'd buried them? Here?"

None of us had an answer for that. Yarbe spoke up, voice hazy as if talking to themself. "I did the maths as best I could. Those rations should have turned to carbon paste and water in a few hundred years at most. Most of the soft furnishings we've seen, they should have been gone in a thousand or so."

"We haven't found any bodies, though," Dufore insisted.

"Have you checked every alley? Every building?" That was Vittar, prodding again, cold cruelty in their tone. They still held Saffa's pistol, down by their hip. "You know, I've been trying to get actual crops started? We found seed samples in here, no idea what of, and we've gathered enough bio waste from you all for something like soil. Nothing grows. The chronium poisons everything. It's not a chemical so you can't purify it away."

Saffa started to say something, but Vittar switched to her language again and cut her off. "You want to see where your food's been coming from? Come." They turned, pushing past Jieruk into the other corridor, the one leading away from Issor's room.

Obediently, we followed. They led us down the hall, past yet more warning-tape streamers and root-fringed doors, then upstairs another floor. The building seemed impossibly labyrinthine for what must originally have been a combination of relatively similar modular units. It felt as if the electric lighting buzzed gently at the edge of hearing, a pressure unlike the diffuse chronium glow by which we had lived for so long.

The room we came to was large, much larger than any of the labs or storerooms we had seen up to that point. Where other rooms had had a few trailing root limbs along their walls, thinning out to hairs, this one was densely overgrown. I think, though my memories of the space are not clear, that the root growths must have torn out the ceiling through to the room above, as well as one or two internal vertical partitions, to account for the size of the space.

Skylights, cleared of chronium, peeked between roots thick and barked enough to look like branches spread across the ceiling. From these roots hung thinner tendrils, tapped dozens of times each with little plastic nozzles that fed glistening pale-amber droplets into bundles of transparent tubing. The tubes led from there to glass flasks clamped to stands at the start of distillation processes. In all it was a densely clinical, sterile forest which took up I would guess two thirds of the room's volume. Beyond that, at the far end, was a bole from which those ceiling-roots and others issued, a great woody tangle that we could not see clearly.

Standing a little way inside the room, down the aisle between one wall and the forest, Vittar turned and spread their arms. They were still holding Saffa's gun, though their finger at least was not on the trigger. In Commonwealth, looking straight at Saffa, they said, "See? All that I have done for you, and not a corpse in sight." They pointed upwards. "These feed directly from the chloroplasts in the cyleaves of the elevator. Water from the condensers goes into a-"

They cut off as Saffa retched audibly, clutching her stomach, her face clenched in pain. Jaw locked, she hissed, "From. Your trees. You were trying. To implant me."

"Implant you?" Vittar gaped at her. "You mean with a cystem? All of this is just sap refining. I haven't been able to get any of it to seed, and even if it would have been easier if you had a cystem, they" – they waved the gun in my direction, and I could not help flinching, "forbid it."

"It wouldn't have been possible." I stepped forward, following Vittar in speaking Commonwealth for Saffa's benefit. "It doesn't matter whether they found seeds or saplings, whether you wanted it or not. We cannot and will not im- equip you with a cystem. It's impossible."

"Don't tell me what's impossible," Vittar said heavily, this time in Federation. When I met their eyes there was a dark, painful intensity in them. "Let me show you what I have had to do to survive."

Saying that, they began to walk further into the room. I was struck afresh by foreboding as I followed, the dark shape of the contorted tree at the far end sprouting dreadful implications at our approach. Saffa followed behind me, obviously still nauseous. I flinched at movement seen through gaps in the forest, but it was just Yarbe hurrying down the matching aisle on the far side of the room to catch up to Vittar.

We emerged into a clear area, the width of the room and a few metres deep, between the forest and the tree. Immediately we could see that 'tree' was not a particularly good descriptor. Whatever its horrible purpose, it was evidently designed to fit around a body, leaning just backward of vertical in the centre with ankles together and arms lifted away from its sides. The negative shape of that body was drawn by coils of bark, bark whose pale surface was stained here and there with spatters of red-brown.

Though Vittar turned to speak to us, standing right in front of the device, I could not tear my eyes away from it. Vittar said, "I still haven't been able to restore all the functions of my cystem. Realised after a while that some of the nutrient recovery functions were dead. I was slowly poisoning myself with waste products."

They stepped backwards and up into the body-shaped impression in the bole. For a moment it seemed that the roots were just inert support, but as Vittar laid their head back, almost the whole thing slithered into motion. Tendrils spread across Vittar's legs and arms, tightening to lock them in place, two heavy bark limbs across their upper torso.

Lest you think that this behaviour is typical of or closely related to what we in the Interstellar Fleet are used to from our cystems, let me make entirely clear that it is not. There must be some relation, because the monstrosity before us now obviously interfaced with Vittar's cystem. But I have never before or since seen a device of living tree like that one, or indeed any at all besides our cystems, which are uniform across all the soldiers I have ever fought alongside.

A tendril climbed up Vittar's flank and across their abdomen, this one obviously fresher, its bark less craggy, rapidly sprouting long white root hairs. It spread to the slash I had noticed earlier in their uniform and disappeared inside. A moment later, Vittar gasped and began to twist against their restraints, their face contorted. Through the close-fitting material of their uniform we could see the tendril doing something, all the more horrible for being obscured.

Saffa retched again, and though I could not tear my eyes from Vittar I heard a splash as her vomit hit the floor, and smelled it, too. Vittar continued to struggle, all but outright thrashing, the sound from their throat strangled and sawing, rising in volume even as they tried to fight it back. Then the pain seemed to crest and they went slack. Sweat glistened on their forehead.

"At first we thought I might get away with only a few minutes every couple of days," they said, hoarsely, not raising their head, "but my cystem is still deteriorating. I can keep the motile functions going fine, just not metabolic. It's up to half an hour a day of this. I haven't been able to improve the auto-anaesthetic at all."

Our cystems incorporate a very basic pain-relief function, enough in combination with the intense adrenaline of combat to give a wounded soldier a little more of a fighting chance. I have heard that the function cannot be strengthened because the risks of malfunctions and overdosing compound. Whether that is the case or not, it is certainly inadequate to the task of surgical anaesthetic.

With what was clearly an intense effort – it looked like the fingers of their cystem along their jaw were locked to help immobilise them – they managed to tip their head forward a few milimetres. Their eyes fell on Saffa, who despite being bent forward, clutching her chest and stomach, looked up. Tone strained, Vittar said, "So yes, to answer… your earlier question- I do expect you to thank me… for feeding you. For however long it's been. Decades. Centuries."

No-one said anything in response. Vittar turned their attention to me. The effect of their gaze falling on my face was immediate and devastating, almost physical. I felt myself take half a step backwards, stopped only because the tubes of the forest pressed into my back. Vittar hissed, "Nothing to say for yourself?"

"Why didn't… why didn't you tell me?" Was all I could manage.

"You were too scared to hear it," they replied, and though their voice was still weak I could hear the hatred in it. "Too scared to face the realities of this place. You didn't want me to do anything that might have gotten us home."

At that I felt the other soldiers, who had gathered to my flanks, turning to me. Still, though, I could not look away from the now-still lump under Vittar's uniform. "What?" I said, faintly.

Vittar raised their voice, which had the effect of lending it an animalistic, rasping edge. "It's true. Every time I so much as suggested – ah – we look for a way to re- to reactivate the elevator… you shut me down. If I'd told you… if I'd told you anything, anything I had to do to set this place up – to feed you – you'd have vetoed it in a second. You don't want us to leave."

"Of course I want to leave!" I said it then with more force than I would be able to muster now. "Did you forget how many of us died in the timescar? It's still out there, they don't just wilt away! And there's a warzone outside it."

For a moment, pain overwhelmed Vittar and they could do nothing but curse. "I'm supposed to just accept this?"

"If, if we-"

"You don't care." They sagged into a hoarse whisper. "Ever since we got here. They might not have seen it but I had to watch you ignore all this. You never wanted to think about what I had to do. You want to play toy soldiers in your pillow fort and never leave this place. You want the war to be over but you don't want to retire or give up being the captain."

I gaped at them, something hollow folding in my gut.

They lifted their head again, and this time their eyes took in all the other soldiers but me. "If you're waiting… for them to lead you home… give it up. I'm the only one who cares about us going home. I've almost- I've almost got it, I'm so close. I'll get the elevator working. I'll get us out of here."

"What about the Affenstrin?" Jieruk asked quietly.

"If they were going to kill us… they'd've done it by now." Vittar's voice was growing hazy. "Dunno why they haven't but we're still here."

It took me a couple of attempts to get words out but I had to do something to regain control of the argument. "What about the timescar, then? And the steps, it took us weeks to come down them, how will you make it without-" I waved an arm at Vittar's prison, "without this? Do you even-"

"That's enough, sir," Ermsan said, reaching to take hold of my arm.

I shook them off. "Do you even know there's anything out there to go home to?"

"You really… wanna ask… that question?" Vittar's groans went through the room like a flash freeze.

Gogi said, "What… do you mean?"

"Have you told them?" Though they had sagged back into their restraints, I could tell Vittar was speaking to me. I didn't answer, and after a moment they continued, to the room. "They haven't told you, huh?" Then, between gasps and curses, they explained how they had returned to where we'd interred the Alliance chaplain and found their dog tags, with their dates a millenium after we had deployed to Nine.

Voice as weak as Vittar's, Gogi said, "Is that true, sir?"

I nodded, once, stiffly.

"Well, I'm joining the one who makes the food," Jieruk said, loud and parade-ground cutting. They strode across the floor and placed themself by Vittar's left hand. "I want out of here."

Gogi took a step forward, faltered, and glanced over their shoulder. Nireba moved beside them, placed a hand on their arm, and led them over to Vittar's side. I looked around the room, trying to judge how the others would move. Yarbe looked miserable, avoiding my eyes. Saffa was stood too close to my side to get a good look at. Dufore's face was a stone, implacable, unreadable.

I have faced mutinies before, often in extreme and desperate circumstances when morale is at its lowest. Soldiers mutiny when the hollowness of the hatred that envelops them is most obvious and they can glimpse through it a world in which their lives are not so cheap and precarious. In other words, mutiny is an act of hope.

I have never seen so hopeless a mutiny as this one, whose leader writhed in agony in the grip of a terrible device without which they would die, at the bottom of an unscalable pit deeper than most oceans, with a planet-devouring superweapon wrapped in only the last vestige of a human being descending outside.

Perhaps for that reason, all of my desperation caught light and flared viciously into anger. I drew my sidearm, throwing off Ermsan's sluggish attempt to stop me, and aimed it at Vittar. "This is mutiny."

How Vittar knew what I had done, I do not know, but they made a noise that might have been the wet ghost of a cruel chuckle. "You really… wanna kill me? I'm the one… who makes the food… remember."

I heard the distinctive, heavy click of someone removing the safety on one of our rifles. I turned my gun on Jieruk, whose hands were tight around their weapon. I could certainly kill them before they could bring the rifle to bear. Vittar was a non-factor and Yarbe unarmed, which left Nireba and Gogi, the latter of whom would certainly hesitate. I was confident I could move fast enough to get inside Nireba's reach unless they reacted instantly and decisively. If Saffa – no, her pistol was on the floor at Nireba's feet where it had fallen from Vittar's grip.

Dufore half-stepped and turned, and as I flinched towards them their rifle came around. They were faster, and I found myself eye-to-eye with the barrel, as close to my face as Saffa had put her pistol in Issor's room. Although their face was stiff with anger, their voice when they spoke trembled. "Don't shoot. No shooting."

Ermsan came around and put themself in my line of fire, though I was now just holding my pistol out uselessly, transfixed by Dufore's betrayal and not looking where I was aiming. "Stop this, sir. We don't have to-"

"Stand aside, Sergeant," I snapped. I felt a heat in the core of my body that I had felt very seldom since arriving in the pit. "There will be no going home. There is no going home."

"It doesn't have to be like this, sir," Ermsan said, pleading. "Let Vittar work on the elevator. We know where they are now. If people want to stay here with them, let them. Why don't we even just move everything over here, there's no reason to stay by the door."

"If we don't do something about the Warmaker there won't be a camp anywhere," I hissed.
"Then why are you dividing us?" Dufore said.

"I-?" I choked in outrage, full-body shaking. "I'm not the one making spurious promises about leaving."

"No, you just lied to us." That was Jieruk, who now also had their rifle on me. "How long have we been here, sir? How long have you known?"

"Centuries," said Vittar, pain turning their whisper to a snarl. "They don't care."

"Shut up!" I shouted back.

As my arm shook again with my exclamation, Ermsan seized my wrist. Their grip was iron, forcing my hand upward, so that even though I set my cystem against theirs I could not get my gun back level. Holding me like that, they took another step around me, right into the middle of everything. "Stop this, all of you. Put up your rifles, soldiers. Don't be stupid."

Slowly, Dufore lowered their rifle. Jieruk did not, until Nireba walked over to them and pushed it down, which they did not resist. I realised that Saffa had slipped behind me, and now stood near Gogi, close to where her weapon lay on the floor. Her eyes were on me, and I shook my head, very slightly. There could be no telling how anyone would react if she made a move, not at that moment.

Ermsan took a long, slow breath, so loud in the quiet that the forest at my flank seemed to breathe with them. To me, they said, "Sir, I share Vittar's view that the Affenstrin isn't here to kill us. Some of the soldiers should stay here and help them tend to our food supply. You take the others and get eyes on the Warmaker, see if you can discern their intent."

In the heat of my shame, I hated Ermsan then, a hate unlike anything in all my soldiering, but I looked around the silent circle. Every eye was on me. "Very well. Who is with me?"

Dufore made a show of safeing their rifle and came to my side. Saffa bent down and took up her weapon, then came to stand by my raised arm. For a moment I thought that would be it, but then Yarbe began, stiffly, to walk across the floor towards us.

"Yarbe?" Vittar said.

They paused beside Ermsan. "I'm sorry, Vittar. I want to understand this place. I'm not finished here yet."

Body language carefully casual, Nireba slung their rifle off their shoulder and turned its butt toward Yarbe, who took it by the strap. They put the weapon across their back, and Ermsan released me to give them space to join us. Then Ermsan walked over to take the spot that had been Yarbe's.

I led Saffa, Yarbe and Dufore back past the forest, through the tape-straggled corridors and downstairs to the atrium. From the entrance, I leaned out gingerly, trying to sight the Affenstrin, but the building faced away from the centre of the pit and its corner blocked the view in that direction. After the blended lighting and tree-root colours of the forest room, the chronium glow of the pit seemed freshly bleak and sterile.

Dufore started to move past me, but I stopped them. "Before we leave, go and grab as much food as you can carry from that first storeroom we found." I turned, nodding in the direction I meant. "You too, Saffa." That would leave Yarbe with free hands to back me up in case of unforeseen circumstances – combat was hardly a relevant concern if we were to face down a Warmaker.

"Is that… necessary, sir?" Yarbe said, tentatively. Their expression was a sad frown, eyes downcast.

"We don't know when we'll next be able to stock up," I said, flatly. I remember thinking, quite clearly, that I was in two minds at once, one angered at yet another act of insubordination, the other resigned to losing even this last remnant of my command. I suppose my distance from myself in that moment must entail that I was in fact in three minds at once. I certainly felt disarrayed enough.

Saffa and Dufore exchanged a look of a kind I associate only with soldiers who have survived long service together, all the way since basic training. Whether they felt any such deep connection or not I cannot tell, but some communication passed between them. Dufore lifted a hand to the strap of the rifle over their shoulder, paused, frowned in my direction, then unslung the weapon and passed it to me.

I had a long moment then to exchange stares with Yarbe. I could not hold it, and went back to scanning such of the sky as I could see. It was as bland and flat as ever. Saffa returned with her arms wrapped around a bundle of ration bars, followed by Dufore who had found a large basin from some cupboard or other and filled it with plastic packages.

We set out. From the end of the building's outer wall, we could finally get eyes on the Warmaker. They were visibly much closer, the wavering glow of their star furnace now discernible to the naked eye. Their wings were fully deployed, longer than their body from lead to trailing edge and wide as a dropship. They might not have killed us yet, but they were undeniably descending at full combat readiness.

Paradoxically, their presence made navigation easier, giving us a clear guidepost to mark the direction of the door by. We could keep to the cover of buildings, taking a bearing only at each alley intersection, and thus at least give ourselves the illusion of being out of sight. It wouldn't shield us from the Warmaker's sensors, which went far beyond the technology available to the Federation or Commonwealth, but the morale benefit was non-trivial.

It was not long before we arrived at the edge of the open area around the chasm and confronted the obvious problem: there, and especially in the plaza by the door, there was absolutely no cover to be had from above at all. I paused there, unsure how to proceed, only for Dufore and then Saffa to walk confidently past me. Then it was all I could do to follow and catch up to them.

Dufore leapt easily down to the edge of the plaza, spilling a few of the food packs from their basin as they landed. Saffa looked at her rope, still fixed in place for her descent but unusable with her arms full of rations. She went right up to the edge, leaned forward a little, and dropped the whole bundle. There was a yelp from below as they rained down around Dufore, and Saffa was actually able to muster a laugh before she set about climbing down after her cargo.

Yarbe and I followed them, and helped them pick up the scattered food. Without discussing the idea, we moved two of the smaller sofas out into the open, between the pillow fort and the area of the plaza where the height map of the pit and steps was still laid out exactly where we'd left it. Dufore and I stripped, cleaned and reassembled the two rifles we'd carried, plus a third taken from our stockpile, and Saffa attended to her own sidearm. Then we sat, looking up at the Warmaker, and waited.

If they noticed our welcoming committee, they gave no indication of doing so. Their course was so directly above us that even with as deep as the pit was, their silhouette still hung against the sky, not the pit walls, and so we had no frame of reference for their proximity. Only the steady, near-imperceptible increase in their apparent size attested that they were approaching at all.

Sitting next to me, Saffa turned her head and said, "You should have told me."

"Told you?"

"Where the food was coming from," she said, quietly, in Commonwealth. "How she was making it."

I remembered bringing her the first beaker of syrup, after we had only been in the pit a couple of days. "You were half-unconscious with thirst."

"You could've explained after." She folded her arms, looked down at her knees. "If it was that or starving… I think I'd still have eaten it."

"I suppose I didn't think that it would bother you." That was not entirely true. It had been Saffa's paranoia about implantation and cystems, though, that had stayed me, not any concern that she might reject Vittar's produce itself. "It's just concentrated tree sap. You must have had syrups like it before."

"Those are sweet, though," she said, then shook her head slightly. "What about the dead guy?"

"I swear on the Crowntree that-"

"Yeah, yeah, you didn't know, I get that, I believe you on that." She frowned, "But she – they were using it to make the food somehow, right?"

"No," said Yarbe, in heavily Federation-accented Commonwealth. They seemed to be struggling to choose their words. "That was just a way of testing if the old rations were safe to eat."

Saffa winced, her lips curling in distaste. "How, though?"

"Well, normally…" Yarbe began, then switched back to Federation, "Normally you'd test with chemical tests that imitate human tissue, right? But Vittar didn't know how to make a test like that, so they tested on actual bodies instead."

"How can you be so calm about it?" Saffa whispered. She looked like she might vomit again. "Wasn't that one of your comrades?"

"I didn't realise they were preserving the body at first." Yarbe avoided meeting anyone's eyes. "Avoided thinking about it, I guess."

Saffa's voice stayed aghast. "It's the preserving that bothers you?"

"Yeah?" Yarbe said, their tone a challenge.

I spoke before the temperature of the discussion could rise. "We believe that bodies should be returned to nature when they're no longer in use," I said, the Commonwealth language making the Federation mantra awkward.

"Not that there's a lot of nature around to return to here," Dufore said, dryly.

"Nothing decays here like it should." Yarbe sounded almost angry about it. "Not the food, not Issor, or the others."

For a moment, Saffa just stared at the two soldiers, mouth open. The Commonwealth are not so fanatical about preserving the remains of their dead as the Alliance, who build elaborate cryomausoleums for their war heroes, but they do grieve differently to us. Sometimes they even burn their dead, which I suppose might have been expedient in the pit but offends me in its wastefulness – bodies are poor fuel and we had not wanted for warmth or light.

"You should still have told me," Saffa said, rallying despite her pallor and turning to me again. "You should have known what she was doing and told me. So I could make an informed decision."

"Sorry," I said, making half a gesture with my hand and giving up. "I suppose Vittar was right. I didn't want to know, so I assumed you would rather not either."

"For someone who seems to hate the idea of parents, you really act like one sometimes," she said, and there was a bitterness in her voice that sounded bigger and older than anything to do with me.

I confess that my first instinct was somewhat to crow over her admission that Commonwealth reproductive systems had flaws, but I suppressed that, choosing my next words carefully. "They hide things from you, then?"

She looked at me as if I had asked the most ridiculous question she had ever heard. "Of course. A child can't handle knowing everything in the universe from day one. You have to fill them in slowly, right?"

That at least seemed reasonable. I shrugged and nodded.

"Problem is, nobody knows exactly how much any given kid can take. Or parent for that matter. A lot of parents can't handle the idea that their kids are ready to grow up, or they don't want to grow up enough themselves."

"Ah," I said, seeing the other side of the pattern that lies at the heart of our hatred for the Commonwealth. "It's that fear that drives them to try to control you."

"They don't-" Saffa began, and stopped. "I wouldn't… put it like that, but maybe you're right." She paused again, attention inward for a second before looking up into my face. "I'd still take it over the… factories or whatever they stamp you out in."

Her tone was not as hostile as her phrasing, but I bristled nonetheless. "Our nurseries are sites of care and education."

"So's my family. You can't tell me nothing ever goes wrong when you're being brought up, right?"

I could not. That stilled the conversation for a long time, until the light from the Affenstrin's star furnace was near enough to play across us like the beam of a distant torch. We could begin to make out the conduits across their body and wings which carried the cosmic-ray pulses to power their weapons and sensors. Then, I think in an effort to distract us, and with considerably more grace than I could have mustered, Dufore began to question Saffa about her parents and her childhood.

That conversation wound on, with Saffa asking in turn about life in our nurseries. The comparisons were not flattering to either side; while Saffa's accounts did little to challenge the beliefs I had about her culture, they did pose some questions about the Federation for which I had no comfortable answers. All the while, the baleful orange light grew stronger and more constant.

Finally the Warmaker hovered at the mouth of the chasm, close enough that we could make out what was left of their face. They paused there a moment, then folded their wings down to a narrower deployment, perhaps only six or seven metres in span. In that form they drifted downward to the plaza, and we rose to meet them.

"Lucians?" They said as they landed and looked at us, the stretched skin around their cheeks nevertheless registering surprise and puzzlement. They folded their wings down further, and we could watch as what had a moment earlier appeared solid metal plates and vanes rolled and folded away into one another, vanishing like legerdemain. When the process finished they were shaped more or less like a human, though their arms were rippling bundles of metallic fibres, not flesh.

They were shorter than I would have expected, certainly shorter than myself, Dufore and Yarbe, though taller than Saffa. What little human skin they had left was pale, freckled across the flattened panes of their face. Fine tubes that looked like glass but bent like plastic wove through their limbs, carrying pulses of amber energy out from the glowing shielding in the centre of their torso.

They raised one hand slowly towards us, palm half-down, half-forward. As one, we tensed, but their voice – as perfectly human and gentle as their body was not – said, in lightly accented Federation "Peace, soldiers. I am a scholar, not a warrior."

Despite everything that had transpired, Saffa and my soldiers deferred to me to speak first. The hatred of soldiers claimed me, though, and what I said was, "And how did the last world you ate receive your scholarship?"

The Affenstrin winced. "If you suffered the terror of my ancestors, I am sorry." They cupped their hands around the star furnace in their chest. "It is true that I bear their sin, but I sated myself on uninhabited rocks ahead of my journey to this system."

Saffa turned to face me, "Even in my time we knew the Affenstrin did not feed on inhabited worlds. I tried to tell you they might be friendly."

"Can a monster know anything of friendship?" I said, then returned my attention to the weapon before us. "You do not deny that you have the capacity to swallow us whole with this moon?"

"Shall I revile you for fear that your kind might implant me with one of your seed?" Although the Affenstrin's face was placid – insofar as I could read it at all – their tone was bleak and tense. Then it softened a little, "You may be sure at least that I will not take this place. A world of chronium would fuel me nothing at all."

Whew. Hopefully that's the longest chapter... two to go! Also this was the chapter where I realised I'm just writing an extended allegory for my life during lockdown/covid >.>''

Chapter 5 is here

Alice Over Zero

@AliceOverZero

Rogue Trans Void Witch

The First Step chapter 4

4. The Warmaker

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