With as much pain as he was in, Skinner knew he was still alive.

He didn’t want to risk opening his eyes – they probably hurt too. He couldn’t feel the comforting weight of his prosthetic arm, which had probably come off during the crash down the cliffside, so he slowly rubbed his face with his right hand, a moan escaping his lips when his fingers touched only the polyform helmet. He slowly shook his head before opening his eyes and trying to take stock of his surroundings.

The inside of his polyform helmet was glowing red from all the alerts blinking across his visor… or what was left of it. Cracks crawled across his face, distorting his vision as he tried to look around. With a pained groan, he reached up and pulled the helmet off, tossing it aside and letting his head rest back on the floor behind him.

From what he could tell, he was still inside the dropship, although it was no longer upright. He was sprawled across the ceiling, uncomfortably strewn amidst piles of debris and supplies. Orange light lit the area, the glow emanating from the fires that burned up near the front of the ship. The craft had suffered heavy damage on its way down the cliffside, and Skinner knew he had to get moving. He wiped at his face for a moment before trying to sit up. His prosthetic arm had, once again, come free of its socket. It hung limply inside the suit and he fumbled with it until he managed to get it reattached. He flexed the fingers, testing it out, before looking around the interior of the crashed dropship.

Something grabbed him from behind and Skinner immediately panicked, letting out a startled yell and trying to squirm free of his attacker. “Be still, fool!” Syyla hissed, dragging him backwards away from his resting place. “You cannot lie here like a corpse. We need to move.”

“Move where?” Skinner asked, shoving her hands off his shoulders and pushing himself up. He picked up his ruined helmet, extracting Lumos’ chip and slipping it into one of the pouches on his thigh. There was no way he was leaving her behind. “How far down did we fall?”

“Far,” Syyla said, looking up. Skinner followed her gaze and felt his heart drop. She wasn’t exaggerating – not in the slightest. He couldn’t even see the upper canopy of the trees anymore… nor could he see the sky or the colony above them. Everything around them was absolutely dark, lit only by the burning remnants of the dropship. Beyond that, everything was completely dark. He could faintly make out some of the massive tree trunks but that was it.

Skinner tried his emergency distress beacon. It blipped once and then failed, displaying an error message. Code 22 – unable to triangulate. The trees were blocking his location and the beacon’s attempts to relay it out into space weren’t enough to pierce the thick foliage. He sighed, putting his hands on his hips and looking around. “See, this is why I don’t work with Senate Hunters,” he said. “I could be halfway to Debretti right now to pick up another job, but nooooo…” he sighed and slumped over. “Now I’m gonna die in a forest. On Grimmak…”

Syyla shoved something into his hands. It was the rifle Nehuasta had given him earlier. “Stop your whimpering, human,” she said.

Skinner ejected a cartridge from the rifle before arming it with a new one. He wanted to see if Lumos could plot a course out of this hellhole, but with his helmet damaged he had no way of communicating with her. He was on his own. He sighed again and ran his prosthetic through his hair, looking around. “First things first, we need light,” he said. “And supplies. Did you rescue anything more useful than me from the dropship?”

“Doesn’t seem difficult,” she said with a snort, “but yes.” Syyla gestured towards a pile of supplies she’d dragged out of the burning wreck. It wasn’t much – some emergency rations and a few tools – but it was better than nothing.

Skinner dug through the supplies, putting together a small survival pack. He took slow, deep breaths to calm himself down – this was far from the worst situation he’d found himself in. Trying to plunder a shipwreck on Sovereign had been way worse than this. He needed to stay calm and to think rationally. Panicked, disparate thoughts were going to get him killed. Normally Lumos was the one who kept him calm and level-headed but he didn’t have her right now. He threw a survival kit to Syyla before picking up another one and slinging it over his shoulder. “We can’t stay here,” he said, forcing his heart rate to remain steady. “Light like this will attract attention, probably from things we don’t want. A forest like this is bound to have predators.”

As if to punctuate his statement, something growled in the distant darkness. Skinner picked up an emergency flare, looking down at it and weighing his options. He wanted to light it so he’d have something in the oppressive darkness, but it would make them easy targets. Syyla looked in the direction of the growl before narrowing her eyes. “These woods are not safe. This is where they were mining. All sorts of things were stirred up here before they stopped.”

“Stopped?” Skinner asked, tipping his head. “Why did they stop?”

Syyla shrugged. “I’m a slave,” she said. “I do not know such things.”

Skinner narrowed his eyes. “But you speak multiple languages,” he said. “I thought you only spoke Heil. You’re definitely smarter than you want me to think.”

“I was panicked,” she hissed. “Forgive me for slipping into my native tongue!”

The growl echoed from the forest again, this time closer. Skinner tensed up, looking into the darkness for any sign of what made the ominous sound. “We can discuss this later,” he said. “We need to move.” The growl came again, this time much closer and above them. It sounded like something was clinging to the rock face they had tumbled down. Skinner could hear the sound of claws against the stone. “Oh yeah. Definitely gonna have to move.”

Without waiting for Syyla, he looked into the forest and started running. The Heil waited perhaps a fraction of a second before pursuing him, their feet crunching through the fallen leaves and branches as they ran. “Where are we going? The colony is above us!” she yelled.

“A-yup,” Skinner said as he cracked the emergency flare. He didn’t want to fall over a log or a rock and end up food for whatever was growling in the darkness. “And we’re never gonna get there if we end up in the belly of a beast, now will we?”

Syyla caught up to him, her longer legs propelling her forward with far greater velocity. “Listen! This is the way to the dig site! We can’t go there – it’s dangerous!”

“Wait, dig site?” Skinner said, grinding to a halt. “It’s this close?”

She stopped, looking back at him in the light of the emergency flare. “Wait,” she said hesitantly, “you… you’re not… why are you here?”

“What?” Skinner asked, utterly perplexed. “I’m—we’re—we’re answering the distress beacon from the colony!” he finally stammered out.

Syyla blinked owlishly at him. “So… you’re—you’re not—never mind,” she grunted in exasperation. “The colony was illegally mining out of an old ruin they found down here.”

“Mining what?” Skinner asked as the growl echoed through the woods again. Both of them looked in the direction of the sound before taking off running again.

Syyla let out a growl. “Do you always ask this many questions when you’re about to die?” she snapped. “Or is today just a special occasion?”

“Special occasion,” Skinner retorted, putting on a burst of speed and chasing the Heil through the forest. “I’m not usually in these situations.”

Ahead, Skinner could see a light glowing in the forest. It wasn’t an organic light, like the bioluminescent mushrooms of Chindrus. It was definitely synthetic – like a floodlight. They changed their pace and ran towards it, Skinner’s ears picking up the sound of something large crashing through the forest behind them. His lungs burned in his chest as he kept running, bursting out of the trees and into an artificial clearing.

The moment they had cleared the treeline and rushed into the glare of the floodlights, Skinner chanced a look behind him. The sound of their pursuer had stopped, the growls changing into a frustrated keening noise. At the edge of the light, he could see the behemoth shape of what looked like a millipede, each section the size of a small house, trundling away through the darkness. “God in heaven,” he muttered, “this is why I hate forests.”

Syyla was busy examining the floodlights… or rather, what they were pointing at. Skinner finally tore his eyes away from the massive insect and followed her gaze. The lights had been erected in a semicircle to shine down into a massive hole in the forest floor. Trees and grass had been cleared away to make room for the heavy machinery it would have taken to dig it.

Skinner edged his way closer to the side of the hole, peering down into the darkness. It wasn’t as deep as he’d expected. Some dramatic part of him had expected it to be so deep he couldn’t see the bottom. Instead, he was mildly surprised to see that it only went down about five-hundred feet. Catwalks, scaffolding and makeshift elevators spidered down the sides of the hole and there were more floodlights at the bottom. They were focused on something.

One side of the shaft had been partially dug away to reveal a set of bone-white ruins. Skinner’s first impression was that they belonged to the enigmatic Old Race that had walked the universe trillions of years ago. They were known for their eerie, skeletal structures that sprawled across, under and through some of the planets he’d been on. A closer examination immediately proved his assumption incorrect.

Old Race ruins, by experience, consisted of a singular domed structure that acted as an entrance. Much of the structures were usually underground—with a few exceptions—but this didn’t fit the bill. The excavated structure had obviously been underground for a very long time; long enough to begin becoming part of the geological strata surrounding it. While made from a similar white material to the Old Race ruins, the shape was all wrong. This one looked brutal compared to the smooth contours and sloping domes Skinner had seen on Altar or Sovereign.

“What, exactly, is that?” Skinner asked, tipping his head curiously. “That doesn’t look like—”

“It’s not,” Syyla said as she looked down at it. “That’s what they were mining for.” She didn’t wait another moment before beginning her descent down the catwalks, taking the stairs two at a time.

“H-hey! Wait for me,” Skinner said, taking off after her. “Don’t leave me up here with all these—well—whatever that thing was in the woods.”

Syyla either didn’t hear him or was too focused to care. She was all but leaping down the stairs until she reached the ground level, walking over and standing in front of the excavated ruins. She appraised them cautiously, standing in front of an opening that yawned like the cavernous maw of an ancient predator. Skinner caught up with her a moment later, standing slightly behind her as he looked over her shoulder at the structure. “You know a bit about this, then?” he asked.

“I was enslaved and forced to help with the mining efforts,” she said. “This is my first time here in person, but I saw all the things they got out. Artifacts. Relics. Black market bait. The financiers of this place were paying top dollar for them.”

Skinner shivered. Something about the ruins seemed to ring a bell in his mind. The cube-like structures towered over him, forming a rough arch with several more alcoves off to either side. Conduits of blue light pulsed like the heartbeat of a living thing as he watched. Syyla walked over to them and frowned, reaching out as if to touch them before deciding better of it. “From what I heard, though, this place was inert. Dead.”

“It doesn’t look dead to me,” Skinner said. “And that’s the problem. We should be finding a way to send a distress signal out of these woods, not delving into this.”

Syyla shrugged. “You can stay out here and keep watch,” she said. “I’m going in. There might be some equipment in there we can use.”

Skinner almost agreed with her until he heard a growl from the top of the hole. While that millipede creature hadn’t gotten bold enough to enter the light yet, the sound set his teeth on edge and lifted goosebumps across his arm. “There’s safety in numbers,” he said, “and I have a gun.”

“Can you shoot it?” Syyla asked, “Or am I going to be a casualty of your haphazard firing?”

Skinner sneered at her. “I can shoot it,” he said. “I’m better with pistols but I haven’t survived this long by accident.”

“We shall see,” Syyla said. “I’m not hauling your corpse out. Let’s go.” She didn’t wait for him to respond before striding forward into the ruins.

Skinner sighed dejectedly, looking up at the top of the hole again. “I should never have let that Hunter convince me this was safe,” he said before following her. Normally he wouldn’t have felt this uneasy – Lumos made wreck diving and ruin exploration fairly easy. Without her, he was trusting his own instincts…

…and Syyla, for what it was worth.