“What is that noise?” Asked Ithaca. They had been walking, descending lower and further under the mountain, for two full days since leaving the stricken lift shaft. Moisture dripped from the ceiling constantly, making the air heavy with humidity and the bare stone floor slick underfoot. They had followed the holographic map each of the few times a fork had appeared in the path, and according to Ipra, they had turned first back towards the direction of the lift shaft, and were now heading away from it once more.

“What noise?” Asked Dannal, working his jaw in an attempt to make his ears pop. The air pressure had been going up on occasion as they descended, and with the added humidity, it was hard to breathe some of the time.

 “Can’t you hear it?” Ithaca asked, turning her head this way and that, trying to catch the location and failing.

“Hear it? I think I can feel it.” Said Oldra, placing a hand against one of the damp walls. “Like, a low constant grinding.”

“That’s it.” Said Ithaca, opening her hand and looking at the map. “I wish this had a key or something, it’s hard to know what these symbols mean until you stumble onto where it’s taking you.”

The others grumbled their agreement. Since leaving the lift, they’d passed through three places on the map with similar markings as the area ahead. The first had been an open crevasse that seemed to drop further away below than even the lift shaft had done, where Dannal had almost lost his footing as they scaled around it. The second had been a near vertical drop to the rest of the path in a cavern full of jagged stalactites, where Oldra had cut the back of her arm as she negotiated the drop. The third, which they had approached with trepidation, had turned out to be a vast crystal cavern where their dim torches found their light reflected and magnified to the point where just one was needed to illuminate their path.

All three had been marked with odd collections of letters and shapes on the map, and the chamber that they were starting to approach was no different. At least, at first it was no different. As time passed, the chamber filled more and more of the hologram, becoming a vast cavernous space a handful of turns in the path ahead. To add to the confusion, the sound was getting progressively louder the closer they got.

“A landslide?” Dannal suggested, as he helped Oldra over a slumped section of the cavern wall that almost blocked the path.

“That continues for three hours without easing off at all?” Asked Ipra, who looked as grim as Ithaca had ever seen her. 

They passed another turn, and the noise level increased, almost beyond the point of being able to hear each other. They paused, Ithaca fishing for earpieces in her bag and handing them out. “I thought we might of needed these if someone snored.” She said with a smirk, and the others chuckled, even if they could bareilly hear her.

It took another hour to get to the cavern ahead, and the insanity they found within it. They turned the last corner, and stepped onto a much wider section of path. By this point, the noise was so loud it was a presence of pressure rather than sound. It shook their bodies constantly, making their bones and muscles ache from the bombardment of force. But that was ignored at first, as they looked out in awe and confusion.

Conveyor belts, thousands of metres across, rumbled constantly under a vast ceiling of stone, roaring either side of the four and upwards into darkness. They were loaded with rock, huge amounts, ground to different sizes, from almost dust to boulders big as a house. In the distance, more conveyors poured more rock onto the main pair, a constant tipping of rock moving at only a few metres an hour, but flowing endlessly out of the darkness towards the base of the mountain.

With the ground slick still with moisture, they stepped out onto the path. It was like walking into the hub of some vast transit junction, but more massive than anything Ithaca could ever recall hearing about. The ground vibrated gently, nothing near as hard as the constant sound suggested should be the case.

“What do you think this is all for?” Shouted Ithaca, but the others ignored her. She shouted again, Ipra spotting she was talking and tapping the others on the shoulder. Ithaca opened her mouth to shout again, when something changed. The air suddenly felt still, and she realised that the conveyors had all stopped. A few in the distance seemed to still be working but the nearest ones had stopped their endless rattle.

Ithaca gently reached up to her ears, when Dannal put a hand on her wrist, shaking his head. They waited a few moments, but the rattle didn’t return. An orange light started to strobe through the cavern, and Dannal nodded. “Looks like what ever this mechanism does, it’s moving on to another process.” He said, as they others lowered their ear protectors.

A human voice saying something that the four couldn’t understand echoed around the cavern before, with a deep groan, something above and beyond the ends of the conveyors started to move. The group moved on, glancing back to see if they could detect what was happening now every so often.

“Look, there!” Said Oldra, looking back over he shoulder once they were a few kilometres away. They followed her gaze up into the base of the mountain. Two spinning lights could be seen, tiny against the vastness of the mountain’s root, their light glinting off a vast metal plate. As they watched, it crawled upwards, closing like a vast jaw, metal teeth against the rock gums of the mountain. With a boom that was felt seconds after they closed, the vast shutters slammed home. The orange lights spun for a few more moments, then went out, replaced with a few points of flashing red light in the distance.

“We should keep going-” started Ipra, when the voice came back, its instructions echoing around the vast chamber. 

“What could it possibly be doing now?” Asked Oldra, before a deep, base whine started, and a grinding noise echoed towards them from the mountain, booming across the vast cavern as some other process began, hidden from their view by the metal shutters.

“Let’s go.” Said Dannal, turning to continue down the path between the vast conveyors, the others following him. “Maybe we’ll find somewhere to sleep just beyond the cavern.”

By the time the four started to feel weary, they were still deep within the vast cavern. They had passed more conveyors, some coming from above, others from below, all static while whatever process was going on behind them worked. In the end, they pulled themselves up onto a gantry next to one of the bigger conveyors, and set up camp for the third time since leaving Dannal’s home. 

It was drier on the gantry than on the floor, and whatever process muffled the conveyors shaking from reaching the ground worked back the other way, so the shaking of the current process didn’t keep them awake. Within minutes of turning off the lantern, even Ithaca was asleep.

Her eyes snapped open some time later. How much later, she didn’t know. She paused, wondering what had woken her. She still felt tired, she didn’t feel any of the constant dripping on her and she didn’t need to excuse herself. As she lay there, going through the reasons to get up, she heard it, a rhythmic thudding sound, growing slowly louder. She placed her hand over the person next to her, and shook them awake gently.

Dannal gave a soft groan, and Ithaca hushed him into silence. A soft glow was building somewhere beyond their camp, and she slid herself to the edge, looking over, Dannal following her.

“Why did you wake me up?” He asked, but she said nothing, just peering into the darkness until she could see where the light was coming from. She pointed, and he followed her finger. He almost swallowed his tongue when he saw them.

Three armoured figures were striding down the passageway they had been using, the tallest of the three large figures holding a lamp of some description high over their head, a huge tower shield in the other hand. The next two figures were just as heavily armoured and armed, but nothing near as massive as the female Otricori that led the party.

“Those are the three that I saw that day at the tube station.” Ithaca said quietly. Dannal’s eyebrows shot up in shock, and he shuffled back as the three grew closer to their location, their heavy footsteps echoing loud enough now to drown out even the constant distant grinding.

Ithaca stayed where she was, watching in horror as they grew closer, until something grabbed her feet and gently pulled her back from the edge. Dannal pressed his fingers to his lips, letting go of her legs as the light reached where she had been a few moments earlier, then passed their camp, echoing away into the distance. Ithaca and Dannal waited until the light and thud of the trio had faded all together before either of them spoke.

“What the hells are they doing down here?” Asked Ithaca, her heart thundering softly in her chest. “HOW are they down here?”

“Same way we are?” Suggested Dannal. “And why, maybe for the same reason they were at your apartment that day. Maybe they’re looking for that as well.” He said, nodding at the watch. Ithaca ran her fingers over it, wondering how right he could be.

Neither of them slept for the rest of what they assumed to be night, in case the three warrior creatures came back. Eventually, with a loud yawn, Oldra woke up, stretching. “Remarkably quiet night, that.” She said with a smile.

Over breakfast Ithaca and Dannal explained what they had seen the night before, the three warriors passing so close to where they’d slept, and Dannal repeated his theory for why they were there.

“I think we are being paranoid.” Said Ipra after they took down their camp. “To have walked this far looking for us is unlikely.”

“Maybe there’s something further along they’re heading to?” Said Oldra, looking up at the cavern roof. “I wonder where we are.” 

“Under Lake Ornkara.” Said Ipra, tossing her bag down from the gantry to Dannal, who caught it and placed it next to Oldra’s. “There is nothing for over a hundred and fifty kilometres in that direction above us.”

“What about beneath?” suggested Ithaca, as Oldra clambered down to join them. “We’re heading down after, something, so maybe they are too!”

“Look, there is NO way that anyone is coming down here by accident.” Said Dannal, handing Oldra her bag. “Anyone that’s down here is probably looking for us. Not that I think for a minute anyone could easily find us down here.”

As he leaned over to pick up Ipra’s bag to pass to her, something sparked off the support for the conveyor they’d been standing next to. Their heads snapped around as another shot whipped past them, clattering into the darkness under another conveyor.

“Ithaca!” Someone bellowed from the dark. “Give me the watch and we won’t kill you!”

“Oh crap!” Said Oldra. “It’s Notrotu! They’ve caught up!”