The sun was already beginning to set when Kurt pulled into the parking lot of a gas station at the foot of the mountain. He’d already sent his nephew back to whatever the cushy executives of the foundation did, and it wasn’t like he had a choice. Some matters were too important to share with family, after all. Some things ran much deeper.

He made sure to lock his car and walked to the pharmacy, the light on its shopfront sign seeming brighter in the dusk. There was a chime as he pushed the door in and stepped into the cool interior that smelled like some cocktail of different pills and chemicals that had been used to clean the floor; he crinkled his nose and went up to the glass counter, currently unoccupied.

“I’ll be right with you!” The voice came through the opened door into the storage in the back.

“No rush!” Kurt called back, rifling through a stack of breath mints, picking out an orange-flavoured packet and laying it on the countertop. He turned around, facing the wall of assorted unrestricted pharmaceutical products. He picked out a hand cream and a small bottle of a more delicate lotion for the face, placing them next to the mints.

The pharmacist emerged from the back, a stocky, overweight man with a balding head and a pair of rectangular glasses. “Can I help you with anything else?”

“Yeah, uh…do you have any Argentex?”

“What for?”

“It’s preventative. Apparently lots of silver deposits in the area. You know how digging is, stuff gets into the air.”

“Dig site?” The pharmacist tapped at his computer, and opened the glass door on the other side of the counter, grabbing the first box out of an otherwise pristine pack. “How many?”

“I’ll take two just in case. Better safe than sorry.”

He placed them on the counter. “Not every day someone buys that.”

Kurt chuckled. “Can I get a bit of that uh…what was the eyedrop that helps with contacts again?”

The pharmacist shrugged. “There’s a whole bunch of them. You got them on?”

Kurt reached into a pocket behind himself, playing up trying to find something, and then produced a dropper bottle. “Here, this.”

The pharmacist squinted. “That’s a bit unusual.”

“Do you have a stock?”

“I’ll have to check in the back…” He tapped at the computer again. “Don’t think I can sell you this one with a prescription though.”

“I have one.” He navigated to an image on his phone, putting it on the counter. “The doctor said I was allergic to some of the other ones.”

“Huh. First time for everything. I’ll just be a sec.” He went back into the storeroom.

Kurt paced in place, and glanced back towards his car.

A shape was moving in the dark at the end of the lot.

He pushed the pharmacy door open and took half a step out, trying to get a better look. The thing had disappeared right as it slipped behind the car next to his, so he kept staring, holding his breath.

It came out from the other side of a large truck. A large, tubby mackerel tabby with its yellow eyes glinting against the light from the pharmacy. Probably fed and spoiled by the station attendants.

He sighed, and turned back to the counter.

The pharmacist was back. “Will that be all?”

“Yeah, that’s all.” He rummaged in his code and slid in some credit chips.

“You’re from offworld?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Never seen a local being that worried about their car. Even the city boys know it’s safe out here.”

“Yeah, you got me. I was on Turpentine most of the year. This order must be really strange for you.”

“Yeah, no kidding. What have they got in the smog over the-”

Kurt took out another handful of higher-value credit chips and held them at the edge of the countertop. Almost double of what he’d given Hanlon. “You’re wired into the city’s distribution system, right?”

The pharmacist’s eyes lingered on the extra chips, and then met Kurt’s. “I’m not sure there’s anything else I can get you help with.”

Kurt kept his hand on the addition. “All I need is a name. Anybody who bought those same drugs. Then all this is yours.”

Slowly, the pharmacist turned to his terminal and began tapping away. After a minute of peering at the screen, he turned back. “Woud you like a physical bill?”

“For record-keeping, sure.”

His purchase was registered with a cashier, and the list of items was printed after his first set of chips had been sorted into the register. Then a second slip came out, containing a completely different purchase. The pharmacist held them together and handed it to him.

Kurt let go of the extra money and gathered up his products. “You can keep the change,” he said, and shouldered his way out of the shop. Before he even made it off the sidewalk in front of the pharmacy, he’d already peeked at the date on the second slip in the light of the overhead sign.

Two days ago. He wasn’t going to run out any time soon.

Kurt opened the driver’s side door and tossed his haul into the passenger’s seat, before climbing in himself and starting the car up. The engine rumbled through the seat, and as the dashboard lights came on, he suddenly realised he was no longer alone. His eyes carefully crawled along the breadth of the rearview mirror, finding the figure sat in the back. “You always try to scare the shit out of people like this?”

“How is the operation?” It sounded like a woman.

Kurt knew better. “We only just found a proper way in. I had a feeling one of you would turn up sooner or later.”

“It’s of great interest.”

“Let me guess, the war?”

“Among other things.” She leaned back in the seat.

Kurt casually put his seatbelt on and peeled out of the parking lot, turning onto the road back towards the city. “Then list your demands. I’ve been waiting to hear back from your people for weeks.”

“We’ve been…occupied.”

Kurt took the ramp up onto the start of a well-lit highway. He could see his passenger was a pale, blonde woman with her hair tied back neatly in a bun. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“There are no demands. Yet.”

“Are you coming tomorrow? See it all for yourself, since clearly you don’t trust me.”

“I’ll expect a tour.”

“Deal. I was preparing one anyway. All the experts get to be the first ones to see the interior.”

“Let’s not turn this into any more of a publicised shitshow, Armitage,” she said. “Should I expect the other one?”

“Not yet. I’m working on it, but at this point I doubt there’s anything he can do to us.”

“You better hope you’re right about that.”

“I said I’m working on it.”

No reply.

He glanced in the mirror. The woman had vanished into thin air. “Fucking Stateship,” he mumbled, and sped up.

Now that Alexa thought about it, it had been forever since she’d seen Hecate from that high up. She had a distinct memory from the beginning of the last two decades of staring out the viewport of a transport pod moving down the cables of the space elevator, seeing the sprawl for the first time and being completely star-struck. For a little girl born on Grailis - tried as she may, she could no longer picture what her former distant home had looked like - it had been magical. Even more magical was just how much the people smiled, and how seemingly convenient everything was.

And now, at 23, her opinion of Hecate had changed so much it was unrecognisable. Not that any of those things she believed had been false, but as she often told Aerin back during their university years, there was always a cost, visible or otherwise. It had all come spilling out again last night to the same girl she’d always shared it with, and she’d been given the same reassurances.

It's folly to control everything and try to make them good. That was all good and well.

But Alexa’s affliction had evolved. She had no way of knowing if Aerin had been anywhere near the action on the other side of the core, but here, the effects were subdued. It was the invisible hand of the Stateship that curated and conserved their views of the war, and while there were an abundance of channels to see otherwise, most people simply didn’t bother. It was just easier to go about your day and keep Hecate running as it always had. Like clockwork.

The VTOL jumpcraft shifted, beginning its descent towards the ridge of the northern Vestin. It sliced through the fluffy white clouds like a hot knife, revealing the dig site through the window in the bottom of the vehicle, between Alexa and Aerin. Even if they couldn’t see past the gigantic tarps that shielded the pit and the workers from the brutal sun and rain, the scale of the whole thing was insane. It was like one of those state-backed, year-long efforts to unveil some ancient ziggurat on Earth that she had seen rerunning on the local history network, and yet somehow even bigger. Large automated drone platforms were constantly leaving the site with truckloads of rock and dirt, shipping them off to parts unknown, while their brethren returned with empty beds to be filled once again. The fences were topped with curls of barbed wire and as they got even closer, men with assault rifles and dogs, sectioning off each part of the perimeter. Overlooking them from inside the dig site were a pair of concrete watchtowers armed with floodlights that remained unused in the daytime, not at each corner of the area.

“Hey,” Aerin said, drawing her attention back up from the floor and the mountain got closer and closer. “It’ll be fine.”

“That’s a lot of guns.”

“Yeah, but they’re here for our safety. They’re not gonna do anything unless you try to steal from the dig.”

Alexa said nothing to that, just leaning back in her seat to wait for the jolt of their landing. Less than a minute later, the jumpcraft settled on the middle of the mountain road, the same way it had parked right on the street outside her house that morning.

When the doors of the craft opened and her safety belt unlatched itself and left, the noise of the rotors hit her once again. It was bad enough that she heard the thing coming from all the way inside the downstairs bathroom, but being directly next to the giant propellers was almost unbearable. She sprinted as quickly as she could towards the opening gates, shielding her face from the dust being kicked up around them. The noise of the machine faded as it lifted back off, slowly replaced by the sound of Aerin laughing seeping through.

Aerin waved as Kurt came into view.

Gone was his clean white suit, replaced by a rugged bomber jacket with a fur-padded collar and dark cargo trousers. He waved them towards him. “We’re moving up the schedule!”

“What’s the rush?” Aerin put her hands on her hips.

“Trying to beat an inspector getting here. I don’t like putting myself in handcuffs just to make someone else more comfortable.” He lowered his aviators. “And here I thought you weren’t interested.”

Alexa crossed her arms as she matched his gaze. “I gave it a bit more thought. Couldn’t hurt to come.”

“Well I’ll appreciate your expertise either way, Miss Romilly. I think Mr. Bloom is by the barracks, he’ll have the non-disclosure for you.”

“I’m not signing anything.”

Kurt turned to Aerin. “Really now?”

“It won’t be a problem,” Aerin said. “I think it’s more important she sees what’s down there. Then she can decide.”

Alexa had already begun wandering off, past the crew of workers riding the four-legged supply automatons up the slope, inching closer and closer to the edge of the hole. A rickety lift had been drilled into the wall of the pit, but she ignored it to get a better look at what was below.

Aside from what she assumed was the hardened tip of the craft, the hull was made from a series of interlocking metal plates not too dissimilar to a modern spaceship, except the surface was covered in little damage marks, each created by an individual collision with tiny rocks and debris out in space. Three thousand years. It simply didn’t make sense. She recognised the hull material patterning, the egg shape of the craft reminiscent of a heavy-duty invasion lander, the beginnings of the bottom thrusters coming into view from under the ground.

And then there was the gash. The ship had yet to be freed from its earthly prison, but a breach in the hull had been revealed, packed with dirt, with its own dedicated team of workers carefully chipping away. There was a hovering drone with a camera buzzing around, and once in a while, it would stop near the crack and document the progress and whatever small objects were stuck in the soil.

Aerin placed a hand on her shoulder. “We’re going down.” She tilted her head towards the elevator platform built into the lip of the pit, which Kurt was already on.

Alexa silently walked on, grabbing the railing and looking down. Most of the work around what looked like an exposed airlock, dwarfed by the visible parts of the ship, had ceased, the labourers replaced instead by a small contingent of armed men in neat black uniforms and berets, each one sporting a transparent domed mask over their face. A similar mask was thrust into her hands by Kurt, who wordlessly stared out over at the ship as the lift began to descend.

Alexa pulled the mask over her own face, checking for the canister at her chin, and held on as the rickety platform rumbled down to the very bottom. The ground here was still soaked from yesterday’s rain, slowing the dig, but the concrete buttresses installed in the pit itself stopped the walls from collapsing in.

One of the uniformed men saluted Kurt as he stepped off, and he gave it a dismissive wave. “Girls, this is the new head of security, Eric Suthers. If you see something, he’s the one to tell.”

Suthers get them a curt nod, his bright blue eyes almost glowing in the shade of the tarps above. “Just stay behind my men and we’ll be fine.”

Alexa turned to look at Aerin, who had also put on a mask, then back to Kurt. “You said it’s three thousand years old. Why do we need armed security?”

“In my experience, Miss Romilly, plenty of things live longer than that.” He nodded at Suthers.”

“Formation!” Suthers shouted, causing his men to arrange themselves in front of Kurt and the two girls, submachine guns at the ready. He himself took up the rear. “Do it,” he said into his wrist-comm.

Stone ground on stone. The noise made the whole mountain around them vibrate, as if the whole ship was going to blast off into the sky it had landed from. But a moment passed, and the shaking was gone, for a tiny little green light to come on next to the airlock. Its metal groaned as the two halves of the ancient seal struggled to spin apart, folding into the hull bit by bit and leaving a black void into the inside of the ship.

Alexa felt her lips dry out.

As a unit, they began moving, each step getting them closer and closer to that abyss.