As Sorak, Theriault, and Terrell left the bridge, Nassir watched the pulsar loom large on the main viewscreen. He couldn’t see the relativistic jets of supercharged particles bursting out of it at regular intervals of less than two seconds, but he knew they were there—just as surely as he knew that even the most infinitesimal miscalculation by zh’Firro would see the Sagittarius reduced to ionized gas before any of them had time to realize they were dead.

He clutched his armrest a little tighter and put on his mask of calm.

It’s not just a job, he reminded himself, it’s an adventure.

The Sagittarius touched down with a rough bump, and Ilucci felt the impact rattle his bones.

Commander Terrell sealed the hatch to the main deck and the centenarian Lieutenant Sorak primed the depressurization sequence for the hold, both acting in preparation for the unsealing of the aft exterior hatch. Ilucci had never enjoyed stuffing his portly form inside an environmental suit, one of the least forgiving of all garments. As the landing party’s departure became imminent, the chief engineer tugged at his suit’s inseam, desperate to relieve its overly snug fit and give himself enough slack to walk with a normal stride. He wondered why the pressure gear always seemed cut for people with stick-figure bodies.

Overcome with what he believed was a reasonable degree of paranoia, he rechecked the settings on his suit: Oxygen level: check. Reserve power: check. Radiation barrier at full: check.

Everything was the same as it had been sixty seconds earlier.

He had almost succeeded in calming his frazzled nerves when the aft ramp began to fold down, away from the underside of the ship’s saucer, toward the ground below. As the sliver-thin crack between ramp and bulkhead widened, Ilucci took in the barren sprawl that awaited the landing party: a tenebrous, trackless waste on the dark side of a radiation-bathed disk blasted sterile by millions of years of bombardment by a pulsar.

Terrell led the landing party down the ramp and out into the forbidding darkness. Despite the small size and supposed low density of the statite, its gravity felt close to Terran normal.

Theriault jumped up and landed almost immediately, displacing the regolith beneath her booted feet. Over the shared helmet comm channel, Ilucci heard her say, “Artificial gravity?”

“That’d be my guess,” he said. “If it’s consistent, we might be able to use the rovers.”

Sorak stepped away from the team and moved a few strides beyond the sheltering overhang of the Sagittarius’ saucer. Ilucci, Theriault, and Terrell followed him. Standing in the open, Ilucci turned in a slow circle, observing his surroundings.

The graceful off-white form of the Sagittarius was veiled in shadow because its running lights were off. Over a hundred kilometers away in every direction, but still clearly visible thanks to the absence of an atmosphere to obscure the view with haze, the horizon curved upward by the slightest degree, making Ilucci hyperaware that they were on the shallowly concave side of the circular statite. Beneath that close horizon, he knew, light sails fanned around the statite’s edge, transforming the pulsar’s regular bursts of lethal energy into power and lift. Overhead, the stars burned with cold, steady fires, offering minimal illumination and no warmth.

He noticed that the others all were facing in the same direction. Turning himself toward the same bearing, he saw why.

An enormous structure stood several kilometers away, at the apparent center of the statite. It looked like a ruptured blister, a gigantic splashing droplet of molten black glass frozen in time. Its shapes and protrusions made it seem simultaneously biological and mechanical. The simple act of looking upon it, even from this distance, filled Ilucci with a cold dread. Everything about the construct made him want to retreat inside the ship; the last thing he wanted to do was move closer to it. Which made it very easy for him to predict what Terrell’s next order would be.

“Master Chief, let’s power up the rovers and head over to that structure, on the double.”

“Aye, sir,” Ilucci said, jogging back up the ramp and inside the ship’s cargo hold, in a hurry not to comply but to turn his back on the biomechanoid horror dominating the bleak nightscape. He took his time powering up one of the two terrestrial rovers, a pair of off-white, six-wheeled all-terrain vehicles optimized for moving personnel but powerful enough to haul cargo. Stenciled on the back panel of each rover was its nickname. “Roxy” was the faster of the two, but “Ziggy” had proved on many occasions to be more maneuverable, particularly at speed or in tight quarters. Roxy started up with no difficulty, and Ilucci hopped behind the controls and guided it in reverse down the ramp. A quick jerk of the wheel and a tap on the brakes, and he spun it to a halt beside the landing party, facing the alien structure. He hooked his gloved thumb over his shoulder at the empty seats. “Meter’s runnin’. Hop in.”

Terrell took the front passenger seat. Sorak sat behind Ilucci, and Theriault climbed into the seat behind Terrell’s. All four of them took a moment to secure their safety straps, and Ilucci gave the rover’s protective roll cage a firm tug to make certain it was secure. “And away we go.” Against his better judgment and natural instincts, he stepped on the accelerator and sped the landing party toward the obsidian nightmare ahead.

The drive across the statite’s surface was eerily silent. No one spoke; they all simply stared at their destination. The rover’s electric motor was quiet even in terrestrial settings, but in an airless environment such as this, it made no sound at all. No motor hum, and almost no appreciable vibration of acceleration. All that Ilucci heard during the drive to the structure was his own shallow breathing, hot and close inside his helmet. He watched the Sagittarius grow steadily more distant in the rover’s side-view mirror.

As they neared to within a hundred meters of the structure, its details became clear and all the more terrifying. It was almost obscenely black. A wall ten meters high ringed its base, and from it a dozen looming towers rose at thirty-degree intervals and curled inward toward its center, like the retracting legs of a burning insect. Every square centimeter of its exterior that Ilucci could see was either mirror-perfect, fissured with cracks, or ringed with tubes that made him think of veins. Small tendrils of violet energy crept up the ebon talon-towers, and when the creepers met at the apex, they coalesced into bolts of blue lightning that stabbed down into the heart of the machine. The design was strongly reminiscent of the Shedai-built Conduits that Operation Vanguard had uncovered throughout the Taurus Reach, but this was clearly the product of a different culture wielding a less organic technology than the Shedai’s.

Terrell nudged Ilucci and pointed to the right. His voice crackled softly over the helmet comm. “Circle its perimeter, Chief. Let’s find an entrance.”

“Copy that, sir.” Ilucci steered right, off their collision course, and followed the curve of the structure. Within a minute it became obvious that the stadium-sized facility was round and highly symmetrical in its design.

They were two-thirds of the way around the wall when Sorak pointed at a subtle variation in the shadows-on-darkness surface of the wall. “There. That looks like an opening.”

“All right,” Terrell said. “Chief, take us in. Sorak, set your phaser for heavy stun and stand by to scout the entrance.”

Ilucci drove the rover toward the wall and slowed to a gradual halt less than ten meters from the opening. Sorak freed himself from his safety harness, leapt from the rover, and dashed forward until he was beside the entrance. He peeked around the corner, then stole into the shadows with his phaser level and aimed straight ahead. Darkness swallowed him in seconds.