Hellsky (Hunter-Killer #3)

Chapter 29 - Echoes

Lanto's felt like his whole skull was starting to ache. His eyes had been straining over the logs from the Nautilus for days now, looking for signs of... he wasn't even sure what. Anything that might match up with the discoveries being made beneath the vast warrens of the Scraegar Labyrinth.

So far, they had a handful of anomalies logged from the Nautlius' scans of the planet on its initial approach, hundreds of years ago, but nothing that indicated the existence of any other intelligent life – let alone the Crawlers and their mysterious masters. He expanded the search, examining the initial scans of Rychter, back from Old Earth – a time and place that was a thousand years and hundreds of billions of miles from the ground beneath his feet.

But now the latest reports from the team at the Scraegar Labyrinth had shed a new light on their search. He'd re-read it a dozen times, and examined the bizarre image of the alien star map several times more, trying to really get his brain around it.

Without seeing the place firsthand it was difficult to make the mental leap, but he forced himself to try; just to accept the grainy images from the dig teams as proof of what they'd found. So far the information had been passed to him through delicate channels, with Aurelia and his old acquaintance, Minister Yanfoukis. It appeared the two were well entrenched in their hunt for saboteurs in Brekka, but that hadn't stopped them from keeping an eye on wider proceedings.

Thank the Watching Lords for people like Yanfoukis, he thought. Sometimes he felt like a link in an ever-weakening chain of sanity on this furnace of a planet.

What the teams had found there made was frightening in its complexity, but they may also have finally given him a solid lead on narrowing his search.

"Wink." Lanto let the innocuous little word pinball around in his mind for a few seconds as he sipped his coffee. "They're sure?"

"It's an educated guess," the archivist answered, tapping a finger against the data slate. "But it seems a sound enough theory, given the design of the mechanism. I've cross referenced against several different maps, from the Nautlius archives and from the handful of maps that our own astronomers have put together. It appears to match up – if you look at it the right way."

Thaniakas handed him the slate and Lanto examined it. He was no cartographer, and the sphere formed a bewildering tangle of wires despite the high resolution image. Thankfully the researchers had annotated the thing with the apparent planetary positions, and he squinted and tilted his head he could see the similarities.

"Alright. So, Wink, what do we know about it?"

"Original surveys from Up River didn't show anything unusual," she answered, shrugging. "A standard planetary body, if a little on the small side. Four thousand kilometres in diameter, freezing surface temperature, atmosphere of mostly nitrogen, with methane and hydrogen. A few other trace elements." Thaniakas tapped a finger against her chin thoughtfully.

"Those surveys are almost a millennia old," Lanto countered. "We have no real sense of time scale on how long the Crawlers have been here, or when that structure was built. Perhaps whoever built it came after the original surveys."

The archivist nodded. "If they did, the Nautilus may have recorded any anomalies when it passed through the system."

"We've been looking in the wrong place," Lanto chuckled. He put the data slate down, leaning back in his chair and clasping his mug in both hands, a faint spark of triumph igniting in his mind. "All this time we've been focusing on the sensor readings taken of Rychter and its moons. We should have been looking out there."

"Everflowing," Thaniakas muttered, sagging back into her chair.

At that moment there came a crisp rapping on the door that Lanto had come to recognise all too well. He cast an irritated glance back over his shoulder as the door rasped open, and in marched Lieutenant Almar Nastassos, his two guards in tow as always.