He seemed just as surprised as they were.

It looked as if he had been waiting to use the airlock himself, heading in the opposite direction. His eyes widened with shock as he took in the sight of the four people standing in front of him.

He was away the next second, a blur of limbs sprinting back the way he must have come down a long, ill-lit corridor of...

Bones.

They stretched into the distance, bleached white and arrange neatly, row after row. Lines of skulls ran closest to either wall, and in front of them carefully placed ribcages. Lined in front of these came femurs, then tibia and humerus, clavical and scapula and bones too varied and numerous to mention. They swamped the floor from both sides, separated only by a narrow, clear path in the middle down which Kilgore had run.

“What the...?” said Andreas, as they stared in horror at the scene before them, Kilgore forgotten for a moment.

Wherever the gigantic airlock from before led, it was not here. They were in a small, windowless corridor that curved off to the right, and the air was dry. Far dryer than where they had just come from.

The bones, too, were dry, clean and spotless and almost artificial in the weak lighting.

"So, uh, do we go after him or..?" said Cassandra, voice shaky.

The others struggled to take their eyes off the macabre scene.

"Ye... Yes, of course we do," said Anisa, fixing her gaze firmly forward towards the place where the corridor curved out of sight. "Come on. Let's go."

It was eerily silent now, the sounds of Kilgore's frantic footsteps long since faded away.

Even the sound of dripping water would have been welcome, Keri thought. There was something terrifying about the silence; it was as if the bones absorbed sound.

Cassandra gave a low, stifled chuckle.

"Dead quiet in here, ain't it?" she said.

She fell quiet again when there was no response, and they moved on in silence. They walked fast.

The corridor was a slope that ran gradually downwards, and to their mild relief the bones gradually petered out, each carefully organised line running out at different points. Eventually, the corridor was wide and empty, the slope too having disappeared.

The corridor opened out into another cavern-like area, although the roof was far lower and darker than any they had seen before. It extended out to the left and right too far to see in the gloom, but in front of them some distance away the ceiling once more curved down, joining with a wall in which a wide opening stood, dark and foreboding.

"There's something... odd about this place, don't you think?" said Keri.

She was walking in the centre of the group, and almost slammed into Anisa when the woman in front suddenly stopped.

It was true. The first section of Triton was unlike anywhere else on the earth, of course, yet it had at least been familiar. Despite the unusual layout and the claustrophobic, decaying feel, it had been built along similar lines to the structures they knew back on the surface. The same materials, the same architectural style, the... same.

This section was like something out of a Victorian nightmare.

Thick metal pipes emerged from the walls, from the ground, running along for long sections before once more disappearing into the sides. They were as silent as the rest of the place, inactive, lined with large valves every ten metres or so.

Above them, the roof was formed and supported by a series of arches that erupted from the floor and swept over their heads, long and thick and looking as if they are designed to hold up the ocean through brute force. Girders were fixed between them.

The huge hall was filled with what could only be trucks, though on a greater scale than anything Keri had seen before. The vehicles stood twenty or more feet high, each of their many wheels taller than a man, treads deep and wide. The majority of the mass of each of these was taken up by a huge and heavy yellow open-box bed sat atop a reinforced chassis that must have been able to carry untold tons of material. The cars had no cabs or visible means of manual operation, though that was not unusual; it just meant that they must have been fully automated when in use. Humans would have no part in steering these behemoths.

"What were they doing with all these?" asked Andreas, rapping the closest with a knuckle.

"Moving a lot of something, that's for sure," replied Cassandra.

The vehicles were spaced regularly in rows across the floor, wide enough apart that any single unit could be driven between their counterparts. Keri stared at the one beside her. It was so large that its sides and top faded into the murk. She struggled to imagine the noise and power the place must have been filled with when these machines were operational.

A sudden loud, echoing clang of metal rang through the air. It came from the wide opening they could see across the hall, of such a volume that Keri could feel it vibrate through her bones.

She looked at the others as silence fell once more.

No one spoke as they cautiously advanced in the direction of the noise, an atmosphere of dread and inevitability hanging heavy over the group. The light thinned further as they approached the opening, and when they tentatively passed through it was impossible to make out anything more than a few feet in front of them.

"Can anyone...?"

Keri's whispered words cut off in surprise at the echo that came back. In the absolute silence the reflected sound filled the room, and that room was big.

A mechanical roar filled the air at the same time as the floor beneath them jolted, a disorientating and alarming shift in her weight telling Keri they were moving downwards. A second later, the lights came on.

It took a while for her eyes to readjust, but when they did she saw that they were in a space that dwarfed any area they had seen so far. Bright halogen lights ran in evenly spaced rows up a sheer rock face that was racing past them all around, directly behind them and far in front.

They were on an elevator, she realised. One without sides, nothing more than movable a steel floor in actuality, and one wide enough for the trucks in the previous room to fit comfortably on, but an elevator nevertheless. If they had kept walking when they first entered they would have fallen a hundred feet or more to the ground below.

Metal screamed and pumps hissed as the elevator descended, taking them into the bowels of the earth.

And it really was into the earth. They were descending into a huge bowl hewn from rock, perhaps a kilometre in diameter. The rock face racing upwards around them was natural, rough and irregular, the very bedrock of the ocean. The dark grey of its surface was mottled with patches of other sediments and even the white of the occasional fossil, revealed by whatever had cut the rock away.

Keri saw that 'whatever' at the same time as the others.

It stood in the centre of the room, a mechanical monster of iron and steel larger than whole buildings. The thing must have been four or five stories high, and consisted of a central, box-shaped unit from which jutted two long arms made of criss-crossing beams perpendicular to one another, the arms protruding from the cab in opposite directions.

It was what was at the end of these arms that drew the attention, however.

A single huge, wickedly serrated circular blade was fixed at the end of each arm, each vicious tooth longer than a person. The metal, dark and black, nevertheless glinted in the bright light, and despite the fact that the blades were motionless they had an air of sudden, biting speed. They were raised at the moment, high in the air and far above as the elevator continues its descent, but it seemed as if they would come crashing down at any moment.

"Ok, what the hell is that thing?" said Anisa.

"Ummm... I think it's what made this hole," said Keri.

It must have been. You could see the hydraulics that would allow the arms to extend or retract in what was a huge mechanical endeavour itself, and the length of their reach matched almost perfectly with the breadth of the depression. The rest of the distance could be accounted for by the dozen colossal caterpillar tracks that held the entire edifice up and must, on an almost unimaginable scale, allow it to move.

"That's a drill?" said Cassandra in disbelief.

The reply came from all around, it seemed, amplified by speakers placed inconspicuously in the walls, in the beams of the giant machine. It echoed through the vastness as it spoke.

"An excavator, actually. A bucket excavator. The design has hardly changed in a hundred years, except in size. A feat of engineering."

Keri recognised the voice, the same as she had heard back in the apartment so long ago. It was Kilgore.

She looked around, and spotted a tiny figure sat at the window of the central cab of the machine[1], actual levers to his front. There was no one else it could be.

"Alright, Kilgore!" shouted Anisa, at the same time as Cassandra issued an unprintable curse. "I don't know what the hell you think you're doing, but it's time to stop messing us around."

Though she shouted at the top of her lungs, her voice was insignificant in the vast expanse.

Andreas sidled up to Keri as this was happening.

"I don't know what's going to happen," he hissed, "but stay away from those wheels, alright?"

Keri looked at him like he was mad. He thought she needed to be told that?

The elevator came to halt with a loud hiss, pressure releasing somewhere out of sight. Bare, uneven rock stretched out in front of them, rough and scarred by deep, wide grooves.

"Why did you come here?" came Kilgore's voice once more. "What possible reason do you have for coming all this way?"

"Give us the data sphere back," said Anisa, as if she hadn't heard him.

"Data sphere?" came the reply. "What I took from you is no data sphere. It is an... an egg. The embryo of a new world, an embryo with a million parents. But it is one I should be father to. I who can modify it, improve it, leash it. I just need time. Just time, AND PEACE!"

The final two words were shouted with such a passion that the audio squealed, an ear-splitting scream that left Keri momentarily deaf.

Cassandra was speaking to Anisa, and her words gradually filtered through as Keri's ears cleared.

"...any idea he was this nuts? I mean, we always knew he was weird, but hey, who are we to..."

Anisa shook her head.

Andreas stepped forward, shouting up at the cab.

"And what makes you think you know how to improve it? The thing was designed by machines that could out-think any of us running on a potato!"

There was a pause. Kilgore seemed to be thinking.

"I... I can do it! It may take me longer than those damn calculators, but it will be me doing it. Not some unthinking lump of metal."

Another pause as the group took all this in.

"Wait..." said Anisa, bemusedly. "You're a Purist?"

Purist. The term for the majority of modern-day humanity, but generally used to refer more specifically to those who not only considered the body dysmorphia and bionic augmentations of the era of the Butchers anathema but actively worked to keep all such technology firmly under the control of the ‘standard’ humans. They held the positions of what vestigial arms of government yet remained, headed the upper echelons of Inc-Man, and generally gravitated into all the roles ordinary citizens were too disinterested in to deal with yet knew were necessary. Few had any problem with this order of things. Indeed, it met with general approval; the Butcher era must never be allowed to return.

But...

"...but you're augmented," shouted Andreas, echoing Keri's thoughts. "How can you have a problem with the machines?"

"They who let their souls be led by the soulless are damned," came the reply, reverberating around them. The tone was flat, the tone of a mantra repeated by a fanatic.

"The fucking Manual?" spat Cassandra. "He's a truist of the fucking Manual?"

The giant excavator roared into life.

[1] Had she been aware of the history of such machines, Keri would have known that earlier versions had the control booth adjacent to the wheel, not the central axis. But she wasn't, so she didn't.