“Hey.” The voice, muffled by a Murkata-branded gel pillow, slowly trickles into Lanis’ awareness. She feels the familiar grip of Mirem’s hand against her shoulder, and slowly peels an eye open.

“Sorry to wake you up,” Mirem says. “That Murkata officer is back. He wants you to go with him.”

Lanis slowly pushes herself up in the narrow bunk with a bandaged hand. Her body feels more battered than when she went to sleep, but it only takes a few blinking seconds for her mind to sharpen. She hasn’t truly slept since the Cauldron began, but this is all she needs.

Not so for Mirem. She’s taken a shower and put on clean clothes during Lanis’ nap, but the dim glow of the bunk room reveals a face that has aged a decade in twenty-four hours. She looks not just physically exhausted, but emotionally too, and her voice has a fragility that is unfamiliar to Lanis.

“Who else is going?” Lanis asks.

“Just you,” Mirem responds.

Lanis pulls Mirem into a tight embrace, speaking softly against her face.

“I know you’re exhausted. And I can’t imagine what you’re going through,” Lanis says. She pulls away from Mirem, her face reluctant but determined. “But you’re the one I trust most here; and you at least have some idea of how these corps work. I don’t know what I’m dealing with in these meetings. You need to come with me.”

“Yeah, I don’t know if they’re going to like that,” Mirem mutters, but she slowly nods her head.

“Thank you” Lanis says, squeezing Mirem’s hand.

She quickly pads to the bathroom, reluctantly glancing at herself in the mirror, and is glad for the muted light. She fell asleep in the same Murkata uniform that was given to her in the infirmary, and her short hair is an unwashed mess. She makes a perfunctory effort to get some parts of it to lie down. I’m going to take the longest, hottest shower when this is all done, she thinks, before drying her face and still-damp hair. It seems like a stupid thought, what with the world probably on the verge of ending, but Lanis finds it reassuring.

The Murkata officer meets them back where he dropped them off in the cafeteria. It’s mostly empty now; it appears that most of the others have also drifted off to get what sleep they can. A few of the Fleet delegation still huddle in small groups, but Lanis doesn’t see Lieutenant Tran.

“I’m to escort you to the executive offices,” the Murkata officer says, his mouth tightening fractionally as he watches Mirem approach along with Lanis.

“For what?” Lanis asks.

“A meeting. Beyond that, I have not been told,” the man responds.

“Well, Mirem is coming with me this time,” Lanis says, trying to keep any hint of compromise out of her voice.

The man’s eyebrows twitch in disbelief.

“A Kaisho in the inner sanctum is unprecedented,” he says, his voice growing stiff.

“I’m not Kaisho any more,” Mirem responds, narrowing her eyes at the officer. She straightens herself up, and Lanis knows that she's trying to keep the exhaustion from her voice.

“You’ve been through their corporate induction…” The officer looks like he’s going to say more, but he turns his head slightly, receiving an update from his built-in comms. Whatever he hears, he clearly finds it unpleasant, and he purses his mouth even more tightly. He turns back to Lanis, unwilling to give Mirem the satisfaction of his overridden decision.

“Fine,” he says flatly. “Follow me.”

They mutely accompany the officer through a different branch of gleaming corridors, then to another elevator, this one smaller and more ornate than the previous. Lanis feel the lurch of a quick descent.

How far down does this complex go? She briefly wonders as the seconds tick by, at least twice as long as the prior journey. The doors slide open, and once again Lanis is greeted by a towering Murkata security guard, another twin to the ones who were present outside the steering committee's board room.

The guard performs the same procedure of scanning Lanis’ body, as if Lanis might have snuck something in during her brief time in the Murkata compound. He hesitates for a flickering moment in front of Mirem, as if her presence is not just unexpected, but distasteful. He scans her all the same, but without quite the same understated deference he showed Lanis. Behind him another guard looms. The guards outside the steering committee had side-arms, but this one cradles a hip-articulated pulse rifle that looks like it could weigh as much as Lanis.

The first guard grunts his satisfaction.

“Follow me,” he says, his gleaming artificial eyes lingering on Mirem, in a tone that brooks no discussion.

They are led down a short, unadorned hallway, to a large matte-black door, tall enough for the colossal guard to enter without needing to stoop. The guard pauses before it, and he lowers his head for a moment. Lanis can see his mouth fractionally moving, almost as if he’s mouthing a prayer. Then he looks up, pushes the door open, and stands aside to let Lanis and Mirem in.

If the boardroom of the steering committee was a corporate cathedral, the office that Lanis and Mirem now enter is a crusader’s mausoleum, functional and grim.

The walls are paneled in matte black polymer rather than wood, broken only by racks of dataslates and inset weapons cases—some sealed, others holding openly displayed relics of violence: an old Fleet boarding sidearm, a glassed Kaisho security truncheon, and a serrated knife still crusted with dark matter, among others. The furniture is dense, the desk bare other than a glittering holo-cast of Terra and a half-empty glass of water, and the lighting of the room is dim and uneven.

The only concession to comfort is a leather chair that looks like it’s been sat in for decades, its surface worn smooth at the arms. In it resides Morris, his thuggish face heavy and glowering. Two hard-looking Kaisho attachés stand behind him. Admiral Ren stands before the desk in her perfect blue Fleet uniform, along with the woman Tallin, the Murkata officer who gave the first briefing in the steering-committee's boardroom.

The door closes quietly behind them, and the Murkata guard stands next to it, his arms crossed behind his back, as invisible as a seven foot, four hundred-odd pound aug-human can be.

Morris’ eyes glide across Mirem as if she’s an uninteresting speck of dirt, focusing instead on Lanis.

“We have some updates,” he growls.

The holo-cast on the desk expands, and it switches from a view of embattled Terra to a frozen first-person video frame. The view is murky, mostly dark with a confluence of what looks to be green laser beams. Morris jerks his head toward the officer Tallin, and she begins to speak:

“This video is from a Planetary Admin Special Sec decapitation team,” Tallin says. The video begins, rapid and jerky.

“The team was sent in soon after Kaisho’s betrayal became apparent, though we’re just receiving this video now. They were able to breach Kaisho’s media division’s headquarters, and were searching for board member Pryce, who heads that division. Kaisho is currently broadcasting planetary-wide propaganda from this location.”

Lanis hears the crackle of the decapitation team’s internal comms, layered voices speaking in clipped battle-chatter, overlapping with distant gunfire and code exchanges from other squads in the building. The cast is briefly lit by a concussive burst, and the view jerks forward through a breached door. Then a sudden halt, the first-person view locking up as the room ahead spills into focus. Lanis can hear a grunt of what passes for shock from one of the elite Special Sec members.

The room has the layout of a large open-office, but with all the terminals pushed to the side, clearing a space in the center. Across the floor is some sort of pattern. The team’s pulse-rifles sweep their beams across the floor, and the first-person view magnifies.

Blood. Lanis realizes, horror dawning upon her.

It’s all blood,

The pattern is not random or simple, but is rather layer upon layer of geometric complexity, lines curling in upon themselves. Lanis feels the hair on her arms stand on end as she realizes that along those lines are sigils, coarse, sharp-edged symbols that have been wetly etched upon the floor in biological matter.

The camera pans. Along the walls, against shuttered windows and the high ceiling, hang dozens of bodies in paralyzed supplication. Their faces are frozen mid-scream, fingers curled as though they had been tearing against themselves in their last moments.

None have eyes.

Beside her, Lanis sees Mirem's hand moving to her mouth, eyes wide in the holo-cast’s red glow. Admiral Ren keeps her gaze down toward the floor, while Morris and Tallin simply stare at the video in dull acceptance.

The view swings back, lower. Along the edge of the room is movement. Dozens of dimly-lit, hunched forms slowly stand: people, or what passes for them; dozens of them, their eyes wide and vacant. They begin to shuffle toward the viewer. Lanis hears the sec-member bark a command, sees the pulse rifle rise up, swinging between shuffling targets, and then the video freezes.

“I’ll spare you the rest, suffice to say that the Sec team did not find their target, or survive long themselves,” Morris says.

The holo-cast fades, the view of Terra slowly replacing the monstrous video.

Lanis finally exhales.

“So. A nightmare, indeed,” Morris says, thrumming his fingers against the arm of his leather seat. “We’re having our crypto-linguists analyze the symbology across the floor. It’s nothing they can make sense of, yet. But it seems apparent that this… shrine, for lack of a better word, has certain mytho-genic echoes that cannot be ignored. I find your hypothesis of this entity’s goal of tearing a hole between dimensions increasingly persuasive. And if it can… corrupt people like this…” Morris inclines his head slightly to the holo-cast. "Well, time is against us. But that's not all." He glances at Tallin.

Tallin says, “With Fleet’s intel, we have surmised that the enemy has, as of yet, taken no Navigators alive. However…”

The holo-cast spins and focuses on a new location, one that Lanis recognizes.

“It has managed to capture a cohort of the Fleet Academy cadets."

The words linger in the dark air, and Lanis feels not just her arms, but her entire body go cold. Some expression must pass over her face, for Morris grimaces, almost in sympathy to her reaction. Admiral Ren says nothing, but simply continues to stare straight ahead into space. Tallin looks to the admiral, as if waiting for her to speak. When she does not, she continues.

“Fleet tried to evacuate planetary Fleet Academy,” Tallin says, “but they were only partially successful.”

The holo-cast spins again, showing red and green dots falling down from high orbit down to Terra. Most wink out before they reach the ground, but some, more red than green, manage to land. It appears that Fleet and the anomaly each had an insertion carrier, and that most of the corrupted Insertion Units were answered in kind by Fleet’s own units. However, the majority of both appear to have been destroyed by orbital ships before they landed.

“The enemy managed to land three Heavy Insertion Units outside the Fleet Academy grounds, whereas Fleet only managed one,” Tallin continues. “Fleet’s Unit was destroyed, though it did take a corrupted Unit out with it. These Units, along with Kaisho infiltration teams, then captured a number of Fleet’s academy cadets. Our intelligence implies that they haven’t been extracted, but are still at the academy grounds, awaiting their… purpose.”

Admiral Ren finally speaks, her voice a horse croak, acknowledging what Lanis already knows.

“Our Fleet navigators appear to have a certain resistance to the corruption, whether through their Warp shielding training, or their augments, or their ship AI pairings. Whatever the case, those resistances either do not exist, or are at a far lower threshold in the cadet classes,” Admiral Ren says, her jaw clenching.

“All the untapped psychic power, and none of the failsafes,” Lanis whispers.

“Correct,” Morris says. He leans back, his leather chair squeaking, and considers Lanis.

“We can’t do much to help Mars Fleet, and our subsidiaries are now holding the line against Kaisho. This is our highest priority." He glances at Admiral Ren, then back at Lanis. "We’re putting together an assault team. We’d like you to be part of it,” he says.

Lanis meets the man’s eyes with disbelief, then glancing to Admiral Ren and Tallin.

“What? But I’m an Arena pilot. I’m sure your pilots are far better than me.”

“That would be true,” Morris says. “But there’s a suit they can’t pilot. They don’t have the right implants for Fleet tech. ”

The holo-cast view changes again, and there, half slumped in the middle of the Cauldron’s ruined buildings, illuminated by a swirl of Murkata mag-levs and heavy equipment, slumps a Fleet Insertion Unit.