I spun and scrabbled in the rapidly spreading pool of my own blood, scanning the space between me and the ex-sculpture. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for.

I ripped the pistol from its sticky-patch on the severed leg and aimed with both hands, rolling out from behind the cabinet.

Thought jolted.

“Home sweet home.” said Melano, tracing a system of sluggish black fjords with a thick finger.

The canyons passing below us looked painfully familiar, but then canyons often do. I shivered anyway; shook my still huge-feeling shoulders and launched myself towards Melano.

The ship had changed us while we slept: our bodies were shorter, broader; bones strengthened with carbon fibre, roped with high density muscle to take the brunt of Hancock’s punishing gravity. In fact it was only a little over two gees, but it would have been enough to definitively incapacitate the lithe, micro-grav adapted incarnations that had sustained us thus far.

Hancock was a carbon planet—a chemical peculiarity common to dwarf star systems. The nebula which had given birth to Gillespie and its companions had been statistically rich in carbon, while relatively poor in oxygen. Whereas oxygen rich systems might produce familiarly friendly masses of water and silicate rock, carbon ones tended toward structural analogues that were at once superficially reminiscent of earth-like worlds and yet mercilessly inimical to life.

Hancock’s iron core, though long since sapped of rotational momentum by its proximity to Gillespie, was kept alive by the harsh tidal stresses that same mass exerted on it. This tidal energy maintained seismic processes which still periodically ruptured its graphite mantel, spewing forth mountains of silicon carbide and sending geysers of diamond shrapnel shooting high into the planet’s thick, carbon monoxide atmosphere. This same smog of atmosphere was responsible for the photochemical synthesis of long-chain hydrocarbons, which regularly rained down on the planet’s surface, crazing it with a network of rivers and lakes of liquid petroleum.

Hancock’s one moon had turned out to be a completely un-remarkable chunk of captured asteroid, barely twenty kilometres long. It had taken us less than an hour to discount any possibility of Tjssin hiding beneath its surface; then we turned our full attention to the nightmare landscape spread below.

“No thermal, gravitational or electromagnetic anomalies that I can see.” I said. We had let ourselves slip into a low, decaying orbit, still high above the atmosphere proper; still small and dark enough not to trigger any potential automated defences.

“I wish we knew how long we’d been out for,” said Melano for the tenth time, her voice almost a whisper. “For all we know he might have been here centuries already; more than enough to hide a maser cannon in every crack on the planet if he wanted.”

I shook my head wearily.

“Do you think we would have weaponised the whole planet just to be on the safe side? He doesn’t want safe, Melano; he’s a player, just like us.”

“He’s nothing like us,” she snorted. I abandoned the broken loop of conversation, and honed into the viewscreen. We were seeing by real light for the first time in millennia, by some measurements. The computer had upshifted the infrared until Gillespie spilled a sickly glow across Hancock’s crumpled face, defining peaks like dying embers.

“What’s that?” Melano pointed.

“What’s what?”

I amped the mag; applied a half dozen filters and enhancement algorithms.

“That.”

Melano escaped without a scratch; the security guard wasn’t so lucky. By the time the dust settled, Tjssin was nowhere to be seen. The cops scooped up what was left of Phjolca; patched me up and gave me a disposable prosthetic. I didn’t complain; I wasn’t going to need it where we were going anyway.

We bought our way out of police custody in under twenty-four hours, but by then Tjssin had already made for orbit. Nobody had stopped him.

It wasn’t about the money. Hell, it wasn’t even about revenge, really. If Tjssin had just stayed put, none of this need have happened. He knew exactly what he was doing when he ran; he knew us.

We never walk away from a challenge.

The ship began to rumble and glow as it dipped into atmosphere. If there were smart cannon down there, we would know about it soon enough. We dropped through the bottom of a layer of thick, orange cloud and banked hard over a cracked and blackened landscape. A lone mountain loomed in the distance, its peak wreathed in cancerous smog.

“Subtle.” said Melano.

There, extending from the side of the mountain was a stepped pyramid more than a mile in length. The pyramid was made of solid diamond.

“Why would Tjssin build something so obvious?” I asked myself out loud.

“I don’t know, but I don’t like it.” said Melano, monitoring the wide spectrum scanners with a suspicious eye. Nothing had tried to stop our approach, yet.

We flew on.

A thick, petrochemical rain beat down on the plateau, washing across slick acres of diamond painted ruby red in Gillespie’s amplified glow. I stepped cautiously, hefting the repeating coil gun the ship had grown for me. Melano favoured a compact but high powered maser. We communicated subvocally, via the linked machines in our blood.

Inside?

Where else?

It could be a decoy.

It’s the only man-made thing on the planet, Melano.

Who says it’s even Tjssin in there? This thing could have been built by anyone. Fucking aliens for all we know—

Do you really believe that?

… no.

The resonance had been building since we made orbit, and I knew Melano was feeling it too. It was stronger than anything I’d experienced before; the deja vu physically dizzying now. Each step echoed jarringly in my head as we made our way across the vast plateau.

Tjssin was near.

We passed out of the oily rain through a ten metre high portal carved into the side of the mountain. The sides of the monumental passageway were clad in diamond chased with graphite inlay; tumbling, geometric fractals that confounded any true sense of scale. It soon became evident that the passage was narrowing as it burrowed. Its false perspective constricted to a bottleneck after only a few dozen metres, forcing us to continue in single file.

I’ll go first, I subvocalised. It was no act of bravery on my part; we both knew fine well that my weapon would have the best chance against any hardened defences that might lurk inside.

Melano sent her agreement.

It was dark ahead. I switched my vision to wide spectrum composite and checked that Melano had done the same. The suddenly exaggerated perspective of the dwindling tunnel made my heart leap; we had been here before.

The tunnel hemmed in until it almost scraped my elbows. The heft of the coil gun under Hancock’s two gee’s suddenly seemed less reassuring than it had when we stepped off the ship; my arms trembled from the effort of keeping it pointed straight. The passage tilted down into the earth, dropping until the faint reflected glow of Gillespie was extinguished entirely. We continued a hundred metres or more in tense silence before the passage changed again.

Without warning, the walls sprang apart to reveal a chamber which was maybe hundreds of metres in diameter. The steps of our bare feet echoed horribly as we padded out into the vast space. There were no automated anti-intrusion devices, no hidden pitfalls; nothing popped out of the ground and blasted us into tiny pieces. It wasn’t exactly an unpleasant development, but it did surprisingly little to calm my jangling nerves.

Where is the bastard? sent Melano.

I had asked myself the same question.

Further inside? I sent, This could be just the first chamber; there’s enough space under this mountain for these passages to go on for miles.

A maze? Melano laughed, her trepidation not entirely masked by the subvocal synthesiser. Fucking great.

I guess we’ll find out, I replied.

Through the sonic gloom of our reflected footsteps, I made out rows of long, oblong blocks about waist-high lining either side of a wide central avenue. We made for the left, ducking behind the blocks and staying low as we moved further into the space.