Søren’s boots click on the concrete, his held lantern a single star in the velvet darkness. His breath lingers on his trail.

A fragment of the machine looms, cyclopean caterpillar tracks, feeble light glittering off glass and cable before disappearing into distant gloom.

He continues his round, light shone into every crevice, every familiar crack interrogated. Up a catwalk and another orbit, the armour of this mechanical behemoth is scored, in some places streaked with cracking bubbles frozen in the metal. The bulkhead doors are still locked, blinking lights still following.

Walking on, a distant patter, then a grand, creaking groan echoes around the hanger. Søren freezes, casting the lantern about, unveiling stillness and dormant steel. The echoes die, his breath hanging in the air.

The air is still, distant sounds are a gentle texture and sharp, mixing with hints of oil and plastic. The texture grows as he pushes aside an armoured door, its protesting metal shrieking. A huddle around another lantern is revealed, snow-robes now soft furnishings, cards and merriment passing around.

He pulls off the headwrap and helmet as the tepid warmth rushes over him. A hand is drawn, a steaming mug is pushed into his exposed hands.

“Is it still there?”

Søren tosses a bullet into the pot and takes another card.

“It’s still there.”

They can’t even summon up a groan.

The pot goes around again, slowly, passed by lethargic hands. The loser stands, grumbles and shuffles out, their lantern becoming the memory of a star in darkness, their footfalls the only permitted noise. “Have fun Fingers” Ash jeers.

“News?” Søren asks.

“You’d have heard me singing from the bleeding mountains. Just the weather.”

The hand is finished. Søren throws down a meagre showing.

“Oh, Station Eleven’s gone quiet again.”

Søren forces a chuckle. “Baker’s still not moved on in the world then.”

A susurration of amusement.

A computer’s warble shakes them from their smiles. There is a general groan. Søren is silent, hoping someone else volunteers.

Elle looks up from the screen, “Perimeter A-“

Suddenly, harsh light floods the room, bulbs igniting then dying, leaving velvet darkness clinging to the edges of the lantern light, subtle after images dancing in their eyes.

“Not the perimeter then”

Echoes of sirens reach their ears, overridden by the tortured screech of metal as, hands on tools, they watch the blast door fall. The sirens muffled with its final click.

“You said the system was locked?” Ash’s voice has lost its calm drawl, a hint of accusation in the flow.

Elle goes to snap back but Søren raises his hand. He points at Ash “Door”. Then glares at Elle.

“Oh, and Ash, I’m sure we’d prefer to live though whatever you’re going to do to the door.”

Ash rolls his eyes exuberantly.

Minutes later, they huddle behind ancient lockers. A grinning Ash squeezes the detonator and ringing pain drills into Søren’s ears. He stands first, shudders, and creeps towards the scorch-scarred door.

Beyond, the light spreads over the catwalk before fading into oppressive gloom. A little reaches the eyes of a robed figure, motionless in the dark. To Søren, it seems as if glitter dances in their familiar eyes.

The explosion’s echo returns, a momentary tangle of heavy noise.

“Fingers…?” He is too still. Too many lights shine in his eyes, sunken beneath hood and robes.

“They have entered the machine.”

“And?! Get moving!”

“They are right. We have no claim to these sins of a dead world.”

“Fingers?” Ice scythes away the adrenaline in Søren’s veins, holding him frozen. “What?”

The light falls across his face. A kindly expression bound in rivulets of dark glass, their eyes all black angles with the coldness of the void between the stars.

“You should join them too. The music is so beautiful.”

“Fingers,” Søren chokes. Words deserting him, he stands aside, gesturing at Ash and closing his eyes.

His world flashes red through crushed eyes as a wave of heat scorches his beard. The smell of burned hair mixes with the stink of cooked flesh. He opens his eyes to Ash lowering his grenade launcher. Pausing a moment, Søren watches Fingers’ remains fall, trailing faint smoke before the dark envelops it.

Running through the darkness, a great tremor freezes them as their catwalk rumbles. The wind is the first to reach them, fresh and sharp. Carrying snow. The walkway swaying, outside air mixing with the aroma of scorched metal.

The clang of reverberating metal as they throw themselves down swinging stairs. They reach the pockmarked skin of their charge. A history of wounds and repairs flows under their hands as they trace the hull.

Running along the machine now, fainter tremors, irregular heartbeats, sneak up their boots. Søren fancies seeing glittering in the darkness, never in the same place twice.

Slowing, straining against the freezing air the hatch is reached. Bubble-streaks, where the metal has frozen in the act of boiling, and bullet notches give way to claw-gouges and maw-marks. Struts hang, sheared. The hatch, missing.

Stepping through the torn wound, the cloying darkness gives way to claustrophobic metal inadequately lit by red lights; all they do is drench the shadows crimson. They kick aside tools, boots catching on opened plating.

The distant heartbeat grows, lights begin to flicker on, momentarily blinding their dark-adjusted eyes. Doors begin to creak open. Others grind closed. They slow to a careful walk.

Ash and Elle watch as Søren looks past them, dodging back as one slices down between them, with the final crunch of a headman’s axe. Their stunned silence is punctuated by Søren’s muffled beating on the door’s other side.

Between their scrabbling and the rising heartbeat beneath their feet, their senses are occupied with desperation.

The sensation is that of sharpness at their necks. A half-familiar voice from behind them intones “A-ha, you will turn slowly. They are quite obedient but any sudden moves…” the voice trails off.

“Come now.” More sharpness grips their heads, Ash feels teeth scratching at the back of his skull. Oily claws dig in dragging them away. Behind them is only the click of pointed glass scuttling across metal. A whisper’s slither darts past their hearing as they are yanked away from the door and into crushing unconsciousness.

***

The whisper surrounds Søren. “Silence” it says.

The futile thumping has stopped, Søren is motionless as clicking scuttles seep through the door.

“They have not yet passed.”

He waits, heart in his ears, chaining the fear in his bowels.

A subjective eternity and the sounds have passed. He breathes again, gasping the freezing air.

“Who are you?”

“You stand within my body.” The voice is perfect, almost wistful.

“A name?” The gasps are shallower. “What is your name?”

“My crew called me Herald. They are no longer here.”

“What?” a final gasp “What do you want?”

“Your pursuers wish to use me. They speak of great works and unbelievers. I do not wish for such an ending. I do not know what survived, but I do not want the last act of my world to be one of horror.”

***

With creaking metal, a thin shaft of painful light fills the room, frozen blood glittering crimson motes in the air. They look up into a beatifically smiling face.

One they have seen before.

“F-fingers?” Elle stammers.

Fingers steps into the room, a light beam sweeping over his body, glittering as it passes over dark glass infecting his skin, his eyes. A mass has formed around the chest wound. In this light, Elle can just make out the scorched edges of Fingers’s original flesh.

Fingers kneels before Ash, Ash’s eyes open, fingernails drawing blood in shock.

“Ash” Fingers says softly. “You are forgiven for your crime. No lasting damage done.”

“You died!” Elle sobs through haggard breaths.

“Yes. But I was called back.”

Ash’s screwed up eyes ache as he lies on the floor. Elle’s are wide open her heart punching her ribcage, her lungs barely hers.

“We have a great work here. It is a shame you do not comply.” The smile continues. “I could say many truths. This world will be safer for you when the work is completed. Unbelieving dead and unthinking beasts erased. But you will remain defiant. Your role in this world. I will return soon. Is there anything that would make you more comfortable?”

“Our kit?” Ash forces a grin. It doesn’t work.

For a moment, the smile hardens, the eyes glitter onyx.

“Perhaps not”

Fingers leaves them in darkness. The crunch of the lock sounds, then stillness.

Elle groans on general principles.

***

The clink of scuttling glass on cold metal always behind him, Søren darts down a left, then a right. A door grinds shut, screeching echoes masking his follower. A moment of humming silence before he strides passes a helpful looking door. Strain blossoms through him as he wrenches it open. The faded stencilling of ‘Armoury’ disappears into the wall.

“A more useful room” Søren mutters.

Inside, racks of dead laser rifles lie touched by naught but time. He slides one out and snaps in a battery…

Nothing happens.

“Long dead, unfortunately.”

Grinning to himself and the darkness, he bends a wire into the socket before replacing the battery. This time, a cluster of lights flicker green.

“I am obliged to inform you that hotwiring the status lights doesn’t mean that anything will happen when you pull the trigger.”

Søren grins. “But they don’t know that.”

***

Glassy fingers coming to needle-points run themselves across Ash’s face. Elle’s has already been doodled over, blood seeping through the line drawing.

Fingers’ freshly sallow face looks kindly on as he draws his newfound claws across exposed skin.

“Now.” His voice is soft. Calm. “I’m deeply afraid that I simply don’t believe you. I was most gratified when humans of your thoroughness were assigned here. So, you understand, I find it most difficult to believe that this complex hasn’t been searched quite, quite completely.”

Behind this new face, Elle’s seeping eyeballs can still make out the beasts motionless behind him.

He steps back, looming over their slumped bodies, flicking flecks of blood onto the walls.

“Ah, the valour of the ranger. Never to be underestimated. Please don’t try anything… valiant… without me.”

The human-shaped creature slams the bulkhead door, leaving them in utter darkness. Muffled words filter through and mix with the stuttering heartbeat of the great machine.

***

Søren peeks around another metal corridor; nose, eye and bristles glaring at the short corridor beyond. He darts forward again, ready beside the door, cold leaching into his shoulder, his breath hanging before him.

“Movement inside.” Herald’s whisper is harsh, immediate.

Søren nods at what might be a hidden eye, then draws the bulkhead door open. Though the life-noises of this great machine have long replaced silence, Søren still cringes at the piercing shriek of ancient metal against itself.

The vestibule inside is a catacomb of monitors, a morgue of computers. Sitting in the centre of the vestibule, crash harness dangling about him, is Fingers.

Or at least, something Fingers shaped.

Søren throws himself away from the doorframe, cradling his useless gun.

“Søren. I’m so happy you’ve made it.”

There was glass where his chest should have been. Where Ash shot him.

“Our great work requires your assistance.”

Glass in the eyes. Glass in the heart. Søren blinks away a tear for the shape it inhabits.

“I have eternity, Søren. Do you?”

Breath taken, teeth gritted, Søren spins out, impotent rifle high, unmoving from the Fingers-thing’s forehead.

“Come now. The great work needs you.”

Fingers stands, then walks towards Søren, their face plastered with an expression of deep serenity. Søren circles wearily around them, backing slowly through the door.

“You cannot but help us help everyone, Søren.” Fingers says, pushing past, disappearing into the metal labyrinth.

Søren lowers his gun and swears, slamming the bulkhead closed in frustration.

Everything within is dead, computers languished unpowered since the last age. Søren prods a few keys listlessly before sitting heavily on the chair with a long creak.

“Søren. Emergency radios are provided in the cabinet to the left of your feet.”

“I’m taking a minute” he murmurs, rubbing his eyes.

“There is only so much I can do to delay them.” The harsh speaker quiet, trying for softness.

“His name was Fingers damn it.” He half-heartedly spits.

A few more moments. The chair creaks again. A gentle vibration seeps in, a distant rumble from below and a mote of acceleration flickers up, across his body.

Søren shakes himself, dusting off memories old and new, putting aside ‘was’ to deal with ‘now’.

Pulling, the whole cabinet door comes away with a metallic groan. A cluster of radios, huddled at the back, wrapped in neon green. Søren reaches in, taking a whiff of the ancient, sterile air, retrieving one of the heavy boxes. The smell of burned plastic wafts around.

It warms as it rouses, casting a small circle in the frost. Søren jams the wire in, reanimating the great machine’s antenna. He clasps it to his ear in gloved hands, casting into the static. Nothing but static. The storm-winds of an empty world. He hears neither hope nor help, only words slipping from a desperate imagination.

“Is there no one out there? What has silenced the world? Did we not win?” Herald asks.

“No help eith-”

A too rapid clicking, growing louder, lashes their attention away.

Herald’s surrounding voice stops. Søren sits motionless, petrified. The scuttling nears, clinking on the door. The sounds slow, a noseless, eyeless thing mere irrelevant inches of alloy between them. The silence is a distant rumble beneath and muffled roar around. The clink has stopped, lungs bound and burning, Søren imagines the beast snuffling around the door, picking his sent from the unlived in mechanical corpse-breath.

Then, the metal drum beat of running boots, close, moving… away.

“Neat trick” Søren grunts.

“A simple one” Herald replies. “Do you have a further plan?”

He leans back for a moment. “Get Ash and Elle back. They’re rather more enthusiastic about sabotage than I am.”

He stands, pausing for a moment, then grabs a pair of unused radios. A minute and torn thumbnail later he pings one’s thermal battery out. Grinning through his wince, he forces it into his rifle’s battery slot. Nothing happens, his grin evaporates. Søren looks around for a moment, and vigorously shakes it. The little light turns green and the grin seeps back.

He eases the door open, twitching at every low creak. Edging out, rifle cradled, he hurries in the opposite direction.

Suppressed and unheeded, neither hear the speck of a whisper under the screaming static.

***

Søren creeps on, dissonant voices beginning to suffuse the dead air around him. Onwards, tone, then occasional words are revealed.

Then he breaths.

The voices evaporate, the laboured groaning of the awakening machine returns, filling the silence.

Clicking steps ring out.

Louder. Søren’s lungs writhe, every muscle burning with stillness.

A distant sneeze cannons through the silence. The footsteps cease.

Then continue stronger.

The machine twitches through his boots with the dull thunk of a blast door. Edging out, past the abruptly silent door he follows Herald’s whispers.

Another junction, wishing he would dare run. With each sealed room his hopes raise. Each passed an iron needle in his ribcage.

Finally, Herald whispers “Stop. They are within.”

Pressing against the warming wall, “If you would be so kind.” Søren petitions. A moment. A quiet click, amplified by his paranoia and the bulkhead door swings in.

Pushed aside, the dark metal glitters with crimson specks. Huddled, crushing against each other, dim light falls across Ash and Elle. Their hands pale and red, gripping each other’s tunics. They look up as Søren fills the doorway, muted spark in their eyes.

Søren steps within. Crouching, he prises their hands gently away, their coldness seeping into him.

Ash draws a haggard gasp, “What can we do?” he says blubbering. “Death. Death isn’t”

Søren draws them up on their shivering legs and embraces them. Their heartbeat throbs though him as heat leaches into their tight grip. His warm whispers of hard nothings in their ears.

A moment too soon, they relent, Søren’s jacket a smear of sweat. He tries to grin as he drops a misshapen duffle bag between them. It lands with a clanking thud.

Elle stands and breaths, forcing prickly air into her lungs. Eyes closed, holsters her pistol, fits her body armour, each over-tightened strap a chain for her fear. A moment, a crushing heartbeat, she forces her eyes open.

Ash stills his tremoring hands. Muffles his screaming mind, leaving only a detached chill.

They creep out, slow steps interrupted by a distant chuckle.

Clinging against the wall, Elle edges an eye out. Before her, hands clasped, stands Fingers, his face twinging with disappointing frustration.

Gun in bloodied hands, Elle spins out, each shot a clanging hammer blow in these metal veins. Elle stares down the gunsight as their bullets blossom crimson roses across him, who merely smiles back with the tender warmth of a hydrogen bomb.

As if shattered bone and torn sinew is beneath him, he continues his lazy stride, perfumed with metal-stinking blood swirling with acrid smoke.

“Back. Now!” Herald shouts.  They leap away as another blast door crunches down. For a moment, inhaling quietness, breath settling on the dark metal.

Another moment, an almighty chime, suddenly the door twists, misshapen with a wreath of vanishing vapour around the newly forged bulge.

Herald directs their mad sprint away. Rabid chiming of flesh and metal behind.

The bridge ahead.

***

They rush inside and set to work. Ash pries open the floor, disappearing into an ocean of electronics, wreathed in wire. Elle and Herald chatter away as her fingers clatter across a keyboard. Søren double bolts the door and watches, twitching between every sound beyond the door and the boiling storm beyond thick windows, already consumed the horizon, flowing towards them.

Even concealed, the weapon dominates this room. Every readout. Every wall. Each way they turn, their eyes cannot but know its state, its sleep, and what would wake it.

Elle grins to herself and looks up into their expectant faces. “I’ve disabled the safeties and set up a resonance…” ancient and tortuous physics lessons flash dark fins on her moonlit sea of memory.

“It’ll blow up when they pull the trigger.” she sighs.

Søren sags but the tension still binds him, iron bands crushing him.

He looks Elle in the eyes and nods, “Pull Herald out, Station 7’s silent but I’d make for it anyway.” he commands. “We can’t risk Fingers undoing your spells.” A deep breath. “I’ll fire when you’re clear.”

“I will stay.” The walls declare.

“No!”

“My story is over, I have slept awaiting a world long lost.”

Shaking, Elle speaks “I’ll… put it on a timer.”, her eyes deep and desperate. “Just… in case”

A few moments with code and wire, and she gingerly places a detonator on the console between them. A dull, drab, white box with a pregnant switch and winking lights. “Five minutes. Enough for all of us.”

Awkwardly, she addresses the wall, “I’ve put a software tigger as well” she breaths deeply, “just in case.”

Søren turns to the door, “Good. Let’s get Herald-”

With an instant screech, the blast door is sundered from the wall, a momentary blur as is smashes through the window. The shockwave hammers their ears ringing as icy air floods into the room, fraying their lungs.

Søren dives, then rises, bringing his dubious rifle to bear. His finger twitches tight as a glass barb slashes past his arm. For a frozen instant, a streak of hot-ruby glows in the metal above the door, crimson laser glittering off swirling ice and rust.

Fingers steps through the door, leaning over him, smiling with too many teeth. Almost idly, he picks up the fallen weapon and snaps it, tossing the remains away.

Scuttling up behind him, the uneyed over-limbed beasts hover at his whim. Outside, rising storm clouds preclude further hope.

Søren looks into his sallow face as he cackles. Looks past the needle-teeth in black gums, feels his humid breath as he cackles.

“Further interference in the great work will not be… permitted. Your bodies will join me, even if your minds will not.” He looks Søren in the eyes, inky starless eyes, reaching…

“Stop!” Shouts Ash, dead-man’s detonator held up triumphantly, trigger gripped in quivering, shaking hand, his face a pallid mask. His tired eyes dart around the room, failing to see everything, yet dragged back to his wrist, beaded with scab and sweat, the stark LEDs ticking down. Behind him, lashed by intruding storm winds, Elle lies prone, pinned beneath a beast’s maw as her pistol skids away.

Fingers sweeps his gaze over Ash and snorts. “There is too much holding you to this world, Ash. No doubt you have some cunning, yet valiant device concealed here. But remember-” he reaches Ash, staring into his quivering eyes, nose to nose, Ash twitching under his putrid breath. “We have eternity…” A claw softly, unstoppably, grips his wrist and turns it to face him, ignorant of grinding bones. Søren watches Ash go white. “…you have four minutes.”

“What will it be?” Fingers chuckles. “Pick your end.” A claw grips the detonator and wrenches. Ash relinquishes, his hand pulsating with hot-cold pain. He marvels at Ash’s clammy, grimacing, face. Enjoying this moment cast to the backdrop of roiling storm.

The window, showing that useless boiling blizzard, explodes. Flensing glass and freezing wind sweep in, buffeting them, cutting them. An arrow of molten metal, seen only as a blinked away green flash scythes past them, splashing against the wall and leaving a scorchwork star.

Søren watches Fingers’ dark eyes focus on the storm, seeking to see as the boiling winds invade the room. White, black and speckled grey all writhing across the sky. A moment, he spies a figure amidst the mist. Another blink erases all suspicion.

He cannons into Ash as misshapen claws reach out. Wrenching Elle away, they tumble unceremoniously through the shattered windows, remnant shards flaying cloth and flesh as they plunge into the blizzard.

“Storm will judge your worthiness.” Fingers chuckles, watching them sprint across Herad’s twitching carapace and leap into roiling mist, harsh snow enveloping them.

***

The wind encases them, snow blurring around them, grasping them in a featureless, grey world. They speak no more; every breath is a sharp gasp of freezing pain. Climbing out gouged caterpillar-track welts, their muscles scream and stiffen, old sweat already hair-matted ice.

Ash falls first, foot catching on some unseen hazard. Halting only for a moment, Søren sweeps him onto his shoulders before pushing back through pain and snow.

The timer reaches zero. The ice, the world lights up as if they lie in the heart of the sun. For a glorious moment their skin warmed, steaming into blisters before a velvet duvet of darkness consumed everything, sun and stars were swallowed up.

Burns cracking frozen skin they turn to look upon the only light left; glowing tendrils writhe with grasping hands of utter nothingness around the ancient war machine, each casting off mouthfuls of alloy as the mere physical world stood between them.

Enraptured, the crunching of snow behind them is lost in the screams of metal and wind.

Pulsating waves of heat and cold wash over them. Their eyes water. Gravity pulls stronger, weaker, then stronger again. Within moments their brains, freezing and beset by the impossible, begin to fail. Begin to fall.

The ground engulfs them, cold and sleep soaking in.

Søren’s last sensation is that of something soft. An embrace of warmth. A hint of gloved hands.

“That’s a bit odd” he thinks as the harpoons of unconsciousness drag him down.

***

“Sor-en” the voice is plagued with static.

He snorts himself awake. Eyes open to a calm twilight, a field of ice, stars glittering off jagged debris. “Herald?”

“Sor-en” the voice calls again.

Wrapped in a blanket, Søren pulls himself across steaming sharp metal, wrenching debris away, exhuming the voice. Beneath, a single, cracked lens looks unblinking at a perfect starlit sky.

“Sor-en”

“I I I I would like to see the sun r-r-rise” it stutters.

He gathers what he can, cradling the eye, trailing sparking wires. The ice outside is suffused with the grey light of dawn.

“You you are warm. It is so cold in here.”

“I’m here”

“th-ank you”

He settles on a hill away from the bunker. A glow is gathering below the horizon. Huddling the casing, he points the eye eastward.

“So-ren. What ha-pppp-ens nnext?”

“I. I mean we’re usually buried-“

“N-o. To the y-ou that makes you you and to the me th-at ma-kes me me.”

“I can’t answer for that. A journey. Judgement, perhaps. Yours alone.”

The distant sun spills over, igniting the sky in a blaze of crimson. Reflecting off scattered clouds, a great well of detail and light. The ice is lit orange.

“ha-ve seee-n now. It-‘s gettttting da-rk and co-ld. Co-me w-hat may. I will wa-it for you, Sor-”

Søren sets out, back upon the ice. He cannot quite bring himself to leave the dead behind.

***

There are two figures ahead, exposed on the sunlit ice. He sees Fingers throw his head back and laugh. They gesture Søren over. The other is hooded, wrapped in speckled grey snow robes, gloved hand holding Fingers’ palm skyward.

“Søren” Fingers says wistfully. “It’s been a pleasure”. He holds out his other hand. An abomination of flesh intertwined with animate glass. His multifaceted eyes sparkle with the distant sun, glitter with the snow.

Søren doesn’t quite hide the flinch, but he takes the hand. A harsh warmth seeps through his gloves.

The wind picks up, and the dark glass starts to flake off Fingers’ skin, away, across, the ice.

“The music… it’s fading”. The glass is gone, flakes of bone and flesh follow.

“It’s silent now” he says, before Søren is left with an empty hand of lingering warmth as Fingers’ ashes drift away.

He watches her pull an empty, scorch-streaked rocket launcher from under the ash and snow before trudging down, into the steaming crater.

Then he is alone on the ice, painfully white. Below them, a gentle breeze sweeps snow over Herald’s corpse, interring the mechanical grave.