As the last door rushed open and the sharp, cool air of the hangar washed over them, Tessa breathed a sigh of relief, grinned openly. In the center of the bay, Tessa’s Seindrive sat tethered to the deck, hovering on suspensors like an eager falcon. A dozen paces further, the hunched and shadowy forms of two short-range rescue transports crouched in their harnesses, automatically primed and ready for flight. Myyaelae pulled free, limped across to the door controls.

“Disengage the tethers on your semiatmospheric.” He managed, eyes focused entirely on the panel as he keyed in a sequence of command codes. “I will follow close behind. There is an emergency supply shelter sixty kilometers due east. I will transmit the exact coordinates once I am aboard one of the transports and the autoflight beacon is locked upon it.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Tessa grinned, already loosening the straps on her Seindrive. “I take it there’s enough food in the shelter to last us a few weeks, if HQ can’t get someone out here sooner than the Hephaestus.”

“More than enough.” Massive, man-sized locking bolts slammed back into the wall as they disengaged, lights flashing on either side of the bay doors. “The emergency supply shelter was designed and outfitted to provide for the needs of the entire staff of Erebus for up to three months.”

“The entire staff?” She ducked under her rig’s shimmering S-Vectoring panels, yanked free the last strap. “Must be a big shelter.” Her grin softened a little. “Here’s hoping we aren’t the only ones to escape. Could get lonely.”

Myyaelae turned back, sagging to one side as he favored his injured leg.

“Indeed.”

Tessa’s eyes lingered on his, and as one burnt hand came away from the wing of her rig, she stared at him, vestiges of her smile falling away, turning to something softer, concern edged with curiosity, shock.

“How many do you think made it?”

Myyaelae looked away, keyed a final sequence on the panel, then turned to limp toward the transports. Tessa’s lips parted, but as she hesitated, she thought better of her words and looked away instead. Part of her knew the answer, hated knowing it. There were other escape craft elsewhere in the facility– had to be, ways that researchers and staff might have escaped. . .

“There isn’t much time.” The Gnarian said gently. Tessa nodded, swallowed.

“Right.” She let the strap she’d been holding go, hauled herself up onto the wing of her rig and popped the canopy. Glancing back at Myyaelae, she caught his eye, the deep, resounding sadness there. “See you in the sky.”

The edge of a smile crossed the Gnarian’s face, and as he paused a moment to look up at her, his alien lips parted on the edge of speech.

The sounds never came.

In a roar of shattering composite and rending steel, massive fingers of glassy chrome ripped into the bay’s high, overhead ceiling and peeled back exterior sheeting and support beams like soft wax. Tessa’s move came reflexive– in less than a breath, she had dived for the deck, putting the body of her rig between her and the falling shards of torn steel that dropped from above like massive vines thick with overripe fruit. Somewhere in the haze, the pelting, clashing fall of steel, she heard Myyaelae cry out, and then another noise, a gurgling howl that echoed through everything, reverberated across every inch of steel and chrome in a way that left a frightened chill in Tessa’s heart, a chill that settled colder into her flesh than the open, frozen air of the planet as it rushed in to fill the bay.

And then she heard the sound, impossible, haunting.

Clicking.

Swallowing past her fear, Tessa grabbed onto the wing of her Seindrive, used it to haul herself back up and onto her feet again. Cruel, bitter air bit into her lungs with every breath, already freezing skin to a solid, icy edge. Shivering in a hunched heap and propped oddly on his one good leg like a broken, sinuous marionette, Myyaelae stared wide-eyed at the thing that sat perched at the ragged edge of the torn-open roof, its flesh all twisted, liquiferous metal moving like surging muscle. To Tessa, it looked like some kind of cobbled-together automaton of flesh and glassy, moving chrome, vaguely modeled after the bizarre, multi-limbed bodies of Cygnans, but with vestiges of its once humanoid appearance still clinging to the design, manifesting in absurdly large hands, vaguely human legs and a biped torso all unmolested by the changes, the mutations which the Coralate soldier had forced into the design. To Tessa, it was surreal, an abomination of blue skin and cybernetic soldier three times her size staring down at her from the edge of frozen infinity, but to Myyaelae, it was terrifying. Recognition blasted through him, left him reeling, slack jawed, freezing as he stared.

“Gilgamesh.” He breathed. “Great goddess, we are in your hands now.”