Hail stacks us up against the doorframe, looking in. I’ve got her back, and Salt leans against the wall across from us. He’s got a stubby shotgun the same colour as the rust-sheen plating that keeps him alive, and almost as bulky.

We hesitate—all three of us. We should’ve punched through as soon as we cleared the step, rolled around and swept our way through the room on the other side, but we’re all feeling it. A heavy dread, curdling in the pits of our stomachs.

Hail takes a breath, waves us through a ready check and punches through. We follow, skirting around the huge metal slab and fanning out with gun-sights tracking cones of IR sensitivity.

Nothing moves to meet us, but we know the difference between caution and paranoia—if there’s any chance of something on the other side, we have to take it as a certainty. Sigurd’s hollows killed their way here, died in droves just to reach the doorstep. If there was anything alive on the other side when they arrived, it’ll be dead now.

That doesn’t stop us running through the clearance patterns. We move in overlapping circles, tracing our way around an empty chamber. Smooth walls match our turns, rising to a dome above us, carved from valley stone. A single opening at the far side leads to a narrow passage into the dark. We take up positions, check our visors and the extra senses in our guns, but we seem to be alone.

“Clear?” asks Hail.

“Clear,” says Salt.

“Clear,” I reply, a moment later. “You feel that?”

“Is my skin crawling?” growls Salt. “Yes. Yes it is.”

We turn as one, look back at the giant slab.

Hail puts out a hand and draws it back. Her visor lights up. “I don’t read anything off it—”

I glance back at her. “—but it’s giving us all pins and needles?”

None of us want any closer to it, but that doesn’t stop it drawing us in. We step around it one last time, roll through our helmet displays looking for any sign of particle wash. Salt gets his shell to scan it from out in the cave, but the machine comes up just the same as we do. Some mild interference, but from an unknown source. Nothing that can kill us, no reason for us to be injecting anti-rad. Nothing to be worried about, if it wasn’t so obviously something to worry about.

It lies flat on the ground where Sigurd dropped it, cracked flooring buckling around it. It’s as thick as dreadnought-plate and so dense that you can almost feel it tugging on you. Silver blisters mark where company guns tried to break it down, but I can’t see anywhere where they made it through.

Scratch that. The huge hinges have been peeled back. All around them are claw marks, gouged through the metal.