Delta site was set up around a thirteen-kilometer-wide hole near the equator of the Slumbering Empyrean, identified even before Nysa’s Wake completed its final insertion burn in the EK Draconis system; much larger holes existed, but few matched its apparently bottomless depth.
This became stranger with initial probe exploration, before crewed expeditions were greenlit by the Antikythera, which found a gravitational anomaly within the abyss. For the first hundred kilometers there was minimal effect, but as probes traveled deeper they were eventually unable to escape what appeared to be an event horizon in the narrowing chasm, at an estimated 1,400 kilometers below the surface of the Empyrean. Even if they were not destroyed by the crushing gravity, primion excitation increased with depth into the hole, preventing exploration by even the simplest of drones by a depth of 350 kilometers.
Probes that were not lost to this anomaly reported that the walls of the hole resembled a cross section of the Slumbering Empyrean, showcasing hundreds of distinct structures and thousands of openings spanning from one side of the chasm to the other. Exploration of most of these tunnels just found dead ends, while others appeared to serve some sort of circulatory function: most spouted water into the void, but others occasionally dislodged other materials.
One particularly notable pipe occasionally spat a variable number of cobalt spheres into the chasm, which contained between them an atmosphere of krypton at several gigapascals, the cluster arcing on a neat ballistic trajectory into the far wall. On impact, the shells shattered and cobalt detritus rained toward the bottom of the void. Another ejected a glowing, white-hot ferrous fluid at 2,482 °C, magnetically contained as it floated across the hole into a receiving opening, a molten ribbon in steady commute. Yet another, nearly seven hundred meters wide, featured a cloud of dodecahedral diamonds with faces roughly forty-seven centimeters to a side, traveling across the chasm at several dozen kilometers per second into a receiving hole.
A different opening, just a few centimeters wide, disgorged a beam of protons at 99.9999999994% of the speed of light, which intersected the diamond cloud; diamonds struck by this beam were mostly annihilated, as if they were consumable targets in an invisible accelerator ring. Hundreds, perhaps thousands more tubes emitted trace gases, exotic plasmas, and significant primion radiation, all feeding unseen machinery below. None of this behavior acknowledged the humans clinging to its surface.
Openings on the opposite side of the hole from an outputting tunnel seemed safer, although many occasionally ‘backed up’ and had their own, less frequent ejections. Yet more tunnels had no evident function and were the primary candidates for exploration.
Delta site sprawled along the engineered lip of the chasm: anchor piles drilled into composite strata that never quite behaved like rock, tents and modules clamped to embedded hardpoints, sensor masts leaning over the abyss like nervous periscopes. Primion shielding nodes traced a faint lattice along the rim, tuned to keep digitized minds within safe excitation margins while the Empyrean continued its indifferent work beneath.
At Delta, Team Baku’s primion researchers watched the field, Team Khepri minded the drill heads chewing into the ceramic ‘rock’, and Team Talus traced the tunnels. Team {SAR TEAM NAME}, that V3N flew for, watched everybody else.
A shuttle, {specific modifications description}, screamed silent in the vacuum towards the site on final approach. V3N’s awareness stretched out through the controls and hull, but they still retained old habits with a hand on the stick. A crackle over the radio, “A little caution, V3N?”
“Safety first, {SAR LEADER DESIGNATION (TL)}.” The shuttle arrived low and fast, carving a tightening spiral over the rim to bleed off final approach velocity. Thrusters raked pale jets across dust and composite, then tapered to a balancing whisper as V3N eased the skids onto the landing pad. V3N let the main drive cone wind down, then stepped out, closing the shutter of their optics to shade from the brightness of EK Draconis-A. Delta site existed in a functionally perpetual day. The Slumbering Empyrean presented almost the same face to EK Draconis-A on human timescales, its slow precession stretching the march from dawn to dusk into centuries. “{CO}, can you put out a call for help unloading? I’m sure there’s somebody big on site…oh shit, what happened to Muhammad?”
{MEDIC} was working on a bisected person lying on a table under their tent near the landing site. Their fusion core and a new set of standard bipedal legs sat on another table beside them, while a power coupling and water lines kept him awake and cooled. “Ah, nothing interesting, just a… miscommunication with a crane while we were getting my workshop set up. Mā shā’A-llāh, I’ll be right again soon, of course with some help from {MEDIC}.”
{MEDIC} finished a weld. Bright slag curls away into the thin dust beneath the tent. “A meter higher and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Be careful next time, I can’t fix your neural lattice being shattered under several tons of metalworking equipment. Flyboy, help me out with holding his hips in place while I get them hooked up to his spine. Your shipment contains my helping hands workbench, so I’ll have to borrow your hands instead.”
V3N braced Muhammad’s torso without comment, letting {MEDIC} work. The medic’s tools moved with fast, economical confidence; a deft surgeon moving without fear of error.
A few minutes passed, and Muhammad had a lower torso again. {MEDIC} started reinstalling his fusion core as the ground shivered slightly, the footsteps of a titan making his way over. “Ay bruh, you called for unload? I got an hour before the eggheads need me again.” The shuttle was loaded with {MEDIC}‘s equipment, a few extra ovens, water tanks, anchoring equipment, and mule drones. “Yeah, the bird I just landed. Can you just get them on the ground? We’ll handle unpacking.”
“Can do.” As the giant hefted the cargo from underneath the shuttle, careful to make appearances as he flirted with Muhammad, V3N glanced past them to the chasm. Far below, one of the narrower vents was coughing out slow beads of glowing slag that hung in the thin local atmosphere before some unseen intake inhaled them again.
”You see that little dribbler down there? Been spitting the same three lumps of metal on a perfect arc since we got here. Makes our pallet stacks look sloppy." "When the architecture starts filing QA reports, I’ll let you redesign the yard. Until then, hold still.”The titan got the last of the cargo down, asked if there’s anything else to help with, then paused with one massive hand braced on the pallet stack, chassis angled just so toward Muhammad’s table. “Ping me if the new legs torque weird, yeah? I’ve got lifting tricks the manual doesn’t cover.” He finally loped back toward Research-Logistics, leaving fresh prints in the dust.
V3N was waved over by {SO}. The quadrupedal AI scampered up the lanky pilot’s frame to their shoulders as if climbing a familiar scaffold. > Deviation from flight plan; peak throttle during final burn: 92.3%. Inadequate safety margin. Punkass. She nuzzled comfortably in the nook behind their body and their rear-mounted water tank.
> Spiral did not violate safety envelopes. Final burn did.
”That’s why you’re here, {SO}. I pull maneuvers, you write me up.”
She directed V3N over to a bench where {CO} was working on a set of five parrot relays with wires all running from them into a terminal, testing their close range radios. The little drones were perched along the bench like metal seabirds, antennae canted outward, while {CO}‘s own bipedal chassis stood unnervingly still in their midst, a classic sign of a focusing AI.
> HELLO VICTOR THREE NOVEMBER. NICE SHOW ON YOUR WAY IN. HOW'S MY VOLUME? The combined output from all five parrots hit like a flashbang.
V3N winced backwards as they turned the gain on their receivers down. “Way, way too high, little guy. I’m pretty sure they’re gonna have heard that greeting from the other side of the site.”
> VOLUME: NOMINAL FOR PARROT MASS-CAST. LOCAL NETWORK: AWAKE. MISSION: ACCOMPLISHED.
> Your mission is not to destroy Victor Three November's radios, {CO PET NAME}.
Two of the parrots swiveled toward {SO} and blinked status LEDs in something close to defiance.
> SO's safety margins: CONSERVATIVE. Victor Three November's piloting margins: AGGRESSIVE. Composite profile: ...ACCEPTABLE.
”See? Teamwork. You keep me honest, they keep me on my toes, TL pretends not to notice.”
{TL} was planning out routes with an expedition lead nearby, tablet held in the crook of one arm as they gestured toward the chasm rim with the other. Every conversation at Delta eventually oriented toward the abyss. He turned to {CO}‘s bench, “If you three are done re-negotiating my risk budget in public, I need updated flight windows for SAR drills. The Empyrean isn’t going to slow down if someone goes over the edge.”
“Copy, boss. We’ll fish them out befor-”
Suddenly, everyone’s primion shielding went hot, disabling {CO} and {SO} for 2.3 seconds. V3N was struck with a splitting migraine - a sensation they had not felt since before being digitized - and dropped to their knees, hands clutching at their upper chest where their neural lattice sat. The world narrowed to white noise and raw error codes from their sensory bus.
{SO} reactivated first, joints flaring before settling and righting as she ran a quick test on {CO} and herself. As she saw V3N come to and got acceptable POST statuses from a groggy {CO}, she slammed high priority diagnostic pings through every relay she could access.
> PRIMION EXCITATION: OUT-OF-BOUNDS. SHIELDING: SATURATED. {CO}, RESPOND.
The parrots rebooted in sequence, one by one returning to {CO}‘s control. {CO} glanced at {SO} to nod, and V3N just barely noticed her posture slacken a single degree; unnoticeable to anybody outside of {SAR TEAM}.
{CO}‘s first coordinated act was a broadcast. > \{TL}, research team Baku just registered a massive (4,921.3% vs baseline at this site) spike in primion excitation. Advise activating \{the Team}; from the looks of it, the Slumbering Empyrean is blasting Nysa's Wake.
The words landed in V3N’s feed with the flat calm of any other status packet, but the numbers behind them were all wrong. “That probably means-”
{TL}‘s reply cut across the local net and every open channel at once. “Affirmative. It’s the Babel Contingency.”
”…May God help us all.”