TWO - ENTER THE NECROPOLIS

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Not thirty meters from where he had crashed was a large cliff. Below him, stretching out far into the distance, were the deserted ruins of a mighty city. Once great spires that would have pierced the blue skies were little more than crumbling fragments of their former selves. What had been a once thriving metropolis was now fatigued metal being dragged by nature back to the ground.

The pilot looked for a way down from the edge of the canyon. His helmet spied a manhole cover. Heaving with all his might, eventually, although clearly having not been opened for many centuries, it pulled open. A ladder dropped down into the dark and after shining a light from his Halo-Core down into the gloom, he wasn't comfortable about using the rusted staircase. Above him the battle continued to rage, the sounds of blasts and shots echoing down though the fighting was taking place miles above him. Occasionally a blast would descend from the skies and sound across the city. He put a foot on the ladder and clambered into the dark.

Dripping water echoed around him, and condensation made the rungs of the ladder slippery underfoot. It was unbearably stuffy, like having just come out of the shower. Slowly but surely he worked his way down through the labyrinth of ladders and walkways. They rusted tunnels had apparently been some kind of maintenance way or secret escape route. The pilot did not care what they were. Off to one side a faint shaft of light streamed through, illuminating a small chasm through which the trickle of a stream filtered through rock. It was an amalgam of rock and metal, of man and machine and Mother Nature.

Before long the pilot came to a steel door, next to which was a dusty panel with an entry pad. He looked at it for a few minutes and then gave up trying to work out a code. He found a crowbar and began to bash his way out. Before long the aged door developed a dent in one spot and as he worked up a sweat a crack formed. With one final swing a hole appeared. Pushing one end through and leaning upon the other end the pilot forced the door open. He slipped through and out of the hillside caverns.

The room was an ancient storeroom filled with cobwebbed utensils and tools for all manner of jobs. The pilot pushed past and stepped over the fragments of an ancient door. He was in a broken building, perhaps an office block, now with a wall eroded by time. He found a decrepit, crumbling staircase and descended with due caution. Several floors from the bottom he found the way blocked by a wall of bones, blank eye sockets sizing him up. He hurried on past. In the distance he heard the whistling of another craft falling to the ground. The ship landed close by, the building shaking in its foundations. The pilot hastened in his exit from the building, feeling the cracking of rocks above him, the shuddering of sections of building falling to floors last walked by ghosts.

The man looked up around him in the street to see a maze of ancient walkways and paths. Skeletons of buildings towered over him and the man wandered through the stone-paved streets lost and abandoned. He looked back to take note of where the staircase was hidden, should he need to return. It was at the end of a dead-end street, some corpse-like streetlights lying like fences down the way. He tried to imprint the sight into his mind. After several seconds, noting as many features as he could, he headed off into the city.

The necropolis was a mess of rubble and ancient paths. Ivy and trees grew through broken walls and strange birds roosted in ruins. Small rodents scampered here and there, the planet having retaken the fortress. Smouldering here and there were the remains of ships. Once or twice the man approached a wreck, asked for signs of life, but found nothing stirring. The battle raged on and those that hit the ground had little chance of survival. The man realised how lucky he was, having crashed into the gulley, the soft ground of the grass and undergrowth having cushioned his blow. Additionally, he'd had a friend tinker with the ship's shields before he went down to give him a little extra. Maybe that had been the difference.

Through the city of the dead the man walked, the sounds of war a melody. His boots echoed on the ground, Celestrian sabatons protected him from the whims of the dead planet. Spires of once great peoples rose watched as he trod in their shadows. It had been said that the people of Greivstor were on the fringes of great technological advancements that would bring them to interstellar greatness, putting them up with the greatest of races, but their devastation two millennia earlier robbed them of the chance. From what he had seen, the pilot agreed with these speculations. A few thousand years before, the Empire would have been proud to call these people friends.

He wandered through large behemoths of buildings, noting the faded signs on shattered windowpanes, before he spied a large shadow from the corner of his eye. Falling flat against a building, he peered around the corner down the alleyway where the shade had been spotted. There was a creature clad in armour with a purple mark on the side. It had a spider-like body with the torso of a man atop the arachnid. It glanced around to ascertain whether anyone was nearby, and the pilot shrunk back. The creature took off a section of its armour. It took out a small vial containing some kind of red liquid and uncorked the top. With one pincer-like limb it pulled out a pipe from its flesh, a snake of machine workings. It poured the vial's contents down the tube and the thing shook with pleasure.

The man extracted a gun from its holster silently and took aim at the thing's head. He saw cross-hairs in his helmet's visor, moving in relation to his arms and the gun. A small bleep told him that he was on target. He whistled, as if to a dog. The thing turned and hissed at him.

"Time's up."

The thing's head exploded and brains coated the ground red. The body toppled over as limbs flailed for a missing head. The pilot ran to the twitching body, extracted a blade from a pouch in his battle-armour and sliced. Underneath the armour he saw was a tangle of flesh and machine, cogs and gears flowing with oil and muscle, all combining together into one sentient being.

"Biomechs." He crouched down and looted a gun and a flask of water. Another ship hit the ground. Another crater. Another forgotten name.

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