First Contact — the Underhold

Element

Three-person armed recovery team, call sign CARNELIAN. Names withheld; see BIGOT annex.

Dial state

Armed, primed, and — per debrief — afraid and concealing it. The console seated a lock the crew had not intended. GG-1 read the room and chose accordingly.

Destination

GG-D9, the Underhold. Not on the surface of any body. A worked-out world of iron galleries and ash under its own sunless sky.

Subjective duration

Crew estimate: about fourteen months. Elapsed at GG-1: nineteen days.

Returned

Two of three. The third remained in the Underhold — accounted for, not recovered.

CARNELIAN crossed expecting a room. They arrived in the territory of an empire. The inhabitants of the Underhold — the debrief calls them the Drûl, for the word they used for themselves, between the drums — are not the analysts' idea of an alien. They are broad, tusked, iron-shod things that build in basalt and bone, that field standing armies the way we field opinions, and that have been at war, internally and eternally, for longer than the team could get a straight answer about. They are governed from a seat the prisoners learned to call the Ember Throne, and they were not frightened of three soldiers with rifles. They were delighted. They had been waiting, the way a siege waits, for a door to open from the other side.

The rifles did not signify. CARNELIAN's two survivors are blunt about it: edged iron, numbers without end, and a command that treated casualties as an accounting entry. The team was taken inside the first day. What the Drûl wanted confirmed was the far side: that there was a world at the other end of GG-1 that was soft, lit, populous, and — in the assessment they fed back to their throne — unguarded and unaware. They learned that Earth exists. They learned roughly where the door is. They learned we did not know they were coming.

The two survivors got out during a succession killing that turned the gallery they were held in into a battlefield, reached a bearing one of them had memorised, and dialled home dirty, scared, and lucky that fear dials toward home as readily as away from it when home is what you want most. They came back through GG-1 nineteen days after they left, into a containment posture that had written them off. The "three voices, not in distress" the civilian console logged were CARNELIAN, alive, on the far side, the whole time.

The spoils the team carried out — an iron casket among them — were handed to the external partner and accessioned as the Ashfall Reliquary (see Research Sharing). It orients overnight toward the floor. It is pointing home. Both survivors were debriefed, treated, and placed under oath of permanent secrecy under the GROUNDGATE compartment.

"They didn't want our weapons and they didn't want our codes. They wanted to know if the place we came from was as soft as we smelled. I told them nothing. It didn't matter. They could smell it too." — CARNELIAN survivor, debrief tape 3.