Gravemire. What a shithole. Perhaps that is a little unfair. All Hive Worlds actually have nice parts, the guilded spires of the aristocracy, the glittering pleasure palaces of the merchant barons, the vast basilica presincts of the Eclesiarchy, it is just that the toiling multitudes never get to see them. Most of my time, I am fortunate to say, has been spent in the more rarified precints. We came down on the modified shuttle, though exactly how it had been modified was a little unclear to me.

"Nice dress," Selenica called as I headed up the ramp, following a cargo servitor that was loading crates of specialized equipment. I was dressed in a black leather storm coat over a red and gold body glove with long glossy black boots. My hair had been elaborately but severely braided, pulled back to the back of my head and held in place by a series of ruby studded pins.

"Not a dress, but thank you," I replied. She was dressed in the robes of a senior articifer a series of stained glass pendants around her neck marking her as glazier arcana. Our research on the three week voyage had not given us much to go on. Lazarus' analysis had narrowed the equipment used in the dig to one of the merchant manufactura in Hive Orcus. Unfortunately that didn't necessarily mean there was a connection. The gear might have been purchased legitamitely, there was no crime in selling construction equipment of course, but it was our only lead. There had been a spirited debate between following this lead and pursing the las guns. Ultimately the problem had been resolved by transit times. All three of the forge worlds which produced the unquie pattern weapons were more than six months transit. Peronally I was just glad to move on to an actionable lead. I had spent much of the past several weeks going over the transcripts of the xenos tongue. The recovered fragment was part of a mythic cycle that told the story of an ancient hero who had been on a quest to recover ancient words of power. It was steeped in disturbing allegory and grew more obtuse and disturbing as it went on. Id started to suspect that the gaps in it were partial translations of alien concepts that humans lacked and begun working them phoenitically, assembling combinations from the crammed together characters. I had begun to suffer from strange dreams. On the third day I had been awoken by Hadrian having been screaming in my sleep. On the forth day I had given myself a nose bleed and stopped my studies.

"Emmaline," Hadrian prompted and I came back from the reveriee I had been slipping into. I smiled at him in reassurance.

"I'm fine, just getting my head in the game," I told him. We had chosen to pose as purchasing agents for an off planet commercia. It was a comprimise which gave us access without the exposure that would come from posing as nobility. There would be less parties, but hopefully we would be able to get more done.