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curiosity, he took another step. Then another. Before long the still mist surrounded him, and visibility fell to five meters or less.
    “Stupid, stupid,” he whispered, even as he took another step.
    Individual subhuman voices stood out against the thrum now. The sounds came from the left and right, but not from ahead, he realized. It was as if the beings were formed in a line, and he’d just crossed it. He glanced left and tried to peer through the heavy mist. Just at the edge of his vision he thought he saw a human form, swaying on its feet as if in a trance. To the right he saw the same, or thought he did. The cloud made it hard to trust his eyes.
    Only then did it occur to him that there were no trees here. None upright, anyway. Fallen trunks of shattered wood littered the ground around him, some still tucked in the embrace of strangler figs. He stepped around the huge stump of a kapok tree. The smooth, fleshy base ended in a violent mess of splinters. Another nearby had been uprooted completely. The chill he’d felt before vanished, replaced by humid warmth that grew with each step.
    The mist cleared slightly, if only for an instant, and Skyler realized he’d walked into a wide ravine with curved walls. The ground beneath him sloped gradually downward.
    Not ten steps later a wall of earth loomed ahead of him, and then he saw the mouth of the cave. Or, more aptly, thetunnel, for this huge circular opening was clearly not a natural formation.
    Skyler knew then, with sudden certainty, where he was.
    Something had crashed here. It didn’t take much imagination to guess what. The proximity to the Elevator, the ring of chanting subhumans lining the site …
    He’d found one of Tania’s five mystery shell ships. Of this he had no doubt. The objects had trailed in behind the Belém Elevator’s construction vessel, and then she’d lost track of them. In truth, no one had given the objects much thought since then. Not that he was aware of, anyway.
    Swallowing a growing dread, Skyler crept forward, gun constantly sweeping the fog ahead of him until he reached the mouth of the tunnel.
    Faced with that black opening, tall as a two-story home, and no backup, Skyler finally stopped. He stood there, caught between the sane choice of returning to get help and the intoxicating urge to see what lay within.
    A vision hit him. The colonists, huddled around the comm, a dozen people speaking at once and as many more coming through the speaker, as they debated the proper course of action to explore the crash site. If it even was a crash site. A slew of other theories were offered. Fair or not, the mental image resonated.
    “Yeah,” Skyler said to himself, “enough of debate and consensus.”
    He set to work on his gun again, taking care to keep noise to a minimum. The grenade launcher came off, the flashlight taking its place once again. Backpack re-slung over his shoulders, he took a few tentative steps into the darkness. He glanced back with each step, waiting until he could see little of the ground outside before turning on the flashlight. The last thing he needed right now was for a slew of subhumans to spot him and come charging in.
    Root systems from the trees above the tunnel dangled from the ceiling, charred and gnarled. The air had an overpowering smoke scent to it. Exposed rocks dotted the curved wall of the circular passage, some cleaved in half, signs of slag fromthe heat of whatever had forged this cavity. Water trailed down the center of the floor, eroding a jagged path into the darkness.
    When the trickle of runoff began to widen into a pool, Skyler knew the back of the tunnel loomed. The diameter of the cavity began to shrink as well, and the heat became stifling. Without taking his eyes off the dark passage, he reached and unzipped his vest. Moisture and sweat trickled down his neck and sides.
    Two steps later he caught the first hints of a shape in the gloom. The light from his gun struggled to illuminate the form