Stonehaaryn labyrinth, Pyrotus Six, September of 137 AL.
He could hear the tank treads rumbling up ahead, paving the way for the battalion on its march towards their objective; Calx Urbs, an underground research facility operated by Clades Corporation.
Several weeks earlier M. Fleet Command had received a distress signal from the surface of Pyrotus Six; the sender was a Machinae soldier named Elliott Clements claiming to have been kept as a prisoner of war in an underground facility. He'd managed to escape through a series of tunnels belonging to an old tungsten mine around the prison and made his way to the surface. The team that picked him up reported that Elliott was crazed and manic; he jumped at shadows and acted paranoid, disturbingly he was covered in surgical scars. He displayed signs he'd been tortured, and judging from the pictures Salem had seen he hadn't been fed in a long time. Further investigation showed he'd been operated on, and after a night in the hospital Elliott Clements passed away.
Salem had read and reread the reports and transcripts of the prisoner's rescue and debriefing a dozen times, and everything Elliott described sounded scarily familiar to him; an underground facility staffed entirely by Stonehaaryns wearing Clades uniforms, where several hundred prisoners were kept and experimented on by a mysterious mad scientist. All signs pointed in one direction; Elliott had escaped Calx Urbs, the laboratory of the Monstermaker, Devon Marco.
Machinae intelligence agents didn't know where the facility was located, they knew only its name and the vaguest idea of its purpose; Calx Urbs served as a prison complex and laboratory for Clades corporation. Judging from Elliott's reports, it housed several hundred prisoners that were used as guinea pigs in Marco's experiments. Salem had mobilized his military immediately after he'd verified the reports were accurate, and inside a week a small army landed on Pyrotus Six to begin the search.
The sixth planet of the Pyrotus system was a barren waste, made entirely of cold deserts and hard stone. It was almost more an asteroid than a planet; Jaeger had scanned the surface of the rock from orbit but found nothing but stone and scrub brush, leading Salem to believe the facility was cloaked to prevent its discovery. Searching the surface would have taken too long, so Salem and his army delved into the mines near where the prisoner had been rescued. He led a column of tanks and foot soldiers through one of the mine shafts, using seismic sensors to narrow the search.
They were three days into their underground exploration they found something promising; sensors showed a large, solid object a kilometer under the surface. It was too massive and too symmetrical to be naturally occurring, Salem knew he was on the right track; Calx Urbs was somewhere down here, and he wouldn't rest until he'd found it and destroyed everything inside.
There were two other columns like his working their way through the mine shafts towards the mass they'd discovered; one was under Augustus' command and the other was led by Korana. Once they'd found the base they would begin a coordinated strike, simultaneously weakening the Stonehaaryn leadership by eliminating several high-ranking individuals in Clades corporation and rescuing several hundred prisoners of war. Most importantly, Salem hoped to find one or both of the Marco brothers; the most wanted men in the Empire, responsible for the creation and use of chemical weapons that ended peace talks and led to the continuation of the war.
Tank treads rolled over stone, crushing or scattering the larger pieces that stood in their way. The mine shafts had widened several kilometers back; the tunnel they stood in now was a natural cavern almost thirty meters wide and ten meters tall. It connected several of the artificial shafts together, judging from seismic scans of the surrounding cave system. They hadn't met any resistance so far, the worst part by far was the boredom; marching through the dull gray tunnels for days on end by flashlight had done little for their morale. Salem was content, if nervous; as long as there were no parasites he couldn't really complain, but in Salem's experience there were always parasites, and the longer they went without seeing them, the more on-edge he became.
