The citadel proved even larger on the inside than it had appeared on the outside. After they had landed, the four person group had searched for hours and found nothing besides room after room that had been stripped of any furniture, but was filled with paintings, often of that same alien being with the mark on his face.

“We need sleep,” Bo said finally on that first night, and they all agreed. They chose a small room with only one entrance, easily defended, and hunkered down together, keeping a look-out awake and switching every two hours.

There was no morning or night on the asteroid, no sun near enough to create such a thing, and the group just moved on when they were awake, and made their way through room after room once more.

They lay together again after at least twenty hours of searching, when they were all running on empty, on the verge of exhaustion. They set up a look-out, and went to sleep.

Bo took the first shift, and he was staring tiredly at the entrance to the circular room they had chosen when the door swung quietly open.

Bo tensed in the darkness, pulling his handgun slowly up.

A Destune stood in the doorway, there was no mistaking it. It was humanoid in appearance, two legs, two arms, but covered in white and gray scales, like a lizard. Half of its face was gone, replaced by dingy metal, the eye a red glowing orb. Its right arm was metal from the elbow down, and there was a stretch of its torso which was also a machine.

Bo didn’t hesitate. He fired. The bolt booming in the small room, catching the undead android in the chest and sending it flying backward, and waking his companions.

“What is it?” Gar was asking, reaching for his rifle.

“Destune!” Bo said as he pushed his bulky frame to its feet. Char was up as quickly as Gar, and Yelia right beside him, all with weapons aimed at the door, which had creaked back closed. The Destune having been holding the handle when he was rocketed backward.

For a moment Bo had to wonder if it had been a lone creature, for nothing else came through the door, but then it was opening, and there were others. All as garish and frightening as the first.

The small room was alive with the sounds of gunfire. The Destune without firearms, but weapons of their own, including a sharp spear thrown in through the door, which caught Char in the shoulder and sent him to the ground.

“Char!” Yelia screamed, dropping to her knees to make sure he was okay. The wound was deep but had missed anything of importance, and he urged her to get back to fighting. She did so, and soon the Destune threat was extinguished, leaving more than twenty of the undead creatures now firmly dead, shredded by energy and plasma bolts, and Gar’s metal slugs.

“There will be more,” Bo said needlessly. “We need to find that machine.”

“We have no idea where it could be,” Yelia groaned. “It would take a year to search this whole place. What are we going to do?”

“We take a year then. I don’t know what other option we have,” Gar said.

But it did not take another year. It was Char who found it, or at least figured out where it might be, walking past one of the rare windows in the citadel, which looked out over a massive courtyard in the center of the structure.

“Look at that,” he said to the others, pointing. From the center of the courtyard rose a metal spike, with wires hanging all around it. “Looks almost like an antenna, doesn’t it?”

“Worth checking out,” Bo said. They had made their way to the courtyard.

“Here!” Yelia called after a few minutes. There was a rusted iron door built into a small stone hut nearby, and Yelia pulled it open as the others gathered around her. Inside the hut, a stone staircase led down into the asteroid itself.

“Looks right,” Gar said. Yelia nodded and stepped down.

A blaring scream went up in the courtyard, and red lights began to flash from atop metal poles in each corner of the courtyard.

“Oh, no,” Char said, turning to see Destune streaming in from all sides.

“This is it!” Bo said. “Yelia, get down there, we’ll hold them off. This is a good choke point, and they don’t have guns.”

“I can’t leave you!” Yelia argued, worried that Bo was going to get killed.

“Take her and get her to the machine!” Gar told Char, and then Char was moving, taking Yelia by the arm and tugging her down the stairs.

There was a long hall at the end of the steps, which led to another closed door. They ran for it, and burst through the door. There was the machine. It was spindly and made of metal, humming with energy. There was a chair inside the machine, and Yelia ran for it. She looked around and sat down. Immediately, her body was rocked with electricity, arching her back, making her nails dig into the arm of the chair. Yelia screamed, and then she felt her sister.

“Fib?” she called, and then everything around her went black.