Dungeon of the Endless: Apogee

A few hundred condemned criminals were being shipped to the Auriga system on board the prison hulk “Success”. All they knew about Auriga Prime was what the probes told them: it had water, temperate zones, plant life, and plenty of metals in the crust. In fact, the planet Auriga once hosted a major settlement of the galaxy-travelling precursors known as the Endless, and was still orbited by a functioning (and well-cloaked) defensive system… Luckily, every set of holding cells also functioned as an escape pod, so the ship let itself disintegrate and the surviving prisoners fell bruised but (temporarily) alive and (momentarily) safe to the planet below. Safe, that is, until they realized that they had crashed through some sort of Endless facility, all the way down to a sub-basement so deep and ancient it might as well be called a dungeon…