The first creature came through the southern wall of the instrument room at the fourth hour of the morning, eleven days after the highland garrison's arrival.
It did not come through the Gate. The Gate was sealed and monitored and the seal held. It came through a section of the facility's foundation stone on the instrument room's southern side, a section that had not been part of the original Gate mechanism but had been in contact with the Gate's pressure field for one hundred and ninety years.
Urrak saw it first because Urrak was on the instrument watch and his station was the one closest to the southern wall. He heard the stone before he saw the creature: a low sound, not loud, somewhere between a groan and a scrape, the sound stone made when something was moving through its internal structure rather than against its surface. He rang the bell cord twice, which was the alert signal, and stepped back from the wall with his weapon drawn.
