by Kali Wallace
Every motion I made felt too loud: the sticky-soft peel of the gecko soles, the crinkle of flexible polymer on my arms and legs, the sound of my neck rasping against the suit’s collar. I cast my light around and found two metal staircases leading down. I chose the one to the right, closer to where I thought the transport tunnel should come into the base, if I was understanding the layout correctly. The staircase had a skinny gate across the top, but it swung open easily on recently oiled hinges. The stairs creaked and trembled as I descended. I couldn’t even see how far down they went. I had no idea where a control room might be, or the entrance from Nimue’s transport tunnels, or the systems room and physical brain of the AI that ran the factory. All I could see were the steps before me and the machines around me.
I could also see, here and there, in glimpses and gaps, in flashes of illumination when my light turned, what those machines were building.
Weapons. The factory was building weapons, exactly as I had suspected, but suspecting a thing to be true was very different from seeing it firsthand. Winding around me, on both sides of the staircase, was a tangled braid of racks and conveyor belts, drawing from the hidden depths of the machines like tributaries joining a river that flowed toward the far side of the facility. Most of what I could see nearby appeared to be the incomplete pieces of products that would be completed and armed elsewhere. There was a line of missile casings standing upright like soldiers momentarily frozen midmarch. There were slender canisters with no markings or labels laid out like baguettes on a conveyor belt. I recognized the shape from history books and news reports: the UEN had used noxious gas loaded onto riot rovers to slip into crowds and quash Martian protests. Something about the blankness of those canisters, the complete lack of exterior markings, was so much more unsettling than a rainbow of warning labels would be.
I kept walking. Down the stairs, through the machines, gaping with growing horror at all I saw.
Egg-shaped devices that looked like beehives, with each cell glinting strangely. Fixed-winged drones like pinned butterflies. Armored rovers with empty gun mounts. Countless pieces, incomplete parts, devices I didn’t recognize. Wings, perhaps, or blades. The casings for small explosives. Sections of what I assumed were to be larger unmanned spacecraft, visible now only in shards of curved hulls and polished nose cones.
My mouth was tacky and dry, my heart beating quickly. I imagined this facility functional. Every machine chugging, every belt whirring. Bots I could not see piecing together these uncountable parts into whole and operational devices. I imagined all of these weapons loaded into transport containers. Ships coming to Nimue to carry them away—the crews would be told they were transporting water or fuel or precious metals. Shipments would spread throughout the outer system, carrying Parthenope’s weapons into every major port and station. All waiting for a signal from Parthenope—and what would that take? They were not building all of these weapons without a plan. Whatever that plan was, whatever conquest they wished to achieve, the spark to set it all in motion could be anything. A deal gone wrong. A treaty disregarded. A rivalry grown tiresome. So little. I did not know what they were waiting for, and that was as terrifying as not knowing what they intended to do.
I stared at all of it, committing it to memory with growing panic as I continued my descent into the facility. Another turn in the staircase, then another. There I spotted the first surveillance camera, but I couldn’t tell if it was working. I shifted my light from one hand to the other to test if the camera followed my motion. It remained still.
The light did catch, buried deep in the guts of a machine, the flat, reflective faceplate of a helmet. There was a line of mech suit helmets lined up on a belt, like disembodied heads, separated from their bodies.
The factory just kept going. It extended down and down and down, stretching into the depths of the asteroid, so ruthlessly efficient in its design it would have been impressive, if its purpose weren’t so terrible. I was growing impatient and frustrated. I was fairly confident the transport tunnels should be meeting the base somewhere ahead of me and to the right, but I had seen nothing like a control room for human crew, nor a systems room for an AI. I had not heard any sounds except my own footsteps and my own breath. The silence and the darkness weighed on me, turning that vast space claustrophobic and oppressive, with the dance of my own flashlight casting nervous shadows in every direction.
I made it all the way down to the factory floor before I saw the first hint of light.
The stairs deposited me near what seemed to be the middle of the facility. There were racks of transport containers in the distance, on the other side of the factory, with the broad area directly before me split by what looked, at first glance, like a misplaced city street. There were buildings of one or two levels, with dark windows looking outward like eyes. I was so disoriented, so frustrated with how little I could see, that it took me a moment to realize those rooms were exactly what I was looking for. They were the parts of the facility designed for human crew.
But there was nobody there. All the rooms were dark. There should have been somebody, Ryu and the others, or Sigrah. They couldn’t all still be in the transport tunnels; more than enough time had passed. I didn’t want to consider that I had been so wildly wrong, to think this was the only possible destination, but the alternative was worse. The spiders could have found them in the tunnels. Another mech suit, against which they would have no defenses. Sigrah could have caught up to them and killed them all. Finished the work her bots had failed to do. Even now she could be returning to the station to tell Parthenope something unfortunate had happened. What the Overseer had shown me on surveillance made it abundantly clear that Sigrah had a story all planned out and absolute confidence that nobody would question it.
I turned to the right, toward where I believed the entrance from the transport tunnels to be, but as I did so a glint in the other direction caught my eye. I thought at first it was only a reflection, but when I turned off my flashlight and waited for the spots to fade, the light remained.
It was a low red glow at the far side of the factory. As my eyes adjusted, a shape emerged: a sphere, sitting above the central rooms, high above the factory floor, visible only in shards of faint red light that shone from frail lines on its surface.
No. That wasn’t right. The light was not on the surface, but coming from inside. Visible through tiny cracks—but how tiny were they, truly? I had no sense of distance, no way to gauge the true scale. The red lines were uneven and jagged like the seams of a human skull. The shape, the scale, the deep red glow, everything about it was at odds with the tightly efficient facility around it.
The sphere sat above the factory like a wasp nest, or a banked ember in the oppressive darkness. I knew better than to jump to conclusions, but I was ready for a leap. This was not a structure designed by human engineers, for human purposes.
This was where the weapons AI kept its brain. It had made itself a home.
I moved away from the sphere, staying close to the base of the machines. I hoped I would not have to approach that unsettling sphere directly. For now, I would search for a control room as I cautiously made my way toward it.
I had just passed the staircase again when a soft noise caught my attention. I stopped abruptly, silencing the sound of my gecko soles on the floor and the crinkle of my suit, and listened. I couldn’t tell at first where it had come from. Only when I heard it again—a soft, rhythmic pair of taps—was I able to pinpoint it as coming from ahead of me and slightly above. As I turned, a bright light flared from the same direction.
I snapped my flashlight off and stepped back, knocking my head painfully on the underside of a conveyor belt. I bit back the yelp of pain and waited.
This light, unlike the red of the AI’s nest, was brilliant and pale and not at all hard to see. It appeared as a neat rectangle in the wall of the factory, a bright glow several meters wide and tall, bouncing as it gr
ew brighter and brighter. It took only a few seconds for my confused brain to make sense of what I was seeing: somebody was approaching within the transport tunnel. I heard no voices, only the soft sound of footsteps. Whoever it was, they weren’t using gecko soles. They were leap-stepping along in the manner of people used to low gravity. My mind raced to figure out who it could be, but without any real idea how long it took to pass through the tunnels, nor what obstacles they contained, I couldn’t even make a good guess. Probably not a large group, judging by the sound.
An interminably long time seemed to pass before the light changed from a distant glow to a bright pinpoint, and the edges of the tunnel were illuminated clearly. I glimpsed the dull gray of a vac suit and the reflective curve of a faceplate— just enough to be sure it was a person, not one of the black mech suits, but there was nothing more I could discern. They could have been anybody. At the end of the tunnel, they descended a ladder to the factory floor, sliding more than climbing, and landed with a tap of boots.
Nobody followed. They were alone, and they knew exactly where they were going. There was no hesitation, no worry about what might be lurking in the dark. It had to be Sigrah. Fuck. But the others had fled before her—where were they? Why had it taken her so long to get here? Perhaps they had hidden somewhere in the tunnels, or had another destination in mind entirely. Perhaps she had searched along the way. Or caught up to them already. I hated not knowing where they were.
She walked straight from the bottom of the ladder to the first room in the row. For a moment I saw her only by the light shining around the corner and through the walls of windows. There was a mechanical clank—a door unlocking—and the light dipped, concentrated behind the window, snapped off.
Lights came on inside the room. Behind the windows, Sigrah removed her helmet and set it aside. She turned, peering down this way and that; she was looking at consoles and screens. Her expression was hard to read from where I stood, but while she moved quickly and with purpose, there did not seem to be panic or fear in her demeanor.
I waited until she was turned away from me to slink quickly back along the machinery. She would have surveillance now, security control, weapons, anything she wanted.
The lights could come on at any moment, but for now the darkness protected me. I ran across the open space to the row of rooms in the center. I pressed myself against the wall and waited to hear the door open again or the crackle of a radio or the clink of metal spider legs.
Instead I heard a gentle whir, very faint, obviously mechanical. It sounded like a fan, something weak and small, but I could not see it, could not see anything at all. My eyes strained in the darkness. It was coming from above, and after a few seconds it was joined by another just like it. One to the left, one to the right. Still no lights came on on. I had no idea if Sigrah had surveillance access yet. She could be looking right at me. She could be calling upon weapons I would never see in the darkness.
I flinched when I felt something fly past my head. In the faint, faint light from Sigrah’s control room, all I could see was the hint of motion, a shadow among shadows, moving so quickly it blurred before my eyes when I tried to track it.
My mind filled with stories I’d heard as a child: rumors of heat-seeking and motion-sensing machines stalking through the Underground tunnels beneath London, remnants of the war set loose on Earth by Martians determined to claim their revenge. Family dogs blasted to soggy red pulp in suburban gardens. Homeless men chased like animals through the streets of Southwark. The same from my father’s side of the family in California, where my cousins spoke of craters in the desert where homesteads used to be, of children snatched from schoolyards by gleaming insectoid prowlers, of an old woman who mistook a threshing bot for a recycler when she stepped outside and her head—so the gruesome story went—rolled into the street while her body slumped in her front hall. There was no truth to the rumors. The war never reached Earth. All the violence had happened on Mars or in space. But the stories were terrifying precisely because the machines were real.
I held my breath until the whirring sound faded. Slowly, carefully, I turned my head to look for it, whatever it was. A smudge of movement well above me, but no light, no reflections. It faded into the enveloping darkness. I took a few more steps, feeling my way, my heart pounding.
Another few steps. My hand slid from the wall into empty space. An open doorway.
I slipped into the room and shut the door quietly. Breathed a cautious sigh of relief when the latch caught. Breathed again when the whirring machine retreated.
A few steps into the deeper darkness and my boot connected with something soft but immovable. I lurched forward, caught myself. I leaned down to find the obstacle on the floor.
Touched the cool, smooth, familiar material of a vac suit.
Traced with my fingers along the length of an arm. The curve of a shoulder. A warm, exposed face.
TWENTY-TWO
I jolted upright and stumbled backward a few steps, slammed into the hard edge of the doorframe. My heart was hammering and my breath coming in quick rasps. I couldn’t hear anything else, couldn’t hear if the drone was hovering right outside the door. I felt an arm. Warm skin. A face. Light, light, I needed my fucking light—I switched it on, remembered half a second later to bank the glow with my hand. I let my eyes adjust.
There was somebody lying on the floor right in front of me. I dropped to my knees and reached for them.
“Hey,” I whispered, scarcely daring to make a sound. “Hey, are you okay?”
I recognized the black hair braided into rows: Melendez, the crew’s geologist. I stripped off my glove and reached into the collar of her vac suit to find a pulse. She was alive but out cold. I didn’t see any obvious injuries, no blood or head wounds, but I couldn’t examine her thoroughly while she was wearing a vac suit. She was on her front, with one arm caught awkwardly beneath her body, the other reaching above her head and gripping the ankle of a boot. Somebody else’s boot. She wasn’t alone.
I panned my light over the room. My hand was shaking so much the beam danced over the walls and corners and dusty consoles and people on the floor.
They were all here. I crawled past Melendez to reach Dolin, who was lying in a sprawl next to Dietrich-Yun. Elena Yee was just beyond them, Balthazar right beside her. All of them were unconscious. All wearing vac suits with no helmets. Katee King was curled onto her side at the base of a console; there was blood on her face, more matting her hair, staining the gloves of her suit. Ryu was next to her.
“Oh, fuck, Avery.” I lurched across the room, tripping over Yee’s legs, and fell to my knees beside Ryu. I turned them onto their back and brushed their limp black hair off their face. “Come on, Avery, wake up. Wake the fuck up.”
I couldn’t tell if they were breathing. They looked so pale, so bruised with their twin black eyes and swollen nose. I leaned close to listen for their breath, tugged at their collar to find a pulse. Their skin was clammy and cold.
There. A flutter beneath my fingertips. A pulse. Slow, but steady.
I let out a shaky breath and pulled them close.
“Oh, fuck you. Fuck.” I could feel their breath now, warm and a bit sour, shallow but even. “I hate you so much. You need to wake the fuck up.”
But they didn’t wake up. They didn’t stir. I reluctantly crawled away to search the room. I needed to know what had happened and why they were unconscious.
As I turned, there was movement at the corner of my eye.
I looked up, startled, but saw nothing except the flat, pale reflection from a small window in the door. Shit. I hadn’t noticed it before. I switched the flashlight off and stood, somewhat unsteadily, to pick my way across the room in the darkness. I stopped when I reached the front wall, and I waited.
A moment later: a click. The door was opening.
I heard no whirring, no humming, none of the soft mechanical s
ounds of the drones, only the soft scrape of the door and the sticky peel of gecko boots. A faint shadow of motion resolved into a dark shape. The silhouette of a person less than a meter away.
I lunged wildly, my heart in my throat, and struck out with both hands. The first blow, the one from my right, was a useless slap that caught the edge of their shoulder. But the second, from my left, was a solid punch of metal fingers curled into a metal ball, and it connected with their face.
Face. Not faceplate. Not a hard helmet but soft flesh.
I heard a spluttering “Fuck!” before the whirring sound returned. There was a gasp from the other person—right near my ear—then one hand on my arm, twisting me around, and another clamped across my mouth. They pulled me backward, my boots dragging uselessly, and pushed me to the floor. There was a scrape—a creak of hinges—and the door clicked shut again.
A soft, soft whisper as the hand moved away from my mouth: “Shut the fuck up. It will hear you.”
I had no time to respond before the whirring noise grew louder. There was a sharp pop and a crackling sound outside the door. White light spilled through the window, and a rain-like patter filled the room. Something, several somethings, struck the door and wall, causing the entire room to vibrate with deafening noise. As the sound of the impacts faded, I could again hear that close, constant humming that put an ache in my teeth.
There was another volley of impacts on the door and wall, and a crackling, like fireworks, that landed a series of loud metal pings. The door rattled under another round, then another, before the drone moved along the wall, launching its attack on other doors, other rooms. The noise of impacts grew softer as the machine drifted farther away.
I breathed in silence, waiting. The room was utterly dark.
There was a scrape and a scuff. A sigh.
