The Overseer understood that to be a rhetorical question and did not answer.
Fuck. I needed to think. I rubbed my eyes tiredly, rolling my head to ease the tightness in my neck. I had let my disgust for Mary Ping color my conclusions. Because she had killed David, I had wanted so badly for her to be responsible for everything else as well. I had wanted her hubris to have been her downfall. And perhaps it had been, but not in the way I had imagined.
There were two AIs on Nimue. Not a single virus-infected AI acting strangely. Two AIs, one acting exactly as it should be, protecting the crew as best it could, and one acting in a way that looked wildly strange because I hadn’t known what I was looking at. They could both be Overseers, but I rather suspected that the one in charge of the facility in the UEN base was something else. It had different goals, different directives. An Overseer would never inhabit a weapons-grade mech suit and attack a crew member under its protection—but a weapons AI could do that easily, under the right circumstances.
The others were going to be caught between Sigrah and the AI—if they weren’t already. I asked the Overseer how much time I had before Wellfleet arrived. Its best estimate was just over two hours.
“Show me active visual surveillance in Residential and Operations,” I said. “Please.”
“I’m afraid some of my surveillance modules are damaged, but I will show you what I can.”
The Overseer brought up images from the station above: smoke filling the junction, the tangled ruin of spiders scattered throughout the corridor, Delicata’s body, Vera’s body. Nothing but flickering lines or darkness from at least two cameras. The explosion had been largely contained within the junction and Ops corridor. The walls were scorched, control panels cracked and smoldering, but there were no serious obstacles or obvious structural problems. At the center of the junction were the mangled remains of the bots, fused together in a gruesome tangle.
“And the cargo warehouse?” I said.
The screens changed obligingly. It was quiet, without any signs of movement. No spiders. The doors to the tunnels were still open; Sigrah hadn’t closed them after she passed through.
“The cargo airlock.”
David’s blood, nothing else.
“A map of the facility exterior, including all the remaining UEN infrastructure.” I rolled my shoulders tiredly and sat forward in the chair as the screen changed again. “Thank you.”
There. There it was. The transport tunnels had to follow the spine of the facility before branching off toward the UEN base. But there was also a way across the surface of the asteroid. A route fast enough that Ned Delicata could use it on his regular “routine maintenance” checks. That was what he meant when he offered to go out and head off the crew before they reached the secret factory.
“Fuck.” I sat back in the chair. “Fuck everything.”
I hauled my pack into my lap to take stock. The radio, useless for now, but probably wouldn’t be later. My PD had been cracked across the screen in the explosion but was still functional. Flashlight. Rebreather. At the bottom of the pack, the emergency vac suit was still folded up neatly. A quick check showed it had not been damaged. The radiation sensor still hung from my belt.
I hurt all over, every bloody joint throbbing with pain as I stood, but it was bearable. I would survive.
I couldn’t get out of it this time. I was going to have to go outside.
TWENTY
I limped over to the lift and waited. Standard-issue emergency suits were flimsy as hell, minimally pressurized and insulated, and relatively easy to tear, so I decided to keep it sealed up in the pack on my back until I needed it.
“I cannot protect you if you leave this place, Hester,” said the Overseer.
“I know. I need to leave anyway. Just open the doors ahead of me and shut them behind me.”
The lift doors slid open. I stepped inside.
“Be careful,” I said, then felt immensely foolish, then guilty for feeling foolish.
“You as well, Hester,” said the Overseer.
The doors shut, and the lift carried me up to Ops.
Outside the systems room, the corridor was filled with drifting smoke, pockets of heat, whirling dust. A bitter, metallic scent made my eyes water and my throat ache. I switched on my flashlight, but the air was so choked with dust the light only made it harder to see. I turned it off again and pulled the front of my shirt up to cover my mouth and nose. I paused every few steps to listen for the clatter of metal legs, but I heard nothing. I didn’t see any intact or waiting spiders, but that meant nothing. If any had survived the explosion, they could be hiding again. The explosion had done the most damage in the front part of the corridor, near the door to the junction; it took me a few minutes to pick my way over and around the ruptured wall plates and twists of metal.
I stopped at Delicata’s body and nudged the twisted remains of the dead bots away from him. I knelt and scrubbed my hands on my trousers. He had told Sigrah he still had the key; he had to have meant the key to the UEN base, the one he used for his visits or inspections or whatever the fuck he had been doing. The corpse stank of charred meat and scorched plastic. I swallowed back my nausea and began to search his pockets. The fabric, where it had not been burned, was tacky with his blood. I tried not to look too closely at the ruin of his shoulder and upper arm, but my gaze kept drifting that way anyway. I wondered if that was what I had looked like when the rescue crew found me.
I
