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 grew 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
