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 sounds 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.
Then, in a whisper, Hugo van Arendonk said, “Hello, Marley. I think you broke my fucking nose.”
“What the fuck is that thing?” I hissed.
At the same time, van Arendonk said, “Where did you come from?”
“And what did you do to them? Why won’t they wake up?”
“What did I do? Fuck. Fuck.” He took a deep breath, then another. He was trying to calm himself down, which did not exactly help me calm myself. “I didn’t do anything, for fuck’s sake. And to answer your first question, who the hell knows what the thing is. Some kind of bomb filled with shitty, smaller bombs? I’m not a fucking engineer. It can track motion and see in the dark a hell of a lot better than I can, but it seems to be pretty stupid about finding targets. Couldn’t you see it?”
“Why would I be able to see it?” I said, still whispering.
“You’ve got that eye.”
I stifled a short, hysterical laugh. “The good ones cost extra. I can’t see shit with this one.”
“Where’s Mohammad? Are you alone?”
“It’s just me. He and Hunter are in the transport tunnels.”
“Oh, fuck. Fuck. He’s such a fucking—”
The whirring noise returned outside the room, and van Arendonk broke off abruptly. For several seconds neither of us spoke. We breathed quietly, carefully. The noise faded again as the drone moved away.
“Sigrah’s here too,” I said. “In the control room.”
“I know. I was watching for her. She switched on those fucking drones.”
“What happened to everybody? Why are they here?”
I heard a shuffle and a rasp as he adjusted his position. “Sigrah and her bloody henchman happened. They attacked us in Res.”
“After that. I saw the surveillance. The Overseer showed me.”
“The Overseer— Fuck.” A huff of laughter. “You can’t trust that machine. Did you happen to get a look around this lovely facility when you came in? This is what it’s been hiding.”
“It’s not in control of all this. That’s—it’s something else. A different AI.” He started to interrupt, but I spoke over him. “I can explain. I will. Just tell me what the fuck happened.”
A pause, one in which I very much wished I could see van Arendonk’s face, then he said, “We, uh, we fled into the transport tunnels—you probably saw that much? We made it before Sigrah triggered the lockdown.”
“That was the Overseer too, trying to stop her from catching you.”
“Was it?” He let out a slow breath. “Well, it didn’t do a fucking bit of good. It’s a bloody maze in there, and it took us a while to get through to the part that’s been closed off. But we got here eventually and started looking for a place to take care of the injured. And to find a radio. This is some kind of comms room, but everything’s shut down. They were trying to get it running. It seemed like a secure
