From the room I ran to the base of the towering racks of shipping containers. I veered to the left, away from Sigrah, toward the AI. The incessant hum of the beehive grew louder as a second drone joined it. Distantly, I heard shouts and another two explosive bursts, one right atop another. For a moment the factory was washed with pale light.
In that light I saw the massive, red-veined sphere ahead. It was too far. I couldn’t sprint across the open space with drones following. I turned sharply to the right and slid into a gap between two shipping containers, balancing carefully on the metal rack.
One of the beehives let loose another spattering of projectiles—how many bombs did those fucking things carry?— that struck the shipping containers with a deafening noise. In the brief strobe of lights I saw the drones bobbing uneasily back and forth, passing the gap this way, that way, back again.
I couldn’t stay there for long. There was a series of loud pops from elsewhere in the factory, followed by a startled shout. The drones whirred swiftly away.
Slowly, with as little noise as possible, I crept back toward the end of the shipping containers. I turned on my flashlight and held my breath for several seconds. The air was hazy with smoke, making it hard to see anything. I stepped out from between the containers.
There was a buzz right behind me. Smoke whirled as a drone zipped past my head. I cursed and nearly tripped as I ducked out of the way. The drone spun and flashed, preparing to fire, and I threw my arm up to protect my face.
Instead of the sound of the drone spitting another volley of projectiles, there was a loud crunch, followed immediately by the solid, deafening clang of metal on metal. I lowered my arm cautiously.
One of the black mech suits stood right before me.
I stepped backward in alarm. Another drone flew down toward me, moving so fast it was a blur of motion. When it was about three meters away, a second mech suit dropped out of the darkness, knocked the drone from the air, and smashed it to the ground.
I felt movement in the air as a third suit landed a couple of meters away.
And another, right behind it. Another. Every one landed with a terrifying thud of metal on metal, filling the empty space between the rooms and the cargo with still, black statues. They weren’t only on the floor. There were mech suits standing atop the rooms as well, dark sentries in a line from one end to the other. I tried to count, quickly lost track. Two perched on the track of an overhead crane, another on a shipping container in the cargo rack below it. The suits did not move after they landed. They were as still as pillars, faceless and dark. They didn’t seem to be doing anything. My heart was pounding so hard it hurt. There were so many of them.
And I could see them. I could see them, even through the shifting smoke, even though my flashlight was feeble and dim.
I blinked my eyes rapidly. The factory had begun to hum. I hadn’t noticed before, but it was obvious now as the noise rose all around, and with it came light so gentle and gray it was almost unnoticeable at first, and it grew, and it brightened, like dawn rolling over a landscape. The low hum turned to a steady rumble, punctuated by machines chugging steadily somewhere in the distance, as regular and even as the beating of a dozen giant hearts. There were heavy clanks, metallic whirs, the hiss of air, and the chattering sound of racks and conveyor belts moving.
In both light and shadow there was motion: engines grumbling, belts rolling, robotic arms lifting and twisting. Noise from the machines wrapped around me, a bone-shaking industrial racket.
The factory was waking up.
The snap of my radio was so surprising I nearly yelped.
“It’s not going to work.” It was Sigrah, and she was furious. “Whatever the fuck you think you’re doing, you should surrender before you get hurt.”
I waited for van Arendonk or Adisa to answer, but there was only silence.
“Stop what you’re doing. You don’t have any way out,” Sigrah said. “Be sensible, Safety Officer Marley. You’re not a fanatic like Mary. You know the difference between a tool and a messiah.”
I felt strangely, eerily calm, although my heart was still racing. So she knew I was here after all, and she thought I was the one who had restarted the factory.
“This base is under my control,” Sigrah said, which was a complete fucking lie and we both knew it. “You can’t hide forever.”
The mech suits did not react at all. The nearest one was barely two meters away. The material covering the body was slick and flexible, with few seams visible; the boots were solid and sturdy. The faceplate was completely featureless, so devoid of light I could not tell if it was truly empty, if it was meant to hold a human person on the inside, or if the suit was merely a sick simulacrum of a human soldier. It wasn’t exactly black, I realized as the lights grew brighter, but an undulating dark gray that seemed to shift and move as I stared. It was, in a way, beautiful, even though the rational part of my mind knew the mottling effect, however it
