“They’ll find you soon enough,” Sigrah said. “You’ll be safe if you surrender.”
That made no sense. They had already found me. An entire platoon of them had already found me, these suits that had knocked the drones out of the air before they could reach me, and now stood silently, watching, waiting. Not attacking.
She had to be talking about something else—about the weapons under her control, the drones or spiders or whatever else she’d got her hands on.
She went on, “When the company arrives, you can help me explain how the situation got so complicated.”
A new sound registered. It was a gentle patter, like raindrops on the roof of a garden shed. The smoke whirled. I saw a glimmer of silver.
“You can use this to your benefit,” Sigrah said. “Don’t be stupid.”
There. I could see them now. Spiders racing across the factory floor.
They wound around and through the legs of the mech suits, gleaming through the smoke, catching the light as they turned, every second drawing closer.
“Okay,” I said quietly.
Sigrah had stopped talking. She was waiting for me, but I hadn’t even lifted my radio to answer. There was no word from any of the others. They were probably dead. I hoped they weren’t.
“Okay,” I said again. I looked at the faceless weapon before me. I tasted blood at the back of my throat, sour and metallic. “I’m trying to help you. I can help you. Let me help you.”
One of the suits moved to crush a spider beneath its boot. There was a crunch, a few sparks, and the other spiders skittered around it. A few of those spiders stopped suddenly, twitched, and writhed, their legs curling up underneath them as though they were in pain.
“Right,” I said. “I guess that will do.”
And I was running again. With the lights on I could see my destination clearly now. The AI’s sphere was against the far wall, clinging like a wasp nest to the vertical shaft of a missile silo. The nest itself was a dark globe on a skirt of metal girders and supports, pieced together from tools, raw materials, cargo containers, transport rails, bits of missiles and scrap. The exterior surface of the sphere was gleaming black and silver and bright, burnished copper, like the shimmering, changeable scales of a slumbering dragon. It was massive, perhaps thirty meters high, and even as I raced toward it, the suits moving to intercept the spiders behind me, I wished I had more time to study it, understand it, maybe find the awe that Mary Ping had felt when she spoke of it.
I was at the base of the structure and beginning to climb when I felt a pricking sharp sting on my right arm. It was followed quickly by a sharp jab where I should not have felt anything: in the shoulder joint of my artificial left arm, the mechanical junction where there was no flesh and no bone. I felt it like a lightning strike, and the vision in my left eye flashed white—pure, blinding white, so painful it was like a physical assault—and my entire prosthetic arm spasmed violently.
My fingers clenched, then opened. But I wasn’t doing it. I watched in horror as I made another fist, one entirely outside of my control. I couldn’t make my hand obey. I couldn’t get the fingers to work right, couldn’t bend the elbow.
I tried to grab the spider from my shoulder, contorting myself painfully to reach for it, but I couldn’t grasp it. I skidded down the sloping structure, kicking with my boots to stop my tumble. Before I could start climbing again, the metal fingers of my left hand closed around my right wrist and squeezed.
It was such a shock, so unnatural a thing to see my own hand acting without my permission, that I didn’t even realize what was happening as the grip tightened and a sudden, sharp pain spread through my right arm. I jerked my left arm away—tried to—sent the command to open the fingers and release,but my fingers stayed closed. I could not make my left arm obey. Even when I’d been newly fitted with the prosthetic, thrashing about my hospital room and knocking into everything I could not avoid, I had not had so little control.
Pain exploded through my right wrist and hand as the grip tightened. I screamed—I was cracking my own bones. I was breaking my own fucking wrist and I couldn’t stop it. Spots danced before my eyes and for a second there was nothing else, no factory, no asteroid, nothing besides the overwhelming, inescapable pain.
I rolled onto my side, trying to smash the clinging spider against the floor, but as I was turning I felt the sloped structure shift beneath me. My elbow dropped, twisting my shattered wrist in the grip of my unyielding left hand, and the pain was so great I let out a strangled cry and blacked out for a second as I fell.
I landed on the spider—it crunched beneath my shoulder— and lay in an agonized daze.
Several seconds passed before I tested my left hand again. This time, the fingers obeyed; the elbow bent when I told it to bend. I wanted to weep with relief. I was too afraid to try to move my right hand. It throbbed even when I was still, and every beat of my heart sent fresh waves of agony radiating up my arm and across my neck, my jaw, my back.
The light around me shifted slowly from low red to a piercing shade of blue, a shade that made my prosthetic eye twitch unpleasantly. The noise of the factory was muffled when the hole I had fallen through closed with a shuffle of metal plates. The battle between what my left eye was telling my brain and what the rest of my body believed sent a wave of vertigo through me. I rolled onto my side and retched.
The blue lights blinked,
