“What is that? Are those drones or bots? Are they—”
Vanguard answered with a weapons schematic on the screen. Right. Should have been obvious. It was showing me what the mech suits could see. It wasn’t limited in its choice of tools by the need for semiautonomous behavior of a cohort the same way Sigrah was; it could individually control as many machines as it needed to without any degradation in attention or reaction speed. As I watched, several of them began to move. The segmented view on the screen became nauseating, dizzying, impossible to follow, so I narrowed it down to just a few, and only for long enough to see that they were heading in the same direction: toward the comms room where most of the crew lay unconscious.
“That will work,” I said. It had to work. I had no other ideas. “Do it. Get them to safety.”
Through the other window, the activity in the missile silo had, at Vanguard’s command, ramped up to a frantic speed. One swarm of cargo bots was redistributing the weapons among the twelve rockets, stripping out everything bulky and useless, making space; another swarm was marching into the missile silo with a steady stream of containers that carried the new payload. The machines moved swiftly and with dazzling efficiency. Vanguard estimated seventeen minutes to completion. It was an eternity for an AI. A thousand life cycles. Millions of calculations. An eon’s worth of decisions.
For me, a small fleshy human in the middle of a factory of war, it was no time at all.
Another pair of spiders struck the window of the control room. There was a loud snap, and a wide crack spread across the glass, left to right, with tendrils of smaller cracks reaching all along its length.
Time was up. I had done what I could.
“Ready to move out?” I said.
Vanguard’s only answer was to start turning off the screens of the terminals around the control room. The white light vanished, replaced by the muddy standby red. I took a breath and shoved the door open.
Bug was waiting for me outside, perched on the railing. I started toward the ladder, but the spiders were already there, joined in a silver web across the top, so I swung both of my legs over the railing and jumped.
I struck the outer curve of the sphere crookedly, with one gecko sole catching, skidding, catching again. A fresh riot of pain screamed in my left hip when I landed, in my right arm when I tried to steady myself, and for a second my vision was dark with spots. I had to ignore the pain, all of it, for a little while longer. Bug bounded after me, propped me up to keep me from toppling down the side. When I had my balance, it let me go to smack away the few spiders trying to follow. I scrambled over the outside of the sphere and dropped down to the underside of its support structure. I could hear the cargo bots working in the sphere overhead, could feel the rumble of their movements. The metal plates protecting the base shuffled again, as they had when I came in, and I scrambled out.
I slid to the factory floor and rolled right into the legs of a stationary mech suit. Bug tumbled out after me. One of its forelimbs had been badly damaged and was dangling uselessly by a few singed wires. It regained its feet quickly and, with its remaining forelimb, it gestured at me. It gestured again. It ducked its head, once.
Then it turned and raced back up toward the sphere.
Another explosion flared from the base as it approached. Bug’s damaged forelimb tore off and skidded down the metal slant. I winced, even though I knew it felt no pain, even though I knew it was only one physical piece of a much greater whole. I rose to my feet, using the mech suit for balance—which was when I noticed that the suit was not a solid figure. The torso was split down the center, with both sides folded outward, and the helmet was tilted back. It was open. Open and waiting.
“Fuck’s sake,” I muttered. “We did not agree to this, kid.”
But it was, I had to admit, a good idea. I stripped off the ruined vac suit even as another explosion flared behind me. I almost forgot the airlock key but remembered to dig it out of the pack. Vanguard’s praying mantis was reshaping itself, damaged and undamaged parts alike, into something broader, wider, a shape I hadn’t seen before and didn’t recognize now, but it was clearly trying to contain the spiders in a cage of some kind. It wasn’t going to work for long.
I stepped into the mech suit backward and slid my hands into the openings for its arms. It felt wrong immediately, too big and unwieldy, and the sense of wrongness only grew when the suit began to close around me. My right wrist was a blazing knot of pain, but as soon as the suit closed over it, the agony began to lessen—ah, right. Analgesics in the suit. Useful. The glove pressed the thick metal key into my left hand; it seemed as good a place as any to keep it for now. The helmet was the last to fold into place, and for one heart-stopping second, I couldn’t see anything.
The suit whirred to life around me. The helmet’s visual feed clicked on just in time for me to see fire engulf Vanguard’s bot. Metal groaned ominously—the base of the sphere was weakening—and a spider raced toward me, so fast it was scampering up the legs of the suit before I could react. I
