Had I not been wearing the suit, the explosion would have turned my head into pulp. As it was, I felt the force of the blow rocking me backward, felt the slight pressure as the helmet adjusted to cushion my head. The stuttering flash of white light that should have been blinding was instantly dimmed. The visual input came back quickly, slightly quivering: there was damage, but it seemed slight. I didn’t wait to find out. I tried to speak, to call out to Vanguard or even the others, but the radio squealed and spit feedback into my ear.
I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to trust that Vanguard would save the others. It was faster than me in every way. It had an unlimited number of hands and the ability to use them all at the same time. I could not carry ten people to safety, even with the suit. There was nothing for me to do but run.
So I ran. Down the line of rooms in the center of the factory, letting the suit’s mechanisms propel me forward faster than I could ever manage on my own, with balance and surety as the boots gripped the floor without the least skid and the exoskeleton kept my limbs in perfect alignment. The spiders raced around my feet, nipping at the metal, searching for purchase, releasing their chemical and setting it alight, but none of it slowed me down. Even with radio static in my ear and visual inputs showing me nothing but a murky sea of smoke and metal, I did not hesitate as I barreled forward.
I almost missed the nearest staircase and had to turn so abruptly I would have fallen without the suit. A beehive drone dropped into view in front of me, a couple of meters away. I dodged even as it released a volley of its bees. I didn’t stop, didn’t even pause, but I sure as fuck felt the impacts on my helmet, my arms, my back, each a solid blow that snapped and popped so loudly the radio squealed in protest.
One of the bees affixed itself to my right arm. It was the first close view I’d had of them, and it was an ugly little thing: a fat gray bot that clung like a slug and pulsed, something moving within a soft sac beneath its shell. I grabbed for it with my other hand, but it was harder to dislodge than I expected. It didn’t help that the suit’s gloves had trouble reading the signals from my prosthetic hand. I had managed to get one thumb under the edge when the bee exploded.
The force of the impact knocked me sideways. I skidded across the floor for several meters on my side and slammed into the metal strut at the base of a machine. My right wrist was in agony, but there were no more than the faintest scratches on the black surface of the arm. The suit had protected me from the worst of the impact.
But as I got my feet under me, I understood that denting my suit was not what the bots had in mind.
The spiders were scrambling up the staircase, with the beehive drone humming above them. I ran for the stairs and made a single jump up three steps before the first of the spiders exploded.
The staircase lurched beneath me, twisting as it broke free from its brackets. I grabbed the railing, but that was already loose and bending as the beehive fired a round of its little bombs into the stairs ahead of me.
I jumped and I caught the edge of the landing and held on—thank fuck for the suit and its stubborn gloves and Nimue’s low gravity. A couple of spiders swarmed over me as the staircase toppled, the entire length of it breaking from its brackets and twisting to the side. It fell into a hanging conveyor rack of metal canisters, knocked several of them loose and onto another belt below, where they jammed themselves between the gears.
There was an ear-splitting metallic shriek; the entire belt jolted to a stop. The canisters, now crushed together at a bend in the belt, began to crumple. An arm of twisted metal punctured one canister, then another, then a third, and a faint white mist burbled out to engulf the machine. The belt was still trying to move, grinding against the damaged canisters. Somewhere within its mechanisms something sparked.
Small licks of flames glowed in the white mist. They were a brilliant, vibrant blue, and they grew larger.
I tugged myself to my feet, kicking one of the spiders away as I did so, and I bounded upward, taking every flight of stairs in two long jumps. I had absolutely no intention of being near enough to discover what those canisters held, and holy fucking hell these suits were amazing and terrible. I couldn’t help but imagine what a private army of soldiers could do with armor like this. How little chance anybody would stand, on any station, armed with only electroshock weapons and a foolish belief that there was anybody out there interested in making sure everybody played by the rules. Parthenope couldn’t have designed all of these weapons from scratch. Even with all the secrecy around Nimue, somebody would have noticed the company hiring a bunch of designers and engineers. They had to be working with somebody else, somewhere else. That was a terrifying thought to add to all the other terrifying thoughts.
The light changed as fire spread through the factory, fading from bright and white to a deep, murky red. There was a symphony of strained, agonized metal around me, the distant pops of fuel igniting, the machine rumbles turning to shrieks and squeals. The fire suppression system kicked on, filling the air with foam and mist, making it impossible for me to
