Dolphiam Sector, Agua System, Azura

  Valentina's skin was writhing, fibers slithering below the skin in large enough tendrils to be seen, like snakes beneath a taut tapestry. Her leg was red and angry, but the fibers went beyond the injury on her shin, climbing up over her knee and into the thigh beyond. The rest of her was pale as ice, mouth slack, eyes empty of all awareness.

  But for everything, she wasn’t dead. Corporal Johnston wasn’t sure that was a blessing. “We swore mercy shots if what happened to the Matador ever happened to us.” The Marines who had gone over for rescue operations, Valentina among them, and had promised that to one another.

  “You can’t be serious.” Havermeyer hissed. “This is a Cataclysm, not some mystery disease. These fibers have an intent. If we can fulfill it, we may be able to lay everything to rest.” Maintaining an understanding of machines was the very crux of the tech-monks’ teachings. When it came to Cataclysms, they were tragedies. If the source of the machine-soul’s despair could be eased, then the effects of the Cataclysm would lessen.

  “From my perspective, the intent looked like dissecting everything,” Johnston argued. Valentina’s leg had been splayed open, sublayers peeled back like the flesh of a citrus fruit, allowing more fibers entry. They were stained red where they permeated her flesh, but for every massive shift they made below the skin, she didn’t react, breathing steady, but eyes glassy. One of the automatons had wrenched her free of the nexus’ grip, and carried her to this abandoned subway car, but seemed far too late.

  Johnston might have offered a mercy shot to her, but whatever precedent was set for her, would hold for anyone who became infested, and Valentina hadn’t been the only victim. Havermeyer was kneeling in front of the other. “Admiral, I’m going to take off your boot. I need to see.”

  Havermeyer didn’t wait for a response. He began undoing the tension seals on the Admiral’s magboot, staying carefully clear of the tuft of neurofibers protruding above the ankle. Slipping the boot off, movement was immediately obvious. White threads enshrouded his foot, sliding below a bandage on his heel, some preexisting injury that had provided an entry point. The undulating movement below the skin was clear. “He’s infested.” Not as bad as Valentina, but bad enough.

  “What do we do?” Johnston asked Havermeyer. Given everything they had seen on the Matador, let alone seen here, infestation was a death sentence.

  “We could try to amputate.” Havermeyer said. “It’s crude, but it doesn’t look like his infestation has progressed as far.”

  Johnston shook his head, expression unreadable through his helmet. “He won’t survive that. Not in these conditions.” In the rot and algae-filth of the colony’s tunnels, the injury would be guaranteed an infection, not to mention create a glaring access point for the neurofibers.

  As they discussed above him, Admiral Gives kept fading in and out, awareness some oscillation between the numbing haze of shock and the utter discomfort of the neurofibers wriggling in his heel. There was some debate on what to do. Johnston and Havermeyer dropped their argument into hushed tones, as if he couldn’t hear them standing a mere few feet away. He could, but he could feel his attention slipping, the moments of lucidity becoming shorter and further between. He kept coming to with the side of his face pressed into the moist, mildewing seats of the subway car. He should have been cold. Water had worked its way into the body of his suit, and while Azura’s temperatures had been reliably above freezing, it was far from warm, like the rains of late autumn. Here, in the catacombs where the dull sunshine never reached, it was less windy, but even colder. He should have suffered from that, should have been shivering, but he wasn’t. His body just felt useless, clumsy, disconnected.

  He should have been cold, should have been sore, but all he felt was the discomfort of the fibers squirming in his foot. While he gritted his teeth on their most violent movements, even that wasn’t painful, it was just strange, some alien sensation, foreign sensitivity. But it was more than that. These fibers weren’t a mere parasite, nor some infection, their interest was in connecting to their host, learning their host, and his left foot was beginning to convulse every few minutes. Something else tightening the muscles, something else was learning how to use them, and his awareness was slipping further every minute.

  He felt distant, but that was the weakness these fibers instilled upon their host, rendering them unable to flee, unable to fight. That was their function, joining to the electrical network of their host, be it power circuitry or a nervous system, they fed off surplus energy and grew until they could bypass the network of their host and seize control. Between people and machines, the method was no different. They’d infest, grow and eventually take control. The longer the wait, the lower the chance the infestation could be removed. It was already gnawing on his awareness, dulling his ability to control his own movements. He felt like a shell of himself, or rather trapped within a shell that was his own body.

  He felt a prick on his arm as Havermeyer injected him with stimulants, trying to bring him back to awareness, but it wasn’t enough. Even in those moments of lucidity, he’d lost the ability to truly move. A paralyzed host, just as Valentina had been when they’d found her upon the seats in the transit station.

  Eventually, the consideration of amputation came back to the fore. “Do we attempt it? We can cauterize the wound. Cover it with a seal patch,” Johnston said. The Marines were no stranger to battlefield first aid.

  “There’s no way to know if the fibers are still localized,” Havermeyer said, having thought it over. There was a better chance of that for the Admiral than Valentina, but there was no guarantee cutting off the limb would stymie the infestation.

  “But it might buy time.” Johnston argued. “It will slow it, might at least get him conscious.”

  In one moment of lucidity, the Admiral was conscious, just unable to move. He doubted Havermeyer and Johnston would move to amputate anytime soon. There was always a degree of hesitation when it came to maiming the officer they’d been assigned to protect, and they would hesitate too long. He could feel the fibers shifting, spreading, growing. Their hesitation would take far too long, but the automatons were still present, guarding the doors. The one nearest to him was watching him. He knew it was. He stared at its boxy head. “Get it out.” He needed to be able to function. If he couldn’t, then, without a pilot, no one was making it off Azura alive. The instruction emerged in an incoherent gargle, his voice and body uncooperative. It didn’t appear Johnston or Havermeyer heard, but the automaton did. The words may not have been comprehensible, but it had clearly been commanded to act.

  Since escorting them here and being interrogated by Johnston, the automatons had been still. Silent. Awaiting directions. The one nearest to him did not move, simply announced. “Enacting sterilization procedures.”

  The automaton at the rear of the car, spun and reached out with blinding speed and proficiency. Its long hands had an extra joint in the fingers, and gripped onto the fibers emerging from his foot like a vice.

  It felt like it had grabbed him, the pressure abrupt and shocking. He cried out, as Johnston spun and whipped his weapon into ready position, clearly unnerved by the automaton’s sudden activity. “Get away from him!”

  The automaton hadn't grabbed the Admiral’s foot. It hadn’t grabbed any part of him, but he still felt it as if those fibers were another limb. After all, they had tied themselves into his nervous system. The automaton began to pull, yanking the fibers out, and searing pain wracked his body. He convulsed, but he felt suddenly aware, more so than he’d felt since they arrived in this subway car. He could hear Johnston shouting, the whine of his turret spinning up to speed, aimed at the automaton. “No!” the Admiral shouted through the pain. “Let her!” He couldn’t say more than that. A scream erupted involuntarily from his chest, his whole body rife with agony.

  The automaton stopped, its hand still wrapped around the fibers. It had only pulled an inch of their length out, connections still extending deep into his foot. The Admiral caught his breath, feeling the fibers writhe with activity, this attempted removal antagonizing them. The automaton displayed no signs of concern, but he knew who was controlling it. He stared at it, ensuring his certainty was evident. “Keep going,” he instructed. “Don’t stop until it’s out.”

  “Affirmative,” the automaton replied. It adjusted its grip, winding the length of the fibers around its metal hand, then pinned down his foot and began to pull steadily once more.

  It felt like his nervous system was on fire, then being ripped apart and pulled through his foot. Some utterly unique, alien agony. He thrashed and screamed. Johnston stepped in to hold him down, and offered a sterile rag for him to bite on, muffling the noise. The sensation was like having his foot was being ripped off, precious nerve by precious nerve, but with the automaton’s unfaltering hand, the fibers were pulled further and further out, sliding from below the skin with the ease of a thousand microscopic threads stitched into the flesh.

  At some point during the process, he blacked out, his body mercifully reacting to protect itself, by sending his awareness somewhere, anywhere else.

  He dreamed that he was aboard ship, standing in one of the Singularity’s many near-identical hexagonal corridors. Only this wasn’t the peace of some quiet patrol. This was years ago, decades even, as he stood face-to-face with two technicians that hoisted a black crate between them, bound with security seals and locks. “Where are you taking that?” he asked.

  “You’re not cleared,” one of them replied, calm and confident in his objective.

  Not cleared? “If that device is coming aboard my ship, then I am cleared to know its purpose and destination.” He was oath-bound to protect this ship from all threats, and the Frontier Rebellion had taught everyone that even the most mundane equipment could pose a threat. There had been too many incidents of tampering and sabotage.

  “You’re not cleared,” the technician repeated bluntly. “Our orders have come from the Generalty itself.” The highest-ranking officers in the fleet. “These devices are being fitted to every ship in the fleet, no exceptions. Resistance to be met with court martial.” The lead technician leveled his gaze, “Are you resisting, Commander?” He spat the rank mockingly. “Command would love it if you did, and I’d be happy to deliver that news.”

  There was no lie in that. High Command hadn’t wanted him here. A lower-class citizen commanding the Flagship? It was an insult to every high-class officer the fleet had trained. It didn’t matter which side of the Frontier Rebellion he'd served on, that he’d been decorated in the service, or even that he had graduated top of his class at the Academy. All that mattered was that he was not supposed to be there.

  But this wasn’t about him. “Singularity’s systems are unique. Your surveillance device may not operate as intended.” They had told him nothing about this clandestine device. He had simply been ordered to bring the ship to a remote outpost for modification. Rumor said it was a surveillance device, the same they’d begun installing on the fleet’s newer ships. The Singularity hadn’t been built for it, but in their eyes, his command necessitated it. He was untrustworthy, and leaving the flagship of the worlds in his hands could only be a mistake. “I can help evaluate if the device will be effective. This ship does not operate networked systems.” There was nothing for a surveillance device to tap into or record, and his instincts screamed against this. Command had been too secretive. They refused to specify what type of system would be installed, which meant that there was something wrong with it. Something they didn’t want him to know.

  “It is not your concern,” the lead technician reminded, then shouldered him aside with ease.

  It didn’t take much effort. The few weeks he’d been here had not magically recovered the strength he’d lost undergoing the scout fleet’s preparation procedures. He was weak, and through he hit the wall with a resounding thud, the Marines standing at the end of the corridor didn’t move to help. They didn’t even look his way, because they wanted him here about as much as anyone else. He was alone in his oath to protect the ship, and in that, could not resist. It would have achieved nothing. He was one man against the fleet, and at that, a pitifully weak one. If he resisted and was inevitably eliminated, that device was still going to be installed.

  So, he convinced himself that he could counter it. That he could remove it if it proved harmful. He told himself he could repair any damage this caused, as if he had fixed anything during his tenure so far.

  The technicians were allowed to work, and when they left, the case between them was empty. In the hours that followed, the entire ship shook and shuddered. Nothing he, nor any of the engineering crews did seemed to ease it. Cursed, the engineers said. Possessed. Commander Gives didn’t consider it that way, because all that noise didn’t feel evil. It felt scared, but he knew was that something was wrong. He simply didn’t know how wrong until weeks later when they found them during maintenance: strange white fibers, nearly translucent in the light. They were thinner than hair, but moved and twitched like something alive.

  In those weeks, the rumors had grown, traded between crews on leave. Command’s device required no network. It grew its own, siphoning energy from the power grid and harvesting elements from the air, and would eventually grow into every system a ship possessed, like roots permeating fertile ground. Commander Gives ordered them cut and removed on sight. But they grew and regrew until the crew realized that the incredible heat of a plasma torch rendered them dead.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  By then, it was far too late. The ship was infested. Neurofibers were in every conduit, penetrating every system and he felt the way it choked the ship, an inescapable vice, a physical parasite. It was months before he saw the ghost again. And when he did, she wasn’t the same. There was something haunted in her expression, something broken. Even when she made eye contact, she wasn’t looking directly at him.

  He tried to reach out, tried to calm her, but the only words she spoke were, “Get it out.” A plea.

  And he assured her he would, that he would find it and rip it out of the ship.

  So, he searched. He dug the fibers free, tried to trace them to their source. But they led him to places he couldn’t follow, or to systems he already knew: sensor arrays and communications hubs. There were times he got close, where he knew he was close, but found himself disoriented in corridors he knew well. That was the ghost’s doing, not intentional… At least he didn’t think so. Command’s surveillance system, the Black Box, and its strange growths had twisted her to protect itself.

  So, it took months. Months of careful notes, months of counting the corridors, months of systematically checking compartments and then, there it was. An empty storage room, no longer so empty. It was dressed in tresses of white, wriggling connections reaching down into the deck and beyond. There were millions of them, all sprouting from the box set down in the center of the room. It lay tangled amidst the slithering sea, a blemish upon a weave of strange, shifting white tendrils.

  He knelt down before it, sizing the best place to start cutting. But when he lit the plasma torch he had brought with him, the shadows of the room flinched. And that instant of fear and acknowledgement… Commander Gives wished he didn’t recognize it. But that dread had flooded the air every time Brent began his abuse, every time he had ripped the ghost apart.

  And it stopped Commander Gives dead in his tracks.

  He was too late.

  Perhaps it had been too late the moment the Black Box had been installed.

  Its fibers were part of the ship now, too thoroughly ingrained to be separated. To the ghost, who felt the ship’s condition as though it were physical, damage to the fibers was damage to her. She had wanted it removed. Maybe she still did, but cutting it out now was going to be torture. Seeing the integration before him, he wasn’t sure it could be undone, and the attempt, knowing Command, would trigger some other fail safe.

  He extinguished the torch and set it down beside the door. Fear hung in the room, feeling so much like it had when he’d first returned to take command. The ghost had been terrified, of him, of everyone, left in an abhorrent state by Brent’s abuse. This felt too much the same, just the constant state of expecting pain. He wasn’t sure what else to do, so he sat down, just like he had then, and offered company, offered calm. “I’m sorry,” he said, uncertain, what, if any part of the ghost was listening. “It is not my intention to hurt you.” He had wanted to help. “And, if this cannot be removed, we can live with it.” A tie to Command, a constant spy looking over his shoulder. It would certainly be his end someday, when he was ordered to do something else he could not stand, but that day did not have to be today. “I know it’s foreign, that maybe it drives you to do things you would not ordinarily, but it doesn’t make you an enemy.” It was a part of her, and despite numerous complaints on the fibers’ strange movements, no one had been hurt. “You are still you, no matter what this is or what it does.”

  He sat with the Black Box for a few hours that day, just watching. It was a thing of absolute horror. A parasite. But with removal unlikely, if not impossible, moving to accept it was the next best thing. He had no idea if his time there helped, but he revoked his standing orders to cut the fibers where they were found the moment he stepped back onto the bridge. Fighting the infestation served no purpose now, and the Black Box became a background threat, something that always lingered, but would never rise to the fore… At least until the Anti-Corporation Control Rebellion, where he disobeyed his orders to let one measly ship live.

  Or until they found the Matador and realized just what the Black Box’s fibers were capable of.

  When the Admiral awoke to the reek of Azura’s decay, he immediately reacted to wretch, dizzy with drugs, achy and cold. Johnston caught him before he rolled off the seats, and Havermeyer was standing there with a syringe full of stimulants. “Naddlethworfing hell,” the monk said, “we thought we were going to lose you.” His body had reacted badly to having the fibers removed, gone into some convulsing state that looked like a seizure, without the facial twitches.

  Grabbing the edge of the seats, the Admiral sat up, finally able to take stock of the situation as he took deep breaths and willed the dizziness away. The walls of the subway car were discolored with growth, windows fogged and streaked. A work lamp from Havermeyer’s kit had been set in the center of the aisle between the Admiral and Valentina. A first aid kit was open next to it, strewn about in its case chaotically, like it had been raided in a hurry.

  “How do ya feel, suh?” Johnston asked cautiously.

  “Better,” seemed the appropriate answer, though it wasn’t entirely true. He felt worse in some ways, cold, sore, heart pounding from the stimulants, but with the fibers removed, he at least wasn’t catatonic.

  Johnston muttered something his helmet mic did not quite catch, then stood. “I about blew that thing’s head off,” he said, nodding to the automaton kneeling at the end of the seats row. “But it musta known what it was doing.”

  The Admiral followed his attention to the automaton, still kneeling at the end of the seat row with a fist full of squirming white fibers. They were pinkish on their ends, but not riddled with flesh. No matter how painful the process, his foot had not been badly mangled. The fibers were much too thin to snag tissue, smooth like suture thread. His foot was red and angry, but that was from the insertion of foreign mass below the skin, not some property of the fibers.

  But seeing that automaton again and feeling the presence it carried, far too familiar to be in this hell, jolted him back to that memory once more: the sight of the Singularity’s infestation, a thousand times worse than his own. Suddenly, he understood why the ghost had reacted the way she had, what had truly been taken from her.

  The neurofibers were not symptoms of a Cataclysm. They’d been born from it, created by a mad AI to stitch its aberrations together. The ghost knew more about Azura’s Cataclysm than anyone. She had known what those fibers were and where they had come from, the moment she felt them working their way into the ship’s systems.

  In that moment, she’d been damned to an inevitable Cataclysm herself.

  And he was responsible.

  “What about Valentina?” Johnston directed everyone’s attention back toward the comatose Marine. “Can we pull the fibers out and rid her of the infestation?”

  “He’s not clear of the infestation.” Havermeyer corrected. “Not until someone does a biopsy.” If so much as one of those fibers had broken off in the Admiral’s foot, then it had a chance to regrow. The only way to halt a neurofiber’s growth was to cut it with a plasma torch.

  Admiral Gives nodded his agreement, “If I act contrary to your survival, I expect you to address it accordingly.” Anyone infested, or potentially infested, could not be fully trusted. One of Valentina’s teeth was cracked and bleeding, the only real spot of color in her vacant expression. He could feel his own arm bruised from where she had bitten it, acting under the control of the nexus. “Was anyone else exposed?”

  “No,” Havermeyer said. “Just you and Valentina.” The aberrations had tried to rip into the rest of the team’s suits, but it wasn’t easy to tear the rubbery material, and the rigid protection of the combat armor layered over the suits had helped. “Then there’s the automatons.” Strictly, they had been exposed as well, though none showed symptoms, at least not yet.

  Havermeyer looked to the security drones, as if expecting a reaction, but none moved. They stood still, watching the entrances of the subway car, except for the one kneeling at the end of the seat row, fibers in hand. He wanted to ask questions. Where had these automatons come from? How were they being controlled? But there was no time. “Shall I attempt to extract the fibers?”

  “No,” the Admiral said. “There’s too many.” As he sat across from her limp body, he could see Valentina’s infestation clearly now. The bulge on her leg was a pronounced, wriggling tumor. The skin stretched so tightly around it that it looked ready to split. That tumor was four times the size of the knot that had been pulled from his foot. The fibers surely reached deeper than they could see, if the worm-like movement across her knee was any indication. Admiral Gives had been in the nexus’ grasp for mere minutes. Valentina had been exposed to it for over an hour by the time they found her. “Removing them here will kill her.” They were too ingrained with her body. He doubted even the automatons would be able to pull them out. The attempt would probably end up ripping her limb off. The security units were capable of applying hundreds of pounds of pressure, stronger than even Johnston. “But, we need to keep the fibers from reaching her brain.” That infiltration would be fatal to the person they knew, even if not to her body. “We need to slow their growth.” The most obvious way to do that was to remove the largest mass of fibers and force them to regrow.

  That tumor would have to be cut out.

  Johnston let out a low rumble, a noise of contemplation on his massive frame. “Is there anything left of her?” She’d been completely unresponsive since they’d arrived in this car. Would this operation accomplish anything, or just be pointless mutilation of an inevitable corpse?

  “Corporal, I cannot answer that,” the Admiral replied. Valentina could be half-conscious and unable to respond, or simply vegetative. “The medics aboard ship may be able to tell.” The medical scanners could look for brain activity. “But, she is your comrade. You would know her wishes better than I.”

  “And what if we stopped this Cataclysm?” Johnston asked. “Would that save her? Maybe Havermeyer is right. Satisfying the intent of the Cataclysm may lay everything to rest.”

  “The Cataclysm is over,” the Admiral said. It had been over for fifty years. “We are simply dealing with the remains.” These fibers were the vines of an artificial forest that had lost its caretaker. Its roots penetrated everything with growth, but there would be no planning, no harvest to come.

  “Suh, I’d like to try and save her… If we can.” Johnston rumbled. “If it turns out she’s gone… Then we’ll lay her to rest the way she’d want.”

  “Very well,” the Admiral could align to that intention. “That tumor needs to go.” They could not slow the fibers’ growth, but they could make the path to Valentina’s brain longer, and force them to regrow their numbers.

  Havermeyer nodded, knelt down beside the first aid kit, and pulled out a scalpel.

  “No,” the Admiral told him. “I will do it. You are not contaminated. We should minimize your direct contact with the fibers.” He, on the other hand, was as contaminated as he could get. There was little more to risk.

  Havermeyer slowly lowered the scalpel, wanting to argue, but knowing that was reasonable. The neurofibers were not technically a biohazard. They were not organic in nature, but the way the propagated and grew here, they had to be treated like a transmittable infection.

  Admiral Gives leaned down and grabbed his discarded boot, laying haphazard beside his row of seats. He picked it up and dumped it out, tapping the bottom to remove any loose debris, then shoved it back on his foot. It was soggy and cold, but the protection it offered was far better than wading through Azura’s catacombs with open wounds.

  Havermeyer surrendered the scalpel when the Admiral held out his hand. Taking it, the Admiral knelt down in front of Valentina’s leg, and its bulbus, quivering deformity. There had been a small cut on her shin, made by whatever had sliced open her environmental suit, but such a large mass of fibers had pressed into it that it was stretched wide like a teardrop, blood staining only its outermost edges as it oozed with the watery yellow ick of puss.

  The scalpel cut in sickening ease, and all it took was a nick. The skin stretched over the tumor split open, outermost layers tearing slowly open in a jagged line. The flesh below undulated, fibers squirming like a thousand tiny maggots, twitching slithering between the blue-purple of small veins.

  Admiral Gives cut through the remaining, uneven skin tissue as the fibers began to spill outward like long winding cannula of loose intestine. Behind him, Havermeyer began praying in the ancient tongue of the tech-monks, utterances barely audible. “Get your plasma torch ready,” the Admiral told him. It would be needed to stall the fibers’ growth and cauterize the wound.

  Setting the scalpel aside, the Admiral looked through the first aid kit for another tool. There were forceps and tweezers. Havermeyer’s tool kit surely had a clamp and pliers, but none of those were proper tools to grip a knot as big as that on Valentina’s leg. In that, the solution was obvious. He stripped off the bulky, insulative gloves of his environmental suit, and pulled on the sterile gloves from the kit. “Corporal, she may react to this.” And it wasn’t likely to be in a good way. Stars knew the Admiral didn’t like it.

  Letting out a breath, he reached out and pinned her leg down, then began working his other hand into the wound, sliding under the split skin and digging down and around the sides of the tumor. It was wet and oh, so warm, squelching with the movement. He expected her to scream, to cry out, even to let out a shuddering gasp, but she gave no reaction, not even a shiver. She laid limp and expressionless, empty eyes staring ahead as a thin dribble of blood and saliva leaked from her mouth.

  As he tightened his grip, the fibers slithered and flexed, squirming between his fingers like a pulsing heart. Slowly, he began to pull the tumor out. It moved easily at first, the length of the fibers not yet penetrating further into the flesh. The unfortunate few smaller veins caught within the fibers popped, splattering him with warm red flecks. He pulled until he met resistance, the fibers taut where they dug deeper into the oozing tissue below.

  A baseball-sized knot of fibers writhed in his hand, audibly burgling in a mess blood and tissue. The skin on Valentina’s leg collapsed back into place below, unevenly stretched and wrinkly, like a deflated balloon. It smelled like iron and puss, momentarily overpowering Azura’s constant odor of dampness. “Cut it,” the Admiral ordered.

  Havermeyer looked uncertain, but obeyed, igniting the plasma torch in his hand. There wasn’t enough room between the Admiral’s hand and Valentina’s leg to cut safely. He had to burn one of them. He chose Valentina. The blue flame of the torch cut through the fibers easily, their burned ends shriveling up like leaves burning in a fire. Valentina’s shin sizzled and blackened below, red welts rising on the less damaged skin. The mess of the open wound below darkened it seared, bleeding slowing to a stop as it was cauterized. The meaty smell of burning flesh rose into the air alongside smoke.

  The heat of the torch was uncomfortably hot on the Admiral’s unprotected hand, and the moment the last fiber was severed, he yanked his hand back, knowing mere proximity to the torch would leave it red and tender. “Get a suit patch over her wound,” he told Havermeyer. They would need to keep it as clean as they could.

  Havermeyer turned off the torch, and started rummaging through his kit for a suit repair patch. Behind him, Johnston had the veiled expression of a Marine who had seen people die, and was quite certain he was seeing it again now, even if he didn’t want to admit it.

  Admiral Gives stood, and simply because he had nowhere else to put it, deposited the handful of bloody neurofibers into the most distant corner of the subway car. The automaton which had pulled the fibers out of his foot did the same, leaving a small mountain of wriggling tendrils. No doubt they would slither outward and the non-burnt ends would seek a way to reconnect to Azura’s greater network, but it would take time. “Corporal, do you have any idea where we are?”

  The big Marine shook his head. “No, sir. Got disoriented after we fled the nexus.” The only intent had been to flee that place. There hadn’t been time to verify a direction. “We moved for about fifteen minutes.” At their hobbled pace, that equated to less than a mile of travel. “Took shelter when we saw it.”

  The Admiral looked over to one of the automatons, seeing it suddenly move its head. He halfway expected it to interject with directions. The security units with them now had been in these tunnels for years, if the age of their build was any indication. Perhaps they had mapped the remains of the colony out, but it spoke only to raise a warning. “Incoming movement detected.”