Dolphiam Sector, Agua System, Azura

  Movement. Every soul that had come down in their Warhawk was accounted for in the dank subway car. Movement could only be coming from other sources: more of Azura's aberrations.

  The away team wasn’t given time to contemplate it. Before even the automatons could move, a loud splash echoed through the tunnel, and the windows on both sides of the subway car shattered in a cascade of blunt safety glass. Long, half-rotten appendages reached through the frame, waterlogged fingers and claws grabbing at anything they could.

  Admiral Gives and Havermeyer both reacted to shield Valentina’s limp body, but the instinctive movement put them both closer to the window. Groping hands latched almost immediately onto the air packs of their suits and started pulling. Havermeyer screamed as he was lifted from the benches of the subway car and yanked against the aluminum window frame. The Admiral reached immediately for the sabre on his hip, but his hand bumped against an empty scabbard, his sword lost in the chaos of the nexus.

  Before the Admiral could react further, the automaton closest to him burst into action, wrapping its long digits around the aberration’s appendage and ripping it clean in two with an eruption of blackish, reeking fluid – human blood and Hydrian ichor long since gone bad. With its second arm, the automaton latched onto Havermeyer’s suit, and yanked him free, easily pulling him away from the window and shoving him forward. “Evacuate,” it intoned in the same steady feminine voice it had used before.

  “Aye, Lady,” Frenchie said, running up from the back of the car along a bench of seats, dodging sewn-together claws and appendages as he ran toward the front. “Clearing the way!” He hopped past Johnston’s mountainous figure, raised his rifle, and released a burst, shattering the windows at the front, so he and two automatons could jump out.

  Admiral Gives started gathering Valentina into a position he could try to lift her, but was pulled back by the air pack on his suit. The nearest automaton shoved him toward the front of the car and grabbed Valentina itself, ushering him and Johnston onward.

  They passed through the cab of what had once been an automated subway car, its switchboards and indicator-lights long dark, and splashed down into the tunnels of Azura.

  “Watch yourself!” Frenchie called, standing behind two of the automaton’s lanky figures. “It’s in the water and it don’t look like calamari!”

  Johnston almost immediately felt a long line of stitched together limbs bump against his foot. It reacted to the contact, curling closer as he stepped away, all but invisible in the murk of the standing water, save the eddies that followed its movement. “I hate this damn planet,” the big Marine drawled, yanking the fortification turret he carried off his back. He started spinning the barrels up to speed, uncertain which nightmare to aim at.

  From outside the subway car, the long limbs of the aberration were clear to see. Joint upon joint, the arms of dead colonists and Hydra were sewn together with rotten punctures, forming a long, snake-like appendage. It slithered around the subway car, wrapping it up like a giant squid preparing to pull a boat down into the ocean depths. Perhaps, during the Cataclysm, it had done exactly that, dooming any colonists who tried to flee to the sea below the city. But now the aberration’s many tentacles writhed and reached through the freshly shattered windows of the subway car, groping the seats where its prey should have been.

  The main body of the squid-aberration was nowhere to be seen, but others were lumbering down the tunnel en masse, none the same as the one beside it. Some figures were top heavy, others sprouting thicker or taller legs than looked natural. They were a mixture of human and Hydrian parts, extra limbs and heads sewn onto their bloated bodies, rot held at bay, but not prevented entirely.

  The tunnel reeked. Algae and stagnant water combined with rust and the sewer-stench of bodily decay, and the sound of it all was so strangely quiet. Several dozen bodies, splashing through the standing water, and not one uttered groan, not one instance of heavy breathing. None of the mouths moved on the aberrations. There was no point in making their vocal cords sing. These golems were not meant to trick and lure in survivors. These were enforcers sent to physically overpower victims and drag them to the nexus for alteration.

  Johnston studied the crowd rushing down the corridor. “We gotta go.” There could be thousands of aberrations in these tunnels. Even with the automatons’ added firepower, they simply didn’t have enough ammunition to fight everything they saw. “Stonewall, heading?”

  Admiral Gives pulled the compass from the front pocket of his suit. It was a little banged up from the fight at the nexus, but appeared functional. Their best chance was to continue West toward where the Warhawk should be. “Tunnel, your 9 o’clock.”

  “Frenchie, take point,” Johnston commanded. “I’ll bring up the rear.”

  The small demolitions expert pivoted from where he’d been watching the mass of aberrations approach and rushed to the front of the group. Two of the automatons stepped with him, the long, deadly shape of their high-penetrating rifles raised. Johnston noted it as two more automatons took up positions beside him, with the last two moving to join Havermeyer and the Admiral in the middle. The automaton holding Valentina’s pale body spoke in the same steady, feminine tone it had used before. “Units will escort.”

  It spoke not to the Admiral, but to Johnston. The big Marine furrowed his brows in confusion for a moment, but then remembered the Admiral, despite being the ranking officer, wasn’t wearing rank markings on his suit. The automatons were differing to him because, visibly, he was the ranking authority here. “Proceed to escort,” Johnston told them. “The more the merrier.” He wasn’t in a particular mood to decline any help offered to them.

  The team began to move, footfalls quick, but cautious though the finger-deep water that permeated the tunnels. Frenchie led them down the westward tunnel, only to find the sound of splashing water echoing back toward them. “Incoming!” he said, raising his rifle. “If dissection isn’t your idea of fun, grab your gun!”

  “Beezlenac,” Johnston cursed. His turret whined as it spun, primed to firing speed, though he hadn’t yet hit the trigger. “Keep pushin’, Frenchie! If the golems behind us catch up, we’ll be surrounded.”

  “Aye!” the bomb specialist said, rushing forward. “Paving the road!” He grabbed a set of grenades off his belt and handed one to each of the automatons beside him. “We’re going loud!” Together, he and the bots yanked the pins and chucked the explosives further down the corridor.

  The misshapen forms lumbering toward them didn’t react when the grenades game to rest at their feet. A moment later, a concussive blast shuddered the tunnel, the pressure wave thundering through the away team like a physical punch to the chest. Without a helmet, the sound of it was deafening to the Admiral, leaving the obnoxious ring of tinnitus in his ears, but hearing damage was the least of his problems. That could be treated aboard ship, if they made it that far.

  The explosion sent gore and limbs flying, ripping apart three of the aberrations, but the others did not even slow. Limbs blown from their joints, partially rotten flesh cleaved and slowly sloughing off, broken bones… It meant nothing to golems that could not feel pain. It meant nothing to forms so perverted they were neither dead nor alive.

  Frenchie felt at the bandolier of explosives slung across his chest, counting the remaining grenades. It wasn’t nearly enough. Short of completely eviscerating the aberrations into discrete pieces, nothing stopped them. Whatever was left kept coming, crawling, grabbing, scraping for traction across the floor. But wounded ones, they could outrun. “Lady,” Frenchie called to the automaton on his left, “I’m hoping you’ve got more than I do.”

  As it leveled its long rifle in parallel with the other at the front of the party, the automaton answered, “Ammunition stores are below 50%.” Still, it did not hesitate, aim steady and mechanically precise as it and the one beside it fired at the most intact golems rushing toward the team. The artillery-like thunderclap of their high-penetrating rifles shuddered the air almost as violently as the explosive concussion of Frenchie’s grenades.

  The automatons’ rifles punched visible holes the size of cannon balls through the main mass of the aberrations, snapping what mechanical or biological components passed for their spines. But not even that killed the remains of the Cataclysm. The golems simply collapsed, twitching with what motor control they retained.

  Perhaps the neurofibers would piece those parts back together in new ways, or perhaps they’d simply lay there twitching until the colony collapsed into the sea.

  Another two booms punctuated the moist filth of the tunnels as the two automatons on the rear of the party fired, downing another pair of golems. Johnston let rip alongside them, shredding the knee joints of the mob behind them. It slowed a few, but others climbed over the bodies without pause. Still more, flesh holed and hanging loose with bullet punctures, simply rotated their orientation, using other limbs to give chase. The madness of Azura did not distinguish between the placement of hands and feet. Some walked open extra legs, others began walking upon backward bending arms and elbows. “Naddlethworfing hell,” Johnston cursed at the sight, even more unnatural than it had been before.

  Admiral Gives knew it wasn’t enough. The automatons’ rifles could stall almost anything dead in its tracks. But they didn’t have the ammunition to eliminate this crowd, nor were these the only aberrations in the tunnels. Azura had possessed a population of a few million during the Cataclysm. More had been taken from the other afflicted worlds, and with golems ahead and behind them in the tunnels, there was no way out. They were confined to these tiled subway routes. Exits were sparse, and the last station they’d seen had been transformed into the nexus.

  Then it hit him: a cold, large raindrop that fell square on his head. Not rain, but a slimy drip of leaking water, the first he’d felt since the weather outside. It was enough to make him glance up. The ceiling was webbed with white fibers that seemed to pulse, stalks of dangling eyes hanging down like holiday ornaments. Ear canals were wedged into the grout grooves of the tile walls. But beyond the half-alive nightmare of these tunnels, there was a massive crack in the ceiling, mold and algae growing across its uneven surface like a scab. And the Admiral remembered the first body he had seen in these tunnels. It hadn’t been dead. It had twitched when he came near. But it had been buried under a pile of rubble caused by the damaged automaton’s rifle. “Aim for the ceiling,” he commanded. “Bring it down behind us!”

  Johnston, Frenchie and Havermeyer took a glance upward, realization dawning upon their faces as they saw its damaged state. Only one of the automatons turned to look, the one holding Valentina, but only one of them needed to. The mind commanding those automatons could see perfectly well through any of those six sets of cameras.

  Frenchie grinned, and yanked another set of grenades off his bandolier. “You heard him, Lady!”

  Three of the automatons rotated their torsos as they kept pace alongside the team and aimed upward. Firing, they carved three-foot channel up into the ceiling, angled toward the most damaged part, which immediately cracked and buckled, small pebbles of concrete beginning to rain down.

  The demolitions expert laughed wildly. “’Course you’re good for the artillery. Here comes the boom!” He pulled the pins and chucked the grenades up into the hole, sprinting as fast as he could from the damaged portion of the tunnel. The rest of the team followed, and an instant later, an explosion rocked Azura’s subterranean labyrinth.

  Boulders of concrete tumbled downward, quickly filling the tunnel. They tumbled in every direction, accompanied by a plume of concrete dust and moisture, eventually piling up until it met the ceiling once more. The entire area shook and shuddered, the grinding and crunching of rock and gravel deafening for a moment, then gone, leaving only the bounce of a few pebbles plopping into the water.

  Breathing heavily, the team slowed, unable to see through the dust that now clouded the subway. It swirled around, thick and heavy with humidity. A gray miasma that tasted of volcanic earth and salt, the most prominent materials on this planet. Collapsing the tunnel on one side had eliminated the aberrations pursuing them, but not those that had been approaching head-on. That crowd would be meeting them now, amidst the dust.

  The Admiral tried to hold it back, to take slow and steady breaths, but the sprint and the adrenaline forced heaving breaths, and the dust tickled his throat. He began to cough, no matter how he tried to restrain it. Soft at first, but then deeper and more desperate as he fought for a clear breath. Shapes were moving in the dust, flashing silhouettes between the helmet lights of the team and the automatons’ head-mounted spotlights. As he staggered, one such shape rushed toward him. It was tall and thin, but the proportions were too extreme to be human. He thought it was one of the automatons, until it struck out, latching onto his arm with a bulging, rotten claw where the waxy green scales were peeling from its bones.

  It clamped down hard, but he wasn’t given the chance to free himself. A dark blade thrust in an instant later, smearing itself with red so near his side that he thought he’d been struck. But the blood was too dark, too congealed and the pain wasn’t there. The blade ripped upward, disemboweling the aberration beside him, spilling long unused and mostly decayed lines of intestines outward. The skull followed a moment later, thudding to the ground as it was cleaved off the spine. With a blur of effortless movement, the automaton wielding the sword yanked the aberration away and tossed it to the ground. It didn’t pause before turning to skewer another, and disemboweling it with even more force.

  Moments later, as the dust began to settle, there was a knee-high pile of corpses and severed limbs before the automaton. A few extremities still twitched, but none could meaningfully function. Other piles of carnage were laid out before the other automatons. The stench of it all was overpowering: bodily rot and stagnant water mixed with the telltale metallic funk of old blood. Dozens of bodies were laid out, stitched-on limbs ripped from torsos, or cut open and disemboweled. Only a few of the aberrations that had been ahead of the team were left standing.

  Instinctively, Havermeyer, the Admiral and the two Marines stepped closer together, tightening their ranks as the last of the golems shambled forward. Azura’s beasts looked uncoordinated, but they were much faster and stronger than they looked. And they weren’t attacking at random. The entire team tensed for another wave of attacks, but the aberrations rushed straight for Admiral Gives before Johnston or Frenchie could react.

  Yet the automatons seemed to have expected that, already a half-step closer to the Admiral than anyone else. Only one golem broke through their ranks, and the automaton nearest to the Admiral reacted in a flash, intercepting the golem and redirecting its momentum to throw it into the wall. Its brains splattered across the tile like an old pumpkin gone soft.

  This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

  “Holy shit, Lady,” Frenchie said.

  Havermeyer stared open-mouthed from within his helmet. He had never seen a bot operate with that level of combat skill, and he had never seen a soldier react that fast, let alone with that kind of strength. But in the sudden silence that followed, Havermeyer could truly study the oddities of the corpses around them. What had the Cataclysm hoped to accomplish with these golems? By mixing Hydrian and human bodies? And, “Why does it keep going after you?” the monk asked. Admiral Gives and Valentina had been isolated in the nexus, seemingly because their suits had been punctured. But those last golems had very clearly been after the Admiral, completely ignoring Valentina’s helplessness.

  “I do not know,” the Admiral answered. Exempting the negotiation, he had not been acting as the one in charge on this planet, nor had he proven himself a threat to the Cataclysm’s remains. But the ghost had expected it. He could see that in the way she was commanding the automatons. Even now, the one nearest to him was a half-step closer than the others stood to anyone else. She was protective, yes, but that protection extended to everyone here, not just him. She wouldn’t be standing closer to him unless there was a reason, because there were enough questions regarding the automatons already and Havermeyer would surely notice. The Marines probably already had, simply elected not to care.

  Then there was the chant the nexus had echoed. An Admiral to become the Shipmaster. It had spoken almost entirely in Hydrian, save his rank. Was that a coincidence, or a clue?

  No, given the ghost’s reaction to stay nearby, it had to be the latter.

  “Better question,” Johnston drawled, “how did it know where we are?” And were they still being pursued?

  “Everything here is connected by the fibers,” Admiral Gives said. The neurofibers had established a physical network in the ruins of Azura. Its web functioned as a nervous system, feeling anything that came into contact. Ears, eyes, cameras and microphones previously harvested during the Cataclysm were watching from the tunnels’ moldy crevices. In a sense, the colony’s remains had come alive, and in the way a body was aware of intruders, the colony was very aware of their movements.

  Johnston looked around, taking note of the small, fleshy chunks in the shadows of the wall. The light coming off his helmet occasionally glinted in the round reflection of a cornea. He’d passed it off before, but the presence of organic remains had gotten thicker as they fled deeper into the tunnels. The discoloration on the tile was not all mold. “Is the ship like that too? Can feel wherever we are?”

  Havermeyer shook his head. “Not in this exact way, I think. We’re rarely in direct contact with the Singularity’s fibers. They’re woven throughout the structure – probably more perceptive to impacts and strain that my Saint herself sustains.” But Azura’s catacombs provided plenty of evidence that the fibers absolutely could perceive contact. Ty severing the fibers in the railgun damage had certainly been felt, as had the Admiral’s later, gentler handling of them. The Singularity’s fibers certainly maintained some perception, but Havermeyer could not fathom what end or what changes that forced upon his Saint. Did the Black Box maintain independence with its perceptions, or did that awareness belong to Saintess de Ahengélicas herself? Was there truly a difference? The tech-monks had never contemplated such things, nor was Azura the place to start.

  Admiral Gives rubbed the sensation of contact off his arm. The golem’s claw hadn’t injured him – no, the automaton had intervened well before that was a possibility, but the memory of the touch unnerved him more than he wanted to admit. There was a reason he preferred to avoid physical contact altogether. “We need to find a way out of these tunnels.” They had fled far enough now that he could barely hear the Hydrian bombardment occurring overhead. Likely, the Hydra were focusing on the part of the colony where they had met the ambassador, intending to sink it, but Hydrian weapons weren’t designed for that. The Hydra preferred to harvest, not destroy. It would take time before the bombardment did enough damage to collapse any surviving part of the colony. “Ensign Havermeyer, are you well studied in old colonial design?”

  “Not particularly, I’m afraid, sir.” Havermeyer’s sect of tech-monks had not been planet-bound. He had rotated amidst a few Saints in his youth, but none part of any traditional city. “I'm sure you know more than me.”

  Admiral Gives didn’t respond to that. He had been born and raised planet-side, as Havermeyer knew, but he had lived well outside the reaches of any city that would have housed public transit tunnels like this. Johnston had a similar problem. Marsed, his homeworld, possessed drastically increased gravity, did not conform to traditional standards of human design. There were the automatons, but regardless of how suspicious it might be, the ghost surely would have guided them out of here if she knew a safe path. Then there was Frenchie, who was never overly specific about his prior tours of duty.

  The mustachioed demolitions expert had not dropped his gleeful demeanor. He smiled and shrugged. “They’ll be transit stations every half a mile or so. Bomb squad used to have to evacuate them all the time,” he said, as if it were the most normal thing. “Emergency exits every quarter mile, though I think we just buried one.” The small Marine shrugged toward the debris behind the team. “That’s the standard for the rich worlds anyway.” Azura, old as the colony was, may or may not conform.

  “Then we need to keep going,” Havermeyer said.

  “Aye,” Johnston agreed, voice deep and commanding. “Frenchie, lead on. Get us out of here.” Once they had gone another half mile, they would certainly be clear of the missile strikes, even if the Hydra continued them.

  The team began moving, more carefully this time, trudging through the algae-stained waters. There were still lumps beneath their boots, and with the stiff heel of the mag-boots, it was impossible to determine if that was the rail of the long-decrepit subway, some flaw in the floor or more tresses of neurofibers. It was nothing they could afford to concern themselves with. The half-alive nervous system of Azura’s tunnels surely knew where they were with its harvested eyes and ears, not to mention the thin hair-like strands of neurofibers that glided across the water. When it could send more golems to collect them, it surely would, mindless in that regard.

  These tunnels would have had a commanding consciousness many years ago, the AI that initiated the Cataclysm itself. Without that, the golems, the nexus, and every other half-alive corpse in this labyrinth could only continue as they had last been commanded – collecting and harvesting any resource that stumbled into their midst. However, it seemed they focused upon the living, biological systems: people – human and Hydra. If they took everything indiscriminately, the automatons beside them now would not have been intact.

  As the team moved, splashing through the shallow waters of the subway tunnels, Admiral Gives could finally study the automatons in greater detail. There were six of them, each identical to the one he had first seen laying derelict in the tunnel. They were Knight Industries security automatons, with long, lanky figures, and an extra joint on the appendages that served as their fingers. Those providing escort around the team were in better condition than the one they’d seen earlier with its chest caved in and arm nearly ripped free at the shoulder. These were lacking major deformities or damage, but the black paint on their chassis was scuffed and dusty. Algae hung snagged from crevices on their bodies, clearly left to rot down here decades ago. Their big blocky shoulders mounted an antenna that bounced as they moved, but two of them mounted extra equipment on their backs. The very same broken equipment that Johnston mounted on his back: a subspace transciever.

  It was an outrageously expensive piece of equipment. Fragile in most circumstances. But it guaranteed one thing: these automatons had been outfitted to be commanded from off-world. No doubt, the ghost was using the same tactic to command them now. The two units mounting the subspace transceivers received a transmission from the ship with commands, and used nearby networking to control the others. If they stopped and worked on it, they might be able to rewire the automatons’ transceivers to reach the ship through an audio transmission. But stopping in these tunnels was dangerous, and repurposing the equipment risked damage. At this moment, the possibility of reaching the ship wasn’t worth losing the automatons’ protection, so the Admiral didn’t bring it up, simply watched the lockstep march of the automaton nearest to him. That unit, carrying one of the transceivers and a sword on its back, was labeled Unit 02 by the white paint stenciled on its shoulder. The others were 01, and 03 through 06.

  Unit 02 never broke stride in the darkness of the tunnels, but one of the automatons in the front, Unit 03, began falling behind, servo joints seizing as it staggered. It was a sudden decline, as it abruptly stumbled wide of the party, but the one beside it showed no hesitation, simply raised its rifle and pulled the trigger.

  As the sulfur-stink of gunpowder hit the air, two bodies crumpled toward the floor: Unit 03 fell to its knees, a cannonball-sized hole punched through its chest, and Admiral Gives collapsed along with it, as if he too had been hit.

  Nobody expected it. The Admiral’s stony expression never gave an inclination of weakness. He hadn’t truly slowed or staggered at any point in their flight through the tunnel. But then he collapsed, and fell toward the concrete floor.

  The automaton standing nearest to him, so fast to react to prior threats, was much slower to react to that. It seemed to hesitate before it intervened, barely managing to catch him before he hit the ground.

  Then it froze where it was, one knee on the ground with the Admiral in its arms, as if completely uncertain what to do. It hadn’t hesitated with Valentina, but reacted noticeably different to this.

  Corporal Johnston had instinctively readied his own weapon, but he stilled his trigger finger. The Admiral had collapsed in time with that shot, but he’d been nowhere near it. More likely, the thunderous crack of the rifle had shocked him, and the abundance of stimulants and painkillers they’d injected him with in the subway car, trying to get him conscious, were finally overwhelmed. Johnston knew from experience that the combination of those drugs made for dizziness and dissociation. They kept soldiers in the fight, but were not without side effects. Stims were meant to fight off the worse effects of shock: confusion, disorientation, weakness… but sometimes unconscious bouts couldn’t be helped. Stims lessened the severity, delayed them for critical minutes and sometimes eliminated them, but it was always a risk. After being half-assimilated into Azura’s nightmarish network, the Admiral’s collapse should probably have been expected, even with the drugs.

  No, despite his first instinct, Johnston knew that the automatons had played no role in the Admiral’s collapse. It was concerning, but not a life-threatening issue. Perhaps more concerning was the way the automaton holding the Admiral had frozen, and why one of their ranks had just been shot by another.

  Frenchie approached first, tapping the kneeling automaton on the shoulder without hesitation. “You short-circuiting, Lady?”

  But the automaton didn’t immediately answer.

  From the ghost’s perspective it was all very… odd. Driving the automatons with the ship’s main computer was not easy. The computer had ample processing capability, but lacked the interfacing programs. The ghost filled in using her own intelligence. They were machines, like her, built of electronics, servos and pistons. She was able to learn the servo commands required for proper motions and provide the proper code. A digital artificial intelligence like Manhattan would have been more efficient, able to make these bots host bodies, and pilot them instantaneously. The ghost could only command them remotely. There was a lag for communications, and for processing, but it had not proven detrimental yet. And the ghost knew, had an AI like Manhattan been here, it could have wrested control of these bots from her without much effort. She was sufficient in this circumstance, but was not adept at it, not built toward these ends.

  Engaging on a personnel battlefield was different and unfamiliar, but the ghost had the memories of the ship’s Marines, and had watched over their training for decades now. She was a built-weapon. Crossing that boundary was not difficult, though none of it was instinctive.

  Every movement had to be calculated. Pulling Valentina and the Admiral out of the nexus’ grip had been methodically plotted and unavoidable. She had been careful to grab the Admiral by the air pack on his suit. It was more than secure enough, and she knew how much he hated to be touched. The automatons had only touched him under his express command to remove the neurofibers from his foot.

  But this abrupt collapse didn’t offer consent. It didn’t offer a method to grab him without directly touching him. So, it was a calculation she had to make: respect that aversion to touch, or catch him. And she hesitated, because the mathematics of interacting with him were much more complicated than Valentina. A human may have caught him instinctively, without even considering who was falling. But it was not so simple for her. Every movement these automatons completed was plotted with a thousand calculations behind it and she had never intended to cross that boundary.

  But safety took precedence. Safety always had priority when the ghost interacted with the crew, so she commanded the automaton to catch him before he hit the ground and was suddenly uncertain what to do next. It wasn’t safe to lay him down in these tunnels, but she knew he wouldn’t want anyone carrying him.

  Then some part of her uselessly fixated on the fact that, excepting the actions taken to pull out the neurofibers, this was the first time she’d ever touched him. Or touched him in any way that equated to personal contact. And because she knew how deep that aversion to touch went, some part of her was terrified that this crossed a line, removing the boundary that had made him feel secure in her presence.

  Further calculations could not reach a conclusion on how to proceed.

  “You bots still with us?” Johnston said slowly, taking a careful step closer. These automatons had been critical in their survival, but this pause was growing more concerning the longer it lasted.

  “Affirmative,” came the response from one of the other droids.

  The one holding the Admiral didn’t speak. But Johnston could see the ship commander was breathing. “You, uh, want me to carry him?”

  “Negative.” Interacting through the automaton, the ghost stood, readjusting the Admiral’s weight. He felt strangely light, but these automatons could lift hundreds of pounds. She knew this would not have been the Admiral’s preference, but he had never shown the same disdain to machines as he had for other people. Regardless, she would apologize later. After he and the others were free of this world.

  After a pause, Frenchie’s mustachioed face split into a maniacal grin. “Fuck, Havermeyer, you drugged him up real good!”

  “Stims are supposed to help people stay conscious!” Havermeyer argued, watching the automaton’s careful interaction with the Admiral. It had been careful with Valentina too, but less measured. Less cautious. Almost like it knows.

  “Ba-haha,” the bomb expert chortled, brushing gravel and gore from the crevices of his suit. “I’m sure the Lady doesn’t mind that much,” he said, elbowing the nearest automaton. It wasn’t the one carrying the Admiral. Frenchie knew it didn’t matter.

  The Lady. Frenchie had taken the calling the automatons that since they first appeared. Havermeyer knew not to put too much weight on Frenchie’s antics. The bomb specialist was renown to be crazy, if normally harmless to allies. That said, Frenchie wasn’t the only one who referred to these bots by a feminine title. In a moment of duress, the Admiral had done so too. At the time, Havermeyer had thought it an accident, instinct brought on by the bots’ familiar, female voice. But Admiral Gives wasn’t known for a loose tongue. He was particular in his choice of words, even under torture and direct interrogation. Havermeyer knew that better than most.

  No, the more time Havermeyer spent with these automatons, the more confident he was that something was amiss. They weren’t behaving like normal security units, too invested in protecting the injured. They had cited the Singularity’s activation authority, but the ship wasn’t capable of remote-controlling these units. The ship wasn’t even capable of using simpler drones. And then there was their voice. That had been an anomaly from the start. The voice of the Singularity’s automated protocols was unique, part of the very legend that had made her a Saint. These automatons should not be using it, even if the Singularity’s authority had activated them.

  It figured the Marines didn’t care for the anomaly. But the Admiral hadn’t commented on it either. And was certainly aware of the oddity. So why hadn’t he reacted?

  The obvious answer, of course, was that he knew the cause.

  The tech-monk found his attention drawn back to the smoking chassis of the automaton that had been shot. No more lights glowed from its boxy head. It sat hunched over in the shallow water, dead. “Why did you shoot it?” he asked, directing the question to the automaton that had fired.

  “Unit 03 was failing to respond within established time parameters,” it answered. “Contamination was likely.” At the front of the party, Unit 03 had wrestled with a golem in the dust of the tunnel’s collapse. Fibers had broken off the aberration had taken root, permeating further through its control systems as long as the automaton was active. The ghost could not be permit it to become a threat. The other automatons were likely to encounter the same issue if they remained active for too long, but for now, they were still responding to commands within acceptable time-parameters.

  One of the units from the rear of the party stepped out formation and pried the high-penetrating rifle from the dead automaton’s hands. It brought the rifle back and offered it to Corporal Johnston. “Units have observed an acceptable degree of strength for you to wield this weapon.”

  Johnston holstered his fortification turret onto his broad back, then reached out and took the weapon, aware that no normal human could wield it. High-penetrating rifles functioned like a tank gun, more akin to artillery than precision weaponry. The recoil was usually too much for Marines to endure, hence why they weren’t equipped that way. These guns were longer than average, built for an automaton’s lanky limbs, but Johnston could hold it, if awkwardly, and he, a high-grav worlder, could sustain the recoil. “Much appreciated,” he told the automaton that offered it to him. “We best keep moving.” The Admiral would likely come back to consciousness in another few minutes. They might as well keep moving while there was someone to carry him.