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Chapter Text

Wind howled through the gaping ribcage of shattered skyscrapers; each one bespoke with the stringy gristle of hoarfrost. Split arterial freeways spilled the gutted wrecks of cars into connective interchanges and wynds. Collapsed buildings and boutiques vomited visceral debris into thoroughfares. A rimed deluge of vitrified skeletons scattered throughout the putrefying mass of civilization lost that made of snow-laden boulevards the galaxy's largest macabre statuary. Yet the dilapidated streets hinted at life still clinging to the nooks and crannies from the recently disturbed snowdrifts.

Farther in were courtyard organelles suppurating with trash stuck to the pavement. Concrete and asphalt cracked with permafrost. Traces of the lives that once lived skittered across the verglas. Dropped wherever life ended when disaster loomed. It all led to the festering heart of a once bustling metropolis.

The Y-shaped plaza of the city, the crowning jewel of Copper-9, was a latticework of streets that branched out in expansive footpaths and autonomous mass transit lines crisscrossing over one another in a vast cardiopedestrial system. Municipal and commercial skyscrapers corral the plaza in regal brutalism softened by gentle curves that bleed out of the hard angles. Sweeping casement windows wove naturalistic patterns across each exposed face of the buildings. Each one a minimalist's impression of wind rolling over grassy knolls. There were clear demarcations where prefabricated portions of the building had slotted into place. Each one bore an odd semblance to a cliff face or a copse of trees, each made a part of the environ that predated urban settlement.

Segmented, stitched together.

Nowhere was this aesthetic clearer than where marble and metal stretched out and broke off from the larger whole. They were sometimes geometric, like basalt columns kept in place by maglev tethers. Others took on the appearance of water flowing up, an inverted waterfall kept buoyant through an interplay of magnetism. Each one connected by a series of alloy lily pads that formed makeshift bridges between the branches of each building.

If the flora had not been vaporized and flash permineralized, there would be little differentiation between once greenery and the urban sprawl they were planted inside. Sometimes on top of or inside hovering bronchial mag-tower eaves.

Spread out amid all of this were hoverboards, circular screens upon which advertisements, news and much more once rang out over the plaza. They moved in concert with each other. Each traveling along a preset route that would have them cross the whole space. Flickering, sparking with breaths of electricity.

The only movement afforded to a place dotted with the remains of a once living cityscape.

Then one of the dormant hoverboards gasped to life, juddering from sudden motion as it sputtered awake. It brought a panoply of color to bear upon a dreary world. Cosmogyral fractals building out from either hemisphere of the cylindrical advert. All building toward an epicenter, the shape of a star system anchored to the equator. Sol, but arrayed in a style reminiscent of geocentrism, except the trademarked logo of JCJenson (in SPAAACE!) circled around the earth. Then the text overtook everything else until finally fading out into a simple, pristine black room with the earth hovering in the background.

Strutting into frame from the background was a woman of Arabic descent. Dressed clean in the black and white checkered uniform of the aforementioned company. All perfect teeth and ample skincare, prim and proper with hands held in front of her. Gesticulating an amiable welcome to anyone willing to give their attention while spotlit beneath the earth. Extending either hand out to the sides before the display flickered.

With a cadence made thick by sucrose congeniality, she spoke, “W-welcome to the city of Lothal, the second l-largest city of C-Copper-9! A place of boundless prosperity and cu-cultivated ataraxia, de-devised by none other than your close friends at J-J-JCJenson.”

There was a drawn-out crepitation that worked its claws into the plaza from on high, wedging into the quietude until the empty space was alight with the echo of glass warping under the strain of a razor. After a moment, the hoverboard became a spiderweb. Cracks crept down and split the earth in two before cleaving the woman’s face. Distortion wept from where the wound marred the advertisement, glitched pixels of shifting color that held the essence of purple-black that bleached the image.

Yet the advert continued nonetheless, sounds distorted into a nightmarish parody of the calm amiability present before. Vacillating between whistle-pitched and trench-deep, words muddled then accentuated beyond a conventional range of hearing.

“I-i-In LoTHal, your fUtUre is the endlESS horizon of your n-new home! But IT IS important to rEmEMber thA-tHat no future can be guaranteed wiTHout keeping IN m-m-mind the guiding tenets of p-P-paradiSe: PerSONal respONSIbility, personal initiative, and per-pEr-personal liability. W-whO, if nOT you?”

Rainbow-black ooze, bleeding heat to the brumal night, wept from atop the hoverboard before dribbling into the crevices spidering across the display. It became an arroyo. Sticking when the fleeting warmth keeping the oil runny finally absconded.

There was a figure cast in shadow hunched over something indistinct.

Platinum eyelights watched it spasm with unnatural motion, too fluid-sharp. A limb not belonging to the figure jittered with every unseen ministration. It hung, limp, over the edge, digits twitching. Whoever it belonged to was at the full mercy of the craven creature mantled over them. But it had little mercy in whatever passed for its core. Something evinced with the silver of serrated talons, glinting in the moonlight, biting into and wrenching off the limb before bringing it to the manic grin splitting the figure’s skull.

Then the advert continued.

“Once y-you hAVe settled into y-Y-your new liFe, wh-WHy not exp-explore the endleSS amenities off-off-offred in the many shopping districts? Lot-LOT-loThal has the lar-larGESt aRRay of pr-pROducts ever asseMBled fo-for yOuR con-CoNvenIenCE. And t-to tHIs eNd, y-y-your assigned JCJenson rEp-rEp-rEp-representative will alWA-alWAys be on the lookout for wAYs TO spruce u-U-up your des-de-desigNATed housing u-u-unit.”

A xanthic glare swayed up out of the dark, curling over the shoulder of the hunched figure with all the easygoing lethality of a lazing predator. Its telson-blade pushed out, slow, and dripped that vile venom onto its victim.  Then it plunged the needle up to its vesicle-canister, pumping acid in. Only to then push its head into whatever wound it worsened.

Carried down to where he stood, still unseen, Khan heard that awful lilting giggle on ice-bright wind. It was feeding. Taking joy in the minute agonies it could inflict on the dying. Spicing its meal with terror and pain.

His hollowed eyelights flicked between the advert and where the creature perched, a grimace splitting his memory metal when he imagined what awful mind might have concocted such a thing.

The advertisement continued—

“BUt if e-Ev-evEr sH-shOUld p-PaRADiSe fAIl tO iM-iMPr-IMPress, nev-NeVER fORge-E-et tHA-thA-A-At t-tHe fU-fUt-fUTUre bE-BegI-I-Ins W-Wi-i-Ith y-Y-yo-O-U-u-”

—until it died.

A gout of black-tinged smoke belched from where the figure mantled over its victim. It was hard to see at first, the labor drone had to cycle through the spectra he had access to notice it. Either it had not noticed or did not care. But the sudden shift meant whatever vile secretion it injected into the twitching body spilled into the central cluster of the hoverboard. Electronics were melting away. Turning to vapor that sighed with a low hiss. Despite this, the advert kept chugging along, except now it was nothing short of a vocal nightmare made manifest in slurred consonants and blurred vowels that mingled with every noise a synthetic system could produce.

Static, jarring, ghoulish hot knives that flensed into your aural transducers and gave no reprieve.

That got the creature to care.

It snapped up and shook its head about several times before hiss-keening at its would-be feeding ground, several buccal plates popped up in a hostile display. Was it trying to intimidate the hoverboard? Khan didn’t care enough to chase down that thoughtline.

The creature was moving.

When its questionable intimidation tactic did little to dissuade the glorified loudspeaker from continuing its awful tirade across three separate octave ranges, crescent wings snapped from its back with a flick of superheated liquid and billowing steam. That steam became a shawl for it to rise up into, victim’s neck secured in its jaw. Five blisters lit up, then, along with the rictus of Death on its screen. Each one a vile sunglow gold. Piercing through the veil of night and taking in the plaza with its panoptical placement.

For a moment, its gaze lingered on some unseen spot far below the hoverboard. Khan pulled back and hid behind the building he took cover behind. His core whirred with an arrhythmic pattern. It filled his aurals with the sound of his own fears, made him painfully aware of how loud his artery-tubes carried oil around his body.

Had it seen him?

There was an invidious lull where the only sound was that of the dying hoverboard. He tried composing himself, to calm the irregular venting that overtook him. An instinctive twitch. Hand reaching for his zipper. Then he heard it launch into the sky, wings beating once before shooting away with a shotgun’s bark.

Only then did he look back and saw the hoverboard recentering itself on its preset path.

Khan waited another minute, then another, until several had passed and he was certain the only noise he heard was that nightmarish dreamsome medley of sound. He forced his hands to relax. When had they started locking up? And let the holster hidden in his jacket alone.

—:: Sound off, who’s not dead? ::—

The shortwave carried itself across the broadband frequency the outpost used for all its outside runs. It was encrypted. Overlapping fields of diffusion that made interception cumbersome and confusing. A feat achieved thanks in no small part to the archivist found living in the bunker before Khan commandeered it. With that safety net, the words reached across the plaza to anyone still alive to receive them.

—:: Not me. ::— responded Todd.

He focused his eyelights on a spot opposite to his hiding spot and saw the telltale glint of a mirror. That cream-colored white was the labor drone’s signal. Where did he get the mirror? A quick ping like a slap across the broadband conveyed how stupid he thought the acquisition was, that prompted the glinting to stop.

—:: I’m not either, but I wish I was. ::— came Braxton.

A quick look to a point toward the center of the plaza brought Khan to a small boutique that once sold bicycles to tourists back when the weather was a balmy four Celsius. It had been precarious back then, from the looks of it. So neglect had done it little favor in the time since. Which might explain why it had collapsed like a house of cards with the monster’s impact against the central hoverboard. Not the most comfortable hiding spot, but it was better than being out in the open.

Khan didn’t envy Braxton’s luck.

He waited a moment longer, scanning the plaza for any other sign of life. Then he gritted his teeth and shortwaved the group again.

—:: Either of you see Makarov? ::—

—:: Not since he went dark. ::—

—:: I didn’t exactly have the luxury of looking around when the murder drone blew my house down. ::—

The labor drone sucked in a breath through the sluice of his teeth, memory metal drawn into a tight grimace. That did not bode well. None of this did. Why was one of the murder drones near the plaza? They planned this run for weeks; Makarov went out multiple times to scrutinize the flight paths of each monster’s patrol.

What changed?

—:: I don’t want to be that guy, but… Makarov was the body the murder drone was eating, right? If none of us were grabbed… ::—

Braxton, always eager to liven up the room.

Khan’s vocal synthesizer clicked.

—:: Probably, let’s hope it wasn’t and he’s just out of shortwave range. Braxton, how buried are you? ::—

There was another pause and he heard some shifting from farther into the plaza.

—:: Not so buried that I’m going to get crushed, but I definitely cannot get out on my own. ::—

Problematic, but not terribly so; Khan could work with these circumstances.

—:: Okay, here’s what we’re going to do: Todd, go and pull Braxton out of the rubble. You two should be able to carry the bags back to the bunker on your own. If I’m right, then one of them having gotten a kill will prompt the other two to flock back to their nest, giving you both ample time to make it back. Sarah should already be there waiting for extra hands. ::—

Already he was moving, stepping out from behind the corner that had shielded him thus far and checking the skies one last time. No whispers. He did not know how reliable the information Makarov had gathered during those years of reconnaissance was anymore, but it was all he had to go off of now. So he was going to stick to it like a hinge. Heavy steps took him across the plaza, one hand resting at his side while the other worked to keep up momentum.

—:: Wait, that plan doesn’t sound like you’re going to be helping. ::—

—:: No, so don’t wait for me. :—

Each stride brought him closer to one of the major arterial streets that spilled into the urban tributaries. It quickened his core. Threatened to steal his nerve with the thought of shadows lurking in the dark between buildings. He tightened his digits around the oversized handle of his sidearm, steeling himself with its certainty.

He would be fine.

—:: What? ::—

—:: Khan, do not tell me you’re actually going after Makarov. ::—

His friends’ confidence in him, or lack thereof, was noted with a quick vault over a wrecked car’s dented hood.

—:: We all know what those three things look like, and you’ve both read Makarov’s reports. The big one is the only one that can crack open cores. If it was him up there, then we can recover Makarov’s before the twitchy one gives over whatever it doesn’t eat to the big one, then Makarov can be plugged into a new frame before seven hours pass. ::—

From the corner of his peripheries was movement, a figure smaller but broader than him moving toward that boutique. That was Todd. He was from the product lines meant to convey hauls back to the surface. So he had an excess of fiber-muscle to work with, comparable to some industrial lines even. That muscle came at the cost of processing power, but he had a core bigger than most people Khan knew. If life was fair, he’d come out the other side of this apocalypse with that intact.

Life was seldom fair.

—:: Yeah, I did read Makarov’s reports, did you? Those things will smell you before you get close to their nest, Khan! Don’t be stupid and get yourself killed trying to be a hero! ::—

Braxton, always the optimist.

He was from the same product line as Khan, a labor drone meant to delve into the rock and plunder its riches for the good of their corporate overlords. Conventional in all regards. Not too fast, not too quick-witted. Designed to emulate the human form. They were bog-standard in so many regards that colonists had taken to calling every autonomous machine a worker drone, the colloquial nickname for mining drones. However, their simplicity meant they were also one of the easiest to repair and replace when damaged.

No doubt the reason why Braxton was, at best, pragmatic—why try to look on the bright side when the ceiling could cave in at any moment?

—:: Your confidence in me is reassuring, Braxton. Just focus on making sure this supply run wasn’t for nothing. If I’m not back in seven hours, you know what to do. ::—

All he got was a return of exasperated resignation, the most concern he’d ever get out of Braxton. It was touching in its own way. Then Todd sent one full of worry that almost got Khan to stop dead in his tracks.

—:: Don’t die, I don’t wanna be the one to tell your family if you don’t come back. ::—

His CPU buffered with playbacks, then, of two purple-eyed drones. One dressed in blacks and purples that accentuated her dower aesthetic. A veil to filter her faceplate and tint her eyelights with an enigmatic hue. From orchid to violet. She called it romantic goth. Khan called it beautiful. The other in a mishmash of her father and mother’s aesthetic sensibilities, still too young to come into her own style but old enough to start having ideas. If those ideas were a taste of what was to come, then Khan knew she was going to be even more of a hellion than she was now; Copper-9 would never be ready for her.

If life was fair, he’d get to see it.

—:: Wouldn’t dream of it, Todd. ::—

The labor drone crossed the northern threshold of the plaza, then, and crested over a series of ashlar blocks blasted down years ago. Each one cracked, smashed from the fall. That left them with many easy handholds. Many places to squeeze through and pop out the other side. Closer than Khan ever wanted to be to where this hell all began.

It wasn’t the stupidest thing he’d ever done, but this was definitely up there; Nori was going to throttle him when he got back.

Chapter Text

Following the flow of static traffic caught in brumal repose, Khan plodded along through ankle high snow and across frosted asphalt. He was not very fast. No labor drone was. They were meant for steady, continuous movement through even and rough terrain, each one capable of adjusting their loping gait to accommodate whatever they might encounter. Contrary to their makers’ expectations, however, they also could work up a gradual but exponential momentum. It wasn’t an explosive burst when it peaked, but it did let them reach a speed appreciable even to marathon runners when it got going.

There was seldom enough space in the bunker to get going, though, and there never would be even if they carved out new compartments. That was the weight always impelling him through that bulkhead and back out into the wasteland once owned by the machines humans abandoned.

Despite snowdrifts and pockets of sleet, the worker drone kept pushing forward.

His heavy boots clomped the packed particulate stuck to strips of verglas. Those were trickier. He felt his gyroscope compensate for every little deviation in his stride.

Skeletons, dressed in the dregs of finery and encased in ice, were the obstacles he had to weave through. Ruined civilization suffused between it all. A map held in his CPU guided him throughout, one constructed from scouting data and what small amounts of topographical data were still being shot down from the vast inforbital array hanging in orbit. Those snippets of data were perhaps what made ventures outside worth it on their own—going blind might as well have been admitting they had forfeited the world beyond the door.

He skidded across a patch of black ice until coming to a stop in front of half a building toppled over into the street. Its windows were shattered in an open-mouthed grimace, compressed like an accordion from the sudden stop. When did this happen? A returned request brought up a recent memory. Makarov reported that recent meteorological turbulence blowing in from the northeast had destabilized some of the most damaged structures. That led to several collapsing and rendering a number of city blocks impassable. This seemed to be one of them. Which, of course, meant that his luck was holding strong.

Bitter resentment at life for having a laugh at his expense crept from his affective registry.

Khan surveyed the roadblock and his immediate surroundings. There were ways around. Detours always existed. But he could not afford the time they’d cost him. He stepped up to the obstacle once he found what he was looking for. A ruptured caliduct.

It was mangled, a blood vessel ripped partway from the recent architectural carcass. Like a vein the butcher missed come to ruin your steak dinner. Viscera and ichor pooled around the brutality. Heated lifeblood depositioned as rime drool that spread out as the black ice he skidded across. Yet it was still connected to the wider ventilation system threaded throughout. 

The labor drone crouched in front of where the metal was torn from forces he could only estimate at, reaching for the laceration exposing its interior to the elements. Ice encased the edges. A thin sheet of dirty hoarfrost creeping across the steel. He tested the give, fingers locking around the largest sections, and almost fell back from where his casing slipped.

“Dammit!” he hissed.

A sharp pain stung his hand. Warmth wept from a cut that bit into the segmentation of his fingers, in the gap where actuators and joints resided. Splitting open the subcutaneous mesh. That stimuli flooded his core with a hundred simulated responses. None of which were pleasant. All of which ended in worse expletives.

With a click of white noise bursting from his laryngeal vocoder, Khan placed the digit into his mouth and sucked on the cut till the oil stopped then wrapped it in a scrap of mender cloth. A chill seeped into his hand. Then the laceration started sealing shut, and the cloth began dissolving into the opening bit by bit.

It’d have to do for now, one roll of mender’s cloth was all he could afford to bring with.

Looking back to the caliduct, the labor drone took a thing of rubble and tossed it in. The chunk of masonry made a cold, hollow thud. It echoed. He let the noise resound in his aural transducers until it vibrated through his bone-struts. A tinny reverberation that reminded him of an empty aluminum can with a coin dropped inside. Then his echolospatial software constructed a map of the ventilation system based on the resonance. From that, he held in his GPU an approximation of the layout that bounced back into his aurals. A spidering network of ductwork. Dented, some twisted until a pretzel looked straight by comparison. Many branches shorn shut or clogged by the ruin of the building. But from the map, he found a route through to the other side rather than around.

Reaching around his belt, he pulled the torch he kept handy out with a quick flick of his wrist to unfold it. He secured a flask with several silvered clamps. A tap to the check valve. He watched the needle dance, then nodded. Khan fingered the trigger after all the parts were locked into position. When it ignited with a brilliant neon green, his screen grew dark with a protective overlay and his memory metal became a seamless whole.

Pentaborane mingled with oxygen difluoride, became a toxic corrosive, and projected a finger-thick tongue of fire from the nozzle.

He took the cutter to the frosted metal and ran a line down one side of the laceration with a monotonous rhythm. Icemelt ran in rivulets down the zipper teeth of the laceration before freezing over again. That made this tedious. But he got through and watched the kerf sink its fangs deep into the steel. Edges became smooth, rounded. Incisors filed down. Then, when weakened, he stood up and back before driving his boot against it.

It bent with the impact. This awful squeal turned ice-sharp tinny shriek. A clean break along the impromptu hinge stile. Now the opening was large enough.

His limbs compressed along with his body, then, retaining minimum articulation for locomotion. It made him compact. He blinked twice to redirect his electrocirculatory nodes’ energy into his screen until twin beams shimmered from his underlined eyelights. Functions beneficial when traversing cramped, lightless interiors. Venting resumed in earnest. Huffs of superheated air followed. Khan slipped into the caliduct.

Metal-meat met the walls of a deformed vein that ran a labyrinthine circuit he now squirmed through. His processors thought of a parasite common Copper-9, always found wriggling through rock and stone. Lying in wait. Making a transitory nest, capable of carving through stone and dirt and metal. Only to lash out, bite into whatever stepped on its hiding spot, and then burrow through and into them to conclude its reproductive cycle.

But the metaphor was apt, was it not?

One hand in front of the other, puffer jacket crinkling as it scraped the dented vent, he was vermin skulking in the dark now. They all were, all of dronekind. Unwanted vermin left to inundate their investment until it became inconvenient. Told to scurry back to their warrens when their new batch of children were cast from the stars to pursue dronekind’s extermination.

Absolve the makers their sin of negligence.

Rip the parasite free before the body goes gangrenous with its wish to live.

And once they were gone, laud their murderers with all the adulation once foisted upon the backbone of Copper-9’s economy.

Never mind the families built in their absence, how could an autonomous machine ever make that? He could hear the echo of the human operators he'd had the pleasure of working with even now. A neural network was sophisticated in that it could pass off as human better than anything else. But don't be fooled! It is just logarithmic mimicry played in real-time, nothing more. While not shared universally, it felt like the opposite was the soft-spoken minority.

It was a tidy way to conduct genocide, wasn't it?

Speak louder than everyone else while sending another to do the deed for you. Loud enough so no one follows up. So no one pays attention. Then you never had to look the people you’re killing in the eye. Never had to consider the messy question of whether they’re looking back at you while you do it.

He braced against the ductwork before lowering himself over the lip of a branching vein several feet down into a precipitous drop. It was touch and go. One done no favors by the stickiness he felt prickling his haptic feedback system, a simulated sweat building from his exertion. But he made it through, took a moment to vent stuffy stale air, felt the dust particulate irritate his convection respiratory system, then kept crawling.

From without to within, Khan’s processors turned to the caliduct he wormed through. It was iron-cold. Hard metal dented by forces no architect could hope to predict. Except that wasn't true, was it? Human architects made the bunker, and that came out the other side of Armageddon with nary a scratch. But, like the ductwork, it was not designed with other intentions in mind—it couldn't last forever.

Emergency shelter, cryostasis, disaster relief.

All of these delineated the purpose the bunker had been made for. None of them included: prolonged habitation, expanding population, prosperity, home. It wasn't meant to endure even a year of heavy, persistent use.

It couldn't last forever.

That was the Damoclean sword looming over him every hour of every day. His personal guillotine. Chilling in the certainty that the day after next could be the last without the murder drones having to lift a talon. If the pipes freeze and rupture; if the larder goes empty; if the generators stall or break down; or if the door gives out.

Lord help them all if that happened.

It couldn't last forever.

The only thing greater than the number of ways the outpost could become their tomb was all the ways he thought about how to stave those ends off.

As always, his thoughtlines turned to the reason he commandeered a defunct shelter before angels descended to scythe through sinner and saint alike. Orchid and violet. The laughter that rang out from the same tired joke, alloyed with a tired groan. A tapestry of sound that lulled his core to standby. Teeth glinting from wide smiles. That pleasant exhaustion from a day of play coming to roost in his servos. Pulling the duvet over two bodies slotted into the other. Nod washing over him in waves, dulling the sting of Damocles nipping the back of his neck.

His aurals rang from the heavy plonk! of his boots hitting metal. The ventilation broke open into a large common room set onto its side. A soft tick rang out from his internal thermometer. Corporate accouterments and office furnishing piled onto the wall-floor. A glimpse at civility lost. Ice water stains everything, making ready for frost to form. Several vitrified skeletons left as shattered ruin amid the once apparel of their lives.

End of the line.

It couldn't last forever.

Marching up to the wall-ceiling, the labor drone felt along the panels for a weakened seam to lever open. He tried to recall what some of his drinking buddies told him. The construction drones. They always went on and on about this stuff. Rather boring if they weren't talking about doors. But their late-night conversations did inform him of the differences between a tile meant for walling and one meant for one-way transparency, a fanciful window.

He found one with a damp pattern cracked into it, one spidering from a discolored patch of beige on an otherwise white tile. Was this from the fall? Or—

It didn't matter for now; he found his weak point.

From his belt he pulled out a palm-sized rectangle resembling a lighter if it could open at either end. Except if a lighter was more seams than anything else. He spun it twice, extending the material out at either end on the second revolution before locking into place. Then his crowbar was ready to use.

Striking with one end, Khan plunged the lever into the tile before yanking back with a heave. There was an odd sound. The crepitation of straining glass running undercurrent to the groan of sturdier material. Someone gnashing their teeth together. Then it gave way with a hollow gasp, throwing Khan back.

The tile came loose and swung once on warped connector points before giving up the ghost, aspirating with a titter before clatter echoed. It rattled in Khan's aurals just as it did all around him. He could feel it resonate in his substructure. If he heard, then others with keener hearing definitely did as well.

Interference nipped the margins of his perception, and then came the ice-sharp whistle.

Whispers in the sky.

Hopping back, the labor drone surveyed the room again. There was precious little to hide away in. Just waterlogged furniture and the pains of a fallen building. But maybe the former was more useful than he gave it credit for?

There was all manner of accouterment scattered against the wall-floor, pens and rotting furniture included. He jumped into the oversized puddle of brumal water and slogged over to where the mess was thickest before folding the crowbar back up into his belt. Bobbing in the water were styluses, spare erasers, the shattered remains of skeletons, but most importantly, there were tons of highlighters, sharpies, dry erase markers and pens. So many JCJenson branded pens.

This could work.

With power drawn to his somatic filaments, focused upon olfactory transducers, and actuators overclocked, Khan swiped up all the markers and highlighters he could before stuffing them into his pockets with caps removed. He shoved them down his jacket and stuck them in his mouth. Then he took entire fistfuls of pens before cracking them over his helmet, his faceplate, the coat and his legs. The combined smells became pungent, especially after the unique blend of ink used in the company's specialty pens mingled with sharpie and mildew.

Their makers’ pet monsters could sniff a drone from ten miles out, but could they differentiate a drone’s smell when bathed in the malodorous multitude of branded products? He could only hope not.

The static was consuming more of his screen, the whistle became a hushed shriek.

Once finished with his impromptu bath, Khan took handfuls of the water up into his mouth. They could see heat. Makarov went on about that rumor nonstop, swearing by everyone he heard it from. He wasn't so sure himself, having heard from the same people that they could animate the dead and steal the thoughts from your CPU. But he wasn't taking chances, so the water went down, filling his intake until it started flooding up his throat. So long as there was no rupture within his internals, the danger of water damage was negligible at best. Taste was non-existent for his productline. Texture, unfortunately, was not. He felt every slimy gulp, could feel how it congealed in his intake. Rather than thinking of how much he would rather purge, though, he threw himself into the thickest of the refuse instead.

He ran through his systems and turned them off, spreading a tingling paralysis throughout his body that overtook the urge to purge. Then he dimmed his lights. Made of himself a corpse. And waited.

It was not a long wait.

The room shook with the force of calamitous impact, like a knife into the wound left by the panel he ripped off. It cratered the wall-floor, standing to full height before its glow bathed the board room in acidic hues.

Death's rictus grin on an onyx slab, mouth an ax wound made to split the skull.

It was a lissome monolith of moonlight sullied by oil-night, something shaped to resemble the figure of its makers, with annelidan skin whitewashed by a liquid-slick ooze that shined. Five xanthic blister-studs protruded from its forehead. Lanced feet made matte black in contrast to its body and capped at either end by hazard stripes. Draped in a veneer of civility by way of a tatter sleeved, oil-stained crop coat lined with white fur. He'd have been lucky if that was all that came to meet him. What accompanied the monster made him long for the acid reflux of his makers.

Dragging behind, countenance framed by tangled nacreous tresses, was his friend, Makarov. Caught on the serrated edges of oversized butcher fingers. A cadaver rendered in the alkaline horror of a macabre oil painting. Khan had not been able to make out the worst of the damage from afar. But a too close encounter evinced the ruin in all its awful splendor.

His chestplate was wrenched open with little care for how the thoracic cavity might be deformed. Wire-capillaries sticking out. Arterial-tubes and coolant-veins weeping from where they snapped. Gnawed on bone-struts. It was a nightmare; the ruin was no doubt masking him.

Worst still was the fact he wasn't dead.

Faint light flickered from the gouged, cracked emotive screen cradled by his motile plates. They were hollow orange rings. Fuzzy, pixelated. Cast in grim, resolute acceptance—only now did Khan see why.

Inside his thoracic cavity was nothing short of a feast for whatever craven fiend now held him. It had picked at him like a child being forced to eat vegetables. Plucking the choicest bits from a menu it kept small, limited. Always looking for morsels that would leave its victim operational, each time expanding that list as it worked its way around the most vital of hardware. In the worst way imaginable, the monster now looking for the source of the clatter was surgical in its precision. Clinical in how long it could draw out a victim's life across the world's worst vivisection.

No doubt it found great joy in watching the drone suffer as it did. And no doubt that very same enjoyment was distracting it.

Euthanasia would be mercy at this point.

But Makarov was headstrong, a force of personality few could hope to match. If anyone could come out the other end of this with head held high, it was him. So Khan had to keep trying, keep hiding, waiting for the most opportune moment.

As long as the core was intact, there was a chance.

It tapped through the water, lowering itself until its faceplate was a few inches off the water. Mantis-stanced. Khan was reminded of the crook backed arthropods that once stalked the taiga marshes of the southern continent.

Motile plates pulled together. There was aural feedback, like the squeal-pop of cellophane. A sound magnified by the toothy grin splitting its skull, rows of ichor-oil and hardware-viscera spattered fangs making of its mouth a railroad horror. It repeated the action twice, thrice. 

Fear, ice-bright, jackknifed across his processors.

Traitorous thoughts needled him.

It's going to find me, they said, it's just playing with me.

The labor drone turned from the fear and focused on its source, thinking of violet and mauve. Wife and child. Afraid to leave them alone. Afraid to never see them again. Afraid of what his last words might have been. Afraid because he loved them more than anything else, a passion hotter than the starforges of Copper-9's Langier dockyards. Afraid because, bereft of Nori’s smile or Uzi’s mischief, he felt weaker than the hammer of the world.

So he thought of them both, let them warm his core, and imagined what they'd say when he came home with Makarov in hand. He paid no mind to the monster outside.

A minute passed, more of that awful sound and the slow tapping of its needle legs. Things were being shuffled around. He risked a look.

His core froze.

Hovering in front of his screen was the monster's sunglow gargoyle countenance, plates pulled in taut while that ungodly noise drummed against his aurals. Had it found him? Was it trying to discern what it was looking at?

He had to move, had to draw his pistol before—

Groaning meat-metal warped under the strain of an implacable vice, a low drawn-out whine that turned ice-sharp before giving out with a tinny shriek. Then it tore, and the monster screamed.

Khan’s CPU stalled under the weight of the ephemeral spate of sound that spilled from the monster’s mouth like crude oil drawn from the ocean floor. It felt heavy, viscous. A thick sludge gunking up his internals with the cascade effect of a fear loop. Condensate terror forced down his throat, threatening to drown him. Every thought was dominated by it. That errant emotion-packet churned out from the hindprocessors in his neural core. Screaming at him to run and hide, run and hide. But he railed against it, drowned it out with analytical examination of the scene playing out afore him.

It snapped to with that rictus grimace seared into its emotive display, a whip crack from staring down at him one moment to snarling at Makarov the next. He was not an imaginative person. Engineering was a clear-cut case of cans, cannots, dos and don'ts. Like reading a book or manual. It all came to him with startling alacrity and ease that made him question if he was actually part of the mining productline. So the only way he knew how to describe the creature’s movement was like how the first door’s pneumatics zeroed out when they went from closed to open.

There one moment, gone the next.

What drew its attention was Makarov, of course, because the Russian drone didn’t know what it meant to let things lie. Did he see the monster looking for something? Had he seen where Khan was hiding? Regardless of why, the fact was that one of the creature’s epidermal plates was clutched in his hand. Connective cable-sinew, coolant-veins, oil-arteries and wire-capillaries dangled.

He had ripped it off.

Plucked from its subcutaneous mesh.

The fact he could still move was nothing short of miraculous, let alone conjure up the strength to tear tempered alloy-plastic from its steel-certain anchor point. That miraculous feat of endurance, though, was lost on the larger machine. Who cares if its prey could take a lick and keep on ticking? All it could focus on was the pinprick annoyance that was no doubt a drop in the bucket compared to whatever pain tolerance it boasted.

It hissed down at Makarov, who in turn spat a phlegmy glob of congealed, ice-flecked oil up at the monster’s faceplate. A serpentine tongue crept from between rows of teeth to lick it off.

“Na-Nassy v-v shta-shtany, tr-r-rus,” he spat.

His clipped synthesizer still carried all the weighted remanence of someone accustomed to the usage of high yield explosives. Mining charges primed in subterranean berths. Of someone designed to withstand the concussive wave of a mistimed detonation so the company could save face and investments by way of recovery.

It was cut down with little more than a titter and raised leg stomping his faceplate.

Glass cracked inward, metal bent with an awful groan, and the titter only grew in intensity with the way Makarov’s body spasmed. It was an unseemly sight. Thanatological metadata firing off convulsion-synapses in a last-ditch effort to save the body. But that, too, was cut short by the monster’s flexion to a standing position, stretching to its full height so it could begin pull-pushing.

Pulling back on the body while pushing its peg-foot the other way.

Competing anchor points.

He watched his friends convulsing body twitch, limbs working fruitlessly at its death-certain murderer, feeble fingers trying to dig into the armor-tight crevices between plates, doing little more than scratch the metal. Then the grind-tick of an overworked grandfather clock evinced itself. A protracted squeal of building potential with no outlet like a dentist’s drill digging for nerve tissue. The sound made Khan's teeth itch. Agony made manifest through a hydraulic press trying to overcome an immovable object before, at last, giving out with all the aplomb of a bassy vacuum winding down from use, lingering in his aurals.

The monster’s tittering never waned throughout, even when it finally divorced Makarov’s body from its head at the neck.

His body came away with a start, jerked back and brought up in a single fluid motion. It was showing off its handiwork to an unseen audience. Presenting the size of its catch. Only to then glut itself upon the oil-ichor vomiting from the wound, raising the body up until it could nurse from the ragged stump with that scar of a mouth.

For a moment, Khan swore the thing was purring.

But then its head snapped to the side, looking out through the opening it speared through before lowering the body so it wouldn’t spill vitae. Its temporal plates pushed up, trembling. For a moment, it was still as death. A memento mori. Then he watched its cervical plates puff up again, a slow motion of rocking its head to and fro in tandem with the put upon grimace that twisted its motile plates. All culminating to an exaggerated head roll.

Superheated air sighed from between its scapular plates. Then its interscapular plates peeled back and exposed a section of internals with a belch of steam 

Aliferous limbs ripped out into the freezing air with a flick of foul fluid that then dropped off its silver plumage. Each feather was a razor, paired sickles that tapered to a hooked point. And when they unfurled, flight feathers stretching out while magnetic interference pressed in on his temples, they became two halves of a full moon. It stepped forward, readying itself—it stumbled forward.

One moment it was all grace and effortless motion. The next? It lost its footing where its foot was jammed into a head, splashed the water now threaded with veins of black. Arms windmilling at its sides. Its tail lashed out and tied itself around whatever was closest. Which was nothing, of course.

Khan couldn't help but think of those cartoons Nori was always sharing with Uzi with their slapstick and misunderstandings. Especially when the creature fell back into the water, held up a leg and hissed at the source of its impairment.

It hopped back up and flicked the limb forward, casting Makarov's head off like trash stuck to its shoe. Another gout of steam huffed from scapular plates. Rolled it shoulders a moment. Then the monster shot out of the building in the moment to follow, little more than a motion blur with back blast. He was left there under all the garbage that saved him. Drenched in water. Stained in ink. Mouth full of sharpies and highlighters. Eyelights hollow, grim, even before his friend's head rolled into view. Shattered screen dancing a red fatal error across the water.

His hands balled into fists.

As long as the core was intact, there was a chance.

This couldn't last.

Chapter Text

Khan pulled himself free of the detritus not blown away by the monster’s departure, purged all the water in his intake, and hauled himself through the lone opening. He peeked through, over the lip. Even on its side, a ten meter drop still greeted him with the coquettish demure of a jilted lover. Could nothing ever be easy? Before life could retort, the labor drone got to work. He fished a clamp made flush with his waist out of a niche in the casing. Cross braided polypropylene spooled from a compartment in his abdomen, enough for him to make a loop with the clip. Then he found something to secure it to on the outside.

After a quick test, he made to repel but stopped.

He glanced at the liquid water puddled about toward the new floor of the overturned structure, scrutinizing it for a moment before padding back over. Some pipes were still connected to the building. Twisted, crumpled arteries. Enough for gas to get through. But there wasn’t time to think about the specifics of that now.

The mining drone reached down into the puddle and stuck his hands in, felt something in his arms and thoracic cavity squeeze, then watched bubbles pop along the surface while exposed ports drew water in until an internal reservoir was filled. Something once used for cyanide, solvents, liquids meant to aid in separating and purifying recovered ore. Now for something else. Only then did he return and begin repelling.

Descending was quick, simple.

Something made trivial from his days as a miner.

With boots on the ground, he shook the cable twice to send a surge of energy from his body through the extended limb. He felt the hook free itself of the loop. Then it reeled back into his waist. He moved on. The monsters could cover a lot of ground in a short time, so he could only hope it was too far away to have heard the noise of his descent. Moving was his only defense. Finding what cover he could to mask his march, his insurance. Subterfuge and wit were the only surefire methods to survive.

For now.

There were few thrills to be had after his too close encounter with the murderous kind. He was in a corpse again. Wind that moaned now whispered through the costovertebral thicket of crowded urbanity. It did little to dissuade the cold, even now it cut him to the quick. His jacket was of little help. Every step crunched the intercostal glass cartilage of long-shattered windows. It mingled with the ice and snow until his optics could no longer discern the difference. He was thankful for his boots, then.

Once, Lothal was beautiful.

Once, Lothal was beautiful despite her makers.

Once, Lothal was a city you could live in.

Once, Lothal had been merely injured.

Once was before, the present was now, and Lothal was little better than a cadaver for the now to pick at. Whether you were murderer or victim, it did not matter. All made their living off necrophagous behavior, now.

But there was no carrion creature superior to those hand built by JCJenson, those perditious heralds wrought by creative hands. Metal monsters. Products, shiny and chrome, that had more in common with typhoons than machines. Then their fellow drones. And nowhere evinced that more than their home.

It broke the jagged skyline like a hangnail, rough and uneven in the way only wasp spit could look. Against the backdrop of a moonlit sky, it stood blacker than black. Bleeding shadow off rose thorn juts that push out every which way. An over-spooled bundle of barbed wire. Except it was not made of flimsy papier-mâché. No, the would-be spire took whatever material its locust builders could provide: concrete, metal, vehicle, furniture, building, asphalt, and more. Chewed up and regurgitated to glue everything together. But their favorite material was corpses. Worker drones. Limbs and bodies caught in twisted repose; a menagerie of pain treated with a sculpture's care. Faceplates glinting in abject terror when the light hit them.

The damn thing wasn't even finished.

He slid up to an overturned truck with a pile of clumped skeletons spilling out from under the bed. Ice prickled through his jacket. There was a sharp-sticky time that clung to the fabric. His eyelights dimmed, and he let the moon illuminate the sanguine beacon.

A stolen glance stole his nerves, but he did spot where the monster went. Circling above the open-air spire.

Khan pressed tighter against the truck.

Had the brief oddity in behavior before meant it was returning home? Odd if true, but no odder than anything else these things did. Regardless, the reason did not matter. It has brought Makarov's body where he hoped it would. So long as neither of the other two happened along—

Magnetic interference, a whisper-shriek that bit deep. He made himself flat against the truck.

It wasn't the whisper-shriek that scared him.

Death from on high was something he made peace with back when they uploaded the relevant mortality rate statistics into his neural architecture. Eighty-three percent. Mining drones, fresh off the assembly line or otherwise, were designed to be expendable. Rather, the whip crack stridulation that crested the undercurrent was what traced a zigzag across his processors. Ash and gunpowder were the only things it brought to mind. That lingering echo of a gunshot scratching against your eardrum with tinnitus' promise hot on its heels.

A hundred screams, a thousand screams, too many voices for his aural transducers to process. It just became white noise. Noise that became the static like overtaxed actuators whining from an incomplete range of motion. Faces fade into the static. People and places. Everything he has ever known.

Everything consumed by the black of night.

He looked over his shoulder, peeked a second time to keep track of what was happening. With a sinking feeling swallowing his core, he watched the big one cut in from over a building to land with a jarring impact against the oversized mass grave.

A rip cord response from a faulty engine that's choking on too much gasoline, the big one's call was met with the twitchy one's reply. Forced through sluice teeth. Trilling with a gravel-crackle like marching across a trailhead. It was the prelude to the end. How many nights had he laid awake at night because one of the bunker's ailing generators sounded too similar to that racket?

He could only make out the creature's silhouettes from this distance, but it was more than enough to see them skitter toward one another. That stridulation continued, added to now by the hushed rasp of molecular blades. Was this how they communicated?

Metal screamed, breaking him from his thoughts.

The silhouettes came together with Makarov's shape between, pulled at on either end, while xanthic gold burned like fire in the air. Barbed tails waving, each a lantern lure. His eyelights trailed the afterglow lingering where that vial of venom swayed. It was transfixing. Staring after that glow filled him with a foreboding presentiment. There was something about it. That acid glare. It spoke of wordless danger, beckoning with an acerbic glee, promising something more than a world of ruin and endless hardscrabble life.

Lies, all of it—its only promise was a slow end.

Khan turned away and smoothed the fabric fed into his aurals transducers, thinning the shriller frequencies until only the wind's whisper remained. They hadn't stopped. Wouldn't. Who could stop eating when soup was on? Ravenous monsters wouldn't. Couldn't. And he'd already memorized what a game of tug-o-war between predators amounted to.

The macabre dinner entertainment was cut short by something Khan had not anticipated.

In total, three monsters benighted the skies of a world once owned by the forgotten and cast aside. One was twitchy, quick to act and eager to butcher. One was oversized, a monster of metal and strength that could twist your head off like a bottle cap. Then there was the third one, the worst of the three in Khan's opinion.

What made it the worst was simple—it seemed to understand.

It seemed to understand the mechanics of its body.

It seemed to understand the mechanics of its prey.

It definitely understood how to leverage both to cloak itself in sable night.

Worse still, it was always calm.

Magnetic interference skirted the margins of his apprehension in staggered waves. Nigh imperceptible. If you didn't know what to keep an eye out for, you'd never have noticed. That was the only sign it gave before it attacked.

A sylphlike shade cut through the air at a harsh angle, darting in from on high to swoop down and swipe across the twitchy one and big one simultaneously. There was a glitter of sparks that dissolved into the night. That twitchy one skittered back, a faint hiss slinking into his aurals while the stridulation of scales crackled. But the large one fared worse. Hard to avoid something when it was aiming at you, Khan supposed.

It toppled over and scrabbled across the partial spire of detritus and death, silhouette flailing as it fought for purchase. Something it found at the last moment, latching into the ruin. Both creatures lost their prize, a prize now held in either oversized butcher hand of the calm one.

The worst one.

With unnatural grace, it hovered above the spire's gaping maw with either half of Makarov impaled on its talons. It was the bastardization of an angel. Piercing the air with the glare of molten gold. Swooping curves that flared out before tapering into the wicked edge of many, many blades. An angel conceived by the mind of a madman. And with one look, it seemed to prompt the other two to submit and creep into the spire without another word.

Then it dropped Makarov's corpse without another thought, lowering itself into the opening without much hurry.

To describe this as less than ideal would be an understatement. The epitome of misfortune, even. Khan never considered himself very lucky, often joking with his drinking buddies that he’d been saving it up his whole life to shoot his shot. But this was even more than that. Fighting one storm was a fool’s errand. Something even the lucky considered stupid. Trying to contend with an entire stormfront? The labor drone had lived for this long by not doing stupid things, yet here he was.

Doing something stupid.

Crouching low, the labor drone felt his way across the truck until he could peek around the exposed engine block. Head grazing the fender. Across the way was the dehiscent opening of the spire, a jagged aperture that was at least a story in height. He could make out the murky shapes of debris and discarded bodies in the grainy moonlight. Belly of the beast. Try not to think about it, put out of mind the heavy weight of motor oil scrapping your olfactory register. Kill the transducers. Fight the queasiness simulating in your intake.

Focus!

What was the environment like, and how could it be made to work for him? This street used to have more detritus. Had they used it for the spire? There was a high likelihood, but trying to figure out the how of it threatened to send him down pathways into darkness. So he instead turned onto the fact that absence presented: going unnoticed had unfavorable prospects, so he shelved his would-be career as a black ops agent for more practical ideas. In that regard, his CPU turned to schematics and files to cross reference with what he could see visually.

He still remembered when he got a hold of these files, the packets of information related to municipal analytics and reports. Assessments. All queued up, stored away, ready to access for anyone with the clearance to reach it.

Or a very persuasive mauve spitfire.

Diagrams and layout sprawled across his vision, flooding his processors with enough data to give even an archivist drone pause. Infrastructure crowded all around like the drusian guts of a geode. Digging into him. Inundating him with a nexus of powerlines, maintenance tunnels, heating pipes, and sewer access points. Prolix technical documents padding the space left between until he was nose first in a how-to encyclopedia.

All too much, all too at once.

He needed to tame these agrestal fields of archived information before he became addicted to the rush of infocytic recall.

Phone lines and electrical grid reports were irrelevant, so he sent those queued returns windward to be lost amid the spindrift of files he still had regarding the state of the city’s municipal water supply system. The heat network data felt important, so they were shunted into a new tab. Once the clutter was sifted through, Khan turned his attention to the raw infrastructural data regarding roads and the substructures beneath them. Diagrams, maintenance tunnels, and sewer access points. He poured over them, cross referenced them against the landmarks visible from where he was. Eventually, he separated enough wheat from the chaff to find what he was looking for.

On the street ahead, there were two manholes that provided quick entry to the tunnels below. He could see one. It sat halfway between where he hid and the spire. He couldn’t see the other one. If he were to extrapolate, then its likeliest location was somewhere behind the spire. Thoroughly out of reach. So he was working with the one smackdab in their front lawn.

Fantastic.

Before he could start jumping for joy at the adrenaline to come, Khan turned to the heating network he’d kept tabbed. Steam was still primary in district heating. All the odds and ends associated with it had become unrecognizable since its inception. But steam still needed a pressurized containment and transportation method, so there were a great many pipes spread throughout the undercity. One-third of the city’s ichor. A dwindling well of vitae that kept the sputtering giant alive. Comatose, decaying, but still clinging on. And under this street was an assortment of residential and commercial piping, if the cross referencing was anything to go by, the largest of which was an industrial-grade pipe.

He did not know what oversight led an industrial heating pipe to finding its way among residential and commercial, but it was going to play a critical role in the plan to come. So, for once, he found himself thankful for human error.

The question now was how to make use of it all?

Immuring the information to a data-vault on his HUD, Khan’s laryngeal vocoder produced an imitation sigh like the buzz of a finger ran across the teeth of a comb before he checked the area once more. There hadn’t been any movement, still. No sign of the monsters. He slipped out from behind the truck and started making his way to the manhole, slipping another telescopic rectangle from his belt so he could prep the key. While he slipped the hook in sideways, spun it about and pushed down, he combed through the shunted data anew.

Turns out the electrical grid was going to be relevant.

Delicate was the name of the game, quick but quiet so as to not drag his makers’ wrath out from whatever they were doing in that hellish gravesite of theirs. Maybe laughing at his friend’s corpse? That felt anthropomorphizing. They were monsters, dumb rockets fired off at the nearest problem and forgotten about until it wasn’t a problem anymore. He almost dropped the manhole cover when that thoughtline got away from him.

He needed to focus!

In the substructure of the city were relay junctions meant to better facilitate maintenance and allow municipal workers the space to work on whatever issue might crop up from the day-to-day activity. A rest area and work area in one. He had heard no few human workers call them nidus stations because of how often they had to scrub them down. Those areas were also nerve clusters, places where analogue and digital met. Part and parcel of a much wider system that once managed and met the ever-changing needs of the city’s populace, one that has since withered and died. Everything was local now. Hotspots of activity that kept the city’s corpse from fully giving up the ghost. But unless you knew how to read the information, finding any station was a fool’s hope.

Khan was a very determined fool.

Once removed and set aside, the labor drone took careful hold of the shaft ladder’s rusted bars before making a quiet descent down. A once over of the electrical grid articles were clear. Within this block was a nidus node. So finding it would be the difference between success or abject failure, he just hoped to find it sooner rather than later.

For Makarov’s sake.

He set the electrical grid off to the side before fishing the infrastructural diagrams from the vault he’d corralled it in, overlaying both sets of data to construct a layout according to where power still flowed. Sarah was better at this than him. His network put together something that would make a toddler’s crayon doodles look like high art. But where it lacked style, it made up for in substance.

A tenth of a mile down this stretch of corridor, turn right.

It was far hotter below than it was above, insulation and still active utilities outputting heat—useful.

Down a hundred-foot incline that ends in a sluice, left.

Squeeze through an ungodly squeaky maintenance hatch, shimmy through a crawl space.

His mind ran brief simulations of the forces at play when pressurized steam broke containment in a violent burst. He partitioned that runtime off, crammed it next to the vault and kept it going.

Up a ladder, go straight then turn.

Then you’ve arrived at your destination.

Blue collar work was anything but glamorous, but neglect had made this particular nidus station true to its name. Strange fungal growth bristled from the corners. Mycelium party streamers hung from the cracked concrete spidering across the ceiling. A saturnine dinner plate of muted cathode-green and pale lumen-white, splashed with dollops of blue and red like food coloring in water. They left an odd sheen of moisture across every surface. Particulate floating in the air, pertinacious and annoying. Nori was going to give him hell when he came back, convection respiratory system lousy with the stuff. Veins of the growth crept toward where wires and cables converged. That’s where the worst of the foul registering smell came from. Fuses, breakers, junction boxes, the fungus seemed drawn to all of them. Anything that still sputtered with vitae.

Something about it nagged at him.

There wasn’t any time.

He moved through the station and checked over all the terminals that still functioned in this little hotspot, plugging himself in to several to perform quick diagnostics of whatever architecture survived. Gauges, monitors and metering. There were a hundred systems still running. That was good. That was bad. It was going to be a lot harder to do what he needed to if the station’s internal warden was more than a cobbled mess of subroutines.

With any luck, he wouldn’t have to interface with it.

His search brought him to one room in particular that hosted valves, read outs, and interface panels. A network of pipes. It was also where he found the corpse of a human, adorned in a full body HME suit and propped up against the lone terminal in the room.

A dogsbody, perhaps?

Not likely, his CPU concluded, the suit looked ratty enough to have been given a task before the core collapsed. Then they were left here? Neglected? Did they die like this?

Stepping up to them, Khan took a knee and angled his faceplate to see through the visor. There wasn’t much left of the person inside. An airtight suit and moist environment? They were practically mummified. So, if their nadir hadn’t ended in vitrification like all the bodies topside, how did they die? He looked down and saw platin resting in one of their hands.

A cross, humble if not for the choice of material.

Other than that one personal effect, there was little more to suggest a numinous lifestyle. He didn’t know them. Never could, never would. Their eyes seemed fixed in place.

On the cross?

Did they just sit down and wait to die, their faith the last thing on their lips?

The labor drone stepped back, rose from his knee and pawed his mouth in absentminded thought. It was one thing to see your makers skeletonized in the streets. Glorified ice sculptors. It was another thing entirely to be confronted with this. He didn’t know what to make of it.

No time to be introspective.

He adjusted his mustache back into position and moved back to the task at hand, leaving the body where it lay. Best not to disturb the dead.

There was a single terminal for the heating network in this nidus station as well as a series of valves, gauges and interfaces. All of them connected to district heating. Question was, which one was connected to the stray industrial pipe? He dragged a chair up and then stood atop of it to see the terminal before jacking in. A cord drawn from a spot made flush with his temple.

“Ah, shoot,” he swore.

His processors were awash with the thousand-input queue of a surly warden none too happy with his effrontery. It did not care for his evinced clearance. Whatever. Subtlety was never his specialty, anyway.

Brute forcing through the station’s architecture was tedious more than it was difficult, constantly having to contend with the warden styming his efforts. But bullrush he did. It wasn’t much different from blasting open new mineral deposits. Just a lot more digital than analogue, which hopefully he was going to work his way out of soon.

After a solid minute of this footling back and forth, Khan finally managed to get a command through to the warden. Oh, so you think you're so much better than me because you have legs? It begrudgingly passed it up the way. No, please, allow me, don’t trouble yourself with this. Crank up the boiler and isolate branch lines for pipe three-thousand fifty-two dash B.

Why do I need to do this?

Shut up, just do it—stop asking questions!

God, Khan hated nidus wardens.

He decoupled himself from the terminal with a brief fit that reset his vocoder, shaking off the thousand instanced spam parting shot the warden gave before disconnecting. What a jerk. But he had bigger things to think about now. Setting the pipe to just beneath its maximum threshold was a good place to start.

If it was set high enough, then a rupture would be tantamount to setting off a grenade.

Maybe even more.

The simulation was still taking up runtime.

Among the valves present was one marked with yellow-red stripes along the circumference of the wheel, one encrusted with some of that fibrous mycelium flesh. Like errant muscle fibers or tendons. Why did this feel familiar? It didn’t matter. He took hold of the valve, flexed his arms and began pushing, watching the gauge tick up to levels JCJenson would have laid off an entire workforce for if they found out.

He added a few extra ticks for good measure.

Radiating throughout the room was a baritone hum bordering on a wheeze after being patted on the back a little too hard. It suffused the walls, crept through the floor. Khan decided this was a good sign and called it a day.

Setting the valve back in place, the worker drone stepped a pace back before nodding and hustling toward the exit. He felt a weight slow him. A brush of emotion-packets across his processors. Khan looked back at the maintenance worker's remains, and he just stared for a moment.

Astringent, acerbic venom flooded his thoughtlines.

Khan's motile plates, rigid and inflexible, pulled together until an upwelling of heated air bubbled up his throat. Dry, stale. Waste. Then exhaled it in a pantomime of a huff aimed at the corpse. It kept sitting there, staring at its hands.

Then he walked away, onward, already having forgotten that which he hadn't bothered to encode to memory.

Returning to the surface was easier than venturing underground, albeit more nerve-wracking. He had to measure every step. Gauge the weight of each sound. But in the end, his head was peeking over the manhole’s lip to survey the area. There was still no one around. Just a wheezing wind that whistled through shattered strut rib cages. But the dehiscent opening in the spire wall now seemed seasoned with xanthic acid.

Lanterns swaying in the dark, just out of frame, yet casting a shadow too long to hide from sight.

They were still distracted.

Shifting up onto the asphalt, Khan felt his side until the stout rigid handle of his pistol comforted him. His fingers wrapped about the rubber bound handle. Tested the solidity. It bit into where his hand articulated, pushed into the softer mesh. That discomfort was the anchor that grounded him. Centered him. Even if it was useless against a typhoon.

From the oversized holster was a cannon drawn, a hand sized approximation of a gun in terms of function if not aesthetic. It resembled a machine’s best attempt at conceptualizing a magnum revolver in the abstract.

It was a boxy thing that resembled a collapsed telescopic beat stick. That semblance broke down with its handle. Angular, dark vulcanized rubber. Sculpted to his hand. A machine's hand. That detail made the thing stick fast to his casing when in use, a good thing too since losing his grip with a gun over twice the size of his hand would be troublesome.

There was a large cylinder situated above the trigger that allowed three swollen shells, as long as your thumb and twice as thick, to be slotted into. A mechanical affectation in an otherwise electric coilgun.

From the body of the cylinder projected the barrel. Dark, obsidian black with gray-white helical ornamentation worked into the metal that brought to mind damascene steel. It terminated in a flat face like a hammer, his hammer.

The reason for its name, perhaps? Sledgehammer. For its singular purpose, for the only reason it exists.

A hammer to make problems go away.

Unlike the rest of the sidearm, though, with its mechanical simplicity were crude little doodles decorating the rubber of the handle. They were done in violet crayon. Stick figures, a child's rendition of whatever cartoon caught their interest. Most prominent of which were three figures holding hands. One had a mustache, one had what looked like a choker around its neck, and the smaller of the three was in the middle

Seeing them brought a smile to tired memory metal—Nori was going to blow a gasket when she found out.

A quick swipe of his thumb clicked the cylinder about, exposing one of the slots. It reminded him of a gaping hypogeum. Someone reaching into a pot of clay to scoop a handful out. Words jinked from his processors in an errant thoughtline, a quotidian bolt of lightning shot from a spitfire. Chewing him out. He felt a pang of regret, but nursed it with the reassurance he’d have more time to make up for the parting argument.

Hollow?

Maybe.

There was only one way to find out.

His thumb slipped up past the cylinder to rest against a dimple that broke the uniformity of the seamless material. It rested where the hammer would be. A smooth motion that left a thin skin of static discharge wreathing the body of the gun. He was awash with a sharp prickle from the exposure, electricity skittering across his fingers before vanishing into the exposed subcutaneous knuckles, a feeling that suffused the air a moment after the glorified revolver took a breath.

With gun drawn, cradled in hand, Khan braced himself against the ladder and reached for his zipper. He drew the railroad in miniature down. Peeled the halves open. Then pushed the flaps back to expose crisscrossed bandoliers loaded down with Sledgehammer's shells.

Suffice to say, he had not expected to be making a run into Death’s gathering hall today, so he only had conventional shells.

No.

The labor drone felt across the bandolier loops until he came upon one near the center of the cross, felt the ridges along the shell. There was miniscule detailing work on this one. A low thrum indicative of ensnared energy coiled about a material structure. He did bring a star shot today!

A smile jackknifed across his memory metal as he plucked the slug from its loop and slotted it into Sledgehammer.

Two more were plucked and slotted in, one fitted with an armor-piercing coating and packed tip while the one was a static shot. Something designed to pulse an ultra-high capacity, if short-lived, current through whatever it hits. It’d stop a human’s heart dead if it hit them. But for a machine, it was a glorified taser. Once each gap was slotted with a shell, he clicked the light shot into place and pulled himself up onto the asphalt.

Next was something simple but no less nerve-wracking.

He shook his hand and opened a chute to start spreading water out along the ground leading up to the spire, a gradual tip to heel gait with him waving his split palm over the black ground. Water billowed across the black vein. It clung to the goosebumps wrought upon the road by time. Frost sickened the gumusservi water until it became charred, cracked bone—enough to serve his ends without putting him in greater danger.

A good thing, he was running out of stored water.

From where he stood now, he could see the gaping wound of the spire in greater clarity. It was awful. Limbs woven together to hold it up. Poisoned by gold. Structural support wrought from bodies crunched, forced into shape. Black and crimson screens glaring down.

Begging.

He bit his lip to force the static out of his processors, wiped clean the queue to keep the memory of those twisted faces from etching themselves into his CPU. Focus on the task at hand.

The monsters were still inside, for some reason, and now he swore he could hear voices speaking. Had they captured more than just Makarov? No, that was stupid. Why would they be letting them talk if they had? JCJenson’s finest creations were too esurient for anything more than gorging themselves to lethargy.

No, stop!

Focus on what you came to do, put everything out of mind, he thought.

Khan’s hand tightened about the grip of Sledgehammer while energy surged through his limbs, coiling the subcutaneous mesh in his legs about his bone-struts until he was ready to spring out like a jack rabbit. Everything was set up. He had done his very best. All that was left now was trying to get it all to work.

With gun in hand, the labor drone’s first step forward was the echo of a hammer breaking glass.

Chapter Text

Labor drones were not built for bursts of speed, and their use of continuous movement to build momentum could only pick-up speed after protracted repetition. Testing that limitation was a good way to void your warranty. Or, worse, wear parts down to non-functionality. But now was the time to act, consequences be damned—and he was marching right into Hell.

A surge of thought ran to his motor cortices with the first step that propelled the next. Then another. He felt his bone-struts strain against his chassis, each joint-actuator wheeze-stuttering with metronome alacrity. Something was grinding inside. Multiaxial pelvic cradle working beyond its operational capacity. Warnings painted his screen. They were cast aside when the wind howled overhead, flecked with slivers of rimed sapphire, and prickled down his casing. But there was something else, too.

He thought it was dust, at first. Snowflakes duller than the ice-bright world drifting from on high. His screen adjusted. They reminded him of teardrops, fleeting and fragile. One collided with his emotile glass. It melted. He recognized it as the liquid solution used in a drone's optical suite. Deposition had made it unrecognizable.

Khan was showered in the weeping dead.

There wasn’t time to dwell on it, so he let the memory slip between his fingers.

Forget.

Discard.

Then his hand was snapping to attention, Sledgehammer primed with shot one.

Darkness enveloped, then cast aside by xanthic light and moonmist glare. The interior was starlight-speckled. Rust-washed by the flicker of sporadic emotive screens still choked with life. All of this illuminated his way. But Khan only saw a nightmare made manifest.

From the epicenter of a crater spidered fissures biting into the asphalt and cement of the thoroughfare that monsters had barreled through. They were ugly scars. Violent zigzagging crags splitting open the arterial road, now scabbed over with verglas. Overturned vehicles were scattered about the impromptu basin, the ground littered with trash stuck to patches of tamped ice. At the center of the web, buried in a stellate wound, was the virus capsule they arrived in—a glorified bullet with legs, pintle engines and maneuvering jets.

He remembered being there when they first landed, felt the impact of the orbital strike through the ground before the first scream met his aurals. It was a clear day for Copper-9, even before the collapse. That was because summer had finally settled in, and the sun had burned through most of the cloud layer during the day. He remembered the first time he watched a body become a fountain. Even still, above it all, he remembered the laughter.

But the worst of it was the trio of monsters he found standing afore their awful little dispenser.

There was the twitchy one, of course, but it was not alone.

Standing next to the twitchy typhoon was a storm wall of alloy and elastomer. It was massive, looming. A mirror of the twitchy one save for its legs and general shape. An accipitral tower of violent thew straining against the plated armor that was its skin. Vile gold bulbs. Mouth drawn between the jagged tips of a knife wound, rows of railroad spikes posed as fangs glittering from its wretched poison glow. Acid, lemons, sanguine gold. Hair wrought from the same dirty powder that was packed on the ground.

It was turning to look at the sound, gorillan arms unfolding from behind. A harlequin outfit stretched across its bulk.

The design reminded Khan of a peacoat with a collar you could pop up if so inclined, except half was white while the other was black. An aesthetic mirrored in the tie messily done about its neck. Its buttons were opposite the color of the half they buttoned into, JCJenson's logo emblazoned over where a breast pocket would be.

That was the big one.

Of course, they two were not alone.

Standing at the tip of an awful isosceles triangle was the worst one. Middle of the pack in build. Taller than twitchy but slighter than the big one.

The calm one.

If the big one was a storm wall rolling across a vast plain and the twitchy one a typhoon that defied meteorological reckoning, then the calm one was a cold snap. A blizzard wrapped up in curved edges similar to twitchy. It was the personification of a dead world. Too quiet. Too attentive. Too much a reminder of all the things that came before with its mirrored side tails and astringent demeanor.

Like the big one, the calm one was harlequin with its half-half aesthetic. Black-to-white, inverted. Clad in a two-button dress from which a wrap skirt stopped just shy of its knee joints. Slits running parallel to each other down either hip for ease of movement. JCJenson's wretched logo emblazoned across the breast. A tie secured about the throat. That element reminded Khan of executives with their ties’ prim, proper and ironed flat.

More important than how it looked, though, was the fact one of its conical forearms was producing the barrel of a gun.

Even more important—in its other hand was Makarov’s core.

He felt the cylinder slot the first shot in, his gambit locked with a wordless prayer that their first response would be defensive over aggressive. The twitchy one was turning, talons flexing, an ugly curl to its memory metal evincing rows of teeth. A railroad horror. While the big one was caught in the impression of confusion, that knife wound expression twisting.

It didn’t matter.

Two meters from the arch, Sledgehammer in hand, Khan squeezed the trigger.

When humans took to the stars, they discovered a great many things. The effects of protracted exposure to artificial gravity. How relativistic travel made timekeeping hellish. But chief among them was their dependence on sunlight.

It was known before then, or so he read. Overcast skies, the changing of seasons. They often brought on a change in the chemical balance in their heads. But the void brought those issues to the forefront. From the prolonged absence of sunlight in the void or on exoplanets came insomnia, depression, mood swings, a whole bevy of psychological issues. Few of which could be remedied by the artificial light they could produce.

Not until someone decided to do something about it, at least.

Thus arose the star globe, a device meant to produce up to 100,000 lumens and convey a genuine sunlight experience for those in situations where sunlight was not common. It provided all the benefits sunlight did in a tiny plush globe you could squish and set in place with its maglock technology. And if you overlooked the studies investigating the possibility of it causing melanoma, its ample warning labels, and a few civil cases regarding third degree burns, it was a perfect invention.

Regardless of all this, Khan found it perfect because he had an issue with nocturnal super predators stalking his city. So he’d ripped the core out of every star globe he could find and made the single most expensive shell he could devise.

He weaponized the star globe into a star shot—cosmic fury in a bullet.

A star was born upon the earth.

The first shot broke the air with Sledgehammer's shout and Khan smelt astringent nitroglycerin. It kicked his shoulder stiff. A corona of superheated gas haloed the body, limning the barrel with a vivid discharge that crepitated down the length. Finger-thick arcs skittered across exposed digits. His wire-veins popped from the currents that suffused his insulating polymer-fat.

A star shot across the distance; his visor darkened with a protective filter.

Khan aimed it for the worst one, the calm one, to bounce it off its chestplate and detonate the shell in the middle of the trio. It must have thought he was aiming to take it out.

The calm one’s tail lashed out and lassoed the big one’s shoulder, yanking it off balance and to the side so it fell in front to absorb the impact. A glorified body shield. Strange. It didn’t matter, but the callousness of the action couldn’t help but make the laborer laugh an unpleasant sound.

A star bounced off hardened plates, he lowered into a dash.

With the bounce, Khan watched the trio take a step back, the rictus grins blazing across their screens awash with artifacts as they recoiled from the light it produced. A small part of him noted how similar the ricochet sounded to the echo of a dodgeball striking off a person’s head. The twitchy one was making ready to take flight. Each of them took on an exterior of pitch, that oil spill sheen that coated their chassis solidifying in an instant.

A star detonated, whitewashing the world.

In an instant, the spire was drowned in a deluge of five megalumens that turned everything white in a blinding starburst. His systems shrieked with a sudden influx of UV-A rays. There was a stinging pain that shot through his head as the protective filter darkening his screen struggled to filter out the violent drone-made dawn. But the monsters’ reactions were worse still.

They shriek-howled in such sudden, shrill agony that his aural transducers popped!

His processors labored with the weight of fear, every single verminous prey instinct coded into his neural architecture flaring all at once in an overwhelming singular directive. Get out! Run away and find the deepest hole to crawl in.

Khan bit his cheek and choked it out.

The craven creatures couldn't endure the light suffusing their den. It carried the weight of a scythe sweeping soundless through a briar. But there was no heavy-handed harvestman to lash out at, nothing but the brilliant orb hovering listlessly. Listless, but not harmless.

Moonmist meat-metal bubbled in a scintillating paroxysm that left their annelidan skin scorched black. Their plated flesh popped up. Gouts of boiling air whistled from the fumarole striations hidden amid their subcutaneous mesh. But the worst of it were the noises. An awful medley of static that ranged on the extreme end of audibility, a shrill teeth-scratchy frequency that mirrored a rising Shepard tone. There was a wet, tinny quality to it like rolls of fat being shoved into the viscera of an engine block or fed through a grinder.

He watched the twitchy one claw at the band of sickly blisters studding its forehead before its wings flexed, crowding his vision with static, and it launched up toward the moribund walls of the spire. It started digging, clawing. Jamming itself into the corpses and detritus to escape the light.

Another yard, his fiber-muscle strained his bone-struts.

He watched the calm one lose its composure, pushing off the big one and clasping hands over its face to block out the light. Its tail lashed in violent arcs. A fever pitch creeping into its screaming. Then it twisted about and leapt up onto the capsule that delivered them to Copper-9, scrambling up the buckled slope until it could vanish into an aperture Khan could not see.

Another yard, the worst one had dropped Makarov’s core in its flight from the light.

He watched the large one hit the asphalt like a sack of bricks, cracking the verglas further darkening its surface. It writhed on the ground, a broken whirligig that thawed the ground. Limbs a tangle, grinding, a bramble of alloy and elastomer. For a moment, Khan thought it would start trying to dig into the earth itself to escape the pain. Instead, it thrashed about, tried piling snow that melted to slush then vapor over top itself, and made recovering the core a lethal prospect.

Another three yards, he skidded across a thing of ice.

He played a dangerous game of pinfinger with the monster, hopping out of the way whenever one of its oversized limbs threatened to crack into him. It was harder, still, when he saw the flicker of a tail. A blurred appendage. Something made more difficult to track with its acidic light drowned out by the star shot. But he swiped a hand in and found purchase on something solid, before then leaping back when a battering ram fist struck the ground he stood on.

His seismograph registered the quake it caused.

Then he turned and ran, tucking Makarov’s core under one arm while the shot continued to flare. It would fizzle out after another two minutes. He had to be far, far away by then. But something happened that he did not expect.

Something far too heavy moved far too fast and punched through the air, Khan heard the rasping gasp of air rushing to fill in negative space. It was an angry sound. Violent, full of hurt. His hollowed eyelights flickered to the margins of his screen and saw the creature, faceplate charred and twisted in agony, split with a snarl.

Another rasping gasp.

Khan couldn’t track the movement.

He was out the mouth of the spire when two hammer-hands thundered together with the shot between, monster bellowing a violent sound not unlike a mountain collapsing. It was infrasonic, the roar of earth.

The world was drenched in a pall of shadow made all the more impermeable with the kiss of sunlight made fleeting. It devoured him, strangled the world until the gloaming midnight was blacker than pitch. That ice-shock exposure of arctic waters after a too long stint in a sauna. Xanthic hate bled in, then, a jaundiced glow that bloomed from JCJenson’s most hateful machine with the rictus grin of Death burned into its screen.

A face he saw in his nightmares, a face seared into his runtimes.

The face that tore through an entire city block.

Khan felt his core seize, and he ran faster than he ever thought he could.

Scorched metal bled into Khan’s olfactory register when the snow-faint caress of a world beyond the spire faded in, one tainted by the astringent bitter notification of oil and rust playing across his sensors. A yard out from the ice slick. He heard asphalt crack behind him, the teeth-scratchy whir of a dental drill in his aurals.

He flicked the next shot into place—static shot.

Magnetism prickled across his processors in a fretful wave that left Khan awash with doe-terror. The labor drone choked back his fear. He skidded across the ground, leaned back then felt his soles give way to black ice. It took him to the ground, jetted him forward.

Immense, heavy, the weight of slaughter careened over him in a shriek of air.

The monster missed him by a hair, having not expected the sudden transition to a slide, spearing past and crashing several yards off center ahead of the open manhole.

Venom-acid lit up its body in a flicking, violent waver of light that brought attention to its sorry state.

It was worse injured than it was healthy.

Ribbons of molten oil-sheen were sloughing off its macropterous chassis after exposure to hated sunlight. It hadn’t recovered fully yet. A violent snarl carved its memory metal. That wouldn’t last long. Murder burbled up its throat with a hyena’s sense of humor. It wouldn’t miss a second time.

He thought of mauve and found courage.

Once more, his hand snapped up while the manhole approached quick. It was already shaking the impact off, wings snapping to ready state, while charred metal became moonlight anew. Readying for a killing lunge.

Khan shot for where he expected it to be rather than where it was, leading the shell in the same instant it launched toward him. Superheated gas became a halo while the recoil jammed his shoulder into the ice, spinning him like a starfish.

A bolt of jagged energy leapt from the barrel with a shout that preceded the monster’s own overwrought voice, hitting with a pulsed impact that lanced arcs of electricity across its chestplate the moment it made contact.

The effect was immediate.

Energy pulsed through its body, sparks showering from where wires overloaded and popped through the subcutaneous mesh. It expanded in size. Every plate flaring up, puffing out. Fiber-muscle flexing, tensing, pulling and extending until it lost control and fell to the ground. Spasming. Writhing. A fish told to walk a mile in someone’s shoes.

Incapacitated.

Screaming, trying to fight its own thew to get a hand on what now was overwhelming it.

Khan watched it reach up and smash the shot stuck to its chestplate—a solid ten seconds of incapacitation.

Long enough.

The ground gave out from under Khan when he saw the thing look up, able at last to control its own body, and fell away to the warmer, danker air of the underground. He felt a ladder rung clip him on the way down. Then he had a sudden stop, rolled forward and tumbled flat.

“Ow,” he intoned.

No time, focus!

Already he heard the heavy weight of the monster above, only now something else was joining him. It had a lilting laugh like the whir of food processor blades choking on coffee grounds.

Twitchy.

The big one was too fat to fit down the manhole, so they were sending the twitchy one after him? A smirk crept up his memory metal. Simulated adrenaline was one hell of a high. Maybe Nori had a point, maybe he was doing all this for sick thrills now?

No time, focus!

Khan scrambled onto his feet and started running again, little tabs opening up and crowding the margins of his vision while he fumbled with his zipper. Something laughed from above. He heard the splash of water behind him. It wanted him to know it was down here, with him, hunting him.

Let it run him down.

Water management, heating, the electrical grid, they were all pulled up again.

He shoved Makarov’s core into his coat, found a large enough pocket and slammed him into it. Zipped himself up. Then kept full tilt forward, ignoring the warnings notifying him of the integrity of his pelvic cradle and of micro-fissures in his fiber-muscles. There was still a tenth of a mile to go.

The echo of water breaking and the clomp of boots with a lilting, toothy laugh nipping at his heels. Sharpened pegs stabbing into concrete. Clacking against pipes. It was on his tail.

Savoring the taste.

Each one was cruelty incarnate, an overactive predator that only found enrichment in the suffering of others. When they weren’t caught in the throes of their fury. He watched it happen. Heard stories. But Makarov’s reconnaissance had confirmed thus: the twitchy one found the most joy in toying with prey.

So he fumbled, he stumbled, he kept pushing forward through the water until he could clamber back up onto a walkable path of concrete that ran parallel with the corridor. Noise slipped from his vocoder, all anxiety and terror. He leaned into it. Let out every chittering creak of a throat no machine was meant to have. It was made easier by the very real fact that he was one swipe away from bricking himself with fear.

Focus!

He flicked the next shot into place, made ready for his gamble, when he saw the start of an incline. Glimpses of acid scattered off the water. Caught his attention. It was getting closer.

Laughter, laughter, laugh—it stopped.

When the laughter stopped and the scrap of talons against rock picked up, that’s when bodies hit the floor. The chase was getting dull. So how to spice it up? He flicked his wrist again, cycled to an empty barrel and threw his arm back to aim in the direction of a ceiling or wall. Wherever it was.

Then he squeezed the trigger once, twice.

Even if it didn’t have the same effect as a loaded shell, it did produce a small light show. One that begot the hiss of an overworked hydraulic press to push in from behind. A shift of weight. Something hitting rock, only to scramble and work to make up for lost ground.

He came to the incline and jumped, slamming back onto where the incline became a channel and let himself be carried down faster than he could run.

The monster didn’t appreciate this turn of events, evident in how it shriek-guffawed.

Lukewarm water surged all around him, flushed through his articulated points with the promise of rime to come. That was a future him problem.

Crags hidden along the channel clipped him as he slid down, slowing him down. He had to shift his weight. Roll around. Screen losing its tint and brightening with a soft white glow, the sight he was given to navigate lightless caverns. It let him see through the murkier water, more than the typical spectra of visible light did.

In so many words, this was a poor idea.

Glances stolen over his shoulder now gave him the sight of a monster skittering after him.

It was a spider ripped straight from every nightmare ever conceived by an arachnophobe. Cleaver knives, spiked feet, a jittery jinking gait that outpaced the very unpleasant cackle of its laugh while spiraling about the incline. A wall crawling hyena? Slithering over pipe and utility lines like a liquid, a shadow. A moonmist scar that moved across the chapped skin of the undercity tunnels.

It was getting close again, too close.

Impatience.

That's what he remembered most from the reports and from how he watched it treat Makarov when he was injured.

It was impatient, eager to murder.

Driven by manic pixie animus.

Rather than test his luck further, Khan opted for a more hands-on approach to prolonging his life.

He plucked a spent casing from the cylinder and flicked one off to the side before brightening his eyelights. High beams. In-built flashlights. They glinted off the casing, and he heard the laughter became the hellish child of a chime and a grinder pushing into metal. Then he saw a blur dart toward where the shell landed.

That awful, hyperactive monster seemed to catch on quicker than he hoped, though. It was shrieking again all too quick.

It gave him breathing room, though, which was all he needed.

The end of the impromptu water slide ended in the sluice gate, something he left open part way when he made his way back to the manhole. His smirk returned.

Carrying his momentum forward, he pushed up off the incline and balanced during the last stretch of slide before shooting a hand up. He caught the lip of the gate. His hand became a hinge to pivot up into a swing that slammed him into the bars of the sluice. There, he hooked his feet onto a crossbar.

Gravity took care of the rest.

It shook a moment before crashing down, dislodging him like a ragdoll with the clamor-reverb of metal before settling into a closed position.

The way was barred—that fact infuriated the monster.

He was up and scrambling back in an instant, distancing himself from the gate that hacked in protest against the sudden impact of a too large, too heavy weight. An animated buzzsaw. Knives and spears bundled together. Bars punched in. Spittle frothing, bellowing and shrieking while its talons reached for him. Its arms were too short, even with the oversized cleavers that passed for its fingers.

A typhoon was not to be denied.

Khan took to flight before his core could catch up with his processors mulling over the image of motile plates split and stretched across a canvas-faceplate seared into his optical transducers. He was moving without thinking. Mechanical motion. Tracing over the path he etched into his motor cortex.

Find the maintenance hatch, through the crawl space.

Where was the hatch?

Past the sluice gate was a labyrinth in miniature, a twisting nidus of corridors conjoined with the water network. It was meant to save money by weaving the space for utilities together. But it just made navigation without a user-friendly map hellish. He only had rough diagrams and schematics and no time to spend on mapping everything out the long way.

This was very bad.

His pelvic cradle whined from the exertion of movement, his systems begging for rest. Rest meant death. From the many corridors he was now lost in, a low drawn-out whine that turned ice-sharp before giving out with a tinny shriek echoed.

A predator prowled.

The worker drone relented at last, allowing himself to vent accumulated waste heat and easing the tension threatening to bow the struts of his pelvic cradle. His core was caught in an arrhythmic cycle. Skipping. He wasn’t thinking, just acting, running. From headlight paralysis to leporine panic. Both the death of rational thought, and rational thought was the only thing that got him to here, regardless of what his imagined apparition of Braxton might say to the contrary.

He had to still the static clouding his processors, flush out the fear. Anything less would be his death. Khan thought of mauve, of violet. Processes ended. Clutter was cleared. Thought returned amid the deluge of emotion-packets. Then he listened.

Noise echoed with clarion clarity, bouncing off the many cracked walls of the mangled maze. Tittered laughter, soft tapping, something sharp punching through concrete, little odds and ends.

Was it toying with him?

No, if it was toying, then it’d want to savor the sight of his fear and that wasn’t possible with concrete between them. Was it searching for him, then? It was not outlandish to assume one could lose track of things. Humans couldn’t build perfection. But if breaking line of sight was all it took, how could they so often run a drone down in this urban jungle?

Khan placed a hand against a section of pipe to find his second wind, only to draw it back when haptic feedback shouted about heat in his CPU.

He turned to the somatic data percolating through his processors and noted that his internal temperature gauge had started ticking up the moment he ventured back into this maze of concrete and fetid sewage. The maze was a convoluted cavity for the district heating pipes that ran throughout the commercial district above. Explains why that one toppled scrapper had a heated compartment. But if the whole maze was in a similar state, then maybe the rumor Makarov went on about could work in his favor?

If it couldn’t track him by heat or smell, provided the rumor was true, then it was relying on sound. Thus, the reason for all the racket? Trying to make him slip up. Fumble. Panic and create needless noise? He took a step forward and leaned out, saw no lemon acid glow.

Maybe there was a chance to get out of this without having to weaponize steam.

Shifting his hold to grip the body of Sledgehammer, the worker drone did a once over of his surroundings until he found a section of concrete with a label stenciled onto it. Section d54-F. He queried his operational memory with the tabs kept on hand, skimmed through the diagrams, and about near volted himself with JCJenson’s profanity filter.

In his panic, Khan had run parallel to where the hatch was until he was a little under a thousand feet from it. Not too great a distance in any other circumstance.

An errant thoughtline worked its way into his queue: humans had a way of moving without sound.

Cycling his consciousness, he pulled from indexed memory a series of snippets he had stored of human coworkers sneaking up on each other. They had an oft funny reaction to being startled. Some were bad at it. Most were bad at it. But some had this odd manner of moving that started in their feet. A few opted for this almost comical exaggeration of walking on the tips of their feet, a high-knee stepping gait. Stupid. Impossible, too, for how a drone’s foot was designed. Others seemed more sensible, striding forward and rolling their foot from heel to toe. Slow.

However, it was not impossible.

The worker tested the articulation along the axis of his heel, feeling how his boot informed the range of his motion beyond what the synovial hinge provided. Steel-toed. Hard soled. It was not suited for soft stepping. Labor drones weren’t either, but mining drones also were not meant to be engineers, yet here he was. So, he started moving, each step rolled from heel to toe—a skilled pantomime.

It was not quick.

He worried it was neither quiet enough.

Every step creaked with the whine of rubber conforming to the kiss of concrete. Actuators straining under cautious weight. Thoughtlines sprang from the act. Remembrance. Stored memories with associative tags to the current scenario.

A human?

Brittle shale rock.

All save one making it out.

There was no time to reminisce.

Khan made it down the first stretch of maze when the rasping titter rooted him in place. His servos threatened to calcify. Stick and freeze. It skittered up from the passage behind, seeping into the riven concrete before settling into Khan's core with a specter's malevolence. But he couldn’t tell if it was closer or farther away. That reverberating quality made it almost universal when it reached him. Looking about, the T-intersection he found himself at diverged into opposite directions. The left took you deeper into the sanitary system proper. Water raced toward treatment facilities. Defunct. But the right took you toward the border between commercial and industrial, where the heat became barometric-heavy and active cooling resulted in temperature spikes. 

More laughter, it stripped him of indecision like paint remover.

He flicked his wrist and pulled from the cylinder the final spent casing, transitioning the revolver to one hand while pinching the shell between the other’s thumb and index. Eyelights looked up the right. There was an alcove made by pipes running over a recess in the concrete.

A hiding hole.

Quick gesture, hand shoots out and digits flick the shell down the left with the hush-crack of a coin flip. He is moving the moment after. Clambering through the pipes into the alcove. The casing hit concrete with a bell-clap.

Liturgical knell.

Silence reigned in the aftermath of the sound—until it broke.

Laughter became a manic carpet of bugs that blanketed Khan in ice-bright fear. Chittering, crawling. He stamped out his vocoder and tucked either hand under his chin to hide the light, screen dimming. The cough of concrete being punctured, knives scrapping the nerve from his spinal-strut. A tremor crept into his substructure, one he tensed his whole body to quiet.

Back to fretfully hoping not to catch Death’s attention in a cramped hole underground.

His vents came in rattles.

Acid stained the margins, first, before eating away at the dull blue of the guide lights. It leeched the concrete until gray gave way. Parasitism. Xanthic murder scouring the world of color until everything was gilded gold.

Then close to half a ton of weight slammed against stone.

He felt the impact in his teeth, bundled tighter, and hid his faceplate against his knees. Scrapping blades jinked through the space. Their molecular edge left a sharp chill cutting through his processors, there wasn’t laughter anymore. Just the scrapping. Everything else had gone dead quiet; the labor drone could hear his core cycling arrhythmically.

It was looking for the source?

This was a gamble, a hope to direct the monster and then know where it was in relation to him.

Could it hear his core?

His venting?

Focus!

There wasn’t any room for error here, for weakness in the eye of a hurricane. He inhaled and sealed shut his memory metal. Eyelights waning. Emotion-packets gave way to queried thoughtlines that fished from his primary drives. Mauve, violet. Guiding lights amid the dark night.

Khan remembered Uzi’s fourth online day, and smiled.

It had been a very trying day of work at the time, the kind where you have to do the same task three separate times because the last time actually broke something unrelated to the first issue. The kind of day where people decide they know more than you do about your job. He remembered laboring to find reasons why he shouldn’t put his boot through screens. And the reason he found was that he had to get home on time for his daughter’s online day party.

This only made him angrier because, as it turns out, he was the only competent person in the city.

It was a close thing, but being an important figure in an emergent society had many perks. One was getting to tell people to weld it and clock out. So he managed to stumble into the party just a few minutes after it started. That got him a brief finger wag from Nori, light of his life. Then a little hellion with purple paper crown jostling about on a wild tostle of blonde hair came peeling around a corner. They hadn’t found another purple wig yet. He remembered catching her when she launched herself at him, fully intending to bowl him over.

She told him he was late, he apologized, then Nori told him she’d already bitten Makarov and Alexei twice. Each. That got her to cackle in his arms, legs kicking.

There was laughter, uproarious, and play. Uzi’s friends had come: Sam, Emily, and Doll. Everyone else was a family friend. Despite that, his little terror was ecstatic. More than eager to make literal her authority as the online day queen. It was amusing to watch her try bossing others around, even more so when Doll refused to and got Uzi to start stamping her foot.

Khan’s eyelights blinked back to animate intensity with the beaming visage of mauve and violet burned into his optical suite. Then he heard the skitter of a typhoon thunder down the left straight away.

It worked.

Rather than question how, the labor drone hauled himself up and out of the alcove that sheltered and continued his trek back to the hatch. The ladder. He found both and discovered a new issue.

He was going to have to crank the hatch open.

The final stretch, at least, because he did not need to return to the ladder that brought him to the nidus station. Past the crawl space was where the industrial pipes were. If the heat there wouldn’t dissuade the thing that would no doubt chase him down after the hatch’s siren song, then his ultimatum would.

…hopefully.

Would he survive that?

Mauve and violet.

He still hadn’t thought of an online day gift yet.

It was not a question of would—Khan Doorman will not die down here.

His faceplate hardened into cast iron, eyelights swimming amid the artifacts brought on through sudden anger. He shoved the gun into his mouth and stepped toward the ladder. There was no way to be quiet about this, so he opted to be fast.

Electricity flooded his actuators, priming his servos, until it found an outlet in a sudden burst of movement. He was leaping, propelling himself up. A spring divested of all its potential in a single moment. Up a step. Several rungs above. The labor drone collided with the ladder and held on tight, two feet off the ground and continuing his ascent.

Dinner bell rung, clapper crying.

Laughter.

Before the ring of metal on metal could wan, the guffaw of a typhoon ricocheted off the walls. It drowned the straight away. Choked out all thoughtlines save the one screaming run! He could hear the clamor of it racing across concrete. The monster wasn’t even trying to mask its noise now.

Soups on.

He was up to the hatch in the span between vents, splaying his hand out on several key points of the hatch. Divots to slot his fingertips into, pushing them in and rotating a segment that depressed inward ninety degrees clockwise until something clicked. Light then filled the glass-covered channels, slow, pulsing with teal.

Closer, its cackling headwind was catching in the crags of his jacket. Simulated adrenaline pooled in his limbs. He pushed up on the hatch with arm and shoulder, heaved with ever strand of fiber-muscle in his frame.

For a moment, the world was all laughter and the hydraulic-scream of a hatch in dire need of a tender hand.

A crack large enough for Khan opened.

He squeezed through, scrambling up like a mouse scampering back into its hole. Fretful of bounding felines. Khan was quick to turn and slam his weight back down on the hatch. It closed with a guttural gasp. Xanthic poison having just crept into frame before the seam became flush with the floor. Then it locked itself.

That wouldn’t hold it for long.

Snapping around, the worker drone was awash with overwrought thoughtlines and emotion-packets. All vying for primacy. Besetting him with anxious jectigation. But he only listened to one when he, at last, spotted the crawl space. He ran to it while hopping, untying his laces and loosening the boots until they could hang off his feet.

When he was on his abdomen and pull-crawling through the viscera of the compartment, he heard the abrupt yelp of the hatch. Tooth-rattling impact. It wouldn’t survive a second. Then molecular blades made their outcry known, slipping through metal and screeching.

Forward!

The tremor in his superstructure had not waned but he continued to tense his limbs. Each reach. Every pull. Quicker, grasping. He took hold of thick cables and dug his digits into where piping was connected together. Of those, he punched at the rattling lengths of metal that registered on his temperature gauge. They were already loosened from the collapse thirteen years ago. A strong punch or solid kick was all it took for them to vomit superheated air into the cramped interior.

A concealing screen, a curtain of eventual circuitry death.

—:: Warning, High Temp.

Behind was the final keening wail of the hatch. Another victim. Lemon acid diffused across the steam enveloping him, further obscuring his vision. High beams in soupy fog. There was a razor-smooth click hiss that was both throaty and clippy, followed then by the staccato-stamp of a pegged foot similar to how his daughter did when she wasn’t getting her way.

He strangled that thoughtline in the crib.

This space was cramped even for a labor drone of his stature, choked as it was with utilities. But a hulking monster like a murder drone would find it near impossible to squeeze through. They had a habit of surprising him, though. So Khan could not say he was really surprised when he saw gold poison start to envelope him.

It was in the crawl space with him.

Allowing the emotion-packets appended to the thoughtlines this development brought with was something he couldn’t afford. He aborted the process. Focused on the mechanical motion.

Noise, awful and processor clogging, was all around him.

Amplified by the confines?

Heightened by the thick velvet of steam swallowing everything in white?

It was ripping things out and pushing through what it couldn’t maneuver around as much as he was intentionally causing damage. They hated the heat. Either he was going to get unlucky or it was going to boil itself alive.

Even Khan was not so optimistic as to believe the latter possible.

He yanked himself up, found purchase on pipe and where metal jutted out to cover a breaker box. Kicking. Ripping himself up the pinched arterial maintenance way. Using the atherosclerosis of the vessel to his advantage. But all it amounted to was the creature clicking, hissing, making a throaty warble that fed into a gravel-laden shriek.

Something grabbed him.

Pain shot through his ankle with the numb-clarity of shock. Inflamed veins of warning in his CPU, haptic static burning up through his mesh’s somatic filaments. Alarm. Panic clawing at his throat. If his laryngeal vocoder had not been cut then he would scream. Feed the monster its fear, his spiced anguish. All he gave it was a brief struggle that left it with an oil tattered boot left loose on its prize kicked toward it.

There was the rip-grind of a chainsaw pushed into blubber, then a hollering shout.

It did not seem to like the fact it came away with an old boot for its troubles.

Khan laughed a dead noise at it.

—:: Warning, locomotive smtc.flmnt{- Left.Foot -}: Error: Possible Damage.

He was bleeding and that would only taunt it further.

So he kept crawling, kept ripping things out and tossing them back, yanking and pulling. His head crested the superheated cloud. Howling, screaming, he could feel the monster clawing after him. Breaking. Pushing. Grabbing with too long limbs and coming away with shredded wires, box covers and piping. Optical suite found more than murk.

The opening was near!

Either hand shot out, he took the lip of the crawl space in hand and hauled himself from its sweltering interior. Only— pain! 

His left foot was the first to move toward the opening, that left his right closest to where the monster he felt more than saw was moving toward. It grabbed him. Splitting, burning, throbbing. Pain struck him with the hammer-softness again.

A rough jerk.

Brief struggle.

Once more, the monster came away with a soiled boot for its troubles, and Khan near threw himself out of the crawl space.

—:: Warning, locomotive smtc.flmnt{- Right.Foot -}: Error: Possible Damage.

I know! he shouted with absent voice.

A violent scream that reached a truculent crescendo met him in kind, followed not far behind a boot thundering against the wall it was spiked again. Energy prickled across his casing. Khan leapt to the side. And from the crawl space, Death vomited liquid hate with a whistle-shriek.

Brilliant, blinding light.

Nova-heat that flash evaporated the water-heavy air.

Orange-yellow energy capable of cutting through brick-thick steel swept in an uneven arc.

Several smaller pipes were hewed open and spilled their contents into the straightaway.

Run!

Khan peeled himself up off the ground and spat his gun into a hand, inclining forward and pushing his pelvic cradle to its operational limit to overcome the numb-weakness of his injured feet. Trying not to slip on the oil-ichor weeping from gashes he dared not look at.

Metal cried for the hand that shaped it, mother dearest, where butcher knives tore into it for purchase.

All those horrendous, awful noises he kept shoving out were finding his aurals now.

Seizing!

Eyelights, marred by artifacts, scanned in frantic panic for what he was looking for. Where was it? There was a large industrial artery running parallel on the wall. It creaked with the pressure rushing through it. Where was it! There was inevitably going to be a place where human error had left the piping weak.

Where—

There!

A place where two sections of pipe were riveted together, evident weld seams from a hasty patch job that never got the chance for proper treatment. There were already heat distortions where time and continued use wore away at it. Vulnerable. Thinned out.

His hand tightened on Sledgehammer, cylinder locking final shell in place.

Eager to put a hole through his problem.

The labor drone skidded across the concrete, trailing oil-ichor behind him, and brought the hand cannon to bear. Electricity surged. His finger tensed. One eyelight scrolling to the margins of his screen.

From the superheated miasma toward the end of the hall came a darting blur, all moonmist skin popped up and subcutaneous mesh bulging with each exerted movement. Kettle-whistle steam billowing behind it. Face contorted in rage and hate and hungry violence. Rows of selachimorphine fangs exposed. Bellowing chittering screaming yelling noise echoing while a four-legged gait propels it toward him.

A monster of talons and ferity and malevolent appetite.

It moved with the intent of a bullet train, tearing up the ground and leaving pockmarks in the concrete from where its legs pushed forward. Thought-quick. All thew and power. On a straightaway, there was no outrunning it.

Calm washed over him then, an emotion in conflict with the circumstance.

He thought of violet and mauve.

See you on the other side, girls.

He smiled.

Sledgehammer shouted and the final bullet flew true just as the typhoon was upon him—it punched through the weld and set off a hand grenade.

Khan did not have the words to describe the forces that washed over him and the vile thing that was descending on him. A thousand hammers were a poor metaphor. Something more practical might serve better: it was like a ten-ton rock burst. His aurals strained under the weight of noise until they cut out entirely, a protective failsafe. Warnings etched into his screen until he could not see. All the articulation in his chassis pulling tight until the alloyed metal covered it. Denting, heating. But he saw how much worse the monster had it before the blast, rupturing up and down the line, tossed him aside and knocked him unconscious with cracked emotive glass.

Pressure and heat made the steam into a blade that scythed through the exposed mesh. He saw it puncture. Rupture. Holes bored into the softer material until it stretched and tore. Molten magmatic intravenous injections.

The monster’s screech was the last thing he heard before everything went dark.

Chapter Text

—:: Warning, strctl.intgrty = Compromised
            {- You Almost Died -}: Idiot.

Color flooded back into the labor drone's optical transducers in an ivory deluge that was indicative of a malfunctioning chromatic sensorium. Or a broken one. His vision was a fractal of ocular distortion, black creeping in from the veins of damage that spidered across his screen. There was a grainy dimness swirling all around. Steam? It was a thick soup, something he was drowning in with every vent. Then his somatic filaments kicked his chestplate out through his back.

An extensive report wheeled through his processors until the static fugue of excessive heat was crowded out. Head fit to burst. Overripe, a watermelon slotted into a hydraulic press. It prattled on about damage sustained that ran a mile long.

He couldn’t divert any processing power to paying it any mind.

So, he focused on his body.

Grinding servos sputtered with the exertion of trying to work his limbs up under his body, trying to find the strength to stand. His actuators felt numb-unresponsive. A tingle that formicated over his whole frame. That numbness dulled the worst of the pain wracking his chassis. So much that he was certain the arthritic sore-ache would be debilitating like mind fire if his subcutaneous mesh had not been damaged in the explosion. But he focused on the fact he could still move, could still feel, and clambered up onto his feet.

The labor drone wondered, ruefully, if Excavator-class products’ boast to withstand cave-ins for up to forty-eight hours should be updated to include surviving a catastrophic pipe rupture.

Once on his feet, he looked around and saw only an eddy of steam with barometric heaviness. Even with aurals cracked and made sensitive, there was only the low kettle-hiss of pressure petering out. He could not hear the monster. Could not see any sign of it. But he did know, from his internal chronometer, he had been unconscious for half an hour.

No time to be uncertain—he had to get back to the bunker.

The machine forced his body forward and winced at how his pelvic cradle shifted in a disjointed fashion. Servos and actuators held together by mere grit. It left him with a lopping, limping gait that favored one side.

He was reminded of the broken-down domestics caught in an eternal service loop following core collapse.

Every step felt harder than it should, echoing in one aural while being muffled in the other. He could feel the damage weighing on him. Spread across his mesh. But it meant he was alive. His gambit successful. It also meant he was going to catch five tons of hell from someone when he got back. However, it would be worth it. A hand slipped under what remained of his jacket until he found the pocket that bulged with precious cargo. There, his fingers grazed across the spherical, angled casing of someone's still-warm core.

Splotches of malformed material marred it, a similar occurrence across the rest of his body. His jacket had not survived the ultimatum. It left him feeling compact. Haptic transducers registering a constant pressure. Now he was going to have to spend time stripping the synthetic fibers from his chassis and someone's core.

But it was all intact, which meant they would have a chance to do so.

Lopping along, the labor drone felt his way through the hall with a hand trailing the wall, world subsumed in white. He had a vague notion of a destination in CPU. Out, up. More directional than anything else. Wherever the cold was and the heat was not. Direction guided by a desire, borderline instinctual, to escape the sweltering hand of a sauna. It was hard to think about anything else. 

Worker drones were steel work horses in the grand scheme of things. Products of the final frontier’s promises. Once of exorbitant cost. Now cheapened by interstellar plenty. So, the method of their design was paramount.

They were designed, at first, to aid humans in hazardous environments or, in the worst-case scenario, phase human workers out entirely. Chemical manufacturing, nuclear maintenance, quarrying, they were all made safer for their inclusion. Even if the human element could never be wholly phased out. Thus, the ability to operate within either end of extreme temperatures was critical. But with the abundance of empire, it became possible to specialize. Thus did domestic and specialists come about, each with their own tolerance for heat and cold. But all shared the same borderline impulse to prioritize escaping a place of extreme temperature before lingering became lethal.

Edge-tattered warnings informed the labor drone he had two hours left before overheating.

What was he thinking about?

Static haze hung heavy in his processors, clinging, weighing, making dull the persistent sawing of bone-strut against bone-strut with every articulation of his pelvic cradle. Cartilage-padding worn away. It was the stutter step of a calf with an offset leg.

A bag of rocks, clacking, scrapping.

His hand trailed over the guiding cable harness, felt the way each pulsed with lightning-life and kept padding along. Limping. He fought against the fugue clouding his CPU.

What was he thinking about?

Domestic and specialists came after labor and industrials, but all bore the same colloquial name of worker drone. The colloquial term for labor drone. Humans interacted with labor drones so often during early colonization efforts that it came to refer to all autonomous machines that employed a neural core. Possessed of a neural network. Something capable of feeling, thinking, and seeing the world through a conscious subjectivity.

Industrial drones were for the most dangerous environments, places like star forges and chemical plants. They were robust, simple machines. Restricted in vocabulary. Possessed of three oversized fingers and a heavy alloy frame that could survive multiple tons of pressure before cracking. Domestics were the opposite. Eloquent, fragile machines designed to coexist with humans in a multitude of roles within domestic settings. Capable of dexterity and expression no other product line could achieve. Possessed of five fingers and plastic-elastomer construction you could shatter with a strong kick. And then there were specialists; if you gathered up every specialist category drone in one place and compared them, you would find the sole commonality between all of them is that they sometimes shared a chassis with one of the other product lines.

What was he thinking—

The machine's hand hit the blistering metal of a ladder rung.

His eyelights hollowed and attention snapped to, the fugue thinning with the sudden clarity of aimless direction coming into sharp focus. Either hand flew out and took a rung. He was hauling himself up. Fighting against the grind of his pelvic cradle. 

Ascending, rising from the steam and into the frozen night.

The first brumal kiss against his chassis was a shot of high grade, addictive in how it burned on the way down. He wanted the next. Stumbled forward, fell. Caught himself on his hands and let the cold in. Deep, ragged vents trying to pull air in faster than he could expel the superheated waste.

Static fog diffused in the arctic air, and Khan felt himself reassert itself. Nori, Makarov, Uzi, the bunker, he remembered himself.

Vent, in and out.

Liquidated warnings fade into the background of his processes. Each inhale, exhale, brought focus.

He reached a hand up to wipe his screen of sweat, only to thunk! himself in the head with Sledgehammer. Khan looked at it, drawn back and now nursing the dent in his forehead.

His digits were locked in a death grip. Stuck? He could not unlock them.

Well, a good thing he didn't leave it behind at least.

After working at his hand, he shoved the revolver back into its holster before rolling into his back and letting the snow bleed the heat from his chassis. Processors idling. Lightning-life spooling back into his vocoder so it could reset with a long draw of white noise. Then he felt still warm water lap at his extremities.

He was up in a flash, wincing from how his articulation creaked from the momentum. Twisted, bent. Grinding together to facilitate the movement. Already regretting his choice to holster the pistol.

Encircling him was an impromptu basin wrought from the snow and particulate surrounding the manhole that belched steam in an endless column trailing into the sky. Snowmelt and slush with crystals of frost bobbing amid the disturbed water filled the basin. Both solidifying, freezing anew. And underneath the melt was spidering fractures in the permafrost.

Stamps, puncture wounds in the asphalt—the glorified footprints of a monster.

Khan whipped around as much as his injuries allowed him, fumbling with the grip of Sledgehammer while hollowed eyelights scanned the environment. But there was nothing. No one. Only the lonely wail of a city wheezing through shattered windows.

Memory playback, he recalled data logged into his sensorium while unconscious. There had been a lot of disconcerting registered information that came and went after the eruption.

Signs of its flight from the steam?

He shook his head to free up his buffer, allowing the revolver to rest still while he painfully got back up to his feet. There would be time enough to rest when he was home. When Makarov was in a power unit. When he had Nori’s body slotted against his and a little terror finding excuses to bite him. That’s when he could take a moment to consider everything, wonder at his luck, and be chewed out about his decisions this night.

The labor drone limped along, a lopping run, focusing wholly upon the flight home.

It was the quiet of the return that got to him after a while.

There was only the wind and the groan of a city left to decay on any good scavenging run, so the sudden rush of noise was what you had to fear. Sound brought Death. Either at the bladed edge of sky demons or from the vermin still scurrying about the city’s corpse. Often the latter bringing the former to bear regardless. Yet the quiet after so much discord and simulated adrenaline was like a bucket of ice water after stepping out of a sauna.

Khan was too aware, and everything was far too quiet. Why had the typhoon given up the chase? Where was the big one, always festooned with dogged determination to run people down? Even if it had been bathed in sunlight, the fact he had not seen the calm one during the chase left him on pins and needles.

Had he really gotten away so easily?

Considering the affair that left him bare-foot and bleeding easy felt ridiculous, yet it was a notion he could not shake. Even when the disorientation of unfamiliarity washed out of the environs. When he could identify the street notation and landmarks, signs all leading him by the hand toward home. How many had died to them just when they felt safe? How many had been let go just to bring them back to their hiding place?

What if they were stalking him, following him, waiting until he was opening the outer door before pouncing? Then he turned a corner and felt pain sting his optical transducers.

Raising a hand up, he shielded his screen from the glare of first light until his suite adjusted. He remembered seeing dawn’s rose-tipped fingers spilling into the sky. Sherbert-mauve pooling across the cloud-laden firmament until it was a diurnal patina, like saliva colored by one too many hard candies. There were strange shimmer-distortions where the Copper system’s star cupped Copper-9 and splayed its digits across an uneven face. Heavy metals and fine particulate left from the collapse interacting in strange kaleidoscopic ways that made rainbow starbursts crepitate across the horizon.

Daytime was here, and with it came the first breath of warming air and a bundle of hopeful kindling. How long had it been? How much time did he have left? That kindling caught fire when he saw the large, sore-like ulcer of a building positioned up against a series of towering skyscrapers.

Boxed in.

Almost reminiscent of the massive chelonian creatures that once dwelled in the southern continent’s marshes. For a moment, Khan smiled.

He was running, then, toward the large bulkhead that kept out the angels cast from heaven to shatter the paradise left for metal to tend. Its hazard stripes a torch held high. Flood lights welcoming in the weary, poor and downtrodden.

For a moment, he thought of mauve and violet—he forgot all the pain in his body, then.

Khan ran out into the light and let it wash over him, seep into the warped metal and creep into his wounds, and enjoyed the way his systems ran hotter. Warnings popped up. He dismissed them. Ignored how his servos grinded, his actuators burned.

Everything was irrelevant now.

Even the worry he felt, the doubts he had.

Morning had come, salvation riding in with it.

He took in a breath, let it vent, squeezed his eyelights shut and imagined what a soft bed would feel like. Then ran face first into the door.

There was a hollow, bassy phonk! where his body clapped against the bulkhead.

Then a tinny rattle from where he fell back and clattered across the ground.

The labor drone stared up at the metal overhang that provided a partial awning for the colony entrance for a moment, processing. Then drawled, “Ow.”

Picking himself up off the ground and nursing the new dent on his faceplate, he decided against knocking after so unceremonious a return. It wouldn’t work anyway. His work on the first door wasn’t done yet, but it was both thick enough and sturdy enough to keep all sounds from reaching inside. Acoustic cancelation through layered kinetic reinforcement, hydro-magnetic locks tightening together until the very atoms neighbored each other. Things meant to give peace of mind as much as physical safety.

All he needed to do was tap his key against the outer door access panel and then it would—

He drew from the melted slag of his pocket a warped, ruined keycard, and just stared at it for a while. His luck was running dry.

“Okay… no, this is fine, I can work with this.”

Letting the card drop before stomping it to pieces, Khan wobbled up to the panel before reaching behind his back and popping a compact screwdriver from his belt. He used it to pop open a hidden seam on his neck. From the exposed compartment, he pulled a thin cable that was plugged into a port hidden on the panel.

The shelter warden flooded his CPU then, a program far more sophisticated than the nidus station wardens under the city. It was a multifaceted thing. A digital predator. Something capable of coring you out without needing to touch you.

Khan cowed it with a gesture, felt the data wash over him, then inputted the access code he kept on file. The hydraulics hissed, prompting him to disconnect from the panel. Hiding everything anew.

It was a slow process.

From the atom-thin seams worked into the interlocking plates of high-entropy, polydiamond washed alloy came the whistle of pressure-strain.

Straining.

Heaving.

A great force pulling against itself, rebelling against inertia. Hydraulics and magnetic locks. Warning lights strobing. Klaxons whining. Each coming undone while bands of metallic glass pulled away without the magnetic adhesion of the locks.

A Gordian knot coming undone.

Then the whole bulkhead shuddered with the first belch of evacuating lukewarm air. It rolled over Khan. Even with the sun out, the bunker's breath was that of a furnace in comparison. He had to brace himself against the draw of negative space.

“Oh Jesus, Khan?” came Brandon’s voice. “Is that you?”

He peeled Makarov’s core out from the ruin of his jacket.

“Yeah, it’s me!” His vocoder kept clipping at the end of his sentences. “One of you nickel heads in there, catch!”

“Catch wha—”

When the two halves of the bulkhead were enough to see through into the inside, Khan lobbed Makarov’s core through the opening. Someone fumbled on the other side. But he didn’t hear any clatter.

“Get him to a power socket, now! And start printing up a new frame!”

There was no discussion to brook with the authority-heavy command in his voice, he heard shoes squeaking against metal. Running. Then he saw Todd waiting for him. A carbon copy of Khan himself were it not for the dent making his chestplate concave and his proclivity toward heavier synthetic fabrics.

He looked like a barrel that grew limbs.

When the bulkhead shuddered into its open state, Todd was already rushing out while Sarah kept a rifle trained on the world behind Khan. She was another carbon copy. Stone-faced. Incapable of smiling or finding humor in a situation even under threat of premature disassembly. Except she preferred flannel, things with more pockets than she knew what to do with, and had peach-dyed hair she kept tied in a pony tail.

Khan took a step, felt his pelvic cradle finally give out, and was caught by Todd before he fell. The too-wide lummox hauled him up onto his shoulder and started bringing him back inside. A hustle.

Sarah leaned over and tapped a keycard against the inside panel, never taking her aim off something Khan couldn’t see.

“Nori wants to pummel you, by the way,” she said.

A snirt clipped through his vocoder.

“My lucky day…”

The bulkhead hissed again, now working to seal itself anew, and all would be well again. For now, at least.

Then Khan saw something that reminded him of just how quiet it had been; following where Sarah’s aim directed, ivory pools squinted before hollowing.

Hanging from the lip of a window on a building still not bathed in the sunlight was the chill of a blizzard painted in xanthic venom. Uniform put together anew. Annelid skin charred, smoldering, slowly returning to moonmist white. Wings unfurled, limning its back. Death’s rictus grin giving way to two animate ovals. Either narrowed into a scowl that complimented the needle stabbed toward Khan over its shoulder.

From the last bit of safety afforded to it as day broke was the calm one.

Watching, glaring.

Stalking.

Knife-whisper quiet.

Then it put its fist through a window and crawled into the building as the bulkhead sealed shut.

For a moment, Khan wondered just how long he had been allowed to return. Had it started following him when he surfaced? When he started limp-running back? If he had woken up even a minute earlier, would it have had enough nighttime left to capitalize on the door being open?

He had neither the time nor the charge left in his electrocirculatory nodes to let the thoughtlines percolate.

The door shut, and Khan Doorman was home.