Ontological Mystery

From Shifti

Author: Joysweeper

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This story is a work in progress.

[thank you, Martin G. Diehl, for formatting help]

Contents 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 6 6 7 7 8 8 9 9 10 10 11 11 12 12 13 13 14 14 15 15 16 16 17 17 18 18 19 19 20 19 21 20

1

Distantly, Nathan heard something, and fought his way slowly to consciousness. He woke in total darkness, curled tightly with his legs curled against his chest, his arms wrapped around them. Space was tight. He felt warm and wet and drowsy, but all temptation to linger evaporated as he realized that his mouth and nose were stuffed up by something, and he wasn’t breathing.

By raking his fingers across his face, his elbow scraping across something in the process, he managed to catch and pull out the ropy slimy stuff that had gotten into his mouth and nose, gagging and coughing as it slid out of his throat, wrapping it around his hand and wrist. It wasn’t really an improvement. There was air, but it was close and damp and very warm. Now there was a nasty taste in his mouth and nose. When he tried to straighten his neck and get his face away, he realized that he couldn’t.

Something was pressing on his body, keeping him from uncurling. He was in the fetal position in some kind of capsule with barely a few centimeters of space. Nathan felt a little prickle of claustrophobia and forced himself to go over the insides as best he could. They were wet, with some kind of membrane over a curved, porous surface. His own skin was absolutely covered in thick slime that puddled in the capsule with him, as warm as bathwater. He’d been in it long enough that his living and synthetic skin both were incredibly wrinkled.

Scraping some of the membrane away from the curved wall, he braced his right arm and pressed on the surface of the capsule with the cyber fingers, and felt it give, very slightly. It was a hard substance, but he could probably break through it. To see if the thing was anchored down, Nathan started to rock, then to throw himself as best he could against the sides. He was rewarded by the thing falling over and rolling some small distance, making him gasp in alarm. He ended up facing upwards. The slime, splattered around by this movement, started to ooze down, pooling as high as his ears.

No voices or alarms outside, and with a container like this sound should have carried. No point in waiting for a better chance to escape.

Bracing his feet and head and trying to force them apart resulted in a lot of straining and a promising cracking sound. After a few minutes of this he stopped to breathe heavily. He was getting somewhere. Very slowly of course, but he was an Imperial trooper. Imperials didn’t give up. Ever.

Some time later, while resting from the strain, he noticed a pain on his sides and, searching with his fingers, found two small cuts, bleeding very slightly. Moving his arm to touch one caused something on his elbow to scrape along the surface of the capsule. Nathan stopped, and very slowly snaked his hands to his elbows, finding a sharp protrusion on each one. Short, pointed, and sort of pyramid shaped. The texture made him think of a tooth. They were new. He’d accidentally stuck himself with them without knowing, but the pain seemed to have stopped and the bleeding with it. The cuts were still there against his fingers, so he hadn’t imagined them.

Experimentally, he did his best to jab an elbow-point against the surface. There was a sort of knocking/cracking sound, and with eyes completely dilated in the darkness he saw the faintest yellow light coming through. He stuck his fingers through and pulled, then withdrew them and considered.

Trying the bracing position again, Nathan drove both elbows into the sides, punching into them. With a certain amount of trial and error, rotating himself to hit new points, forcing the capsule to roll slightly, and stopping often to rest, he gradually managed to strike a roughly complete circle of small holes. By bracing harder, he forced the capsule to crack along this circle and rather suddenly split, sending half of his body sprawling into cooler open air.

It smelled like damp, swampy heat, and something vaguely spicy, and just a touch of what was probably mold. The slime that had pooled with him spilled and cooled quickly. In comparison to the inside, it was cold. The places where his cybers connected with his skin dipped in temperature, not getting painful yet. He lay there for he didn’t know how long, gasping for breath, too weak to move.

After he got over the shock of it, he wiped slime away from his eyes and crawled the rest of the way out to look at his former prison. The smaller part which he’d sprawled across had been half crushed, though the membrane was keeping the fragments connected to each other and the larger part. It was rounded, but not round, sort of an egg shape.

Actually, it was egg-shaped. No denying it. It looked like an egg. There was nothing on the shell, almost glowing white in the gloom, which could have been opened to put him in there. A giant egg. Surrounded by other giant eggs, he saw now. He counted three besides his own, all standing blunt end down in comically small nest-shaped weavings, barely big enough to keep them upright. The weaving his egg had been on, flattened by the fall he’d caused, seemed to be made of stiffened suede. More of the same was littered thickly on the floor atop textured metal. Scraps of it were sticking to the slime residue on his skin.

The room was small, about bedroom-sized. By the height of the ceiling, he hadn’t run out of time yet, which meant either he was in a miniature or all these eggs were human-sized. It was dark, the low light coming from a dim yellow square in the ceiling, the cracks around a door, and the steady status lights of something squat and boxy. Looked like a humidifier.

The ropy stuff which had been in his mouth and nose was still wrapped around his hand. It was evidently somewhere between a solid and a liquid, with a texture like mucus. Ignoring an urge to toy with it, Nathan scraped it off onto the top surface of his egg, lurched to his feet, and reeled as blood rushed out of his head, dark blotches appearing and disappearing in his vision. He was horribly weak and clumsy, but the tapping sound caught his attention immediately.

It was another of the eggs, cracks forming from a point on the side. The taps stopped and the egg wobbled as its occupant shifted. Nathan hesitated, then went to help.

Nothing happened when he scratched on the surface with a cyber finger, but he had the impression that whatever was in the egg had frozen, startled. Using the cyber fingers – they looked and felt organic, but they were a bit stronger than the untouched ones – he pried shell fragments away from the small hole until it was about palm sized, tore the slit in the membrane so it widened, then stopped. After a few seconds he saw a hand on the other side, clearly human fingers sticking through and grabbing the shell.

A hatching was the only word for it. Nathan tried talking, his voice as throaty as if he had a cold, and got a response, but it wasn’t very coherent. The shell did conduct sound and the holes only made this easier, but the voice was hard to understand. It was better after he realized that there was slime in each ear and tipped it out. After that, they took turns cracking the shell, sometimes sticking fingers through and pulling. Eventually they tipped the egg so that the man inside could break free with a spill of that same slimy liquid, gasping and shivering at first, the same way Nathan had.

Both of them were coated in slime and bits of membrane, and the light was still dim, but Nathan thought he saw the tells in the other man’s build and features. He made himself wait until the other had recovered enough to push himself, shaking, into a sitting position. "Five-oh-first?" Nathan croaked.

"Yeah," the other man said, his voice also harsh and throaty. "Designation’s 6204. Will."

"Nathan, 9129. Trooper?"

"Yeah." He’d thought so. You had to be very familiar with them to see it, but the signs were there on all stormtroopers and most trooper variants.

"Know what’s going on?"

Will stopped to take Nathan’s hand and get hauled to his feet, although their fingers slipped a little. The other trooper put his hand on his forehead and slid it back along his skull, pressing slime out of his hair before saying anything. Having a shaved head, Nathan didn’t have to worry about that. "’S an incubation chamber. Don’t know why we’re up this soon, but that’s what it looks like. Rebirth. We died."

Nathan scowled. "The hell you s-"

Wait. He remembered now, and it made him struggle to contain a shudder. The firefight, the chase, the thing that looked like a child rising out of the floor, hair whipping, eyes bright, the shrill shriek it made, and the way things had gone dark… Well, he knew something about getting brought back. Hopefully either the timer had reset or he didn’t have to worry about that now. Settling, he said, "Fine. Why eggs?"

"Works pretty well, not so many side effects other than the recovery time. I guess…" Will coughed up a bit of slime or mucus and spat it to the side. "Ugh. Sorry. I guess there’s some nice symbolism there, too. White armor, white eggshell." His voice was clearer now. There was a tickle in Nathan’s throat too, and he took a moment to follow Will’s lead and cough it out, though he swallowed it. There was a taste of salt.

"Maybe for you. My armor’s black," Nathan said.

Will’s eyes widened and he leaned away slightly. "You’re an SL?"

"No, no," Nathan said hastily. "TX. Shadowtrooper – Black Hole, actually." There were a lot of variations on black trooper armor – the various incarnations of mechanical and partially-mechanical darktrooper, shadow stormtrooper, clone shadow, nova trooper, dark novatrooper, storm commandoes, shadow EVO…

"Oh. Okay. I guess an SL wouldn’t be brought back through the egg chamber anyway. They’d go through something fancy." Will relaxed a little, though now his gaze was openly curious. "Got any cybernetics?"

Nathan winced, but it was a fair question, and Will didn’t seem judgmental about it. It was common knowledge that troopers in black armor tended to be less human than their brethren in white. "Right leg beneath the knee, part of my right hand, a bit of skull. Both of my ears. Some internals. Bacta therapy fixed everything else. Not that anyone can tell what’s real and what’s not under the synthflesh." A thought came up, and he checked the leg. It was still realistic artificial flesh over a cybernetic, and palpably cooler and less responsive than his real skin, although just as wet and wrinkled. "Isn’t getting brought back from the dead supposed to fix cybers?"

Will shrugged. "Sometimes. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that rebirth’s complicated." He blinked. "We’re both totally naked, aren’t we."

Fortunately, under the dim yellow light panel there was a rack of knee-length bathrobes, the cheap kind that appeared to be made of coarse towels. They were bulky and refused to change into more dignified clothing, but they would do for now.

The growth on one of Nathan’s elbows caught in the cloth. He felt it pierce the bathrobe and wriggle like a loose tooth when he tried to force his arm through. "What’s with this?"

"What, the spike? I’ve got those too." Will pushed up a sleeve and showed his off, sharper and a bit more curved, looking more knife or clawlike than Nathan’s. "The first time I came through here they said these are like egg teeth, and they make breaking through the shell easier. It falls off on its own in a few days, but before that it loosens some more, so most people break or twist it off before then. You can force it right now if you want and it’ll bleed a little, but the slime in the eggs will fix it. It’s some kind of phlebotinum salve."

"So you’ve done this before."

"Yeah. Actually, I died on the first day," Will said, trying to sound matter-of-fact but coming off as oddly proud. "I came back sort of accidentally by cocoon. I don’t recommend it; for one, water gets everywhere, for two, amnesia, and for three, growing wings was really painful and they basically did nothing but make it hard to wear armor. Second time I came back, with the dust, the wings were gone but they came back after the voices got…"

Frowning, Will trailed off and looked at the light coming through the doorsill, then at Nathan. His voice dropped to just above a whisper. "That’s odd. I’ve been out for what, twenty minutes maybe, and you were out early enough to help me. But no one’s come in yet."

"You think everyone could be asleep?" Nathan knew that if lowering his own voice was going to make a difference he was a little late, but he couldn’t help it.

"Maybe," Will allowed reluctantly. "I don’t know how long it’s been since I was killed. But the thing about the eggs is that you can get them and have them carried back to Base; it’s more convenient for everyone. I’ve helped with that in the past. The incubation chamber there – look, I thought they might have moved it and changed the lighting and stuff, but I don’t see why there wouldn’t be any attendants. I’ve drawn that duty. There’s always someone watching so they can wake up all the others and help if an egg starts moving."

"So I would guess that this isn’t the egg room at Base. And I don’t know if it’s the original egg room either. Someone helped that time, and told me she’d been sitting outside of the door and came in when she heard that tapping. Yeah, it still could be night, and they could’ve nailed up the rack with the bathrobes since I was last here, but…"

They both looked at the light through the doorsill. It was a yellow bar of probably-fluorescent light, without a sign that anyone was standing right outside.

Nathan hand-signaled that he was going alone, then remembered that a standard trooper might not know what that meant and said, barely audibly, "Stay here. Going to take a look."

Approaching from along the wall, he kept his footsteps deliberate and very slow – partially out of the desire to stay silent, which was helped anyway by the thick layer of suedelike strips, but also because he was still having attacks of vertigo. It probably had something to do with coming back. There was a reason why newly-revvied people went to recuperate at Outpost before returning to duty.

He wasn’t Force-Sensitive… probably, since it was often hard to tell … but he did have good eyes and ears, and was able to determine that if anyone was nearby on the other side of the door, they were absolutely silent and not within sight of the sill. The door was also locked from the outside. Someone had gone to the trouble to remove the doorknob and replace it with the keyhole facing in. There were deep scratches in the door’s paint from when this had happened. Walking back and not bothering to be as quiet this time, he told Will what he’d found.

"Well, that’s ominous," Will said, frowning at the door. "I think we can assume that we’re not where we should be. Damn. I like a daring escape as well as anyone, but they’re better with blasters and without the just-got-revvied-I-can’t-see-straight effect. Even if it does feel like I’ve been recovering for five days, I’m still not optimal."

"What’s your rank?"

The other trooper set his feet reflexively. "Private first class, TK, five point four years of service."

"Second lieutenant ensign, TX, and six years. Rank you." Nathan let a hint of a smirk cross his face. Whether years meant how long he’d been in the costuming group, or something nebulous involving the Other Life, he wasn’t too sure. But he was a commissioned officer and a Black Hole stormtrooper, so he could pull rank on most servicemen. Having the lowest rank a commissioned officer could have, and being part of the 501st , where the distinction between him and a non-com was hazy, meant he had to be careful, though.

Will shrugged. "All right Nathan, you’re the boss-man. What do we do now?"

Nathan’s vestigial plan – charge the door and knock it out, then try to figure things out from there – was interrupted by a scratching, then a tapping and a very muffled bout of coughing.

2

It was one of the two standing eggs. The troopers traded glances. Nathan was ready to bet that they had the same thought – was it another trooper, or something else? Should they stay or try and get out now?

He decided. "We don’t go yet." Will shrugged – it looked like he was more inclined to leave, but he was dazed anyway, and troopers didn’t question orders without good reason. Even if the orders came from someone barely more qualified and just as out of it.

Again, the sight of fingers through a hole in the shell proved that the occupant was human, and restless, judging by the incoherent mutters and constant shifting. Will got right on that, telling the egg "You’re okay! It’s fine, we just have to get you out of there," though how well the egg’s occupant could hear him was up for debate.

Nathan helped a little, but he felt like he was getting in the way. In between bouts of being energetic and encouraging, Will told him in a much lower voice, "We don’t have hatching tools, you broke out on your own under an hour ago, and yet this whole thing is just so easy. I don’t know what’s going on, but I hope we find out, and soon."

Partway through the hatch, the last remaining egg rocked and shook and finally fell over as whatever was in it, maybe disturbed by the noise, woke up. After another glance, Will left the second-to-last egg to Nathan and went to get the other one by himself.

The second-to-last egg hatched into a third trooper. Who was a woman. There was a moment of disconnect when he saw the irrefutable proof of her womanhood, saw the tells and that indescribable something that meant this was a trooper, and had to reconcile both aspects. There just weren’t a lot of woman stormtroopers. Most of them had turned into men during the Event; there were the Femtroopers, but they didn’t count.

He spent part of that time where she was gasping and helpless going and getting a bathrobe to drape over her. Somehow nudity was more immediate when there were women involved. There was just something instantly uncomfortable about it, even taking into account the fact that she was a trooper first and a woman second. Troopers took care of troopers, but clothing female troopers was a bigger priority than clothing male ones, apparently.

"Uh-oh. We’ve got blue light here," Will was saying, and there was indeed a faint blue-white glow coming from the hole in the shell. Something scrabbled at it, and he added, "Human fingers, though. Hey, are you human? I’m human. Can you hear me? Okay. I’m going to get you out, but you have to work with me."

"Urgh…" The trooper on the ground coughed, long and wet, and spat, weakly clutching the bathrobe to herself as she sat up. Nathan held a furious, brief debate with himself about the proper course of action, then turned away and counted to fifteen, then bumped it to twenty. By the time he turned back she had gotten the bathrobe right way around, put her arms through, and was holding it closed.

He saw her stare blankly at the projections on her elbows, thick and sort of corkscrewed, and told her, "That’s for helping you get through the shell. Will, there, says they come off." He showed her his, then tapped his sternum. "Nathan."

"I’m –" she grunted as he helped her up and steadied her –"I’m – oh. Ohhhh, fusst," she said. Nathan saw an expression of horror spread across her face. "I’m Leahn’Charlie." She had a familiar sharp, precise accent; there was no doubting that she’d meant to mash the names together.

"What?"

"Leahn’Charlie. I mean, Leah and Charlie. Both. Looks like I’m a chimera." There was a moment when her eyes widened and her mouth went slack, and then her face went from horrified to an angry blank as she swore under her breath, a long phrase that Nathan didn’t quite catch.

"I’m sorry about that," Will said from besides the last egg, which was currently still as the occupant rested. He looked at Nathan and correctly interpreted his expression. "Sometimes when you come back you get caught up with someone else. We think. It’s only happened a few times. There’s all these levels – when it’s really late you both come back sort of conjoined, if it happens really early, you’re kind of a blend, I guess. A chimera. It’s named after this one pregnancy thing where zygotes stick together in the womb and you end up with a baby who is its own twin. Frankly most of that was speculation. They gave it to me in attendant training."

"Yeah. Fusst. I had – Leah had, she had attendant training too. The earliest attendant training. That’s… that’s really annoying," the woman trooper said in a dull, matter-of-fact tone, pressing her hands to her forehead, muffling her voice and hiding her eyes. The accent had all but disappeared from her voice; now she was speaking with different inflections, more like a standard trooper, like Will or Nathan. "Just… just call me… look, the combined designation is, uh, eight thou one hundred thirteen. 8113. Let’s go with that."

There was probably someone out there with that number already, but Nathan decided not to push it. "Okay." He also stopped himself from asking about her rank. "What squad – oh. Sorry."

"It’s fine. Makaze, on both sides. Leah was TS and on Makaze Patrol, Charlie CT on Fifteenth Patrol. I don’t think we- they ever agreed on a nickname for that one." 8113 took both hands from her face and shook her head slowly. "Guess that means they got to the bodies before SHODAN did. Better to be a chimera than a couple more cyborgs." She shuddered, making slime flick away from her close-cropped hair. "Fierfek, I hate those things."

"I mean, cyborgs who aren’t on our side," she amended after a moment, her expression shifting from angry-blank to just blank. "Evil ones. Really evil ones, I mean. You know what I’m talking about."

"Cybers aren’t so bad. Have several," Nathan told her. There was, unfortunately, a lot of this sentiment in the 501st. "Hurts at first, takes a while to learn how to use them, that’s all. Also they do sort of make you into a mostly-human thermometer." Out of armor, he could always be relied on to notice if the temperature had dropped or risen.

8113 raised her eyebrows. "Why do you talk like that? You haven’t said ‘I’ once. It sounds really awkward." Over at the last egg, wrestling with a bit of shell, Will grunted, "She’s right."

"What? Sorry. …I’m sorry. Too much – I’ve spent too much time near my SL." He honestly hadn’t thought about that, but they were right. "Half the patrol talks like this. The SL’s a telepath, one of the weird ones. It kind of changes you after a few weeks. I’m with the Secrets," he added.

"The Secrets? I know someone on there. Hey, boss-man, were you part of Tampa Bay squad? Did you get hit by the sh- whoa, hold on, I think we’re getting somewhere," Will exclaimed. The thing in the egg was finally making good progress. It had taken a bit longer than the previous two, even with someone helping who knew what he was doing. "Someone get me another bathrobe. She’s female."

The egg fell open with the now-expected wash of slimy warm liquid, and it was another woman, just like Will had said. Probably in her late twenties or early thirties, and clearly not a trooper. She might have been an officer or one of the others, but there was something strange and round set into her chest over her heart. It glowed blue-white, bright enough to be startling in the dark room. The glow faded when 8113 tucked a bathrobe around her, but as the cheap fabric warped and smoothed into a much higher-quality garment, it was still visible.

"That’s probably silk," 8113 observed, startled. "I don’t think she’s one of ours. Officers don’t have this kind of clothing shift, I think, and unless I’m mistaken our cybernetic hearts aren’t half this visible even if you can see them at all." The unknown woman wrapped her arms protectively around herself and shivered, eyes unfocused, hair plastered to her skin, her lips blue-tinged.

Will chivvied them back, saying, "We should give her some space. She’s not a trooper. It was harder for her."

The woman was recovered enough to lift her chin and glare halfheartedly at him for that, but she didn’t seem to mind when the three of them pulled a few meters away. The room was too small to retreat any further. It was already a bit crowded.

"Think – I think she’s one of the allies," Nathan told the other two. "If she’s a cape, she could be really helpful ." Catching 8113’s eye, he said, "We’re not in the usual egg chamber. The door is locked from the outside."

"That’s not good." They waited for a few moments more, glancing back at the still-recovering woman. "Nathan. What’s this that Will was saying about you being in Tampa Bay?"

Nathan winced. "Was hoping you wouldn’t bring that up. Uh, I was hoping. Fine. Yes, I’m part of Tampa Bay squad, and yes, I was hit by it."

"So you’ve got to take Pym Particles?" The other two were clearly fascinated. Most of the people from Tampa Bay didn’t advertise it. Roughly half the squadron had been elsewhere, like SL-1984 and that Red Guard who spent all his time at Outpost, but even they tended not to give out their squadron name lightly.

"Yes. It would be every nine hours on a full dose, but the capes are paranoid. Apparently, get enough exposure to them and you can control your size, and they don’t trust us with that." Nathan shrugged helplessly. "I’m hoping I don’t need them now. The timer must have reset, since I think revival takes longer than that. Don’t think any other Tampa Bay trooper has died yet."

"It didn’t replace your cybers, though," Will observed. "Huh. Well, revival’s an inexact science. If it happens, it happens. If this is hostile territory and we’re not out by then –"

"Then someone will have to carry me," Nathan said, resigned. "Hopefully it won’t come to that, but if it does, be careful, and appreciate – I’d appreciate some warning." He always tried not to think about that moment when SL-1984 had very physically swooped in and saved them. Sometimes the vertigo and sense of being utterly at someone’s mercy appeared in his nightmares. The only one to retain any of his composure at all had been K. Pike, and even he had been clutching the big white arm and babbling orders that later sounded like nonsense.

"Got it, boss-man," Will said while 8113 nodded. "If it’s me, don’t worry. I’ll be gentle. Look at this. Our hatchmate’s up."

The woman was standing with her feet planted far apart, obviously trying to compensate for unsteadiness. She’d raked her wet hair back away from her face, and the silk robe was still doing poorly at concealing her glow. "All right," she said hoarsely, "I know you helped me, and thanks, but I need to know what happened, where this is, and why there are teeth growing out of my arms." Her elbow-spikes were long, thin, and unbent, much more fanglike than anyone else’s.

Will gave her the rundown about being killed and brought back through the eggs with organic, temporary tools to help break through the shells.

"Eggs? I’ve seen stranger things, but – if there’s an egg, there’s something laying it, isn’t there? And assuming I really was killed, who got the body, what happened to it afterwards, and where is my damn suit? That armor is not going to be easy to fix."

"I’d like to know that too," 8113 said, Nathan nodding with her.

Will winced. "Welll… I don’t actually know if something lays them or not. They’ve never answered that. But the people taking the bodies and giving us the eggs are allies. Really good ones. They’re within the Perimeter, and that means they follow our rules."

"Oh. You’re the little nation-in-exile. Stormtroopers?" Nathan tried not to sigh at that. While this stranger might still be an ally, she wasn’t one of the 501st. A lot of people found it strange, how they’d banded together and weren’t quite at odds with the Rebel Legion. ‘Nation-in-exile’ was new, though.

"We’re Five-Oh-First, yes ma’am. Specifically, I’m Will the stormtrooper, Nathan’s a shadowtrooper, and 8113-"

"Mark me as clone snowtrooper for now." Startled, the other troopers peered at her in the dim light. She looked stoically back at them, and although her features were a bit distorted – and female, of course, though mannish like any woman trooper’s – they were still very like a clone’s. …Well, she had mentioned that Charlie had been CT, and now that he thought about it, the peculiar clipped accent that had surfaced a few times was the accent clones tended to have.

"Okay," Will said, recovering quickly. "Anyway, as for the third question, I have no idea where your armor or anyone’s is. I’ve heard there’s a restoration process for those, too, I know that when we hand over the bodies we don’t hand over the remains of armor, and we give it to people after they’ve come back. And it’s not new armor, or new weapons either."

Nathan had this. "It’s some kind of Phlebotinium gel spray that we trade for. Supposed to be armor components kept in a semi-molten state, doesn’t work like that. Not so much repair spray as restore or remake spray, doesn’t work on organics. Seen it happen once on patrol." Only an SL could get away with carrying something like that – there were regulations – but if you ran on life support, you ran on life support. And if you telepathically talked in everyone’s heads, walked like crowds would part for you, and didn’t hesitate to stand between your patrol and what they could not handle, you could afford to bend regulations and carry restricted substances.

"Who do you trade it from?"

"Shepard Spectres, think – I think that’s what they’re calling themselves now. But they’re not exclusive with us. Anyone could get it from them." Realizing that he’d gone far off topic, Nathan apologized. Being so freshly revived, none of them were at their best.

"I suppose not," the woman said, staring vaguely at the yellow light panel. Shaking off some private reverie, she told them, "I’m Tony. Tony Stark." Looking into their faces and not seeing any recognition, she said, "You know? Iron Man?"

There was another pause. "Okay, I know you want to say it. Anyone who recognizes the name says it. I’m supposed to be part of the stubble set."

Nathan expected her to say that at some point, before the Event, she’d had a genderswapped version of the character in mind when she got into costume, or else she’d run afoul of a persistent secondary. Those were the kind of explanation that came up a lot. That was how his SL had explained why she had an utterly silent, glowing cybernetic liquid-aeration system hooked to her heart instead of a pair of lungs. I-WHO-I-WAS THOUGHT OF IT IDLY AS A THEMATIC COUNTERPOINT TO MALAK LACKING A JAW, she’d said in that inimitable way, which could only be called a ‘voice’ because a sense that something cold and smooth was brushing against your skin had no words in it. Apparently that was the problem with a liquid-aeration system: you had to find a way to speak that didn’t involve breathing. IT WAS A FANFICTION IDEA I-WHO-WAS USED YEARS AGO. OBVIOUSLY I-WHO-I-WAS DIDN’T THINK ANYTHING WOULD COME OF IT.

Instead, Tony talked in an overpatient voice, as if repeating something she’d gone over too many times already. "As far as I’m concerned it doesn’t matter if the people here say I’m not right, not real, or anything else. I was a hedonistic genius billionaire CEO who got kidnapped and built a suit of armor with which to save myself and then became a superhero, and why should I care if all the other people who have that kind of story happen to be men?"

She might be a Stranger, Nathan thought to himself, one of those who might as well have stepped out of another world during Xanadu. Probably the other two troopers were thinking similarly; synchronity might have kicked in already.

8113, in a slightly softer voice than usual, asked, "Why do you call yourself Iron Man, then?"

Tony frowned, opened her mouth, closed it, and looked puzzled. Finally she said, "I don’t actually know. The armor looks male. I could have built it with narrower shoulders, maybe had the waist pinched just a bit, but I never did."

Shaking her head, she looked them over. "I’ve worked with you people before, and I don’t think I trust your recruitment strategies or your plans for expansion." As she spoke, she rocked back on her heels a little, as if she enjoyed hearing her own voice. "But correct me if I’m wrong, you three aren’t anything like in charge, and this place is probably full of people with questionable motives. We’ll work together. You don’t betray me, I don’t betray you. Fair?"

A lot of capes didn’t trust the 501st, which probably wasn’t anybody’s fault. The thing to do, as SL-1984 had patiently explained, was to earn that trust. With capes, with the Rebel Legion, and with the world. Nathan nodded. "Fair."

The door was still locked. 8113 stepped up to the rack with its single remaining bathrobe, eyed it and the screws holding it to the wall, and wrenched it off with a grunt and a shriek of stressed metal. She looked at the other three and said, a little defensively, "I don’t like being unarmed. If we’re wrong about this I’ll apologize nicely and put it back up, all right?"

The bathrobe rack was now an awkward two-meter club or staff with hooks along one side, which she held with both hands at an angle. The metal was clearly fairly soft, but it was also heavy, and probably the most weaponlike object in the room.

Nathan shrugged, Will said, "Okay," and Tony didn’t look up from where she had sat down and started dismantling the humidifier. 8113 and Will both sat down to tie strips of nest-suede to their bare feet as makeshift sandals while Nathan went to look at Tony’s progress.

"This is not, in fact, a humidifier," Tony said, staring fixedly into the machine’s guts. She had popped one side of the casing off somehow, and it was packed with intricacies which she was now removing. "It’s more than that, at any rate. It started life as a humidifier, it has a humidifier’s external structure and some of the insides, and it does humidify, but there are some unusual additions here. I’ll show you one. See this canister here? Very interesting."

Nathan wasn’t familiar with humidifiers. "I see."

She looked away from the machine long enough to give him a look that said no, he didn’t. "If I’m right, and I nearly always am, it’s designed to deliver its contents into the tubing of the humidifier, diffusing them into the air. Could be a drug, a chemical, anything. But we’ve got no way of knowing if it’s been used on us, and if it has, we can’t do anything about it now."

"Fair enough." A thought struck him, so he asked, "Can you reassemble that into something we can use?"

Tony scowled at a duct. "Maybe if we needed a fog machine."

He couldn’t help saying it. "Weren’t you able to build your armor in a cave? With a box of scraps?"

"Now, those are gross exaggerations," she said, meeting his gaze. Her tone was somewhere between bantering and serious. "The ‘scraps’ were largely a wide selection of partial and intact missiles, and the cave came with some admittedly crude tools, including a forge. And an assistant with little of this kind of experience but very steady hands. And a certain amount of time. Not a modified humidifier, my bare hands and the teeth on my elbows, three stormtroopers, and five minutes."

"Point taken. If there’s anything in there you think you can use, though-"

"Stripping it down as we speak, boss-man." She’d picked up Will’s nickname for him. That was a little embarrassing, but at least it meant she recognized that he was leading. He hoped. "Anything else?"

"We’re making footwear out of these nest bits," Nathan said, bending to pick one up. "One of those parts of training no one really advertises is making do without proper equipment. I can do yours, if you like."

Tony shrugged, already involved in the humidifier again. "Weave away." She pushed a foot towards him, and her robe fell open a little, exposing the pale, smooth skin of her thigh. Trying not to look, Nathan settled on the floor, carefully picked up her wrinkled wet foot, and started tying. The suedelike strips, unlike the bathrobe, didn’t change individually, though collectively the sandal he made looked a little more graceful.

A few minutes later, everyone had that same kind of crude footwear, thin and not particularly comfortable but better than bare feet on unknown surfaces. Will and 8113 had also worked on the remaining bathrobe, making a sort of sling which held all the healing egg goo they’d been able to gather. It had soaked through the material quickly and would probably be more useful as bandage material than anything else. Tony, meanwhile, had made a belt out of flexible ducting, and a number of unknown things from the humidifier hung from it. Even in a silk bathrobe she looked better than any of them, and from her smirk, she knew it.

"Are we ready?" Nathan asked, looking at each of the three others. 8113 nodded once, her face set. Will gave a thumbs up. Tony made a get-on-with-it gesture. Post-revival weakness seemed to have faded, at least for now. "All right. Someone help me break the door down."

To his surprise, 8113 was the one who stepped up. He’d been expecting Will, who was now holding her improvised bathrobe club with a dubious expression. Of course, he reminded himself, she was a trooper first and female second, and he ought to remember that. Physically she was slightly taller and broader-shouldered than either of them. He hadn’t asked her rank, but if she was accepting him as the leader, that meant he was higher than her. Hopefully.

They set themselves and, on an unvoiced count, threw their bodies at the door, shoulders first. Something wrenched; the door itself might be solid, but the hinges and the lock were weaker. 8113 nodded, and on another count they slammed the door again.

The hinges couldn’t take it and screeched free, letting the door part company with the wall and hit the ground loudly. Nathan’s foot slipped and he almost fell to the floor with it, but 8113 snagged the hood of his robe and kept him upright. The other two crowded past to join them, Will handing the club back to 8113.

3

They were at the end of a hallway. It too was metal floor, bare plastered walls, dark with a little emergency lighting, narrow and not particularly long or high-ceilinged. That was all secondary to the body crumpled on the floor a few meters away.

"Stay alert," Nathan murmured. The other two troopers went on guard as he stopped to look at the body.

It was a balding man in a labcoat that had once been white. Nathan couldn’t be sure exactly how he’d been killed, but it was a fair bet that whatever had started eating his body had done it.

He had an expensive watch and a tie with dimly visible smiley faces on it. Nathan had woken in the egg when he’d heard something. Had it been a scream? Had it been this man? He hadn’t been dead for terribly long. Long enough that whatever had chewed on his body had had enough time to destroy his face, and the blood on the walls and floor had dried, but there was still some stickiness in the body itself.

There were what looked like animal tracks heading away from the body. No doubt they were in blood, though it was too dark to see the color. The smell of it was powerful.

He saw an ID card on a cord which had probably once been around the body’s neck. After carefully cleaning it and holding it up to the brightest light available, which happened to be Tony’s artificial heart, he saw that it had belonged to a Dr. Lewis Matla, Junior Researcher, Unit Twelve. There was a bar code on it, and a lengthy number, and a small picture of the man’s face. Nathan unclipped the card from the cord and put it into one of the pockets of his bathrobe.

He stood and, on a hunch, lifted the door up so that it leaned against a stretch of wall. Tony’s face seemed a little more drawn, but she examined it readily with him, saying, "Claw marks in pairs. I’m no biologist, but I’d guess something smaller than a human, but not by much." Nathan held his hand to the gouges in the wood, measuring, and had to agree.

"I hear something," Will said urgently. He and 8113 both were staring intently down the hallway. Focusing, Nathan heard nothing for a long moment, and then, several seconds after everyone else, something that he interpreted as something clawed, rather unstealthy, and quadrupedal.

"I’d give up scotch for a flack vest right now," Tony said under her breath. As she said that, the creature came into view. It was bulky, long-snouted, and covered with shaggy brown hair, and when it saw them it snarled, showing off its many small teeth, and charged them with an uneven but very fast gait.

It was fast. As it reached them, Will, on point, jerked just out of its path and scored it with his eggteeth. With a furious snarl, it heaved up on its hind legs, balancing with its tail, and whirled to swipe at him with its massive, heavy claws. Will ducked back and tried to stay out of range; Nathan was doing the same, trying to assess the creature. While it could swing quickly and had a long reach, it seemed limited to a shuffle when on its hind legs.

8113 approached it from behind, swinging her club low, and hit the creature hard enough to knock it off its feet. It twisted like a falling cat and surged back to all fours. Silent now, it dived at her, knocking the weapon aside and managing to bring her to the ground, but as she fell she brought her arm up and pinned its head to her body, trapping its jaws shut, and started to cut and stab at its face and neck with the elbow of her free arm.

Nathan caught its foreleg as it tried to pull away and slash at her, braced his other hand on its shoulder, and wrenched the limb up in a way no quadruped’s shoulder joint was meant to go, making it snarl again. Behind him its tail, thick and heavy, swung, but it wasn’t flexible enough to properly connect with him. It shuffled sideways with its hind legs, trying to either knock him over or heave itself up.

With great enthusiasm, Will joined in, trapping the creature’s other foreleg by the simple expedient of driving an eggtooth through its paw to the floor, holding it down with the rest of his weight.

The creature fought them, but fruitlessly; minus the tail it was less massive than any one of them, and they were stormtroopers, trained for strength and endurance. Even so, it was something of a stalemate. Nathan could and did shift position, more or less rancor-hugging the thing’s foreleg to its body at a clearly painful angle, but the other two could not, not without letting it get its jaws or claws free. 8113 was the only one in position to do any real damage, and the fur of its neck was thick and hampering. Cuts on its head bled profusely, but she couldn’t get at any major arteries or its eyes.

They’d forgotten about Tony. She circled around to the front, a scavenged bit of metal in hand, and looked them and the creature up and down, her expression unreadable. She stretched out her empty hand and set it carefully on the creature’s skull, a little ways farther back than 8113’s pinning arm, as if positioning a nail. Then she raised her other hand over her head and brought the metal down like a hammer.

There was a crunch, and the creature shuddered. Tony hit it again, harder if anything, and its skull caved in. The animal collapsed on 8113 and expired, still reflexively twitching. Nathan and Will hauled it off her, letting her stand.

"Ow," Will complained, nursing one elbow. "That was a bad idea. Guys, don’t land on your eggteeth. It hurts." The tooth had snapped off at the base, and his elbow was now bleeding freely.

First things first. "Anyone hurt?" Nathan asked. The other two troopers had picked up a few superficial wounds each, bloody and annoying now but trivial during the fight. They anointed those and Will’s elbow with egg goo, and that seemed to work pretty well. There was also some damage to the bathrobes, which couldn’t be helped.

"Short of obliterating it outright or cutting off something vital, severing the spine or destroying the brain is the fastest way to kill an attacking animal," Tony said breezily. She seemed slightly bothered about being smeared with blood and cerebrospinal fluid, but was making an effort to appear as urbane and confident as earlier.

"Getting the guts or even the heart won’t slow most of them down. They’ll keep going. They don’t know if they’ve been shot; they’ll die of it, but they’ll just keep going until they fall over. Not like with humans, where one shot and we black out," she said, her mouth twisting wryly as she said it. "You’re welcome, by the way."

After that, they turned their attention to the dead creature. The troopers were inclined to believe that it was just some hostile alien animal, but Tony wouldn’t accept that.

"If it’s an alien, it’s probably another Xanadu costume, or whatever cutesy nickname we’re going by now. We really don’t want someone trying to complain that it was just saying hello. I’m hoping it’s something else, my reputation’s shaky enough already."

On a closer look, Will was able to determine that the creature was a blend of many different animals. Apparently it was very patchwork-looking, though how he could tell was a mystery to Nathan.

"Look," he said, prodding at its forelimbs and the massive, curved claws on them. "It knuckle-walked with the claws faced inwards to keep them off the ground. There are a couple Earth animals that do that. Pangolins and anteaters, I think. With this tail, under the fur I’m thinking crocodile, and there’s a little of that in the snout too. I want to say horse, with nostrils like these, but I could be wrong. Other than that… there’s some canid here. See the ears? That’s fox. Some of the fur is fox, too. Otherwise, there’s quite a lot of wolverine here."

Tony tensed a little at that, and Will had to clarify. "Wolverine as in the hairy little animal with a short temper, I mean."

"’Hairy little animal with a short temper’ would actually fit Logan pretty well," Tony said dryly. "But if he was part of this, it wouldn’t be dead now. We’d be stuck pinning it down bashing and cutting it and watching it heal."

Will shrugged. "Anyway, I could be wrong, but while this thing’s pretty homogenous and not asymmetrical or anything, I doubt it’s a costume. Too small, not cute or intimidating or handsome enough. Furries, when they’re not happy with an existing animal, tend to veer towards a certain look, and this thing doesn’t really fit any of them." He shrugged again, defensively, and said, "I was in the group sent to build trust between us and them, okay? You pick a few things up."

The others speculated about this, about whether this was a secondary-changed human or animal or had been made from scratch, and why someone would do this, while Nathan went back to Dr. Matla’s body to see if there was anything more to be learned from it.

Crouching, Nathan scratched at the surface of Dr. Matla’s watch to clear it. The time was eleven ten at night, on February the twentieth. He’d been dead for a while. The date when he’d been killed had been the fourth of January. Asking, he found that the other three had last known dates ranging from December thirtieth to, in Tony’s case, the second of February. Typically, according to the two troopers who knew anything much about egg-revival, not much more than a week and a half to two weeks passed between death and rebirth, but it wasn’t an exact science.

Nathan found one more thing hidden in one of Dr. Matla’s pockets, along with the requisite lint and gum and spare change. It was a datapad. A piece of his tech, his and every stormtrooper and Rebel, every Sith and Jedi.

"It means that this man had connections to the 501st or the Rebel Legion," Nathan said out loud for Tony’s benefit. "Datapads are ours. The only ones on this world are ones we brought with us. So this might well be a place sanctioned by Base."

"Base being your compound in the hotel," Tony said flatly. She was fingercombing her hair with mixed success, as blood mixed with hair damp with egg goo and congealed.

Will frowned at her. "If you want to call it that, sure. It’s been a month or more, so Base could have decided to move egg hatchings somewhere away from Xanadu. Maybe the Femtrooper situation got worse. Anyway, they wouldn’t move the hatchings without putting a guard and our own watchers on them. So it’s not just a case of eggs going to the wrong place. Something’s gone very wrong."

Nathan hadn’t tuned them out, but he’d been looking through the contents of the datapad as he listened. "It’s been corrupted, maybe by the blood. If we had a good computer with the right interface we might be able to recover some of the lost data, but…"

"That kind of computer doesn’t exist here," 8113 said from where she was trying to quietly fix the new bend in her weapon. "Unless someone’s built it in the past month."

"Know that," Nathan replied in the same tone. "Looks like he used the journal feature a lot. The earliest one that’s not totally gibberish now is from…" He squinted at the date. "November the thirtieth. Most of this is a jumble of letters and numbers," he said out loud, scrolling through the entry, "Random words and word fragments are left, that’s all. Hold on… ‘excited’, think this is ‘project’, hey, here’s a phrase. Think it’s probably ‘theory to application in days’, that’s at the end."

"There are a lot more like that, don’t think we can get much from them. Matla must have put something new in several times a day. Here’s a good entry, from… that can’t be right. October? Must be corrupted." The event at Xanadu had happened early in November, and no datapads had existed in this world before that date. "The body of the entry looks good, though. Hey, there’s a sound version."

He hit it, and a recorded voice boomed forth from the datapad’s tiny speaker, surprisingly loud. Tony made a furious chopping gesture while Will and 8113 reflexively went back on high alert. Hastily, Nathan turned it down.

"We have tested Doctor Sawatsky’s treatment on another batch of inhibited chicken eggs," the datapad was saying, "and this time we found no adverse effects during development or upon maturity. As of this recording none of the birds have crashed. Indeed, nearly all of them are displaying the increased vigor and strength we were hoping for. It looks like we’ve finally got it right. I’m glad. I’ve never become used to observing chickens with those kind of congenital defects." More faintly under his voice there were a series of contented bird noises, which Nathan could only assume came from chickens.

"If Doctor Sawatsky believes this is enough, we can now start human trials!" The doctor’s voice was gleeful. "I hope we can finally make use of those stormtrooper eggs. Kirchner may have acquired volunteers, but they can’t have known that they would be inhibited for so long."

Blithely unaware of the effect this had on them, the recording of Matla went on to say, "I know that stormtrooper eggs, being potential fully mature humans, aren’t quite what this project is aiming for, but Kirchner says there is a lengthy period of weakness and disorientation directly following the hatching-" The last few words took on a warbling distortion and became very hard to follow. This entry went on longer, but was too corrupted to understand anything more. The text version was the same.

"Volunteer?" 8113’s voice was low and angry, and had taken on the signature clone accent, quite distinct from her usual one. She wasn’t the only one with that sentiment. Matla might have thought they’d chosen to allow themselves to be experimented on during rebirth, but he was surely ignorant or deluded. They’d been kidnapped while in no state to resist or understand what was going on.

After a bit, Will, clearly reluctant, said, "Well, there’s really no way of knowing who’s in what egg. There could have been volunteers, and they just didn’t pick the right eggs to cart off to wherever this was." To that, he added, "I’m not happy about this either, but it could be a mistake. Gotta keep that option open."

"It’s super-soldiers," Tony said flatly, as if there was no question. "This is a super soldier program. There’s always one of those in the works."

"I wouldn’t bet on it." 8113 said. The anger and clone accent had gone out of her voice; once again she sounded steady, stoic, reserved. It might have been a chimera thing. "We don’t know enough to make conclusive statements yet." Tony didn’t look convinced, but she shrugged.

The pattern of corruption seemed to be fairly random; there were several entries about what sounded a lot like office politics, complaints about someone named Catherine, notes on favorite chickens – and then, finally, in a hushed and breathy tone, "I’ve been watching the eggs using the thaumatic imager. Day by day, they develop – the fetal stage is past, and now they look like sleeping children. Two girls, two boys. They move sometimes, as if dreaming. I wonder what it’s like."

Tony snorted, but didn’t interrupt. The recording went on gushing happily.

"Crisp, colorful, three-dimensional… ultrasound is now obsolete! I can’t believe they worked out the kinks so quickly. Of course, there will be a terrible slog before the thaumatic imager finally gets approved and distributed to hospitals. I forget how slowly these things progress in the real world. This place spoils my patience."

After that corrupted ones started to appear, in which his voice lost all of the irritation and delight it had displayed earlier, relating terse fragments about attacks and plans, too partial to make much sense out of.

There was one final clear entry, the last and the shortest.

"Damned spiderhands." Matla sighed gustily through the datapad’s speaker. He sounded very tired. "I’m beginning to understand the reservations I should have had about signing on this. It’s like a veil has lifted from my eyes. I’ve requisitioned that last load lifter and had the stormtrooper eggs moved into a storage space. Turant wants to kill off all of the projects, even the ones that haven’t done anything yet, and they should be safe here. He’s mad, you know. I think the spiderhands have got to him, even if he’s not showing anything yet. Well, if Catherine and Turant fail, I suppose my only hope is the stormtrooper eggs. There’s no real power or water down here, but there’s also nothing more dangerous than the krarls, so I think they’ll be okay. I’ll have to check on them regularly. It would be so anticlimactic if they died of thirst locked in the room."

8113 sighed. "It’s starting to look like we’re in a first-person shooter. We started from somewhere with no memory of how we got there and with really bad weapons. We don’t know what this place is, but clearly it’s high tech and there aren’t a lot of ethical restraints. Just as clearly, civilization here has completely broken down, there are bodies, monsters running around, and now here’s an apocalyptic log to give us hints, one at a time, about what happened. Soon we will find better equipment and real weapons, just in time to fight more dangerous enemies and in larger numbers, and at some point we’ll stumble across the plot."

Nathan stared. That was just about the longest thing 8113 had yet said.

After a moment, Tony asked, a little challenging, "So what do you advise, then?"

"Advise?" 8113 shrugged, her face still blank. "We don’t have much choice, do we? We go forwards."

4

They progressed down the hallway, stopping to check the doors. All of them opened for Matla’s keycard. One lead to a janitor’s closet; Tony hesitated for a while, then picked a wheeled mop bucket to carry scraps in, including a pair of rubber gloves and some bleach. Will and Nathan each took a mop and removed the heads; the light wood of the handles wouldn’t be good for much, but they at least meant a little range.

While the hallway was well lit, the other rooms tended to be dark and filled with stacks of boxes. The boxes might have held things they could have used, but they were sealed, with no obvious way to open them. One room held tall floor-to-ceiling metal cylinders, and a humanoid.

"I don’t see it," Tony hissed, her eyes darting as the troopers went on alert.

"Please let me handle this. It’s… There – there!" Nathan jerked his chin towards where the figure had ducked behind one of the cylinders. "We won’t hurt you," he announced loudly, carefully. "If you don’t hurt us, we won’t hurt you."

Very slowly and cautiously, she eased back into view, letting all of them see her.

Clearly she was a furry, the kind of furry that was more along the lines of human-with-nonhuman-characteristics than the other way around. The living parts, anyway. Her legs, one arm, and a good portion of her torso were the most obvious cybernetics Nathan had ever seen, naked gray metal studded with ports and rivets and tiny lights, servos and reinforced wires at each clearly-articulated joint. From her massive round feet up they were heavy-looking and bulky, a sharp contrast to her surviving flesh.

That surviving flesh looked more or less rabbitlike, with short, matted fur and the requisite long ears and a dark, twitching nose. Her eyes, at least had whites and irises and thin, expressive skin around them – humanlike, not the wide, soulless blank eyes of a rabbit. Fur obscured much of her face, but Nathan thought she seemed coldly intelligent. And angry.

"We won’t hurt you. Do you know where we are?" he asked carefully.

"Yes. I’m looking for allies," she said, and Nathan was immediately struck by the harshly precise, almost resentful way she spoke. "You are not on staff records. Am I correct in assuming that you are Lewis Matla’s pet project?"

"Pet project?" He signaled to 8113 and Will, telling them to guard. Without a word, they backed away to watch for trouble. They probably weren’t happy about missing this, but they were stormtroopers. Stormtroopers obeyed orders.

The cyborg was a furry, and furries tended to lose most of the expressiveness in their lower faces, but an ear twitched. "The researchers in this facility, lacking a common goal or field, also were allowed to do as they wished; many had the time and resources to devote to highly specific personal experiments and projects. It is due in part to the escape of pet projects that the outbreak has occurred."

"We were attacked by some kind of creature after we broke out of the room we woke up in," Nathan allowed cautiously after sorting out what she’d said. He didn’t particularly like the connotations of being called a ‘pet project.’

She nodded once, curtly. Her ears should have swayed with the movement, at least a little, but they didn’t. "Matla’s interest in rebirth-through-eggs was documented, and he was known to have access to four, but it was not recorded when or to where he removed them to, only that he put them through the Sawatsky procedure."

"And what is the Sawatsky procedure?" asked Nathan.

Her eyes seemed to flash. "We waste time with this trivial exchange! Projects are running rampant through this facility, and if we do not act quickly it will be too late to save it."

Nathan didn’t have to trade glances with Tony to know that she found this every bit as suspicious as he did. Still, he tried to keep a civil tongue. "We need to know what the Sawatsky procedure is. If you want our help, you have to tell us."

There was a long moment of silence, and he wondered if she was either going to say that she didn’t know or leave. "The Sawatsky procedure, created and named by Doctor Anton Sawatsky, is a series of chemical and radiative treatments designed to enhance a variety of natural processes, including tissue regeneration and recovery time."

"Is it a super-soldier project, then?" Nathan asked, remembering Tony’s speculations.

"Not explicitly. The perfected treatment only has the desired effect on developing organisms. By the time of the outbreak, it was determined that the treatment was unfeasible for placental mammals, having the desired effect only on amniotic animals which develop within calcium-rich eggshells."

"Eggs only, then," Tony muttered. "You’d have trouble making soldiers out of chickens. And I don’t think it would be that easy to get hold of a lot of rebirth eggs." She shrugged. "Might be super-soldiers, might not."

"Have you been satisfied?" The demand was cold with forced patience. Even though the speaker was unfamiliar, he knew that tone. Here was someone used to a lot of influence, and recently stripped of it, who desperately did not want to work closely with anyone, but had no choice.

"On that subject, for now, yes," Nathan allowed.

"Good. Now, there are things I cannot do on my own-" Abruptly her ears twitched and started swiveling, and she turned, in a jerkily economical motion, to fixate on a drain set into the floor.

"What? What is it?"

"It spreads more rapidly than I calculated," she said, as if to herself.

There was a quiet, wet sound, and a low gurgling, and something started to push up through the drain. A shiny, somehow unformed-looking sort of thin column rose out of each hole in the drain cover, waving about, moving with a blind purpose that made the hairs on Nathan’s arms prickle.

"What the fuck is that?" Tony demanded, her voice hushed. The columns – they seemed to be made of something wet and clear and semiliquid, like gelatin – reached a height of about ten centimeters, then, still pushing through the drain, touched each other and fused into a larger column.

A tiny servo in the cyborg whirred faintly as she bit out, "Sedaris’s pet project. I helped make it. You can’t hurt it with kinetic weapons. Leave and get to the closest stairwell. One level up, take two rights, go straight once, and head left. You will find a security station. I will contact you there."

The column hauled itself up farther, quivering like jelly, some of it touching the tile to shove upwards. It was knee high now, and thicker than the drain, still spreading wider and pulling higher. The top formed a vague point and bent pendulously towards Tony.

The cyborg’s mechanical arm started to make horrible climbing whine as she pointed it at the gelatinous blob, her heavy metallic fingers clacking back away from her palm. With her much smaller organic hand, she started making adjustments involving some kind of control surface in the arm. "You’re in my way. Go."

Nathan was a stormtrooper, stormtroopers obeyed orders, and although she didn’t have authority over him, her tone made his body move half a step before he caught himself. He glanced furiously from the cyborg to the expanding blobby thing to the cyborg’s charging arm, which was starting to take on a glow.

Then he heard the gurgling from some other source. There was more than one drain here. An unpleasant chill swept through Nathan, and he nodded once, curtly. He left, Tony following, collected the other two troopers, and set off.

5

"Correct me if I’m wrong," 8113 said conversationally, the neutral expression still firmly in place. "You don’t know who that was. You don’t know what that was. You don’t know where that was, or where here is, or anything beyond what she claimed the Sawatsky procedure is, and that she wants us to climb up here and find a security station. Because you didn’t ask anything else."

Nathan forced himself to say nothing more than "Yes." He would have liked to defend himself, maybe say something snippy about how she probably wouldn’t have done any better. Instead, he pretended to be concentrating on climbing the steep stairs in this twisting, narrow stairwell, wedged in like an afterthought near the unpowered elevator. The lighting here was somewhat brighter, at least.

"Ah, lovely. Supposing the rabbit-cyborg isn’t telling us to walk into a trap, what do you think she wants from us?"

"Don’t know." Mercifully, 8113 didn’t respond, and they climbed in relative silence, the better to listen. There had been another of those hairy long-clawed creatures – Matla’s datapad had mentioned "krarls" – in the stairwell, this one a bit less quick than the first, and they’d killed it on one of the landings. Nathan thought they would probably be able to tell from all that noise if another was coming at them, but what about more moving blob stuff? Or that other thing Matla had mentioned.

Spiderhands. He hadn’t really thought about that before, what that meant. As he climbed, straining a bit under the weight of part of Tony’s salvage, he tried to remember if he’d heard any details on that datapad. Somehow he doubted it. Spiderhands.

"And here’s the door," Will said softly from on point. Tony, just behind him, went up and pressed an ear to its surface, and after a moment she shook her head.

"I hear nothing." She reached over to take back the salvage Nathan had carried for her, glancing sharply over as Will listened for himself.

Noticing a tightening of the skin around her eyes, Nathan rather hastily said, "We just want to be sure, you know? Four ears are better than two."

The corners of Tony’s mouth twitched, but she didn’t say anything and actually got onto a higher step, clearing the landing for them.

Will said, "It’s very faint, but there’s something on the other side. Sort of a voice, I think. It’s laughing." He rapped sharply on the door and pressed his ear against it. "Laughing a little louder now. There’s something wrong with the sound. It could just be how the door muffles it, but I’m having a bad feeling about this."

They agreed that 8113, being the big one with their most effective weapon – she’d killed the krarl on the stairs with it, after all – should go first. She took a firm grip on her improvised metal club, took two audible deep breaths, and opened the door.

One by one they slipped through after her. The hallway here, just off the useless elevator, was smaller than the one on the floor below it, but otherwise very similar. It was quite dark, with only some faint emergency lights in the ceilings and at the keycard slots still powered, enough to see where the floor and walls and doors were.

And the furtive movement of something lurching into deeper shadow.

Nathan tensed instantly and took a ready stance, gripping the light wood of the handle more tightly, and part of him noticed that Will and 8113 had done the exact same thing at the exact same time, which probably meant stormtrooper synchronity was in full swing. For a moment they did nothing, eyes adjusting, the darkness heavy enough that every time Tony, behind them, moved, it made the shadows crawl.

In the dark, something giggled. The sound was… off, somehow. Ragged.

There was no one here with a higher rank, as far as he knew. He had to act.

Clearing his throat, Nathan said, "Hello?" For a moment there was silence, and he said it again, louder. "Hello?"

Something made a very quiet retching giggle, trilling up into a terrible, quavering shriek. He flinched. It was like nothing he’d ever heard before, but it instantly made him think of the release valves on the steam-powered mechanical horse he and the rest of the Secrets had chased down in the Greater Atrium, or his officer after the fight ended and she’d become aware of her burns, or the childlike thing with bright eyes that had killed him.

Although they waited, nothing came out at them. Steeling himself, adjusting his sweating grip on the handle, Nathan took a long step forwards and said, one more time, "Hello?"

There was another shriek, a little lower in pitch this time, and the screaming creature in the shadows started towards them.

It was humanoid and emaciated, but Nathan didn’t see much more than that and the flailing things on the ends of its outstretched arms as it advanced on them, mouth still open in a keening wail.

He shouted "Stop! Get back!" at it, though he could hardly hear his own voice over the shriek. It was taller than him, and as it shuffled closer and reached for his face he moved to block with the wooden handle, but found that he was moving sluggishly, as if he was underwater. There was a ringing in his ears, a sort of pressure slowing him down. He got the handle up, but after that…

He wasn’t alone, though. One of the others would step in when they saw he wasn’t moving, right? He couldn’t turn his head and look – sluggishness aside, that was a very bad thing to do with a menace here – but they were fine, right?

The humanoid came closer, its pace slow and deliberate, almost painful. It came close enough that one of the things that should have been its fingers brushed against the handle he was gripping with slack hands, and his paralysis broke.

Tightening his fingers around the handle, Nathan jabbed the humanoid just under where he hoped its ribcage was, making the shrieking cut off as it grunted and stumbled. It opened its lipless mouth and started to keen again, but now none of them were frozen.

8113 struck it across the face and it closed its mouth and staggered back, reaching as if to press its hands to its head, but it couldn’t do that. It didn’t have fingers, and the flailing spiderleg structures that had replaced them got in the way.

Without exchanging a word, the troopers ringed it, by unvoiced consent keeping far from each other so it would have to choose. It was fairly dark, but they could see well enough. Nathan watched its head jerk from him to 8113 to Will, and knew that, while it was acting no more intelligently than a krarl or some other psychotic animal, he had to try one more time. You needed more justification to kill a humanoid.

"You can still stand down," he said, in a voice a little higher and more uncertain than he would have preferred.

From back near the stairwell and the brightest light source, Tony hissed "Are you crazy?", making the humanoid – a spiderhand, it couldn’t be anything else – jerk to stare unblinkingly at her. Its jaws parted and it giggled eerily.

"Standard procedure," he assured her, becoming the spiderhand’s center of attention again. "Stand down, lower your wea- uh, arms, and we’ll try to work something out. We’re 501st. You won’t win."

For a moment it did nothing but stare. It was anthropocentric, Nathan knew, to assume that only animals had eyes like those – not that sentients couldn’t have eyes that were sunken and red and gummed up with rheum, but he’d never seen anything truly intelligent that had eyes with such a blank, overly bright aspect.

And then it giggled long and hard until the retching, choppy laughter trilled up into a scream again, jaws gaping farther apart than human jaws could go. Its voice climbed rapidly into a high tone that buzzed in his skull, and once again he found himself almost paralyzed as it tottered towards him.

8113 came out of nowhere, swung her club in a slow-seeming arc that seemed to start impossibly far away, connected with its jaw and knocked it to the ground. Its scream turned shrill as she stood over it and clubbed it over and over.

She hit it until it stopped crying, and then until movement stopped. 8113 staggered back, lowered her dripping club, and leaned on it, gasping for breath. Will circled around and went on guard, waiting to see if anything was attracted by the sound.

A moment passed. From the stairwell, Tony craned her neck. "Is it dead?"

"Hold on." Nathan drew closer to look at the broken spiderhand, still twitching a little but clearly no longer alive. Not a lot of beings could survive having their ribcages staved in or their skulls crushed.

"Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s dead. Could you come here?"

With a shrug, the cape walked closer and stood next to him. The glowing cybernetic set into her chest cast a little more light over the body, although it deepened the shadows too.

It was very humanoid. Most of its body looked like an emaciated human, still dressed in ragged, soiled pants and a loose shirt. He couldn’t tell what gender it had been, not without removing its clothes, and he was not about to do that. Its toes were a mess, with cumbersome thick claws on the end of tiny, short digits. It might have walked digigrade or plantigrade or both, Nathan couldn’t tell.

Its head and face were more distorted, even taking into account the fact that its skull and jaw had been rather thoroughly broken, the changes were rather more evident there. Its whole braincase had been different, longer and shorter and narrower, its ears were sort of tattered and mangled but human, and its eyes, as he’d seen, had been sunken into its sockets. And it looked like it had been balding in a particularly unfortunate way, with most of its head hair fallen out and the rest, in clumps, long and oily.

Most obvious, though, was what had happened to the ends of its arms.

"It’s safe to say that this is one of the spiderhands Matla mentioned, isn’t it?" Tony sounded almost casual, though there was definitely an undertone of revulsion in her voice. Nathan glanced at her, then met Will’s gaze before the other went back to scanning the shadows. Tony wasn’t a trooper. She didn’t seem to have built up the kind of mental calluses they had. And she wasn’t 501st, so he had no idea about how well or poorly she might adapt to radically different situations.

Tony repeated the question more loudly. "Hey, boss-man. It’s one of Matla’s spiderhands, right?"

"Probably," Nathan told her. "The name does seem to fit." The ends of its arms… something about them got past those mental calluses he’d been thinking about, made him shudder. The structures – fingers? Legs? – were incredibly long and wiry and had broken in several places. Probably from the beating 8113 had killed it with.

Tony leaned over it, illuminating its stretched out, fragile jaw and long disorganized teeth, the blue light playing over its swollen, irregular throat. "It’s so ugly," she observed, with mixed disgust and fascination. "I’ve seen that much underbite before, but only in really nasty mutants or aliens, deep-sea aberrations, and severely inbred bloodlines. It’s wearing clothes. Do you think it used to be human, or was someone playing a joke that rather lacks in taste?"

Nathan knew he tended toward wild speculation, but he also knew it wasn’t necessarily a good habit to have. "I have no idea. One more thing to ask the cyborg. If we see her again."

Recovering her breath, 8113 spat on the ground, and something about the sound made Nathan glance over and see that she was wiping blood away from her mouth. She noticed that he was watching her and shrugged.

"I knew what its shriek would do that second time, so I bit the inside of my cheek. That did the trick. Egg fluid will probably take care of this."

"Go do that, then. You don’t need to ask me for permission," he said. He might have been the trooper-in-charge, but that didn’t make him an SL or one of the higher-ranked officers.

"Right." 8113 found the robe full of fluid, dipped two fingers into it, and raised them into the air with a dubious expression before putting them into her mouth, like a kid licking sauce off of her fingers. "Oh. Urgh." The accent came back to her voice, syllable by syllable. "It’s like tasting catamenia. There’s not really much flavor, but the texture and the concept are disgusting."

Tony looked up, distracted. "You’ve actually tasted yours?"

8113 shook her head, her tone becoming distant, the accent lingering. "Not me. Charlie, before the event, used to have a girlfriend and he was curious, she was receptive… It was a learning experience."

Will did not turn away from keeping watch, but he did speak up. "What, exactly, are you two talking about?"

"Women’s mysteries," Tony shot back.

Nathan cleared his throat. "We should get going. We’re not doing any good here. I’ll take point." It was the most exposed position, but he hadn’t been in front yet, and he had to do everything that he got the other troopers to do.

6

While the hallway near the stairs had been very dark, more of the emergency lights were in working order farther along. The walls were marked more frequently by dark stains here than they had been on the lower floor, and there was an unpleasant rich, organic scent in the air, like long-decayed flesh or fecal matter.

"Oh, God, I’m so filthy," Tony moaned under her breath, quietly enough that Nathan briefly wondered if he’d imagined hearing her. A little louder, as if embarrassed, she said, "I will be very happy if we find a bathroom somewhere and I can clean up. It itches and I’m probably ugly as shit."

She was covered head to toe in egg goo and blood and cerebrospinal fluids, all of it exposed to the air for long enough that it had thickened and dried on her skin and clothing, looking almost like scales that flaked off irregularly. Even so, Nathan was aware that she looked better than any of the troopers. She’d raked her hair back so that when the mess had hardened it, it looked like it was in a bun instead of being plastered to her scalp, like with Will and 8113. The scales of gunk that fell off of her tended to be large and were almost symmetrical. At some point she’d squeezed it out of her eyebrows and eyelashes, so they weren’t stiff and clumpy. And, of course, she’d avoided being wounded.

It would be no use pointing that out, he thought. "We could all use a bath," he told her, scratching at one arm. The mess itched annoyingly as it dried.

"I’d give up lager for a Jacuzzi," Tony said as they walked, half to herself. "For, say, thirty days, I’d be a good girl and not touch the stuff. If it came with a long-handled scrubbing brush I’d give up stout too."

"Huh," 8113 snorted unexpectedly. "Lager. That would be no hardship. Swill’s not fit for human consumption."

"Oh, no!" Tony said in mock-dismay. "We can’t have you writing off an entire type of beer!"

8113 tsked disapprovingly. "I’ve tried four brands. It’s all tasteless. And that’s not just one person’s tastebuds; I’m a chimera, remember? If either of them had been conflicted about it at all, I would be too, and I’m not. The only reason anyone would drink it is to get drunk."

Tony looked at her a little oddly, but said, "Hey, hey, there’s no shame in drinking to get drunk. As for taste, clearly you’ve only ever been exposed to American-style lager. It’s the overseas stuff that has all the strength and subtlety."

"I’ll believe it when I taste it," 8113 said with half a smile.

"It’s a date, then." Tony grinned and hooked her thumb into her improvised belt. "When we get out of here, I’ll introduce you to some foreign beers. Will and the boss-man can come too."

Nathan hadn’t been able to stomach anything with a high alcohol content since the Event – it didn’t like his cybernetics or something, he didn’t know – but he shrugged amicably anyway. Will, who was currently stuck with carrying the robe that had been soaked through with egg goo, said, "I almost never drink, but I’ll try a glass if you’re paying."

Tony smiled crookedly. "That’s the best news I’ve heard all day. Admittedly I’ve been the next thing to broke ever since I found myself in a world that makes no sense and my finances disappeared, but we’ll work something out."

"Just don’t stick us with the bill," Will told her darkly. "We’re not exactly making fat salaries either. There’s a lot of talk about getting paid, but it’s come to exactly nothing so far. Even with SL-1984’s patents, the communal coffers are not our wallets."

Nathan couldn’t help it. He had to complain. "We’re draining our bank accounts trying to pay for, well, anything. There’s barter with our allies, sure, but that’s goods and services, not money. Imperial credits are absolutely worthless."

"Just like the Social Security number I’ve never managed to memorize!" Tony said, making an exaggerated gesture of shock. "I should have tried talking to stormtroopers before. You always seem so dour."

Still on point, Nathan saw something ahead and motioned for them to stop. He peered at the blocky object on the ground until he realized what it was. "Something really did a number on this vending machine. Wait here, I’ll take a look."

Carefully, keeping his eyes peeled in case this was a trap, he came up and investigated it. The vending machine had been knocked over, its electrical cord trailing disconnected on the floor, and its glass face was smashed. Anything that had been inside had been taken.

"All right. It looks clear." The others followed and started to poke through the wreckage while he stood watch.

"I could use this right here," Tony muttered, bending over to scavenge something miscellaneous and unidentifiable, at least to Nathan. She added it to the mop bucket that she’d been wheeling around.

"There’s some blood here where the glass shards are," Will reported. "Something with soft feet that didn’t wear shoes. More spiderhands, maybe, or something else. It wasn’t interested in the coins. There’s a big heap of them here. If I thought I could get away with it I’d take them." But they were low value and heavy and this wasn’t the time, he didn’t say.

"Are we done here?" 8113 wanted to know. "Any food or water is gone already and I don’t feel right standing around in the open like this."

Nathan turned to her, nodding. "You have a point. Tony? Are you done?"

"Just one more thing." The cape straightened and briskly dusted herself off. "I’m good."

"Then let’s go. I’m on point again." From then until when they found the security station, they were quiet.

A door gaped open, and unlike everywhere else they’d been, it was warmly, brightly lit, at least compared to the semidarkness of the hallway. There was no one inside.

"All right, this is clearly a security station," Tony observed as they went in. "Just as clearly it’s been trashed." Many of the surveillance monitors were broken, and whether that had been done by krarls or spiderhands or something else, it had left no evidence of itself. Whatever had been in had also ransacked the cabinets, leaving them open with their contents spilling out all over the floor. "Now what?"

"She said she’d contact us," Nathan said, not meeting 8113’s gaze. The door to the station, which wasn’t missing after all, turned out to be the kind that slid into a wall. There was no power going to the mechanism and it was fairly heavy, but he was able to wrest it closed, leaving only a small gap. "We’ll have to wait a little. And we should see if there’s anything in here we can use."

There wasn’t much. If there had been food, and the shredded wrappers seemed to suggest that there had been, it was already gone. Likewise, any weapons had to be in one of the strongboxes, which they couldn’t seem to open. Something had clearly tried earlier, leaving scratches in the paint that bared the metal underneath.

There were, at least, what appeared to be security uniforms in a tall standing cabinet. That impression was confirmed by the word "Security" in white, stamped on each of them. Each was largely undecorated and made of some coarse, sturdy cloth that had been dyed either black or a very dark blue.

"These look much more professional than bathrobes," 8113 commented approvingly. Nathan resisted doing a double-take to stare at her face; it was probably just the way egg goo had dried on her skin that made it that discolored. "Are they going to fit?"

Will shook out a jacket and eyed it. It was button-up, with a low collar and two pockets on the chest. "Yeah. Yeah, I think they’ll fit. They’ll probably be uncomfortable, but they’ll fit. Pity these guys didn’t leave any underwear. This is obviously supposed to fit over civilian clothing."

"You’re stormtroopers, aren’t you? You can go commando," Tony told them airily. "Here, give me one." Going over to the cabinet and turning her back on them, she started shrugging out of her robe. Nathan hastily averted his eyes. "And don’t peek. I’m going to want to wipe off whatever I can first."

She had a good idea. Nodding at the other two troopers, trusting that they wouldn’t need him to spell it out, Nathan took a position near the door and followed suit.

"Huh," Tony said to no one in particular. "That’s distinctly odd. I don’t seem to have a navel."

Nathan twitched a little, restraining the urge to look. He heard Will say, "Nope. Eggs, remember? We’ve all got a bit of yolk still under the skin, and it’s not reabsorbed all the way yet. Sometimes when you break out of the revival egg you’re not even strong enough to eat on your own for a few days, so it works out."

"That’s one thing Matla got right," Nathan said, trying to clean his ear with the bathrobe’s sleeve. He wasn’t going to get really, truly clean unless and until they found enough water to waste on bathing; scrubbing took off a lot of the mess and scratched the itch, but he could see that his skin underneath was still stained. Still, it was something, and better than putting on fresh clothing while caked with dried egg fluid.

The uniform he’d grabbed had been meant for someone taller and more slight, with narrower shoulders, and getting his elbows in was a trial. It didn’t particularly matter. When he put it on, it only fit badly for long enough for him to grimace before the cloth seemed to loosen and flow. When it settled again, he was wearing a padded black bodysuit. If it wasn’t his underarmor, it was close enough.

"Everyone’s decent, hopefully?" he said after a moment of tugging at the bodysuit, making sure it stayed. His eggteeth poked through, but otherwise he thought he looked quite up to standards. Clothing didn’t always change into underarmor, for him or any other trooper, but it did do that when he felt unsafe. This situation qualified.

"Yeah, decent enough," Will said. He and 8113 were also in black underarmor, wrapping from throat to wrists to ankles. It was a relief to see his fellow troopers in something like proper clothing. It made this whole situation seem more real, at least. The only bad thing about this was that underarmor didn’t have any pockets, meaning that they had to use their eggteeth to shred the bathrobes, then tie the shreds into crude pocket-containing belts. These, unhappily, did not become more professional-looking at all.

Stealing a glance at everyone’s feet, Nathan saw that the wrapped suede improvised sandals had taken on a more leathery texture, stiffer and more sturdy than they had been before. His had darkened in color, turning a deep brown. Will’s and 8113’s had paled to a dark cream. It was like their footwear had considered turning into their armored boots but had given up partway through.

Tony’s uniform hadn’t changed as much, but it fitted her like it had been tailored, and Nathan thought the navy blue cloth might have become finer. The white lettering was gone, too. Somehow her eggteeth looked rakish and daring rather than out of place. "Not much style in this," she told them, carelessly dropping her robe to the floor, not looking as the silk puffed out and became coarse towel fabric again. "But at least I don’t look as much like a lost debutante." She tied her improvised gear belt around her waist again and adjusted it. "Not to slander your sandal-making skills, but do you think there’s any chance that we’ll find real shoes?"

Nathan’s attention was diverted by a thin snapping sound from the bank of monitors. After a moment a single tiny wisp of smoke rose out of one of the shattered ones. After a moment there was another snap, and another curl of smoke from a different broken monitor. On the third try, one of the intact screens lit up with the face of a rabbit furry, with wires running from offscreen up to blocky metal implants covering the openings of her ears.

He was hampered by having no idea of her name. "It’s you," he said. The other troopers and Tony came closer to look at the screen. "The one we met before, on the storage floor," he said for their benefit.

"I am sorry, but with the power situation being what it is, this communication is not two-way," the furry cyborg said, not sounding apologetic at all. She seemed to be somewhere better lit than the place where they’d first seen her, so he could tell now that her upper facial fur was a sort of strawberry blonde, her lower facial fur more of a cream shade.

"You have made it this far. I am sure that by now you have seen some hint of the scope of how much has gone wrong with this facility." The way she said it was entirely too scornful. Nathan reminded himself that he’d worked with Isards. He could handle working with people who had low opinions of him and everyone like him.

She fell silent, looking out through the screen. "Well, yes. We have," Nathan told her. "I think we figured it out when we saw a body that hadn’t been picked up."

"This is a one-way connection," 8113 said. Nathan glanced at her face and away. It hadn’t been the egg goo. It had been subtle enough to miss in low light, but here where it was bright, it was obvious. "She shouldn’t be stopping for comments like-"

"I will need your help getting the situation back in hand," the cyborg stated. "This necessitates that I brief you."

She launched into the explanation. "When this facility was constructed, a Xanadu AI designated ‘Catherine’ allowed herself to be installed into it. Running and maintaining the facility’s automated security elements were among her responsibilities. Unfortunately, during the outbreak the main power generator was damaged, forcing her offline. The emergency generator is not sufficient to power her or the security systems."

"And you want us to do something about this," Tony said in the brief pause.

"I need you to bring one or more of the auxiliary generators back online. We met on the lowest level, Storage. According to sensors you are now in the security office of the second lowest level, Five. The first of the auxiliary generators is on this floor. Activating it will not be enough to restore the automated security elements, but it will make activating a second and third generator easier."

"Right," Tony folded her arms across her chest.

8113 inhaled sharply. "Hey. Hey. Did you hear that?"

Nathan heard nothing. But Will frowned and took up his broom handle. "Oh, damn. We’ve managed to corner ourselves. They’re coming."

Tony’s eyes darted all over the room and settled on the door. It was where Nathan had left it, dragged as closed as it could get but with a narrow opening remaining. All that could be seen through it was shadow; it was bright enough in the security room that the hall seemed pitch black. "What’s coming?"

"More spiderhands," 8113 stated tightly. "Can’t you hear that sound they’re making?"

7

"Fuck!"

That was all Tony or anyone else had time to say before something in the opening moved. Finally Nathan heard it, a ragged almost-giggle. Things began to happen very quickly.

Two long spiderlegs extended through the crack in the door.

The cyborg snapped, "There are weapons in the strongbox closest to the door! The combination is nine oh nine four two six."

8113 opened her mouth and gave a warcry laced with disgust and indignation, charging forwards and smashing the spiderhand’s attenuated digits with her club. Another hand came through the door and the tips caught at her. The giggling started to build in intensity.

Nathan lunged for the strongbox, almost slamming his body into it, and started wildly pawing at the interface.

"Nine oh nine four two six!" The cyborg repeated.

He stabbed the numbers as Will followed 8113, abandoning the broom handle and starting to wrench at the spiderlegs with his bare hands, bending them in ways they were not designed to bend. But there was more than one of them on the other side of the door.

The strongbox clicked unlocked and swung open. Nathan grabbed one of the things inside and hesitated. It wasn’t shaped like any gun or blaster he’d ever seen.

"Just point the forked part and squeeze the trigger!"

"I can’t tell where or what the trigger is!" The item he’d grabbed was a sort of bent… pole thing, awkward-looking, the kind of weapon made by someone who liked aesthetics and would never imagine that anyone who had never been part of the design process would need to use them in an emergency. It looked like a tool or an item of decorative sculpture.

"Move!" Tony shoved past him, grabbed one of the things, and turned it over several times. "Electrodes. Right. I think I see how this works." She curled her hand around the middle part of it, letting the straps hang down loose, and took off towards the door. Nathan followed, trying to hold his in the same way.

Will was slashing at the hands and spiderlegs with his remaining eggtooth. 8113 was shouting at him to move, get out of the way, raising her metal club like she would swing through him.

"Out!" Tony snapped. "Out of the way! Give me a clear shot!"

Nathan told them "Move!" and they drew away. The spiderhands reached through and finally slid the door open, trilling purposefully as they tottered in on clawed toes.

Tony aimed the forked weapon tool at them and did something. There was a click.

Nothing happened.

Tony did something else, saying "Maybe if I-"

A blue-white light built between the forks and then lashed out to strike and play over the spiderhands, crackling malevolently. The creatures’ giggling trills cut off as they spasmed. When the thin beam cut off, blue-white energy still crackled and flickered over them as they shuddered and tried to stand. A reek of ozone and scorched hair entered his nose.

"Lightning gun," Nathan breathed, filled with a new respect for the ornamental-looking things. "It’s a lightning gun."

Tony said, "So that’s how you do it. Not exactly intuitive. You’ve got to squeeze the handle first, and keep it squeezed, to get the current between the electrodes. Then you pull the thumb trigger." She demonstrated. Another arc of lighting lanced across the intervening space to strike the spiderhands.

"It’s not a precision weapon," she said in a stage voice, like she was giving a presentation, "and there are a few recoil problems, but you could do worse." She shot the spiderhands again, watching as they convulsed and keeping the beam up.

The lightning faltered, the bolt thinning and finally flickering off. Tony looked at the lightning gun, bemused. "I didn’t know that would happen."

Everyone sort of stood in place, waiting for something to happen. The spiderhands twitched for a moment longer, then lay still, steaming faintly.

"Think they’re dead," Nathan ventured. "8113, try to get the door closed again. Will, poke one."

"Why me?" Will complained, stepping up while 8113 wrestled with the door.

"You’ve got a wooden mop handle. It probably won’t conduct electricity, just in case they have a charge." He had a handle of his own, but it was back over near the strongbox, where he’d left it. And what was being the leader good for if he couldn’t make his followers poke things for him?

"Well, we can hope," the other trooper said. Gingerly at first, and keeping as much distance between him and it as possible, he jabbed the closest spiderhand’s side, catching at its ragged clothing. He tried the other two creatures with the same lack of result and started smacking feet and faces, working the tip of the handle into their mouths. Finally he stopped. "Yeah, I’m pretty sure they’re dead or comatose at the least. Prolonged electric shock isn’t good for anyone or anything."

Even so, he looked dubious. "It’s like we’re setting the stage for a horror movie cliché, though. Once I check a pulse or we turn our backs they’ll be up and gnawing on our spines."

"I know one way to make sure that they’re dead," 8113 said, raising her club grimly.

Tony winced almost imperceptibly and turned away, looking over the lightning gun again. "Hmm. You know, I think the problem here is that it ran out of juice." She did something with the end that didn’t have electrodes, raising her voice over the sounds. "Look, it’s powered by what I think might be just a D-battery. Lightning or anything particularly lightninglike uses a lot of energy, and D-batteries contain only twelve thousand miliAmpere-seconds, at best. That’s not nearly enough for a lightshow like we just saw, but this thing is packed with all these other mechanisms, so there might be other batteries in here."

"If you say so," Nathan allowed, totally out of his depth.

She smirked. "Yes, boss-man, I say so." Wistfully, she added, "If I just had a length of insulated power cable and a couple of universal adaptors there wouldn’t be a power issue at all."

8113 finished. She and Will dragged the bodies into a heap in the corner, for lack of anywhere else to put them. Then, back at the bank of monitors, the rabbit cyborg called their attention back to her screen.

"If you continue to use Nguyen’s experimental electroshock weapon, it is advisable that you wear insulated gloves. There are several pairs in the strongbox. Doctor Nguyen hoped to develop a long-range wireless taser for use in security situations. She succeeded, but never got the chance to perfect it." The way she said it was incredibly bland, as if this Doctor Nguyen had transferred somewhere else or taken another job, and wasn’t holed up with other survivors at best.

"Properly clothed and armed, you will be better able to restore power to this facility," she told them imperiously. "Reaching the first auxiliary generator should be a simple task, even for such as you. I will attempt to reach another, and so Sedaris’s pet project will have its attention divided. It can be hurt with Nguyen’s experimental electroshock weapon, but not killed."

Tony scratched at her wrist, appearing utterly casual. "Sedaris’s pet project being the drainpipe monster we saw before."

"It is very dangerous," the cyborg insisted. "Sedaris’s pet project takes apart flesh and bone at the molecular level and integrates it into itself. Electrocuting it causes part of its body mass to lose cohesion and liquefy, but as long as its core is intact, it can simply send out more of itself to recover lost mass. I have not yet managed to locate its core."

"You will almost certainly encounter a branch of it on the way to the auxiliary generator. It is attracted to electricity." The image of her face was replaced with a floorplan with a red arrow that presumably started where they were and ended where they were supposed to go. Nathan studied it while he could, committing it to memory. He didn’t know if Tony could do this, but 8113 and Will certainly could. The floor was bigger and wider-sprawling than he would have expected.

"It is also possible if not probable that you will encounter further resistance. Activating the generator will be simple. We must restore power to get this facility back under control!" For once the cold control in her voice slipped. "Without power our security measures are useless, as are our environmental controls and every safeguard we have! Any other survivors are of no help in this situation. There is no way to leave or contact the outside. You must work with me."

"We get it," Nathan said. "What should we call you?"

She hesitated. Then, "You may call me Jan the Rabbot." The floorplan on the screen blanked, became a horizontal line, and faded to black. For a moment, the room was silent.

"Well," Tony said at last, her voice rich with suspicion.

"Well what?" Will asked.

"Well, very much doubt that she was telling the truth at first. When she said the connection wasn’t two-way." Nathan folded his arms over his chest, echoing the pose that Tony had taken. "Which does mean she can probably hear us now, too," he thought out loud.

He perversely half-expected the screen to come alive again, and for Jan to protest. She didn’t. No one said anything, which, once again, meant it was up to him.

"We should see if that combination works on any of the other strongboxes. It was… uh…" Nathan pressed his lips together and forced himself to remember. "Nine oh nine four two six."

The combination didn’t work on any of the other strongboxes, unfortunately, and assuming that all the others also had six-digit codes and none of their group was Force-Sensitive, trying to guess would be a waste of time. They all took the time to pick up and put on the gloves folded in the bottom of the opened strongbox, which for the three stormtroopers warped into somewhat thinner gloves that they could only hope still resisted current. If that even was what the gloves were supposed to do. They weren’t rubber or latex.

Tony then gave all of them a fast course on how to hold and fire Nguyen’s electroshock weapon, discovering in the process that the straps secured the battery end to the forearm and that a second handle unfolded from the dangerous end, letting them grasp it with their free hands and aim a little more steadily. To start the current between the electrodes, they had to squeeze the main handle and get it to click.

"I suppose it’s a safety mechanism, sort of," she said, holding the electroshock weapon up. "The thumb trigger does exactly nothing if pulled on its own. I’m not demonstrating firing this thing now, and you probably shouldn’t try it, since I don’t know if these things recharge themselves or not. But there’s just a bit of recoil, and it cuts off as soon as you stop squeezing either the trigger or the handle."

Will sighted along the electroshock weapon. "Well, it’s better than a mop handle, but I’d have preferred something with more precision. …I know, I know, I’m 501st and I’ll deal with it, but I’d like that complaint logged."

"We’ll include that detail in the report," Nathan told him dryly.

Strapping hers to her gloved forearm, 8113 said, "We should still bring the wood handles, and I’m still going to carry the club unless and until we find a better melee weapon. You don’t run out of club. It gets bent entirely out of shape and it might break, but I won’t run out of it."

"Rabbot Jan called these things Nguyen’s electroshock weapons. I think that’s too long a name for casual use," Tony said. "We should go with something short and pithy. I vote zapper."

8113 raised her eyebrows, though otherwise her face was smooth, not giving away what she was thinking. Nathan tried to pay attention to the topography of her face, not the skin tones. "Rather casual, isn’t it?"

"Hey, we’re 501st. We call our weapons ‘blasters,’" Will pointed out. "I don’t see the problem."

"You call yours a blaster, but that’s just a type, not specific. I call mine-" 8113 faltered, looking utterly lost. "I… Leah had an E-11. Charlie had a Deece. They were good weapons. …Well maintained."

"We can figure out something else if you like," Nathan offered. He was uneasy about this. She was a chimera. Outside of combat, how did you deal with someone who had once been two people?

"No… no, zapper’s fine." 8113 shook herself and smoothed her features back to blank. "Security zapper if we want to be more pedantic. I don’t have a real problem with the name. I just feel like someone should play Sith’s advocate and question things. Might as well be me."

"Are we good?" Everyone was. The exhausted zapper went into Tony’s janitor bucket, which had also collected a number of the other things she’d found. "Then let’s move out."

8

It took a moment to adjust to the semidarkness outside of the room. Once they’d done that, Tony several seconds behind the troopers, they moved out, keeping alert. Nathan took point, navigating according to the map he’d committed to memory. One of the other troopers, and maybe Tony, could have done it, but if he was going to make the decisions he had to be willing to do what they did. Except for poking dead things with sticks. That was all Will’s.

"So, what was that about why you think Jan the Rabbot was lying?" Will asked softly behind him.

Nathan glanced through a doorway and saw nothing, heard nothing. He ventured, "She said the connection wasn’t two-way. Meaning that she can’t have known what we were doing or saying, right?"

"Which makes it odd," Tony said, "there was that whole thing where she kept pausing after she said anything. Certainly she acted like she could hear us."

There was a sound from 8113, like she was moving her club to rest on her other shoulder. "Still, if she knew we were there at all, it’s not too much a stretch that she also knew when the spiderhands got to us. There might have just been a camera feed coming from that room that she could see, and she read lips or just estimated what she thought we’d say. Despite what we automatically assume, two-way audio-video feeds are pretty rare. Screens don’t typically work that way."

"I get what you’re saying. But if the power situation is so bad that all security measures are down and there’s no way to contact the outside world, why spend any energy on a camera?" Tony asked. "And why not tell us she could see us? She was lying about something. Why? If she needs our help that badly, why not trust us outright?"

"I guess we’ll find out," Will said. He paused, and in a different tone said, "We do know how to start up a generator, right?"

"Leave that to me. I’ll figure something out," Tony told them.

They fell largely silent then, Nathan indicating which way they were going by making hand gestures and letting them follow. The place was quiet. Very quiet. Quiet enough that their breathing and footsteps and the muffled rattling of the mop bucket seemed loud, quiet enough that whenever they stopped to listen for trouble he heard almost a ringing. Unpleasantly quiet.

It was almost a relief when they heard snuffling and snarls and found a krarl tearing at a body just off the route they were following.

"I’ve got this," 8113 said immediately as the krarl bared its teeth at them. It was smaller than the other two they had seen, possibly younger, and when she took a step towards it, the creature whirled and fled, knuckles thumping loudly on the floor. "Aw, damn it. They’re like Femtroopers. They won’t stand and fight if they’re outmatched."

She and Will stood guard while Nathan examined the body. "It’s very fresh," he decided, and gingerly bent down to touch skin, then stood straight again and nudged the ungnawed arm with his foot. "Not much odor. It’s cold now, but rigor mortis hasn’t had time to set in yet. Not sure about livor mortis. The light’s not good enough to see if blood’s really started pooling in the body yet."

"I really needed to know that," Tony said, averting her eyes.

He ignored that. "She can’t have died more than a few hours ago. By the lab coat, I’d guess that she was a researcher, like Matla." There wasn’t as much blood as had been around Matla. That might have simply meant that she hadn’t died here and something had dragged her body to this place, or it might have meant that she hadn’t been mauled until after her heart had stopped. Like Matla, though, her features were pretty much unrecognizable. There was a wedding band on her intact hand. "Hold on, she’s got an ID card." Retrieving it, he held it up to Tony.

She took it, reluctantly unbuttoned her shirt enough to free the glow, and read it out loud. "Huh. L.F. Almeida, Research Assistant. Unit Four. By the bar, I’m guessing it’s not just ID, but an access card." She handed it back and closed her shirt again. "When we turn the generator on, the lights had better be working."

"Matla’s card is like this too," Nathan said. "We got into some of the rooms on the lowest level with it, remember?" He glanced over the body again. "If she was able to hold out this long – however long it’s been since things got out of control – there may be others. And it’s been at least a few days."

"How do you know that? I mean, besides Matla’s log. I know it implied that things went to shit and progressively got worse."

"Look at her hair," he told her. "It’s midlength and the parts that didn’t get covered in blood are oily, unkempt, tangled. Almeida was either naturally uninterested in it – have to check the ID photo to know that – or hasn’t had the time to maintain it for at least a couple of days."

"Ah." From the sound of it, Tony had something more to say. He waited. "You’re terribly casual about this, Nathan."

She had never called him by his name before. Nathan looked at her in surprise. Her face was a studied blank, more deliberate than 8113’s default expression. Was she accusing him?

His immediate response was defensive. He killed it before it could form and tried to address this more carefully.

"Tony, it’s a body. A messy one, but seen worse before." Her face was still blank. Suppressing a sigh, he tried to explain, remembering just in time to use personal pronouns. "Part – I’m part of the Five Hundred and First. While I’m not a name, if you start asking me questions about the Corulag campaign or, well, anything like that, I’ll start remembering that debacle in greater and greater detail."

He rubbed his thumb across the slightly cooler artificial flesh of his cybernetic fingers. "Right now most of those memories are consciously only potential, but unconsciously, they might as well be real. I got sick at my first sight of a corpse years ago." If he thought about it, he knew, the details would start rushing in. So he didn’t think about it. It was enough to know that it had happened. "These things do get easier."

"And it’s bad that a civilian died. Or I think she was a civilian, anyway. I won’t argue that," he said. "Worse than if a combatant died, enemy or ally or whatever. Civilians – bystanders, we call them – are different. Sure. It’s just that I’m a Black Hole stormtrooper. There’s a point where not only did it stop bothering me, the fact that it doesn’t bother me doesn’t bother me anymore." He’d mangled the syntax there, but pressed on. "I’ve more or less managed to de-personize bodies when I’m not in a safe environment. It’s a soldier thing. Since I’m 501st, I’m pretty stable otherwise. Probably."

"I get that," Tony mused. "Really, I do. Some of my best friends are soldiers."

"And it’s not like I’ve never seen a dead body before," she said after a few heartbeats. "Maybe I’ve never seen anyone dismembered, and I haven’t been doing this for even a year yet, but I don’t think of myself as sheltered. I mean, people I knew and was close to have died near me, sometimes violently. And I’ve killed a few people, too."

"I know," he said. "You’re a cape, though. When capes die, you’re either mostly intact or you leave no body behind. Things are different for you. That’s not bad or good, it’s just the way these things are."

Tony nodded and said nothing for a bit, gazing distantly through him. "Give me her card again," she said at last. He passed it to her and watched her stroke its edge with her thumb. Finally she pocketed it and nodded. "All right. I’ll try and have issues when there’s time for them."

"That’s all any of us can do," he said, and signaled Will and 8113 that it was time to move out.

The improvised sandals chafed and there were some small, inexplicable sounds from some of the air vents, but the only other event of interest was when they cornered a second small krarl, or maybe it was the same one that they’d seen munching on Almeida, and 8113 clubbed it to death. It had been feeding on what they first thought was another human, but turned out to be a thoroughly mangled spiderhand.

"Good," Nathan said, taking one of the mop handles out of Tony’s janitor bucket and using it to prod the spiderhand’s limbs, trying to determine how long it had been dead. Several hours, judging by the smell, the rigidity, and how well it had been chewed. Probably not as long dead as Matla had been when they found him, though.

"I assume you’re saying that because this means they fight each other and won’t start teaming up on us, right?" By the sound of it Tony was forcing herself to sound utterly unmoved.

Nathan nodded. "Exactly. It’s always helpful when your enemies aren’t friends. Do you think this is a younger krarl, or just stunted?"

"I have no idea." Dead animals, apparently, didn’t provoke as much of a reaction in Tony as dead humanoids did. "Can we get going again?"

Eventually, they reached the point on the map where the red line had turned into an arrowhead. Ahead was the generator, a room much like any of the others, though there was a symbol stenciled above the door indicating the room’s purpose. They didn’t go in or even go very close. Not right away.

The two other troopers, having the best hearing, reported wet sounds and gurgling. Jan had been telling the truth about Sedaris’s pet project being in there.

Will nervously stroked his security zapper. "I think it’s moving around a fair bit. So, what do you suppose a Sedaris’s pet project looks like?"

Tony exchanged a glance with Nathan and shrugged. "Well, what we saw back on the storage floor with Rabbot Jan was semifluid and pretty amorphous. Could be shaped like anything. I’m guessing a blob of some sort. Maybe a puddle with waving appendages. Maybe a slug."

"Maybe a slug with waving appendages," Will said in the same dry tone. "Great."

Nathan unfolded the secondary handle on his zapper. "The zappers aren’t terribly accurate, and the door’s not wide enough to let all of us in at once. I think only one of us should shoot. Otherwise you might hit me, and I’ve got enough cybernetics that I’d be in trouble. None of you would like it, either."

"Can I be the shooter?" Will grinned crookedly. "I haven’t killed anything yet. It’s all been 8113 and Tony."

"Oh, you think you’ll be able to catch up with me, is that it?" Unexpectedly 8113 was smirking and using the clone accent, her voice playful and taunting.

Clearly taken aback, Will rallied. "Well, yes, if I get the chance, not only will I catch up, I’ll beat you."

"You’ll get that chance," Nathan interrupted, hoping to cut off the start of a kill-count contest. He stared at the dark, open doorway. He really, really didn’t want to send them into a small room occupied with an opponent that they’d never seen in action before. An opponent, he remembered, that took apart flesh and reassembled it into itself.

An idea came to him. "We’re turning back. Leave your bucket here."

"What?" Tony’s look of disbelief almost made him laugh.

"I said we’re turning back. We’re going to find the little krarl Thirteen killed back there, bringing it back, and pitching it into the room before we go in. It’s better than going in cold."

And they did. Retracing their steps at a trot, compromising the need to move quickly with the need to be quiet, didn’t take long.

The krarl had been about as tall as a medium-sized dog, though its tail made it longer and heavier. Nathan dragged it along by that tail, fingers knotting in that oddly soft hair. On the way back, the others trotting along keeping an ear out, Will heard distant spiderhand giggling that rose into shrieks that even Nathan could make out. But the other troopers assured him that it sounded like they were fighting krarls, not more human survivors. They were 501st, so he trusted that they weren’t lying.

Back at the door to the generator, he changed his grip on the creature’s tail while 8113 took hold of its snout. Hugging the wall, they swung it between them, careful of its dangling limbs, and tossed it into the doorway.

After a moment of nothing, a sort of gelatinous tongue stretched languidly out of the room, groped along the floor until it found the body, and looped around one of the dead krarl’s back feet. It retracted then, dragging the creature into the room with a wet sound.

"All right," Nathan said, startling himself. "Let’s go."

Will in front, they slipped into the room to confront Sedaris’s pet project.

9

In a way, it was, as Will had sardonically guessed, sort of a slug with waving appendages. But when Nathan had pictured that, he’d pictured something opaque and mostly solid, sliding on its limbless belly, appendages stirring the air above it. He hadn’t imagined a mass of seething protoplasm moving on a sort of wheel of maybe two dozen dully pointed, jointless legs or tongues or tentacles. They looked the same as the one that had hooked and pulled in the dead krarl. Some of them were even now tucking it up into its body, reabsorbing into the translucent bulk.

The limbs of the wheel-shape extended and contracted in a rolling motion, ones at its front extending to touch the ground while the ones in the back contracted away and flowed across the top of it to reach its front and extend again. The parts of its body that did not send out limbs of the wheel bulged like boiling water, sometimes extending more limbs. Some of those trailed against the bulky housing of what had to be the generator. More extended out, questing vaguely towards the four in the doorway.

Unlike with the krarls or the spiderhands, Sedaris’s pet project lacked that spitting animal defiance and fury. There was something more alien about it – he hesitated to label it more primitive, but perhaps simpler. There seemed to be little bubbles suspended in it, and the dark shadow of the dead krarl was visible at the center of its mass, but it didn’t even seem to have any organs. He’d have been able to see them.

A long limb or tail or umbilical trailed behind it, disappearing into a drainpipe set some distance away in the floor.

"Wait a bit," Nathan said tersely. "Don’t want to hit the generator."

Sedaris’s pet project didn’t respond to his voice. Maybe it was deaf. Some of its appendages were questing along the floor towards them. Experimentally, Nathan sidestepped; after a moment it roll-walked nearer as the appendages jerked and extended more specifically towards him. One or two yearned in Tony’s general direction, but Nathan was closer.

He nodded to Will, not taking his eyes away. "I’m the bait, then. Wait for it."

Nathan sidestepped away, staying in the room and making sure that he was closer to it than the others were. With a series of squelches, Sedaris’s pet project followed, like a bloated balloon on too many reaching strings. It was slower than a krarl, slower even than a spiderhand, and there seemed to be sort of a lag between stimulus and response, but still it moved purposefully after his footsteps. And it might have been his imagination, but that lag time seemed to be shortening.

He ran his tongue over his lips. "Ready? Fire."

There was a click as Will squeezed the handle and started the current. Then the lightning arced away from the security zapper and struck Sedaris’s project full on, current illuminating its entire body. It rippled violently, the small krarl falling out of it to hit the floor with a wet thump.

The lightning cut off and the project sort of dissolved, splashing across the floor into a kind of chunky gel. There was a smell of ozone, a bit like being around an ignited lightsaber but sort of sharper. Sedaris’s pet project didn’t move except to basically liquefy. Some gurgled down the drain. Most of it just pooled passively, gleaming in the low light. Small bits stayed solid, like chunks in soup or stew.

He wished he hadn’t thought of that. They hadn’t found any food or water yet. The project smelled wet and alien, but not repulsive. He told himself that it didn’t look like soup, it looked like vomit, but it was too late. Sedaris’s pet project certainly didn’t look appetizing and he didn’t have even the slightest desire to taste it, but Nathan’s body had decided that it was hungry. There had to be food somewhere in this facility.

"That was anticlimactic," 8113 remarked after a moment, drawing his attention back to the task at hand.

"Keep an eye on it in case it re-forms, and watch the drain," Nathan ordered before turning to Tony, who had just pulled her janitor bucket in from the hallway. "Can you get the generator running?"

Tony unbuttoned enough of her shirt to shine her artificial heart out over the generator’s massive barrel turbines and the controls. She leaned over to examine those controls, splashing heedlessly through Sedaris’s pet project. "Mmm. Not a design I’m all that familiar with. Give me a minute. I don’t want to do exactly the wrong thing."

He watched her looking over the auxiliary generator until he could say with absolute certainty that he had no idea what she was doing. It didn’t take long. He turned his attention then to the dead krarl lying in the middle of the puddle the project had made after getting zapped.

The krarl, soaked through with liquid project the consistency of mucus, looked like it had been rotting underwater for days. Or maybe like it had been washed with acid. Exposed soft tissues had been in the process of dissolving, and while its hair and claws were still there, they were the worse for wear.

Uneasily, Nathan wondered just how many branches Sedaris’s pet project might have. Jan the Rabbot had said that she was trying to reach another auxiliary generator guarded by another limb, and that as long as the core lived, it wouldn’t die. It might be absolutely huge.

How many people might have gone into it, he thought suddenly. People, krarls, spiderhands, whatever else was here. Obviously it didn’t care if they were alive or dead, and if Jan had been telling the truth when she said that it couldn’t be hurt by blunt force trauma, back when they’d first seen her…

It obviously traveled through drainage pipes. Maybe it had eaten and assimilated nearly everyone and everything here in this facility. Maybe only those things too fast and willing to run had survived, the spiderhands and the krarls and a handful of researchers, like Almeida and Jan the Rabbot. And those survivors were now killing each other.

He, two other stormtroopers, a cape without the tech that made her super, and a semihostile furry cyborg might just be the last remaining thinking creatures here.

Sobering thought, he told himself, shaking it off. He could only hope that it wasn’t true. There was nothing he could do about people who had already died. Better to keep going, keep moving forward.

He left the generator room long enough to grab Tony’s janitor bucket where they’d left it and bring it inside with them. The hall was dark, quiet, and empty, so he did this task quickly.

8113 was crouching in the shallowest edge of the puddle and examining a chunk of nonliquid project, her habitual blank expression in place. He went to her, consciously walking slowly so he didn’t splash, and she held up the solid chunk in her gloved fingers, letting him see it.

"There are structures in this," she said without preamble. "Veins or strings or nerves ran through the whole thing, connecting these little nodes. The strings are basically liquid, but the nodes are pretty solid. Small enough to go through drainage holes too."

The node was very pale and bumpy. Glancing around, he saw scores of other solid bits scattered in the puddle. "So it’s not just an undifferentiated mass of gel," he said. "Do you think the nodes held it together and the charge from the security zapper disrupted them?"

"I can’t say." 8113 gave a trooper’s armor-shrug, raising and lowering one arm out at her side. The gesture was more obvious than what most people used, since it could be hard to see a normal shrug when everyone was in armor. "But it’s completely inert now. Good thing you got us these security zappers."

Back over at the generator, there was a hum that built up into a confident droning, and Tony stepped back, her gloved hands posted on her hips, her posture radiating satisfaction. "There," she said. "Done."

After a series of clacking ticks, the florescent lights above came on loudly, momentarily blinding each of them . The lights gave out a very high electric whine, almost too high-pitched to hear. He held still until his eyes adjusted to the brightness, hearing from the muttered complaints and lack of splashing that his companions were doing the same.

"You know, I really should have seen that coming," Tony said as his vision, and presumably the others’, cleared and let him see.

Being better lit – he really couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination call this well-lit, since the florescent lighting was quite inconsistent – didn’t really improve the look of the place. The mucus-like liquefied project was yellowish and had splashed not just on the floor but to some extent on the walls. Beneath it the tiles were sort of dingy and had a used look. The flickering of those lights didn’t help much. Some lights were steady enough, some just flickered, and some flickered quickly enough that everything they illuminated seemed to pulse and throb unnervingly. Why had there been a drain in this room in the first place?

In the dark, the facility could have been anything. Lit, it looked much more like a lab where something had gone horribly wrong. Were there other monsters running around? Had there been a wide variety of them at first, and most of them had by this point gotten killed off by the krarls, the spiderhands, Jan the Rabbot, and Sedaris’s pet project?

He did his best to suppress his imagination. Speculating wasn’t going to help in this situation.

Examining the generator room, they found that along with the door that they’d come in by, there was another, narrower door that didn’t lead out into the hallway. Power being restored apparently meant that all closed doors had locked that way, and there would be no more levering them open. When Nathan tried Matla’s keycard in the reader, it audibly unlocked and opened.

The room beyond was a bathroom, relatively pristine other than the not-entirely-steady flickering lights. All of the stalls were unlocked and empty, seeming weirdly mundane and innocent. Most importantly, there was an enormous stainless steel sink with a tap included, and pipes.

"Wait," Nathan cautioned the others. He was thirsty now and his skin crawled with filth, but he wasn’t stupid, and neither were the others. "For all we know, Sedaris’s pet project isn’t just in the drains, it’s in the water lines too."

Will sighed. "Look, isn’t there something shorter we can call it? ‘Oh no, it’s Sedaris’s Pet Project!’ isn’t something you can shout if you see it coming. It would be on you before you could get it out."

"I vote blob," Tony said instantly, as if she’d been thinking about it and saving up the name.

"Why would you wait to say the entire name before doing anything?" 8113 wanted to know. "We’ll end up shortening it anyway, to Sedaris or Project. I’d like to know if it has an official label. The way Rabbot Jan said it didn’t convince me that that’s what she calls it."

"I still like having short, easy-to-shout names," Will insisted. "Blob would do well enough, but I think it’s taken. There’s that movie from the fifties, and one might have spawned at Xanadu."

Tony shook her head. "’Blob’ is a very generic word. It could describe anything. If we decided to call it, say, ‘The Ever-Lovin’ Blue Eyed Thing’ or I don’t know, ‘John Carpenter’s The Thing’, that would be a very different story."

"Don’t even joke about that," 8113 said, crossing her arms over her chest. "Have you ever faced any pieces of The Thing? It’s harrowing work even with an SL on our side."

"You don’t mean Ben Grimm, I see. Well. I didn’t know it existed," Tony said. "That’s… that’s kind of terrible. Does it do that stunt with the heads?"

8113 said only "Yes," but in a voice that didn’t invite further questioning. Her dappled face was scowling-blank now. Tony looked at the other two troopers, but they didn’t volunteer anything.

"Okay, okay. We won’t call it John Carpenter’s The Thing," Tony said, her eyes widening. "Obviously I misspoke. Sorry."

"I do understand your point," 8113 said, letting her arms slide back to her sides. "For myself, I honestly don’t care what we do or don’t call it, as long as it’s not in the water."

Nathan stepped up, took the mop handle that hadn’t been used to poke dead things, and cautiously used it to turn the faucet valve. Those handles were already proving more useful than he’d ever have expected. Liquid, seeming white because of all the bubbles, poured out instantly and hit the bottom of the sink basin with a dull roar. He jumped before remembering that that was how metal faucets with big metal basins sounded. That was normal.

"It looks, sounds, and smells like water," Will said hopefully.

Nathan swiped the handle through the stream, which splashed and pushed the wood down in his hands but did nothing else, then pulled it to himself so he could touch the moisture and rub it between his fingers. It felt like water, too. Finally, he transferred a fat drop from the broom handle to his fingers to his mouth.

"It’s water," he said at last.

They splashed their hands and arms and ducked their heads under the cold flow, then drank, taking turns at filling cupped hands with water. There was a faintly metallic processed taste to it, but it still seemed delicious.

All of them took turns in the stalls and then washed some more, taking a cue from Will when he took off his improvised belt, soaked it in the stream, and wrung it out.

The sink was just big enough that they could have more or less bathed in it, one at a time, but Nathan didn’t feel safe enough here to let them linger that long. Drinking their fill and sluicing down any exposed skin had to do for now. He noticed 8113 looking at the reflective metal of the basin. Fortunately, it there wasn’t a mirror and all the reflections from the basin were so distorted that he didn’t imagine that she could notice anything.

Finally, to a chorus of complaints, Nathan turned the water back off and they trudged together back into the generator room.

Water was still dripping steadily out of Will’s hair. "So I guess we should head back to the security room and wait for the Rabbot again, huh?"

Nathan had opened his mouth to respond, but a familiar sensation hit him like a tidal wave. He swayed on his feet, and for a moment he denied it, tried to pretend it was something in the water or some aftereffect of breaking out of the egg so recently.

But he was 501st, and denial wasn’t really one of his options.

"Oh, shavit," he said with utter calm. The world sort of spun and twisted, blurring his vision, he had a sense of falling, and everything started to recede away from him. Almost like the tunnel effect. He wished it was the tunnel effect. But instead of the world and everything in it getting smaller as it got farther away…

As ever, it only took a moment before it was done. The liquid project he’d been standing in seemed deeper, threatening to wash over his toes. 8113 and Will and Tony all towered over him, big faces looking down with various expressions of surprise.

"Dying and getting brought back didn’t cure me," he called up at them, knowing he sounded petulant and not particularly caring.

10

8113 exhaled slowly through pursed lips and strode closer to him, making liquid project lap over the tops of his feet. He forced himself not to wince as she knelt, suddenly coming much closer, and extended a massive-seeming gloved hand. She held it reassuringly steady as he stepped on and on the way back up to a standing position. This might have been a little below where his eye level had been two minutes ago, but it felt perilously high up. Fortunately he’d lost his fear of heights months ago.

"I was hoping this wouldn’t happen," 8113 said. Her voice was no deeper than usual, but the way the vibrations carried down her arm and up through her fingers changed the feel of it, lent it a sort of rumble. As far as that went, no one had ever beat SL-1984. Presumably other Vaders, with their artificially enhanced voices, had a similar reverberation, but that was something no one really wanted to know.

"So was I, Thirteen," he said, using that overloud stage-voice he’d been forced to learn at about the same time when he’d lost his fear of heights. He hated being this size, being forced to rely on people so completely. With all this time he’d had plenty of chances to get used to it, true, but that didn’t make it any less irritating.

She transferred him to her shoulder. He wanted to stand and it was broad enough that he could have done so, but the constant minor movement as her weight went from one leg to the other made that problematic. She didn’t have long enough hair for him to grab to keep himself from falling, either. From experience he knew that at this size falling several times his height wasn’t as big a deal as it was at human scale, but it still wasn’t something he wanted to try again.

He settled for a sort of kneeling crouch, leaving his hands low enough to grab at her bodysuit if it came to that. It would have to do. Sooner or later he’d get his shoulder-legs again and would be able to stand even when she was walking, he knew.

"Thanks," he told 8113. She armor-shrugged, muscles swelling and subsiding under his feet and hands. Very quickly he found that it was hard to grip her bodysuit, although he didn’t fall.

There was no way, now, to avoid seeing her face in bright enough light to notice what was strange about it. He was fairly sure that Will had seen it too, but had similarly been trying not to stare. Tony he wasn’t sure about. Maybe she just didn’t care.

From here, at this scale where he was considerably less massive than her head, he could see that even the solid-looking parts had tiny speckles and splotches of the other shade in them. 8113’s face was dappled and irregularly patterned with two similar but still visibly distinct skin tones, one slightly darker than the other. They blended together evenly on her neck, or at least had a much more subtle mottling, but on her face it was clear and distinct. On one side it was mostly small marks no bigger than his hand was at this scale, but on the other side there were broad swathes of either shade.

This had to be a chimera thing. She might not even know about it.

Will tapped speculatively and theatrically at his chin, calling Nathan’s attention back. "Does this mean you’re not the boss-man anymore?" he asked fake-hopefully.

"No. Nothing happened to my brain – well, nothing happened to my mind. I’m still the boss-man." Resigning himself – in the first few days he and the others had raged against it, and they’d gone through that again after they started getting Pym Particles and dealing with it when they wore off, but more than enough time had passed to get used to it – he injected a little humor into his voice. "Damn it, I didn’t even get to kill anything."

"If I’d known, I would’ve let you shoot the blob." Will shook his head. "Oh well. Guess you’re out of the contest."

"There is no contest," Nathan said, scowling. "We’re not having a body count competition. Those just promote reckless behavior, and we’re Five-Oh-First, not Mandalorians. Do you hear me?"

"I hear you, I hear you," the other trooper said, raising his hands in an innocent gesture that did not fool Nathan at all. He left it there, though. Will was a professional, after all. Surely he wouldn’t get carried away by a body count competition. If he did insist on keeping score and comparing it to 8113’s it would be annoying, but it wouldn’t affect his performance. Hopefully.

The whole time, Tony had been staring at him with wide eyes and an almost amusingly shocked face. She was silent for what felt like a long time. Finally, "You know, some warning about that would have been nice."

Nathan winced. "Sorry. Didn’t know – I didn’t know it was going to happen." The excuse sounded pathetic even to him, so he tried to explain. "A good part of Tampa Bay Squadron, my squadron, got caught in something just after the Event. You could call it a persistent secondary, I guess, one that we weren’t immune to. SL-1984 saved us, but the secondary didn’t wear off. Not then, not now. We can be pretty much normal again by taking Pym particles-"

Tony’s eyes narrowed. "As in Henry Pym, I assume?"

"Yeah. We trade for them, but they’re really tight-fisted about it," Nathan said.

"That makes sense, actually. Pym Particles are a lot more dangerous than they seem," she told him, staring thoughtfully into the distance. "They do wear off, but too much exposure too often sort of internalizes them. He – well, one Henry Pym, I’ve talked about this to at least two – said it can make people go crazy. The other one said it just enhances any madness already there."

Then she frowned at him. "But I already know about Pym particles, and I get your condition. Why didn’t you say something right at the start?"

"I should have, I know," Nathan said lamely, forcing himself not to look away. "I told Will and 8113 before you were mobile. But I guess I just assumed that revival would cure or fix it. Sometimes it does that for cybernetics and secondaries." He flexed his cyber fingers. "And I should have told you anyway. I just didn’t think about it."

Tony snorted. "Hell of a thing to forget." But she shrugged. "One fighter down. We’ll deal with it."

"Quiet! Everyone be very quiet." Will was frowning intently, his eyes half closed.

8113 raised her head and held perfectly still, the merest tremors going up her arm. After a moment her blank features rearranged themselves into a scowl. "Fusst. I suppose it’s not safe to stay in one place like this."

"What is it?" Tony was clearly straining to hear, and frustrated that she couldn’t. "More spiderhands?"

"That’s what it sounds like," 8113 agreed. "Still some ways away, but they’re giggling."

"Oh, fuck, not again," the cape muttered, raising her security zapper. "There had better be enough charge. I bet we’ll be fighting more blob project."

"Wait," Nathan said. "We don’t have to be trapped here. Quick, let’s get out in the hallway and see if we can get out of here before they reach us." Will’s brow furrowed at this, and Nathan shared the sentiment – they were stormtroopers and didn’t like running away, but they were also stormtroopers of the 501st, and practicality was more important.

"Tony, will you take me?" To forestall her question, he said, "Because you’ve got something like the security uniform which has snaffles and pockets, and you don’t swing heavy weaponry, and I won’t be in your way."

"Right." 8113 handed him off like she’d done this kind of thing before, and for all he knew, she had. Tony was more ginger about it, but she felt the need for haste as keenly as any of them. He half-knelt half-crouched on her shoulder too, hooking his fingers into the seam. Right shoulder. There were snaffles on it, sort of belt loops that had no purpose he could see, but one made a good handhold.

"Let’s go."

They padded out into the room. Nathan still heard nothing, but from the way the others acted, he was the only one.

"They’re that way," Will said quietly for his benefit, gesturing towards the way they had come. He picked up Tony’s mop bucket, straining just a little, so it wouldn’t rattle and give them away. "I don’t know if they know where we are yet."

"Then we go the other way," Nathan said. "Quietly."

They had just rounded the corner when Nathan finally heard the retching almost-giggle of the spiderhands. Part of him made a note to have his ears checked. Cybernetic eardrums weren’t supposed to be less sensitive than real ones.

"We’re not going in any doors," he reminded them, jolting up and down on Tony’s shoulder as they tried to move both quickly and without making any sound, "we don’t want to be cornered again and have to waste charge."

"We know," Tony muttered between breaths. He hoped that she’d be able to run far and long enough. She wasn’t a trooper or a strength-based cape, after all. Did spiderhands have greater speed and endurance than a technology-reliant cape?

Behind them, spiderhands giggled and shrilled up towards a wail. They’d been found.

"Go. Go!"

Nathan clutched the seam and the belt loop in Tony’s security uniform as they abandoned silence and ran. If he fell, he’d get killed. There wouldn’t be time to turn back for him.

"Don’t look back," he urged, "You’ll slow down. Looking back is my job." He twisted around. "They’re in view. Keep running!"

Tony was gasping a little, or at least breathing with more difficulty than the two troopers, as far as he could tell. They were both ahead of her, 8113 out in front, but he thought that they were keeping to a slower pace than they might have otherwise.

Fortunately, the spiderhands – two of them this time – weren’t very good at the whole pursuit thing. They kept stumbling on those long-clawed feet, and evidently a banshee-shriek was hard to do when that breath was needed for running. The spiderhands giggled constantly, but couldn’t seem to work up to a full scream.

Nathan decided not to tell the others that they were starting to outrun the spiderhands. Not just yet. They might slow down. "Keep going," he urged instead.

8113 was picking the directions they were going, holding her club in both hands like it was a blaster rifle. If she kept at it, they would soon pass out of the area that had been on the floorplan Jan the Rabbot had shown them. How big could this floor be, anyway? And what was it used for? From the map, it was full of small hallways leading to little rooms, a little like the hotel at Xanadu. There was a security station and a room with a generator in it. The lowest floor had been storage, and there had to be other floors.

"Krarl!" 8113 snarled as one lunged at her from a doorway. She hit it across the front of its chest and kept running as it yelped and stumbled. "Keep going! It’ll distract them!"

Will and then Tony pounded past the dazed creature. The pitch of the spiderhands pursuing them changed while the krarl made a half-snarl half-baying sound like an overwhelmed canine. Nathan felt Tony’s muscles shifting as she started to turn her head. Immediately he snapped "Don’t turn around! Keep going!" and turned to peer over his shoulder. He wasn’t the one running, it didn’t slow him down.

"I see why they usually do that paralyzing scream," he commented. "They… they really aren’t very good fighters. Don’t look back. We should still keep going."

They passed into the unknown region and slowed, then stopped running. Tony panted in such a way that made it clear that she was trying not to look like she was breathing hard. Will put down the wheeled janitor bucket. "You know what we should do the next time we find water?" he asked no one in particular. "Find something to carry it with. That would be the smart thing."

"We’ll just have to keep an eye out for bottles," Nathan said. "And for a better cart than this wheeled mop bucket. And while we’re wishing, I’d like our armor and blaster rifles. They wouldn’t run out of charge any time soon." And, he added silently, a blaster did damage at any scale. His zapper had shrunk down with him, making it entirely useless to the others since he hadn’t thought to take it off until it was too late. At this scale it might still be weaponry, or it might throw carpet sparks.

"And I would like my armor," Tony said conversationally, recovering her breath. "Repulsors would make short work of any of these freaks."

"I’d like some Aurek patrols. I worked with one of them in passing once, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more effective patrol," Will said.

8113 had actually cupped her hand around her ear while listening, as always looking angry-blank. "We can’t stay here," she said. "This floor, or at least this part of this floor, is crawling with spiderhands. They’re mostly spread out, but the longer we’re in any one place, the more likely it will be that they find us. We’ve got to keep moving."

"Thirteen’s right," Will said.

Tony said, "I’ve managed to dull my hearing. Loud music and engines do that to you." Almost reluctantly, she added, "But there is something. I guess that’s the giggling. I can’t report on directions, though."

Nathan pursed his lips, then shook his head. Did he really have to say it? "So we keep going. I think we might be able to circle around and get back to the security station."

They walked for a while, changing directions whenever 8113 or Will thought that they were too close to spiderhands. On the way they found a different kind of wrecked vending machine with a few intact bottles of water lying around, and those got picked up and taken along. Unfortunately there was still no free cart.

"I am completely lost," Tony said after they’d made several turnings. "Is this known territory?"

Now that they weren’t running, and since his balance was coming back to him, Nathan had dared to actually stand on her shoulder instead of keeping low. It lurched under him somewhat, forcing him to pay careful attention. "It’s not. We’re not that far from it, though. Guys? Can we get much closer?"

Will shook his head. "Not right now, boss-man. These things are everywhere. I guess it’s good that they never shut up, or we’d have run into maybe twenty by now. They’re pretty thick here."

Twenty – almost certainly more – crazed, cannibalistic or at least very predatory former humans who could shriek in such a way that they could paralyze nearby creatures. How had that happened? Nathan scowled and pushed the thought away. His teammates on Shadow Patrol sometimes teased him about thinking too much in and around combat, when it couldn’t help.

11

"This door is open," 8113 warned from point. "The lights are off – I think – aagh!"

A krarl had leapt out of the room and seized 8113’s metal club in its teeth, rearing up on its back legs and catching at her with the two massive claws on each of its forelimbs. 8113 swore in Mandalorian, her voice tight, and rocked back on her heels as if to pull away. The krarl shuffled after her with its ears pinned back against its narrow skull, forelegs still scratching and scoring like a dog fighting for balance. She kicked it in the stomach, under its ribcage. It grunted and snarled but didn’t let go, champing further on the club like it didn’t care that it was breaking its teeth.

Will circled behind it, hands opening and closing murderously, obviously considering his options. On Tony’s shoulder, Nathan dropped to a crouch and balled his hands into fists. He was useless here.

Or maybe not. "Try to get its head up!" he shouted. "Tony, get behind it with the hammer! Will, get ready to go for its throat!"

Grunting, holding the club tightly enough that he could see the veins bulge in her hands, 8113 forced it up like a celebrating Tusken Raider, the krarl’s long-snouted head hanging off the middle. It still refused to let go, but now it got its forelegs up to brace on 8113’s shoulders like a graceless dancer, claws digging in and clearly piercing her bodysuit. 8113 cursed again, almost hissing.

Tony had gotten behind it, to one side of the thick tail it was bracing itself with, the heavy chunk of machinery she’d used to kill the first krarl raised in one hand which barely trembled at all, her other hand stretching up as if to grab its ruff. Nathan took a firm grip on her uniform and saw Will on the krarl’s other side ducking under 8113’s arm and the creature’s foreleg, the elbow that still had an eggtooth up and ready.

The krarl shuffled on its back feet, its growling getting more intent. Nathan barked, "Now!"

Tony seized the fur on the back of its neck and struck it with her metal weight. She hit off-center and even at this scale Nathan could tell that she hadn’t used enough force, but it hardly mattered. Will had in one violent motion stepped chest to chest with the krarl, circled one arm around its body to keep it from jerking away, and thrust his eggtooth into its throat.

The krarl weakened and died quickly in a gush of arterial blood, falling in a heap on the floor. Its jaws slackened, finally releasing the club. For a moment Nathan thought its trachea had been cut, but no, just the jugular.

Being on the other side, Tony, and Nathan by extension, hadn’t been bled on very much. Even so, Tony grumbled a little and fussed over the few spatters that had hit her. "Why did you want me there at all if Will was going to do that?"

"For one, didn’t know he was actually going to try and cut its throat with his eggtooth," Nathan said, still a little surprised by that. "And for two, wanted it distracted. Didn’t want it letting go and biting anyone, so was hoping that multiple threats would make it react slower." It had been a gamble, but it looked like he’d made the right choice.

Will called their attention to the still-warm krarl. "There’s something you should see."

"It has bullet wounds," he said, wiping its blood away from his eyes. "Look. They’re hidden a bit by all the hair. Here, here… something shot at it, but didn’t hit anything too major. Maybe it got chased off by the shooter. We know they’ll run."

"I see," Tony said. "Not exactly old, but I’d guess it’s been at least a day. Nine millimeter, I’m guessing a handgun." She tried to winkle one of the bullets out with her fingers and one of her eggteeth, and couldn’t get it out. "Stubborn bastard. Well, it might be steel-jacketed, it might not, and for all this talking I don’t actually know that much about bullets. But someone is or was armed with something more accurate and easier to load than a zapper."

There was a small, involuntary sound from 8113, who had leaned heavily against a wall.

"Oh, Thirteen," Nathan said softly, finally noticing what had happened to her. He had to compensate for Tony as she turned to see.

"I’m fine. It’s just a flesh wound," 8113 said, though she was pressing her hands to her gut and her shoulders were bleeding freely. "I’m more concerned about the damage my club took. We don’t have time for this anyway."

"Ignore that and get some egg goo on them," Nathan told Will. From his perspective the injuries the krarl had left seemed more major than they probably where. Blood was everywhere – though, he had to admit, a lot of that had to have been from the krarl. She was standing and talking, though, even if in a strained voice.

8113 reluctantly moved her hands and let Will daub a handful of egg glop – it seemed very thick now – over the wounds in her abdomen. "Great. Thanks. Now we have to get going – spiderhands probably heard us. We can dawdle later."

Some little ways farther on, 8113 stopped in her tracks and said, "Damn."

Tony looked around. "We’re about to be surrounded, huh?"

"You’ve got it," Will said. "I hate that sound. When we get out of this, if I ever make any sound remotely like a giggle, smack me across the face, okay?"

One of the nearby doors was marked as a flight of stairs. Nathan deliberately stamped on Tony to get her to turn. "Are there any in there?"

Will obligingly pressed his ear against the door, then stood back to open it, just in case there was a krarl waiting for them. There wasn’t. The stairwell was empty.

"Obviously there are multiple sets of stairs," Nathan thought out loud. "If we go up them, or down, then we’ll either have to wait these ones out or cross an unknown floor until we find stairs back to this one. There are a lot of unknowns here."

"Spiderhands are closing in," 8113 said. "You’re sure you can’t hear them yet? We could zap them all, but it would be nice to have charge left for whenever we find more of Sedaris’s pet project."

Nathan strained his ears and heard nothing more damning than the hum of the florescent lights. He believed the other two, though. "Let’s go. Save the charges for when we don’t have a choice." He’d had one of the zappers when the Pym particles had worn off. It, and Lewis Matla’s ID card, were now useless to the group.

They went into the stairwell and closed the doors behind them, binding the handles with a length of flexible tubing Tony had picked up from somewhere.

Will took another handful of egg glop and spread it over the clawmarks that he hadn’t gotten to earlier. "There’s not a whole lot left," he said. "I should just tie it into a bundle and carry it on me.

"Yeah, do that." 8113 flinched, very slightly, as he applied it, but held still.

The other wounds, all ragged cuts, had already started to close and become smaller. The tears in her bodysuit stayed. "Give that time, too," she said. "Maybe they’ll fix themselves when there aren’t any marks in the skin, maybe they won’t. Either way, I’m functional." She looked ruefully at the twisted length of metal she was carrying, now completely unrecognizable. "This might be done for, though. I’m pretty sure if I hit it on anything something will come right off. It’s not built for this kind of stress."

Originally the plan was to head back down to the storage floor, since from what they’d seen earlier it had a simpler layout and fewer hostiles. When they reached that lower floor, however, the door was stuck fast. The handle turned, but it wouldn’t open.

Even being bodyslammed by Will and 8113 at the same time wouldn’t budge it. Nathan got Tony to put him down so he, currently having the best eyes for details, could peer at the crack on the bottom.

"It’s sealed," he reported, motioning Tony to pick him up again. "Not even light’s coming through. Something at the bottom and along the edges, probably at the top too. You can see it around the hinges, right?"

Tony put her big face up close to the doorframe, frowning, and nodded. "Yeah, I see it. Sealed from the other side, huh? Could mean whoever was on the other side didn’t want anything coming in from this side. Or maybe there was a sealant explosion. Hey, boss-man, take another look. Is it rubbery, or are there lots of little bubbles?"

Nathan didn’t have to take a second look. "Definitely bubbles."

"Some kind of expanding, hardening foam, then," Tony mused. "That’s tough to get past without the right tools. Which we don’t have, by the way."

"Then we go up," Nathan said.

They climbed past the door they had come in through, and on the next landing they spotted the quick motions of many small things up ahead. The others said they heard wings.

"Will, take a look, but be careful," Nathan warned. On his way past, Will shot him a glance as if to say that he knew to be careful and he didn’t need to be reminded. Nathan would have folded his arms across his chest if he hadn’t been using them to grip Tony’s uniform. Of course he needed to remind them. It wouldn’t feel right to order people into possible danger without being aware of what he was risking. You didn’t take responsibility for something without fearing for it.

Will came back soon after. "It’s a bunch of small, glowing flyers. They avoided me, but they didn’t seem scared or all that curious either. Come on, take a look." They climbed up after him.

Softly glowing creatures alternately fluttered about and clung to the walls with their wings. They made him think of winged spoons, of all things. Glowing winged spoons with four delicate leathery wings each. Squinting at the closest one, Nathan saw that the end that looked like the bowl of the spoon actually wasn’t at all bowl shaped – the creatures had sharply curved heads or necks and the glow they gave off obscured that detail.

Without being told, Tony came closer to the nearest one, which was latched on to the surface of the wall with the tiny claws of its wings. It launched into the air and fluttered among the other airborne ones, swerving broadly to avoid the humans but otherwise not seeming to take much notice.

"Troopers, you’re the ones with the hearing," Nathan said. "Are they making any sounds?"

"Besides wingbeats, you mean?" Will closed his eyes for a moment. "Yeah. They’re sort of whistling or chirping at each other." He opened his eyes again and said, "I think they’re doing call-response. Might or might not be some kind of meaningful communication."

Tony swiveled her head on her neck while Nathan let go and stood upright. Her eyes, on a somewhat lower level than his head, focused on him, though he was fairly sure that at this distance he was close enough to be blurry. "Even I can hear them. You really can’t? Is something wrong with your ears?"

A little irritated, Nathan crossed his arms. "My cochleae are prosthetics, okay? Both of them. And some of the middle-ear structures. Lost the originals at the same time that I ended up needing this." He tapped the side of his head using the cybernetic fingers then, remembering that the synthflesh covered everything and that Will and 8113 knew but Tony probably didn’t, added, "It’s a metal plate. I’m a cyborg."

"Huh." Tony blinked repeatedly. "Okay."

"Usually the replacements work as well as the real ones did, more or less. Same range of sounds, same volume. Don’t know what’s wrong with them now. They probably need another tune up." He shrugged.

"Skipped the last one. We just don’t have the right facilities for this at Xanadu." For Tony’s benefit, again, he said, "Part of my right hand and my right leg beneath the knee are artificial too. They’re not really much stronger than flesh, but they work well enough."

8113 frowned blankly in his general direction. He remembered that she had that common dislike and distrust of cyborgs, but also that it was mild in her case, and she didn’t let it occupy her. Which was good.

"I wish you’d told me earlier," Tony said wistfully. "I could have opened you up and-"

"Hey, I don’t let anyone dismantle me for spare parts," Nathan said, slightly alarmed.

She frowned. "Let me finish my sentences, boss-man. I could have opened you up and tried to figure out what was wrong."

"Do you have any experience at all in cybernetic replacements?" he wanted to know.

Tony grinned crookedly. "Very little. But I’m a quick study."

The little spoon-flyers had kept going about their business. One whisked by not far from Tony’s head in a flurry of wingbeats; she twitched a little, like she thought it had been about to collide.

"Don’t try to catch or swat at one," Nathan said, feeling the muscles in her shoulder rise and fall under his feet. "Nothing makes small semi-intelligent animals hostile faster than making them think you’re their enemy. These might not actually be semi-intelligent, but I don’t think we should take the chance."

"So it looks like not everything here is trying to kill us," 8113 commented, quite clearly keeping a wary eye out in case they changed their minds. "I’m guessing that they’re either imported from Xanadu or someone made them here. Why? Why make krarls and little glowing dragon things?"

"They probably look splendid in the dark," Nathan said, knowing that wasn’t an answer but unable to keep from speculating. He didn’t see droppings or any dead ones nearby, which probably meant that they migrated in a flock or swarm. "Let’s get moving."

They got to the next floor without further incident, listened at the door, and opened it to find empty hallway. The halls seemed bigger here, more like they had down on the storage floor than the narrower passages of the floor with the spiderhands. No one was entirely sure if this floor’s dimensions were the same as on the storage floor, though. It was extremely quiet here, with no more sound than the electric lights and the air conditioning.

Very quickly they found that this hallway was very short. Only two doors branched off away from it. "We could just try the next floor," Nathan said, having seen that the stairs continued up from here, "but I’d rather not. Troopers, can you hear anything?"

8113 and Will each pressed an ear against a different door and waited, listening. After a long moment Will shook his head, but 8113 closed her eyes and motioned for him to wait.

"I’m hearing something," she said.

12

Will came to her door, the one with a ten stenciled into the metal, and took a listen. After a moment he nodded confirmation. "Splashing and voices. Kind of weird-sounding voices."

"Survivors, maybe," Tony speculated. "Survivors who aren’t Rabbot Jan. It makes sense, I suppose."

"Or it could be a trap," 8113 said, serious and pragmatic as always. "Maybe some of the spiderhands have enough brain left to attract prey this way."

"Remaining brain functions or not, they’re all noisy and terminally impatient. Even if they did set a trap, they won’t be able to wait to spring it, not when they see us." Tony pointedly shifted a hand to rest on her holstered security zapper. "And we can handle them."

"This is true," 8113 allowed, "but do we really want to waste the charge? Once the batteries die, the zappers are dead weight. They’re not even heavy enough to make good saps. Generator running or not, we don’t know when we’ll find more or anything that can charge the batteries."

Will cut in. "If it’s survivors, though, shouldn’t we take any chance we can? We haven’t found anything alive other than Rabbot that hasn’t tried to kill us, but if she’s alive, can’t there be others?"

"Quiet," Nathan said. "Will, in what way do the voices sound weird?"

Secretly he was pleased that all of them stopped, and both of the other troopers listened at the door.

"It’s just that they’re rather high. Artificial, maybe," Will said slowly. "But I hear syllables, a speaking cadence…"

"Language," Nathan said, nodding. "Spiderhands can’t actually talk."

8113 raised her eyebrows, the rest of her face unmoving. "As far as we know."

He tilted his head towards her. "As far as we know. Let’s take a look."

Matla’s ID card might or might not have had clearance to get through this door. There was no way that they could find out. It had been in Nathan’s makeshift pocket when the Pym particles wore off, and unless there was a doll-sized reader around it was completely useless. Almeida’s keycard, fortunately, did have clearance. The door opened after they swiped the key, and they went through. It closed automatically behind them.

The room beyond was dominated by what looked like an aquarium that took up an entire wall. There were puddles of water spreading on the floor, and something in the tank was rhythmically splashing more out and on to the weakly-stirring body lying on the metal floor.

The splashing paused as whatever was in the tank saw the troopers in the doorway. Several whatevers, actually. Nathan had an impression of movement and many fins.

"You’re human?" There was a panel with a speaker in it embedded into the tank’s clear surface, and the voice that came through it was high and artificial, almost childlike and with emphasis on the wrong syllables. "Help! We have to get her back in here, she’s dying." A webbed hand started splashing water out again.

The others didn’t move. Nathan nudged Tony’s neck with his foot. "We should at least get a bit closer," he said, and felt the muscles of her shoulder shift under him as she turned her head, scanning the room along with the others. Other than the tank, some chairs, a potted plant, and some sort of computer console, the room was empty. There wasn’t enough cover for a branch of Sedaris’s pet project or a krarl to be hiding itself, even if krarls were inclined to do that. And if anything had been in here, it probably wouldn’t have been able to resist devouring the body on the floor.

"All right, if this is a trap it’s a pretty elaborate one," 8113 allowed grudgingly, and followed as Tony started forwards. Nathan was getting better at staying upright on a platform as narrow and mobile as a shoulder, so he was now able to stand when Tony walked.

The nonhuman lying in a puddle on the floor had many long, slender spines with thin webbing stretched between them, an elongated horselike face, outsized yellow eyes, a filmy ridged texture to her skin, and many gills, flaring in sequence on her long neck. She was as much a human as she was some kind of sea dragon, and she was gasping, too weak to really react to them.

"Lift her up," the speaker grill urged. "Hurry." That nonhuman joined the others in a clump close to where the beached one lay. Several more webbed hands reached over the edge of the tank, dripping.

The other troopers looked at Nathan, and Tony’s head tilted towards him. He pressed his lips together, then nodded. "Do it. Will, shoulders. Thirteen, uh, midsection. Tony-" He’d almost directed Tony in the same way. She was working with them, but he had no authority over a cape. Better make it a request. "Tony, would you mind getting the tail?"

"If you like," she said, a wry grin in her voice.

The three of them got into position. The nonhuman flinched at the first touch and tried to curl in on herself, folding up her stumpy legs, but otherwise didn’t resist as they lifted her.

Tony swore under her breath about the weight, shuddering under Nathan. The two troopers said nothing, but he could see their muscles strain, their mouths setting. This nonhuman was three, three and a half times the size of any of them, and lifting her up high enough took a lot of effort.

Nathan gritted his teeth together hard enough that they ached. He was useless here! One more trooper and this job would be, if not easy, than not nearly this kind of effort! Still – still, they were getting there. Tony’s shoulder muscles were trembling, but she was lifting her share of the nonhuman.

When the other nonhumans took the beached one’s weight and started hauling her up over the lip of the tank, Tony sagged, breathing a bit hard. It was tough to tell if the troopers were the same way, and 8113 was helping the nonhumans by standing under the beached one and pushing, but he saw Will, already getting in position to stand guard near the door, wiping his palms on his thighs and shaking out his arms. Nathan gritted his teeth again. They worked while he stood here and pointed them around like an armchair officer.

The nonhumans in the tank got the beached one high enough that she rolled over the lip and into the water, making enough of a wave to slosh over and smack 8113, who spluttered. A nonhuman swam back over to the speaker grill. Without having to be asked, Tony walked back over to it.

"Thank you," the speaker grill said in that same artificially childish voice. On the watery side a hand came up and pressed against the clear surface, webbed fingers splaying. "We’re in your debt. Blinn’s got the least remaining lung function, and she was asphyxiating."

"Just another day in the heroing business," Tony said breezily.

Elsewhere in the tank, which Nathan could now see was much bigger than it had first appeared - the bottom being quite a lot farther down than the floor, probably extending down to the spiderhands’ floor, and the opposite side being too far away to clearly see with such hazy, particulate-laden water – the nonhuman who had been beached was being tended to by the others, which seemed a bit smaller than her. She was moving more strongly already.

"I hate to bother you for more, but we need another favor. Just a small one," the speaker grill said. The nonhuman on the other side opened and closed his or her mouth, but with a rhythm that didn’t match up with the words. Too regular, like breathing, and the pulsing of his or her gills backed that up. "The environmental controls. No one’s been in here since they took Doctor Kemble’s body away, so no one’s adjusted them. That’s why we had Blinn hanging out over the edge. We thought she could reach the console and we could pull her back in."

Nathan cleared his throat and stared up into the nonhuman’s great yellow eyes. "One thing first."

Either the nonhuman was used to seeing shrunken humans, or he couldn’t read that elongated face. Probably the latter; he saw fins fluttering in the pause before he got an answer. "Yes, what is it?"

"What’s going on here?" He’d meant to stop with that, but like a dam breaking, after that first one the questions just poured out. "Who are you? What are you? Are you costumes? Why are you here? What is this place?"

Tony snorted in amusement. "Take it easy, boss-man," she muttered.

"You don’t know?" There was more fluttering, and the speaker said, "We’re not costumes. They were very careful about that. Some of us were at Xanadu, but we’re not costumes. Or we weren’t, anyway."

"How can you have been at Xanadu without becoming a costume?" Nathan asked, bewildered. "Costume" was a new term, but as far as he knew it meant anyone who had changed at Xanadu. People who had changed because of costumes were "secondaries". Seemed simple enough.

"By not wearing anything unusual, of course. Don’t you know? ‘If you can walk in public without calling attention to yourself, you’re not a costume.’"

"Plenty of secondaries aren’t exactly easy to miss, and there are a lot of costumes who could pass as normal," Tony said during the pause where Nathan struggled with this. "Seems like a terribly appearance-centered rule."

The creature in the tank gave an exaggerated shrug, fins and webbing flaring. The gesture made him or her sink briefly. "FEMA came up with it. That’s not the official position, and last I heard they make a lot of exceptions, but the most care goes to those who aren’t human."

"We’ve been out of it for a while," Nathan allowed cautiously. He’d have liked to hear more, but FEMA policies were a low priority right now. ‘When killing a rancor, it’s wise to ignore a flea’s bite’, the saying went. "So if you’re not costumes, why aren’t you humans?"

"We’re volunteers for the K. A. T., Kemble’s Aquatic Transformation," the speaker said. "Shouldn’t you know this? …Fine. They told us that Kemble was inspired by a costume going by Edward Kazelton, a fish creature who is restricted to fresh water. We’ve seen video of him. He works for an oil company. Kemble was able to purchase samples and a dead lungfish. The idea was to cause similar transformations, but controlled and reversible. He said something about this being a boon to marine exploration and biology."

Another creature swam up to the speaker grill and positioned itself besides the first. They both sort of hovered in place, fins beating steadily, yellow eyes fixed on Nathan. "The way I heard it, he went to Kazelton and was rebuffed, because the oil company pays better. Kemble always sounded bitter when he talked about that."

"They’d done the K.A.T. on some monkeys, and showed us that they could change them back. That was one of the better presentations," the speaker said. Its voice was like a high-pitched text-to-speech program, but Nathan had the feeling that that last sentence was intended to be in a more wistful tone.

"And by presentations…" Tony prompted, crossing her arms.

"Volunteers came down here for human testing. A thousand dollars right at the start, five hundred each day after that, no contact with the outside world until it was done." After a pause and some fin-rippling, the speaker went on. There was no change in pitch, no way to tell which creature was talking, or if they were just curious animals and someone or something else was doing the speaking. "We were all kind of desperate. And if we lost our nerve and opted out of the procedures we were assigned as low-level staff. Pay reduced, of course. There were presentations for each of the procedures."

Tony’s head turned as if to trade a glance with Nathan. Standing, he was slightly above the same level as her eye, but knew that from here he was too close to focus on. It was the gesture that was important, though, not the actual looking.

The second fish creature split away to drift, float, or hover nearby but not quite so close to the speaker, who told them that his or her name was Highsmith, which seemed like a last name.

He or she explained what the creatures knew about this facility. It turned out that this wasn’t much. The fish creatures had been in lab quarters, that immense tank, and various testing chambers for most of their stay. They knew that the facility was underground. They knew that the floor just under this, the one infested with spiderhands, was a residential one, or it had been. That explained why it was such a warren.

Some time ago, none of the fish creatures were absolutely certain how long it had been, things had started to go wrong. Doctor Kemble and her assistants had pretended that there was no problem, even when it was blindingly obvious that they were lying. Kemble had died in a krarl attack right in front of the tank, though in a different room. One of her assistants had taken the body away, and after that, while armed and desperate-looking people had sometimes been seen briefly in various rooms adjacent to the tank, they hadn’t responded to anything Highsmith or the other fish creatures said or did.

"Were those Turant’s people? And who was he, anyway?" Nathan asked, remembering the name Matla had put in his datapad. He’d mentioned Turant along with Catherine. If Catherine was the AI, no doubt a costume from Xanadu, who was in charge of the automated security measures, was Turant her human counterpart? Jan the Rabbot had said that Catherine was offline. Maybe Jan had booted her up again when there was power, maybe she hadn’t.

Highsmith gave a liquid shrug that went from the fins on his or her head down to those on his or her tail. "I met Turant when we first came down here. He was introduced as the security chief, and he didn’t seem to like us much. But I haven’t seen him or most of the other security people since before I went through the K.A.T."

Fanning the fins more strongly on one side of his or her body and more languidly on the other, Highsmith rotated in the water towards the other fish creatures. After a moment he or she rotated back to face the wall of the tank. "But one of the others has seen him since then. Briefly. He had a gun, a flack vest, and his arm was bandaged. He just ducked in and out. Mary says that he was too far from the speaker to get it to pick up his voice and get it in here, but she thought it looked like he was laughing."

Laughing. Matla had feared that Turant… something involving the spiderhands. Affected by them? Infected? Was it contagious? Nathan nodded grimly. "All right. Anything else you can tell me?"

"Some time ago, not long after the power went out… I’m sorry, I really can’t tell how long it’s been… something started happening in this room. It came through the drain." Highsmith gestured at the innocent-looking drain cover. It was wet; from the looks of it, it had been splashed repeatedly, since there were several marks from where differently sixed puddles had dried.

"You saw Sedaris’s pet project?"

Highsmith gave another surprised fin-flutter. "What do you mean?"

Tony took this one. "A big blob of protoplasm with a lot of extensions all over. It comes through the drain systems, keeps a tail or something trailing into the drain, and walks on and grabs stuff with its extensions. It seems to like weak electricity, eating bodies to assimilate whatever’s in their flesh, and being really unnerving."

"That sounds like what we saw," Highsmith said. "It formed a blob like that, and we saw it at the control station, maybe trying to do something. Luckily the controls have safeguards. It didn’t initialize the right sequence and was locked out."

"After a few hours I think it got bored or something," he or she continued. "We’d kept well away from it, with a few of us close enough to keep an eye on it." Another fish creature swam up to hover, float, or drift next to Highsmith. "Schaller can tell you what he saw."

"Please do." The more they knew about that thing, the better.

"This thing stopped stroking the machines. I didn’t see eyes, but I felt like it was looking for us. Maybe not looking. But it knew we were in here, and if it couldn’t get what it wanted from the machines, it would settle for us," the speaker grill said in the exact same high, artificial voice it had used for the other two fish creatures. With longer exposure to the fish creatures, Nathan could now see that whenever the speaker was going one of them was always more animated than the others. While they all opened and closed their mouths in a breathing rhythm, there were more ways of speaking than verbal. Verbal speech probably wouldn’t work in the water anyway.

"It started reaching over the tank wall. When the extensions touched the water, though, it drew back." Schaller gave a liquid shrug identical to Highsmith’s. "I was pretty on edge, and I guess seeing that that emboldened me, because I swam up and splashed it. And it didn’t like that. It sort of shrank away. So I did that some more, and it left, and we’ve been re-wetting the drains since."

"So… it doesn’t like water?"

Off to the side, 8113 muttered under her breath. "That’s pretty much the worst weakness imaginable. This planet is what, three quarters water?"

The speaker said, "I wouldn’t put it that way. I mean, there’s got to be water in the drains, and I don’t imagine you’d get to do anything with bodies and flesh without having to handle blood. But maybe it doesn’t like salt water with traces of I don’t even know in it. That’s what’s in this tank."

"Huh." They hadn’t found much of anything to carry water in yet. Sure, they could empty out the bottled water that they’d found in the wreckage of a vending machine, but then they wouldn’t have anything to drink. Maybe if they flooded the bucket… Tony probably wouldn’t like that, though. And if the pet project just didn’t like touching the water but was unharmed by it, they’d be lugging around that weight for nothing.

Schaller swam aside. Highsmith told them, "We haven’t seen it since. Maybe the water keeps it away, maybe not. But what else can we do? We’re trapped here until the K.A.T. wears off."

They’d cooperated, and if they were so dependant on the conditions of the tank, it wasn’t right to virtually hold them hostage for more information. Nathan asked, "Can you walk Tony through the environmental controls?"

The fish creatures on the other side of the tank walls brightened. "Yes. I’ve watched Kembler and his assistants working on them often enough."

With Highsmith looking on and giving directions, Tony looked over the tank’s environmental controls and adjusted them until he or she was happy. It took a while. Nathan ended up pacing on a console, just so he’d get a chance to actually walk a bit, and on something that didn’t move under him.

He noticed that at some point the other two troopers had taken strips of the bathrobe’s they had changed out of earlier, coaxed the fish creatures into soaking them, and used the wet rags to clean off some of the blood from the krarl whose throat Will had slit. He saw that 8113 had taken off her gloves, but Tony finished before he could see what she was doing.

"Thank you. Maintaining the conditions in here is automated, but the power outage disrupted them. And there’s one other thing," Highsmith continued. "One more thing that you should know."

Tony picked Nathan up, carried him back to where he could get a grip on her uniform, and hooked her thumbs into her pockets, leaning back. "What’s that?"

"There were several people on the security team, but only three were really of note. Those were Turant, Jan, and Catherine."

This caught Nathan’s attention. "Jan the Rabbot?"

"You know her?"

"We’ve met," he said, keeping his voice noncommittal. "In passing. She’s the furry cyborg." Jan had said in the beginning that she’d had something to do with creating Sedaris’s pet project, though she hadn’t told them what it was called at the time. Could she be a guard and a researcher at the same time? Or had that been a lie?

"Oh. Well, we’ve seen her a few times in passing, but by the time things started going wrong, she started looking different. More like a robot. Schaller, can you show them?" The fish creature who was probably Schaller bobbed his or her head in what looked like a nod, then dived down to where Nathan couldn’t see him or her.

"I used to have a job as the political cartoonist in a newspaper," Schaller said, swimming back into view with some kind of white board in one webbed hand and some kind of markmaking tool in the other. He or she started working on the board.

Highsmith told them, "I’ve rarely seen Jan, but some of us knew her a little bit. As far as we can tell, since Kemble died she’s only been in or out of here briefly. Those who’ve seen her think she was looking for someone. Or something, I suppose."

"This’ll do," Schaller said. He or she showed them a board with two cyborg rabbit furries drawn on it, side by side. "This is the version we saw earliest. And this is what we’ve seen most recently."

Both images were fairly stylized and it showed that they had been whipped up quickly, but they were recognizable. They each had three obviously mechanical limbs, the same heads and faces, and each had the same intact arm. But one figure had a slender, more feminine torso covered with a shirt. The other had a more obviously mechanical, bulkier torso, and much more massive limbs.

Nathan studied the drawings for a moment. The more recent one was actually a little sleeker and without as many exposed wires as the Jan he’d seen down on the storage level. It could be just an art thing, but then again… "I guess she upgraded herself, then."

"I just thought it was something you might want to know about. I really don’t know much about Jan other than what she looks like. There was a rumor that she and Catherine were close friends, costumes who had changed together." Highsmith paused. "Do you know anything about Catherine?"

Tony glanced towards Nathan and said, "Not much. Only what Jan told us earlier. Apparently she’s an artificial intelligence from Xanadu and controls part of security."

"That’s what we were told. And she was usually the one who broadcast messages over the intercom. Though the last one we heard was where she was saying that there was a containment breach in Section Two, and security would take care of it. She probably did more than that, though. No computer ever built can match an artificial intelligence created at Xanadu." Nathan actually wasn’t sure which of the fish creatures had said all of that.

"Right. Anything else?"

He grilled – that was a bad word choice – he questioned the fish creatures for a while longer, with Tony and sometimes Will butting in. They hadn’t seen spiderhands and were surprised by the description. They knew that the layout for this floor was pretty simple but couldn’t provide a map. And they didn’t know where Nathan and the others might go to find food; the fish creatures were eating pasty soggy tablets that would run out soon. They also didn’t know when the K.A.T would wear off.

"I wish we could have helped more," Highsmith said. "Good luck in whatever you’re doing."

"Thanks. Don’t die," he said.

"Okay, boss-man," Will said as the four of them stepped back out of the door that they’d come in through. "Where should we go?"

"That’s a good question," he said, stalling.

Tony snorted gently. "’That’s a good question’ always means ‘I don’t know.’".

"Hey, it doesn’t have to," Nathan protested. "It can also mean ‘give me a minute, I’m thinking about it’, or ‘what’s the best way to phrase it’, or even ‘this question lets me exposit particularly well.’"

She grinned. "All right, I get the point. So what does it mean this time?"

"It means ‘I don’t know, because if I did know, the other stormtroopers would too, and I would have said it right away,’" Will said, actually raising his hand to make air quotes.

"Will, can I get you written up for insubordination?" More seriously, Nathan said, "It depends on where we want to go. Option Aurek: do we want to try the stairs again and see if the spiderhands have cleared out from near there yet. Option Besh: do we want to travel over this floor and find more stairs? Like maybe the ones we took up from the storage floor. I’m pretty sure they went up at least this far. I’m leaning towards option Besh personally, but this isn’t a dictatorship."

Tony was frowning. "Wait, Aurek? Besh?"

"Sorry. B and C." Nathan shrugged. "It’s automatic to think of them like that. So. Thoughts?"

Will said, "That first stairway was pretty close to the security station. I’m sure we could find it again pretty quickly, now that we’ve been there once. And Highsmith hasn’t seen anything nastier than krarls, which we can handle a lot more easily than spiderhands." He ran a finger down his opposite forearm and to his sharp eggtooth.

Tony pressed her lips together. "Hmm. That does make sense. Though I should point out that just because they haven’t seen anything too unpleasant doesn’t mean it’s not here."

"Noted," Nathan said. He turned towards 8113. "What about you?"

"Huh?" She startled guiltily, a sort of haunted look under her habitual lack of expression. "Doesn’t matter. I’ll abide by your decision."

"Okay." He closed his eyes and called up his mental map, visualizing what he knew. "Troopers, correct me if at any point you think we’re going the wrong way. We’ll start by going left here."

They were almost a minute out from Section Ten when 8113 said something. She started with, "I saw my reflection in the wall of the tank."

Nathan caught Will’s eye and saw in the other trooper’s face the same guilty sympathy he felt. Evidently 8113 really hadn’t known.

"You could have told me before," she said, stroking her face from forehead to chin as if the patches of pigment could be felt. Her voice sounded dead calm, but the clone accent was bleeding into each syllable. "I – damn it. I practically have ‘chimera’ written on my damned face. On my FACE," she snarled, turning and glaring at each of them.

"So it won’t matter if I avoid everyone Leah or Charlie ever knew. Everyone will know. You get that? It’s on my face." Her voice dropped down almost to a whisper. "Everywhere I go, no matter who I talk to, all of them will be able to see what I am." She reached back up and rubbed her cheek hard, as if to scrub off the sign.

Tony hesitated uncharacteristically, seemingly at a loss. "Not everyone. I just thought you had a birthmark or something. Of course, I don't know what you mean. You've mentioned chimera before."

8113 snorted. "Fine. Everyone who knows what a chimera is will know. That's all of the Five-Oh-First. All of it. I'll either have to start wearing makeup or keep my helmet on. Always."

No one had explained to Tony what a chimera was, had they? 8113 had mentioned it earlier, but that part about being two people could have been taken metaphorically. Nathan chose not to say anything just now. 8113 had reassumed her neutral-blank expression, although she was still talking and had just started pacing back and forth.

"I will never be able to just join a new patrol and be someone else, presumably with my own background and everything. They’ll all know." She stopped pacing and exhaled slowly, staring down at the floor. "Just what I needed. Damn it."

Looking back up, 8113 met Nathan’s gaze openly, almost defiantly. "I’m good to fight. This won’t slow me down; you can still count on me, at least until this is over."

He tried to read her neutral-blank expression and couldn’t get past it. But, he reminded himself, she was 501st. They didn’t fall apart messily until it was safe to do that. "All right. I believe you," he said slowly, awkwardly. "I just wish I could do something to help."

"Yeah, well, if wishes were credits I’d captain a Star Destroyer," she said, the clone accent easing in and then back out of her voice. "Are we going yet?"

"Um. Yeah, we’re moving out."

13

8113 took point, Will following not far behind, and Tony with Nathan took the rear. Quietly, in a voice that he fervently hoped didn’t carry, Nathan explained chimerae into Tony’s ear.

"Huh." She was silent for a time as she walked. Eventually she said, "Isn’t that a pretty common problem, though?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, it’s my understanding that a lot of costumes have identity problems too," Tony said. "They’re caught between two identities. I mean, I’m not," she added with a smirk. "I’m Tony Stark. But most people aren’t so lucky. I’ve met other people with my name and general details, though for some reason they’re basically all guys, and a lot of them aren’t sure if they’re more Tony Stark or what have you. Chad from Accounting, some kid not out of high school, whatever. There’s even one who doesn’t really look like the rest, who looks like a combination of who he was and the Average Male Tony."

"I see your point," Nathan had to say. He hadn’t thought of it like that before. Still, it seemed to him that 8113’s situation was different, and as he considered, he found it. "I really don’t know about how it is for you capes or the furries or anyone else, but in the Five-Oh-First and the Rebel Legion, we have people like me and Will. You know the basic explanation about what happened at Xanadu, right? Not how or why, but what?"

"Of course. The announcers really like that sound byte about costumes becoming real and those wearing them changing." Her head didn’t turn, but he saw one of the corners of her mouth twitching. "My favorite is the idea that people from this Earth were accidentally sort of channeling people from other Earths and other places altogether, which only existed here as fiction, and some of them channeled us poorly, others so well that the medium is gone."

That theory, and similar ones, were fairly popular. No one wanted to believe that their world was entirely a fabrication. "Okay. In that case, Will and I and most of the other troopers were thinking of basically us-as-troopers. So there’s some disconnect anyway, and some of us are Strangers. You’ll find some of us who had to relearn the English alphabet, for example. And sometimes I remember leaving some trinket that I’m missing back at my garrison. But personalitywise, we’re the same, we like the same stuff, we remember the same parents and old friends. Just in wildly different settings."

"And it’s different for people who weren’t thinking of themselves as troopers or pilots. People who end up with very different names and faces and general states of being."

Tony was sharp. "Oh, like Darth Vader?"

"Like Lord Vader, yes." He always felt uneasy when he started talking about Vaders. Better use a different example. "Or a famous pilot, or Mara Jade. Or Madame Director Ysanne Isard. There was an Isard I met a few days after the event. She went by Betty at first, and she was a lot more… open, I guess, than you’d expect Isard to be. Friendlier. But I had to work with her, and she got colder and angrier and more interested in control as time went on, and she kept changing the name she wanted us to call her. Betty, Bet, Yset, Ysanne, finally Isard. And she stopped protesting whenever someone called her Madame Director. She never became a Stranger or forgot the things she used to know. But she still changed."

He took a deep breath. "It felt like she was just getting pulled away from being Bet and towards being Isard. And I hear it’s really common, at least in the Five-Oh-First. Even more so in the Rebel Legion; we give ourselves designations, but they always use names. The point is, a chimera isn’t pulled one way or the other. They don’t have someone they look like and someone they were before."

Tony shrugged, apparently unaware of what that did to his footing. "I guess. Still, when I take her out to try a European lager, I should bring some of my friends."

He crouched, then sat with his legs draping over her shoulder, figuring that even though they’d met only a few hours ago she wouldn’t take it as a sign of disrespect. "It can’t hurt. If nothing else, drowning your sorrows in alcohol is pretty traditional."

Ahead, 8113 kept leading them into making turns at her own discretion. They tended to be not far off from the turns Nathan would have taken, getting them to approximately the same points in approximately the same amount of time. Apparently Will felt the same, since he didn’t protest either. Tony apparently didn’t have the troopers’ navigation skills, but she accepted where they were heading without complaining about it.

Soon they found that this floor wasn’t as empty as it had first seemed. The two troopers out in front motioned for a stop and reported not sound, but vibrations carrying up through the floor.

"I feel… something like that too," Tony said, frowning. "Something big with four feet. Elephant, maybe?"

"No, elephants don’t really shake flooring this much," 8113 said. "They’re more light-footed than you’d think. Most furries are, really. Why would there be an elephant here anyway? How would they get it underground?"

Tony raised her eyebrows. "You’re asking for logic here?"

"A little bit would be nice, yes," she said. "If you’re going to be doing anything with a very large animal, it just makes sense to do it on the ground level. Quadrupeds horse-sized or larger have a lot of trouble with stairs. You can put them in an elevator or something, but then they need to be sedated because it’s a small space, and most big animals are a bit claustrophobic. What’s the point?"

"That the people in this facility were very bad at thinking practically, I guess," Nathan said. "Should we take a look?"

"I’ll go," 8113 said instantly, handing her bent club to Will. "Hold this and wait here. I’ll try not to bring it back with me, but if I come back running, you’d better be ready."

"Right." They watched her slip quietly away, down the hallway and around a corner. Once again Nathan felt a wave of anger at himself and his condition. 8113 was doing well enough, but he was a Black Hole stormtrooper. He knew how to move without being noticed. He could be doing this better, and making up for his dulled hearing by being the most silent and stealthy of the group. But no, here he was giving orders, otherwise completely useless.

"I think she’ll be okay," he heard Will saying in a soft tone. "I’ve heard the stats on chimerae. There have only been five so far, though I guess there could be more who just look like one, uh, parent and didn’t tell anyone. But four of the five reintegrated into the Five Hundred and First with only a few problems. It’s all about having support and forging a new identity. And not having too much to do with old friends and family until after this new identity is solid."

"What happened to the fifth?" Tony wanted to know. She kept her voice down too, like they were talking around a sickbed.

Will grimaced. "He joined a patrol and died in action. A lot of people think it was a kind of suicide; he’d been acting more and more recklessly. He didn’t come back."

"We’ll have to keep that from happening to Thirteen," Nathan said.

The other trooper nodded, staring blankly at the corner that she’d gone around. "Well, none of us knew either of her – parents isn’t the right word, but ‘donors’ makes it sound so callous – so that will probably help. I’m not trained for this, and I doubt you were either. We’ll just have to try our best."

"And make sure that we don’t all die here," Tony added with a bit of her usual sardonic tone.

"Yeah, that probably would put a kink in the plan," Nathan said. But the sober mood remained. If she took too long, should he send Will to see what had happened? And risk it happening to him, too? Or should they just go the other way and abandon her?

He didn’t have to entertain those thoughts for long. Within a few minutes she was back at a walking pace. The tears in her bodysuit, he saw, had repaired themselves at some point.

"There is a sort of hydroponics room or garden out over there," she said, jerking her chin towards it. "Fair-sized. There’s a little pond and solar lamps and a very large animal eating the plants."

"What kind of large animal?"

8113 armor-shrugged and let her arm fall back to her side, thumping against her security zapper. "I’d think it was another biological mashup like the krarls, but it actually reminds me of something. I’ve got tip-of-the-tongue syndrome and I’m not sure what, though. Scaly leathery skin, horns, a beak, a faceplate, and a thick tail. You can come look, I guess. It seems very interested in eating."

Nathan glanced at each of the others and into 8113’s eyes, then shrugged. "Sure. We’re on a time limit here, but it’s not a terribly pressing one."

They followed her. The room she showed them, which had a door but also large windows that made actually going in unnecessary, was dominated by the animal inside. It had all the features that she’d described, although it didn’t really look like what Nathan had imagined from the description that she’d given.

It made a constant set of guttural growf, growf vocalizations as it sank its heavy beak into the foliage and chewed the greenery with massive grinding teeth. The room had the look of a hothouse in a zoological garden, each plant taken from somewhere very different and artificially arranged for as much aesthetic appeal as humanly possible. Everything had been planted in something grayish and pebbly that didn’t quite look like dirt, and must have been some kind of hydroponic medium. The creature, clearly ignorant of whatever effort went into a hydroponic garden, was slowly, methodically eating a swath through the plants, biting through wood and stems and leaves alike.

It had rammed or shoved its head through the big double doors, breaking them off their hinges, and left them twisted and trampled when it went in.

"I really don’t know what it is," 8113 said. Maybe hearing her, it raised its massive frilled head and stared through the glass at them, small inhuman eyes brightly animalistic. It shook its head and especially its horns at them in an aggressive-looking gesture, but its feet stayed planted. Nathan saw, suddenly, the reddish brown stains on its horns and splashed over its faceplate. Blood?

They backed away, going the way they’d come. It went back to eating, and they left it.

"That was a triceratops," Tony said in a very matter of fact tone, just about as Nathan thought they were far enough away to talk. "I don’t know much about dinosaurs, but that was a triceratops."

"Oh, that’s what it is," 8113 said, rolling her eyes. "I don’t know why I didn’t remember. Triceratops."

"A ceratopsian, anyway. There were more than three horns, and it might not have been as big as a triceratops," Will said, making a balancing-scales gesture.

Nathan frowned. "I think I’ve seen costumes like that. Furries. Or scalies, I guess, since they don’t have hair. Aren’t those extinct otherwise?"

Will nodded. "It’s a dinosaur. There’s a saying here on Earth that’s actually pretty inaccurate, since they were pretty successful in their time and birds are doing pretty well. Anyway, when people here want to compare something to a well-known long dead failure, they say that it’s ‘as dead as the dinosaurs’."

"So is that a costume, or did someone decide to reenact Jurassic Park?" Tony wanted to know. "There had better not be acid-spitting frilled little bastards waiting for us."

"I don’t know, and I think it might be a bad idea to go back and try to talk to it," Nathan said.

"We’ll just zap them if we find some," 8113 said, pointedly stroking her security zapper.

"Right. Where are we…"

"You know, I am starving," Tony announced. "Do you think there are any vending machines that haven’t been raided yet?"

"We’ll keep an eye out," Nathan promised. He looked around at the hallway, with its occasional marked double doors.

"We still have to find the plot device," 8113 said. She looked up. "What if we find a door labeled Break Room?"

They found a door with the words Break Room stenciled over it. There was a boxy fridge that was a little taller than Tony’s knee inside, its door gaping open. There had been food in it, and by the smell, the food had gone bad.

As could be expected in a break room, there was a vending machine. It too had been knocked over, its face broken, but Tony still ran appraising eyes over it and said, "I think I can use this. Here, take Nathan."

Will held out his hand and moved it to his shoulder with careful, mostly steady fingers. Riding on shoulders, Nathan reflected, was annoying and not terribly practical, but it was really the only option.

There was a clock on the wall, but it had stopped at one fifty one. And there was a gray couch against one wall, and a potted plant that Nathan suspected was plastic. Not a lot of living things kept in a windowless room under fluorescent lights were that brilliant a shade of green. There was also a countertop with cabinets under it and a microwave on top of it, a small open fridge, and the tipped vending machine that Tony was dismantling.

Will sank down on to the couch, slowly enough that Nathan wasn’t jarred, and let out an immense sigh. "I don’t think I’ve sat down for – well, we’ve been running around for hours. How long do you think it’s been? No, don’t answer that. Too long. Thirteen, come here, you should try this. Get the weight off your feet."

"Not yet. I’m keeping watch," she said from near the door. "What if krarls find us? Or the triceratops stops eating and decides it doesn’t like us? And there might be something worse up here. We don’t know. Make yourself useful and see if there’s anything in the cabinets, won’t you?"

With another sigh, Will shoved off and got to it. Behind them Tony muttered to herself as metal clanked and slid against metal, and glass cracked. "This would be so much easier with some solder and a torch," she was saying in a voice that probably wasn’t intended to carry. "A screwdriver, even! Look at me. I’m rooting around like some primitive. Sloppy, unsophisticated, inelegant work. The things I do to get by."

"Ah, here we go," Will said, pulling a crinkling bag out from between some glass beakers. He unrolled the top and opened it. "Someone stashed their leftover chips in here." He reached in, brought one out, and held it up to Nathan. "Boss-man, do you think these are still good?"

Gingerly, Nathan took it in both hands. "Not a food tester, you know." Still, he looked it over, smelled it, snapped off a bit from the edge, and tasted that. Then he shrugged. "Think it’s okay. Might be stale, but okay."

"I think I’m done," Tony said abruptly. Nathan went off balance as Will turned to see, but managed to keep from falling.

She had somehow connected lengths of pipe and scrap metal into a dark gray club, narrow but thicker and heavier-looking at one end than at the other. "Thirteen, here, take it. I’ve noticed that the bathrobe rack just gets more and more beat up looking."

"Oh," 8113 said, her eyebrows raised high enough that they threatened to disappear into her hairline. She left her post at the door with a stern glance at Will, who obediently took her place, and took it, testing its balance, swinging it experimentally. It made a low whooshing sound. "Nice."

Tony locked her hands together behind her and arched her back, stretching languidly. "I’m pretty awesome, I know."

8113 slapped the new club into her free hand with a sharp sound and smiled. "Thanks, Tony. I mean it."

"Just don’t make me pay for the drinks." Tony made a fluttering little dismissive gesture with one hand, then made eye contact with Nathan. "What was that about food?"

They divided the chips up, most of them going to the other three. Privately Nathan felt he was getting the best out of the deal, but it wasn’t like a few more crumbs would fill up the others. The old and often-repeated saying went that hunger made the best seasoning. Nathan didn’t taste much. He finished too quickly for it to leave any impression in his mind.

"That just reminded my stomach that I haven’t had anything to eat in… well, not since before I died," Will said ruefully. "It wasn’t a very big bag, and it wasn’t full when I found it." He turned it upside down. 8113 had taken watch at the door again, taking carefully measured sips from her bottled water.

Tony took the bag from Will, her shoulder muscles jostling under Nathan, who had transferred back, and tore it open to get at oils and particles of fried potato in the inside. "I’d be that much happier if the vending machines were good for more than just looting spare parts. Anything else in that cabinet?"

"I’ll take a look," Will said, getting down on his knees.

After a moment he sat back on his heels. "That’s weird."

Behind the beakers, at the very back of the cabinet, there was a roughly pyramidal object. There was something about it – it wasn’t just a random paperweight or lost bit of sculpture. It had a sort of whiff of the forbidden hanging around, nothing tangible. Somehow it was important.

14

"Thirteen, come here and take a look," Nathan said. "Close the door. We should probably be safe from roving predators for a little while."

She did, and joined them in looking at the pyramid thing, which was made of some unidentifiable dark, dense material and was about the right size to fit in the palm of a normal person’s hand. It didn’t overwhelm anyone like the random tower of chairs. But it seemed to beckon.

"I’ve got this," 8113 said after a few seconds had passed.

She picked up one of the mop handles, the one that had been used to poke dead things, and carefully extended it towards the thing, just barely tapping the wood against the material.

There was an electronic sound, and then a cone of light projected up out of the point on the top. Within seconds, the light resolved into a small hologram of a man, semitransparent and blue-tinged, casting dramatic shadows on the interior surfaces of the cabinet and making the beakers shine.

The man was caped, hooded, and gloved all in dark shades, had chest armor that wrapped over and covered his shoulders, and just in general looked like an adept of the Dark Side. For all that, he had the smooth, open face of someone who never doubted himself. He held a datapad in one hand, perfectly to scale. Of course, that was easy with holograms.

"Hello. I’ve been instructed to assist any survivors. I am the gatekeeper of this holocron, which was created by Scott Kirchner, a variation on Starkiller, designated SL-7641 by the Five Hundred and First." The projected image smiled pleasantly and turned its transparent head as if making eye contact with each of them in turn. "Some of you seem to be members of the Five Hundred and First. Please identify yourselves."

Taken aback, Nathan just blinked for a moment. 8113 did not.

"Kirchner. Kirchner, the name is familiar," she said slowly, the clone accent seeping syllable by syllable into her voice. "Oh yes. We broke out of revival eggs in a strange place, found a researcher’s datapad, and according to it a Kirchner was responsible for our being there."

"I see. One moment." The image flickered and blurred before reforming. Now the figure seemed to have opened his datapad and looked at something on it. "Yes, there is record of this. Eight revival eggs were intercepted in transit to Base and procured for certain projects."

A Starkiller. Nathan felt his mouth start to dry. Starkillers were… trouble. There was a reason why, despite having enough power to eliminate pretty much any enemy the 501st had, they were never assigned to patrols and only sent as backup when things had gone so wrong that even they couldn’t turn it into more of a bloodbath. Even the most homicidal of Vaders made some effort not to wantonly kill troopers under their command. "But he’s still Five-Oh-First. Why would he kidnap some eggs and take them here?"

"I can’t say. I am not Scott Kirchner, merely the gatekeeper for his holocron, although I may answer to his name." The image smiled again. Now its datapad was closed. "I see that you are confused. ’Holocron’ is short for ‘holographic chronicle’. A potentially vast store of data can be archived on one and accessed with the help of one or more gatekeepers such as myself. This holocron has not been filled to the limits of what it can store, but considering the available space on a crystal-lattice device and the limited time Scott Kirchner had to make it, it’s unsurprising."

"You’re not Kirchner? This isn’t a two-way communication with him?"

"I’m sorry, you seem to be mistaken," the holocron said in even tones. "This is a holocron. It’s a storage-and-retrieval device for knowledge, not a holocommunicator. I am the gatekeeper of this holocron, made in Kirchner’s image. I am a very limited artificial intelligence. Think of me as a kind of search-and-retrieval engine. Like Google, if you will, but more personal, with the thought patterns and appearances of its creators present and without ads for porn. I can also act as a sort of guide if you are attempting something I know about. Something like Clippy, only not quite so annoying, I hope. Now that that’s out of the way, some of you seem to be members of the Five Hundred and First. Please identify yourselves."

Deciding that he might as well, Nathan said, "Nathan. TX-9129. Tampa Bay Squadron. Shadows Patrol. Second lieutenant ensign."

Will took his lead. "Will, TK-6204. Parjai Squadron. Hunter Patrol. Private first class."

8113 inhaled sharply but said nothing. Instead Tony shrugged and said, "Tony Stark. Billionaire playgirl inventor turned superhero. Not actually part of your group. I’m tagging along because I’m curious about what they’ll get into. And because I’ve got a better chance of getting out of here if I work with them."

Finally, grudgingly, 8113 said, "TS/TC-8113. Makaze Squadron. Makaze Patrol and Claw Patrol. Unranked."

"I see. Thank you, new users," the holocron’s gatekeeper said, flickering and reforming, the datapad appearing open and then going through a snapping-closed animation. "Thank you for your information."

It seemed to be waiting for something. Nathan ventured, "Why are you on the inside of a cabinet in an employee break room?"

The gatekeeper made a show of checking its holographic datapad, then said, "I can’t say. I must have been placed here while inactive. Perhaps my creator did it, or perhaps he entrusted it to someone who later put it aside." It made eye contact with each of them again. "If you bring me with you, I can dispense advice and directions, should you need either. I have some knowledge of this facility, though I should warn you that my records are incomplete. When Kirchner copied the databanks to my files, the on-site AI restricted and redacted some of the material."

"Is this AI called Catherine?" Nathan asked.

"Officially, yes. That’s what the faculty call her. However, from what I saw of her inner workings, she calls herself SHHHCHHHH-" With a burst of static, the holocron’s gatekeeper flickered several times, actually collapsing back into the point of the holocron once and re-forming. "How odd. It appears that the on-site AI was able to get into my memory and redact all uses of her true name."

The gatekeeper seemed genuinely troubled. "I’m sorry, but I am literally unable to tell you. This… this isn’t supposed to happen. How can I help you, new users, if I am unable to provide required information?"

8113, reaching up to scratch her scalp, said, "Don’t worry about it. I guess we’ve got to take you with us."

"Please do. My function may have been compromised, but I was tasked with assisting survivors. You, new users, are survivors, and the first on my record." The gatekeeper bowed at the waist and vanished.

No one was all that eager to pick the holocron up, but it made sense. After some debate, Will gingerly reached in and grabbed it, then let go.

"Gah. It’s so cold," he said. "I mean, I’m wearing gloves, but it just cut right through them. Sorry, I’ll try again." He reached in again, and this time he lifted it out, past the beakers and out into the open. "Really heavy, too. I’ve never seen a Sith holocron up close before."

He laid it carefully in Tony’s janitor bucket, where it seemed to beckon and glower, at odds with the junk that she’d picked up. Then he stripped off the glove he’d touched it with and pressed that hand against his face, frowning.

"It felt cold when I was touching it, but now my hand is fine," he said. "That’s just weird."

"Should we go, then?" Nathan asked the group.

"Go where? Don’t we have to meet back with Rabbot Jan?" 8113 asked. "Not that I have any love for her, but aside from the fish creatures and… this thing, she’s the only living thing we’ve seen. For a given definition of living," she added darkly.

"I guess," Nathan said with a shrug.

They hadn’t gotten very far before Will, out on point, swore and backpedaled. "Dinosaur!"

There was a bellow that shook the air. Suddenly enervated, Nathan dropped into a crouch and shouted "Zap it! First clear shot, you take it!"

Will brought his security zapper up and into position as the triceratops ploughed clumsily around the corner, shaking its massive head. There was still blood on its horns and faceplate. Its eyes rolled wildly before it charged, accelerated much faster than seemed natural for something that big.

The lightning arched directly into its head and it slowed, bellowing, shaking its head more quickly. For a moment Nathan thought that this was working, that it would either keel over or retreat.

And then Will’s bolt of lightning cut out. Later, Nathan would remember that Will had been the one to shoot that branch of Sedaris’s pet project, and his zapper was lower in charge. At the time, all he knew was that the triceratops had survived a direct hit and was now tossing its head and rolling its eyes.

"Run," he said through dry lips. "Run!"

There wasn’t time to do anything else. Will snatched the holocron out of the bucket and left the bucket behind. Rocking with Tony’s motions, knotting his hands and feet into better grips, Nathan once again was the only one who’d look back.

It was chasing them. It was chasing them very quickly. "Faster! Definitely run faster!"

He made some very quick calculations. "Corners! Turn corners! Aaah!" He’d almost pitched over as Tony did what he’d told her.

The triceratops thundered past, but it knew they’d turned. It knew. Even with Tony still running, he could tell as it stopped its charge and turned, snorting, its horns noisily gouging into the wall.

They had a head start, but it could run faster than they could. "Find a doorway! Find a small doorway! I see it!"

8113, who was the one in front now, shouted "I don’t see one!"

"Turn another corner and keep looking! Emperor’s sake, keep running!"

They went on like this through several turns, pounding past many doors that the triceratops could have followed them through, including a Section Ten door. The dinosaur sometimes gained on them, sometimes lost a little ground, but always stayed close enough that their rest periods were no slower than a trot. The triceratops didn’t seem to tire, and Will and 8113 could have kept this up for a long time, but Tony didn’t have that stamina.

She was flagging, he saw it, stumbling a little as she ran and gasping more and more harshly. Unlike the others, she hadn’t been able to shout anything as she ran. She wasn’t a trooper. He made another decision.

"Will! Drop the holocron and help Tony!" There was a moment when Will’s face twisted and Nathan feared that he wouldn’t do it, but then the holocron fell tumbling to the ground and Will had matched Tony’s speed, bracing in case she fell.

Way out ahead of them, 8113 shouted "Here! Over here!" and tugged frantically at a door handle. It didn’t budge. "Keycard!" she bellowed.

"Just a little farther," Nathan told Tony, who nodded, sweating heavily, with that glazed look of someone who was no longer really thinking or wholly aware of their surroundings. New recruits had to get to this point repeatedly while transitioning into the Five-Oh-First. Outside of controlled situations like that, it wasn’t a desirable state.

But she did make it to the door, although she wasn’t in a state to pull out Almeida’s keycard. "Left breast pocket," Nathan said, and Will reached for it.

Nathan looked back and saw the triceratops round the latest corner, still furious. "Hurry up," he urged through clenched teeth.

Will swiped the card through the reader, which chimed, and they piled through the door and shut it hard. Then they waited.

The triceratops charged past and once again slowed, turned, and snorted. It made several barking groans that might have been a challenge, and started snuffling around, its feet causing microtremors in the floor and walls.

It was dark in this room, and silent except for the sound of each of them gasping for breath. Even Nathan was a bit out of it, probably due to the adrenaline. He could feel the heat radiating out from Tony’s neck and face and up through her clothing as her body tried to dump it. She had leaned against the wall to the hallway, her eyes closed, her mouth still open and panting. This wasn’t a good way to cool down, he knew; she should have been walking and letting her heart and breathing rates lower more gradually. But this wasn’t the time. Not with the triceratops right outside.

It had gone right through those double doors to that garden room, Nathan remembered suddenly. It had torn them right off their hinges and left horn marks in them. Those had been metal. These walls were not metal. He hadn’t thought about that before telling the others to hide. Nothing to do about it now, of course, and there hadn’t really been any other options. He mentally kicked himself anyway.

Everything depended now on if it knew they were here. If it didn’t know, and they didn’t tip it off, they might be okay.

8113 was in a fighting crouch with her club in hand, though surely she knew how little good it would do them. Will, beside her, was alert and also tensed, holding his now-useless security zapper. 8113 really should give her zapper to him, Nathan thought. He filed that aside for later. He didn’t dare talk now. How good was a triceratops’s hearing?

No one sneezed, knocked anything over, or had any sudden moments that forced them to loudly blurt something. They were breathing too heavily to be silent, but there was nothing to be done about that.

Directly outside of the door, the triceratops grunted. Nathan closed his eyes as he heard and felt its footsteps get more distant. Was it going? Was it backing up to charge the door? It wasn’t long before he couldn’t hear it at all, and another few seconds later the other two troopers left their fighting stances, Will with a huge sigh of relief.

"We should still wait a bit in case it hangs around or comes back," Nathan said softly, and got nods in reply. Tony was looking better as she got her breath back, now grabbing her chest over her artificial heart.

"I left the keycard outside," Will said. "And the bucket is somewhere back there. Sorry."

Tony twitched, still too drained to shrug. "We can just pick the card up on the way out, and there wasn’t really anything too good in the bucket. I used some of it on that club. All the sensitive stuff is on me." She took a plastic water bottle from where it dangled from her belt, untwisted the cap, and took a pull from it, swishing a second mouthful around after swallowing the first.

"We’ll have to find the holocron, too," Nathan said. "Hopefully the dinosaur didn’t step on it. I don’t know how fragile those things are."

8113 said, "It’s a holocron. They’re supposed to last for thousands of years, right? So Sith can pass on the techniques that died with them?"

Will shrugged. "I have no idea. My SL’s a Mara. If she’s made a holocron, she’s kept quiet. That’s on the mystic end. I’ve never had much to do with mystic stuff."

"What’s in this room, anyway?" Nathan asked, changing the subject. Self-consciously he made himself cough, and heard the others do the same, but his facesight wasn’t working right, probably because of his ears. Light from the hallway was coming in around the door, enough to illuminate him and the others. Not enough to show anything of the room, though. There could have been anything in here, and he’d be blind to it.

After a moment and a few more coughs, Will said, "Hmm. It’s no bigger than the break room, I think. There’s… something in the middle of the floor."

"Like a… stack or a pile," 8113 added, moving her head back and forth. "Sparse, sort of. I don’t know. It’s perfectly still," she added. "I don’t think there’s anything else in here."

Tony had her wind back. "What are you doing?"

Nathan saw the pale gleam of Will’s teeth as he grinned. "Echolocating, of course."

"I thought stormtroopers were all supposed to be human," she said.

"Mostly. There are some near-humans here and there, and Aurek takes nonhuman humanoids. We all have to be very close to human," Nathan said. Taking pity on Tony, he said, "Echolocating is the flashy word, and technically it’s what’s going on, but I prefer calling it facesight. Nothing too refined. It’s a matter of sensing echoes as pressure. Most humans have it but don’t do anything with it. You’ve walked into a building before and felt where the walls and ceiling were before, haven’t you?"

She blinked. "That’s echolocation?"

8113 nodded. "It is. Your voice and footsteps bounce around and you can learn to interpret the echoes. We’d get better results by clicking, really, and it’s only any good when we don’t have our helmets and can’t just switch to infrared light. It makes a nice party trick, though."

"Huh. I didn’t know that. The more you know," Tony said. She hesitated for a long moment, then said, "If you’re done echolocating, can I hit the lights?"

Nathan rubbed his brow with the cyber fingers. "Yeah, go ahead."

15

She did, and the light blinded them all at first. Their eyes adjusted, though, and the thing in the middle of the floor was… chairs.

Lots of chairs, stacked in a crooked tower that went all the way to the ceiling. It was just stacked furniture, but somehow it sent chills up and down Nathan’s spine. Why had anyone done that? This must have needed some special equipment to make, since the ceilings on this floor were twice the height of a normal human.

Why stack chairs to the ceiling? It didn’t make any sense. If the room had been set aside to store chairs, they should have been in several shorter stacks, making it easy to come in and take some away.

Chairs. Just a tall stack of chairs. The one at the top looked like it was touching the ceiling. Why do this?

Right up to the ceiling…

Something was wrong, Nathan realized. He’d started repeating his thoughts. He scowled, shook his head, and then deliberately poked the tip of one eggtooth into the skin of his upper arm. That did it. The sudden pain let him break the rest of the way out of what he suspected had to be some kind of entrancement effect. People who saw the chairs immediately fell to wondering why they were stacked in one precarious-looking column and had trouble setting the question aside. They would just stand there, gaping.

Like the other three were doing now. This was dangerous. Nathan stomped hard on Tony’s shoulder, right over her clavicle bone. When she did nothing, he said her name, first conversationally and then in something like a shout.

"The chairs are stacked to the ceiling," she said in a dreamy, vague voice. "Why the hell are there chairs stacked to the ceiling?"

"Snap out of it, Tony," he said. Her big face didn’t move, her expression didn’t change. Nathan expelled a lungful of air in one impatient sigh. Fine. Stepping to her neck, getting close enough that he could have touched his face to her eye, he dropped to all fours, found a likely spot on her trapezius muscle, and inserted an eggtooth. Not the same one he’d cut himself with. That would have been unhygienic.

Her reaction was everything he could have hoped for. Tony yelped and sort of half-leapt away, almost knocking him to the ground. She whipped her head around, nearly braining him with her chin, and almost shouted "What the fuck do you think you’re – oh. Oh." She blinked. "I hope we haven’t wasted much time."

"I hope so too. We can’t stay here," he said, carefully not looking at the tower of inexplicably fascinating, almost ominous chairs. "Help me wake up the other two, please?"

She did, apologizing before and after pinching Will’s cheek with what seemed like slightly too much enthusiasm, and doing the same with 8113.

Facing away from the chairs now, fighting the sudden crawling urge to glance back and trying not to speculate, they decided that enough time had probably passed, and hopefully the triceratops had left. If not, too bad. They filed out into the empty hallway and closed the door firmly behind them.

"All right, this place just got a little weird," Tony said as she bent and picked up Almeida’s ID card. The mark Nathan had left on her bled sluggishly.

"Yeah. Monsters are one thing, but that? I don’t even know," 8113 said.

"Will, you have some of the egg stuff, right? Give some to Tony." Will shrugged an unslung the scrap of bathrobe that had some of the egg salve still soaked into it, dipped his finger in, and extended it to Tony.

She winced and closed her eyes, nodding before Will daubed it on. It covered the cut and stopped the bleeding instantly.

"So, okay, randomly opening doors is probably a bad idea," Tony said, rolling her neck on her shoulders to make her vertebrae crackle.

"This one’s not even labeled," Nathan said disapprovingly. "We’ll fix that. Will, you’re on lookout duty. Tony, do you have anything sharp on you?"

Tony went through her belt. "There’s this."

"It’ll work as a chisel. Thirteen, would you use your club like a hammer? I’d like this door marked."

He’d had a vague idea about inscribing warnings in English and Aurebesh letters, but it turned out that their chiseling method didn’t score through the paint easily or neatly enough. They settled for scratching a large, rough X into the paint on the door and went back the way they had come, looking for the holocron.

Now they all moved with more caution, choosing silence over speed. The triceratops could be anywhere. The holocron, fortunately, hadn’t been dropped too far away.

8113 hissed triumphantly as she first saw it, then picked it up in both hands. It had been positioned in the exact middle of the hall, equidistant from either wall. And it was intact, as far as they could tell.

The gatekeeper flickered up into being. "Is there something you need, new users?"

"We had to leave you behind while running from a rogue dinosaur," Nathan said, and was surprised when Tony snorted as she suppressed a laugh.

"It’s nothing," she said. "Just – what a world, where that kind of sentence makes sense."

The gatekeeper displayed the opening-datapad animation, appearing to study the device’s screen intently. "I have record of a creature that fits your description of a ‘rogue dinosaur’. Several of identical genetic makeup and very similar thaumic resources were created by Senior Researcher Walter Margolis, but only one survived to term. It has been designated ‘Snuffles’ and was, before attaining full growth, allowed to wander the facility in the company of a handler. As it matured, it became more territorial and aggressive, and was soon confined. It is conceivable that Snuffles escaped and has come to consider a broad swath of the facility to be its territory."

Snuffles. Someone had named a triceratops with a face shield too broad to let it through an ordinary doorway ‘Snuffles’. Nathan pressed the cyber fingers against his temple. "Why create a dinosaur?"

"I can’t say. There are no records about why any of the staff chose to work on what they worked on." The gatekeeper shrugged apologetically.

That was singularly unhelpful. Nathan tried to think of another question.

"What are thaumic resources?"

"Thaumic resources fall under what The Five Hundred and First might term ‘phlebotinium’. Kirchner put it like so." The gatekeeper’s voice and appearance changed subtly, becoming less blandly helpful, more… scornful, maybe. Superior. More like an SL.

"A humble blaster rifle may be disassembled, and each component might then be rendered unrecognizable and be used for something else, something that was not part of its original purpose." The gatekeeper seemed to pace, stepping off the point of the holocron, holographic feet walking on air. "Something that previously established science of this world regarded as impossible. The possibilities, we have seen, are worth investigation. I suppose that in this world even our technology is ‘magic’ at its core, a fascinating manifestation of the Force that I have never seen before."

The gatekeeper flickered out and appeared again on the holocron’s point, again looking helpful and not particularly intense. "I am sorry, but there is little else on record. Only that every project worked on in this facility has involved thaumic resources of some kind, which I can only assume correspond to the items purchased from costumes."

Nathan wrestled a bit with the notion. "So it’s less like this is somewhere that a bunch of mad scientists went to, and more like somewhere that a bunch of people who were never costumes or secondaries discovered that they could make mad science."

The gatekeeper smiled pleasantly and nodded. "If you say so, new user."

He couldn’t think of anything more, but 8113 could. "Can you tell us anything else about revival eggs?"

"Certainly." The gatekeeper checked its datapad. "I have record of Scott Kirchner procuring eight revival eggs. All eight were requisitioned by Anton Sawatsky for testing of his Sawatsky Procedure. He was not ready, so they were put into stasis, keeping them from hatching at the predicted time, and removed all together. Four were subjected to the treatment, although his assistant Lewis Matla removed them to an unknown location upon Sawatsky’s death. The other four were to act as control."

Stasis? But the gatekeeper had reported something more important. "Wait. Control?"

"A ‘control’ is essential to the scientific method," the gatekeeper began, but Nathan didn’t have time for that.

"We know what a control is. What’s this about other eggs?"

The gatekeeper nodded and smiled pleasantly. "Staff of this facility did not often follow the scientific method, but Anton Sawatsky did set aside four which would not be subjected to the treatment."

Nathan felt his pulse pick up. His voice remained steady. "Where are they?"

"They should be in a small room that was reconfigured into an incubation chamber. As it happens, it isn’t very far from your current location."

Will spoke up. "Couldn’t you have said something about that earlier?"

The small holo of Kirchner smiled and shook his head. "Please. I am the gatekeeper to a Sith holocron. I have been instructed to help you, but you have to ask. Unlike the gatekeepers of a Jedi holocron, it is not in my programming to take initiative or intuit what you want. Neither will I withhold anything from you by choice."

Nathan looked at the others. "I want to go look. This isn’t a dictatorship, though. What do you think?"

"If there are more eggs – well, as far as I’ve heard they tend to hatch at the same time. That means there could be people who’ve been out for as long as we have," Will said. "And if they didn’t get whatever we got – the Sawatsky Procedure – they’ve probably been helpless for all this time. They’re probably Five Hundred and First. We have to at least look."

"Well, I’ve got nothing more pressing on my schedule," Tony said faux-casually.

8113 shrugged. "I do think we should get back to the security room and try to find the Rabbot Jan, but that has to wait."

They set off, cautious of finding Snuffles again. The trek was uneventful; there was evidence of krarls, some of it rather recent, but none of the creatures themselves. Maybe they were trying to avoid the triceratops.

The door the holocron directed them to was scarred and gouged, much more than any of the other doors they’d seen. Something had apparently tried to get in, and many times, but hadn’t been able to get through it. By the marks, it looked like the work of krarls. Lots of determined krarls.

"Let's see if Almeida's card works," Tony said, and swiped it through the reader. The light above the reader flickered confirmation, and the door unlocked. Tony stepped back and let Will open it.

16

It was dark inside. A pair of red, glowing eyes opened not far off the floor, against one of the walls. For a moment there was silence, and then someone inside spoke.

"I assure you, no one here will attack. Too weak for that." The voice, despite being hardly more than a whisper and having to pause as the speaker caught his breath again, was clear and compelling.

Will glanced at Nathan. "I wasn't expecting glowing eyes in a dark room. Should we go in, then?"

"You should ask who that is first," Tony said immediately, suspicious.

That made sense. "Yeah, do that," Nathan said.

The glowing eyes blinked slowly. "I am an officer of the Five Hundred and First Legion. With me are two stormtroopers from the same Legion. And one mystery, possibly one of our allies. You will forgive me, I hope, if I do not have the strength to stand and greet you."

This seemed promising, but Nathan wasn't convinced. He licked his lips nervously and called out, "What are the names of your squadron and patrol?"

"I am from Bast Alpha Squadron. My patrol is number two zero three, nicknamed the Anvil." The voice answered immediately, now with a layer of impatience that triggered Nathan's kowtow-to-the-superior-officer response. He'd actually opened his mouth to apologize before catching himself.

"I'm convinced," he told the others. "Let's go in."

"Right," Tony said doubtfully, but she stepped in with the others.

Nathan's eyes, and no doubt 8113's and Will's at the same time, adjusted to the gloom. It was another egg room like the one down in storage, and like in that room, there was a single dim light source. One egg was still intact, standing tall and alone. The other three had broken open, and three humanoids who must have been in those eggs lay conscious or semiconscious in the thick litter of suedelike strips.

The red eyes belonged to a Chiss who had dragged himself to lie against the wall. He'd more or less managed to preserve his modesty by heaping suedelike strips over his body, and clearly he'd also made another pile to prop up his head. Somehow he managed to look more dignified by an order of magnitude than the other two. The two humans had done exactly the same thing, maybe at his suggestion, but they looked drained and weak and helpless, exactly the way Nathan would expect them to look in this situation. Somehow, despite his situation, the Chiss had a presence that suggested nobility, banked fire, even control.

One of the humans muttered something unintelligible. The Chiss officer said, "Yes, of course. I have told you who we are. Now, am I correct in assuming that some of you are from the Five Hundred and First as well? One of your number appears to be a member of Tampa Bay Squadron."

Nathan grimaced, but tried to keep it from his face. "You are correct, sir."

"Good." Nathan hadn't realized that the Chiss's head had been lifted until it lowered back down and the strain went out of his neck. Apparently the heaped strips under his head weren't as high as Nathan had first thought. This officer was almost certainly a higher rank than he was.

He had mixed feelings about this. On one hand, he didn’t have to be the responsible one anymore. There was an instant, bone-deep certainty that the officer would know what the best thing to do was. On the other hand, if Nathan couldn’t at least lead he was truly and absolutely useless.

"Thirteen, Will, see to the troopers. Tony? Can you go to the officer for me?"

The cape glanced curiously at the intact egg, but approached the Chiss. Will and 8113 split off and each saw to a human.

The Chiss visibly fought to keep his eyes open; they were featureless, without visible irises or pupils, but Nathan was sure that they were being studied.

Nathan examined the Chiss officer’s blue-skinned features. It was a face he'd seen before. "You're a Thrawn, right?"

He saw an eyelid twitch, and hesitantly, reluctantly, the Chiss officer said, "I was... Marco Aquino, but I don't think that name will work for much longer. Call me by my designation. ID-6981. Or Eighty-one, if you must shorten it. Just not my Name." ID-6981's eyes drifted from half open to thin red slits, but he continued, sounding pained.

"I'm slipping, you see. Until today, I had some control over it, and I believed that this would take years. Decades. Maybe it wouldn’t happen at all. It appears that so much time with so little but my thoughts to occupy myself with started it again. Even saying my Name seems to make it happen faster."

Nathan remembered talking to Tony about this, and by the way she shifted, Tony remembered that conversation too. "I’m sorry to hear that," he said, feeling awkward.

"It’s not your fault. I am certain that it would have started eventually." A fractional shrug. "At any rate, I mind less as it progresses, and I will be more useful to you if I am no longer Marco."

ID-6981's mouth twisted like he was about to say something he didn't want to say, and when he did speak, he sounded even more pained. "A… half-dead master strategist is still a master strategist. A half-dead trooper denying his Name is nothing more than dead weight, at least for the near future. Something to be protected and defended, not an asset."

"I’m Nathan. This is Tony Stark, that’s Will, and she’s 8113," he said, suddenly deeply uncomfortable and not wanting to hear any more. "Someone get the lights and close the door behind us, all right? If it's lasted this long against krarls, it will probably last a bit longer. Tony, will you set me down and get Th- get Eighty-one a bathrobe? Thanks."

The officer closed his eyes before Will hit the lights and made everyone else blink as their eyes adjusted to the sudden brightness. Even prone, he towered over Nathan. Beyond the Chiss, Nathan saw that 8113, crouching near one of the semiconscious troopers, was keeping her face turned so that the side that wasn't as obviously patterned was the side closest to that man.

"You will need to fill me in," ID-6981 said. Eyes closed or not, he seemed very alert. "These are the facts as I know them. The three of us have cheated death and were reborn here at most twenty hours ago, without attendants. We are, all of us, very weak. By this point we have recovered enough to be able to think and speak clearly, though the others were sleeping when you arrived. However, it will be some time before any of us can stand. You, clearly, are not weakened, but I surmise that you, too, were reborn recently."

"You saw our elbows, sir?" Nathan asked, reaching down and touching the eggtooth sprouting through his bodysuit.

"I did," the officer said, giving a fractional nod. "And I noticed your general state of disarray, your lack of regulation equipment, and the fact that you, Nathan, hail from Tampa Bay squadron and are unable to conceal that. Thank you," he added graciously as Tony stepped up with a bathrobe and draped it gingerly over his body.

That was Thrawns for you, Nathan thought, careful to keep it from his face.

The officer continued to outline what he knew, opening his eyes without flinching at the light. "I do not know where this place is, but a large quadrupedal animal has passed outside of the door on one occasion. Five smaller quadrupedal animals, or perhaps fewer than that making multiple attempts, have tried to claw through the door and were balked. Uncountable very small creatures have scurried through the ventilation ducts. Once, very early on, what I took to be humans passed outside."

"Were they laughing?"

ID-6981 frowned imposingly down at him. "No. They spoke among themselves in fearful tones, and neither I nor the others with me were in a state to hear what they were saying, let alone call out to them."

Probably not spiderhands, then. "I’m sorry for taking that tone, sir."

"You will explain your question later," he said. "There is something inside of the last egg. It spoke several times within the first few hours of my regaining consciousness. Unfortunately, at the time I was severely dazed and my ears were still plugged by material from the egg, so I recall little of what it said. Only what it said before falling silent, which was that it had exhausted its power reserves and needed to shut down." He closed his mouth. Something about his expression suggested that he was waiting for someone to speculate.

Tony rose to the expectation. "Some kind of robot, maybe."

"Perhaps. I know from all of this that we are in territory that is, if not hostile, than quite indifferent to us, despite a room that is suited to being an incubation chamber. One of the others with me has informed me that this… litter on the ground is not typical of incubation chambers." He gave another minimal shrug. "And that is the extent of what I, or the others, know."

The officer said nothing more; his expression said it all for him. Nathan launched into a slightly tangled report of what had happened to him and his group, with Tony adding wry comments. To the side, Will or 8113 sometimes looked up as if they wanted to add their own comments, but that really wasn’t done in front of a superior officer. Not by a trooper.

ID-6981 listened intently, but interrupted when Nathan told him about that first spiderhand.

"Excuse me," he said formally. He looked no different from before, and yet his red eyes seemed that much more alien, that much more imperious. "Do you believe that this ability of the spiderhands is due to some kind of Phlebotinum?" Graciously expanding on that term for Tony, he added, "Is it a Force-assisted, magical, psychic, or otherwise inexplicable ability, or is it merely sound in a particular frequency at a particular volume?"

Nathan considered that. "If they were costumes or proper secondaries, I’d instantly think it was Phlebotinum. But from what we’ve heard, almost everything here is made with things taken from costumes and secondaries. And secondaries hardly ever have the kind of Phlebotinum you see on costumes, so maybe these new ones have even less." He shrugged. He wouldn’t lie to a superior officer and omission like this was pretty close to a lie, so he also said, "That’s all just my speculation. I don’t know."

"Hmm." ID-6981 didn’t move, but Nathan had the impression of his fingers steepling together in front of his face. "Would you say that the scream affected you through your ears, or on some other level?"

He didn’t have to think to answer that. "Ears, definitely."

Tony added, "He’s got mechanical ears, but mine are intact and they were definitely ringing after the spiderhand screamed at us." She hesitated, but said, "We can ask Kirchner’s holocron. I’ll go ask Thirteen for it."

Somehow ID-6981’s gaze seemed to intensify still more. "You have a holocron?"

"We found one. The Starkiller who kidnapped the revival eggs made it, and we found it in an employee break room." He almost added that he hadn’t gotten to that point in the story, but he closed his mouth before he could say it.

"Starkiller," the officer muttered darkly. Then he seemed to set that thought aside. "You’re certain that it’s a holocron?"

Now Nathan hesitated. "No, sir. I’m not at all certain. I’ve heard of holocrons, but I’ve never seen one before. It fits what I’ve heard, anyway."

"Interesting. It is an involved and lengthy process, yet I have heard nothing of anyone creating a holocron." Again his face took on a pained aspect, like he was forcing himself to say something he didn’t want to say. "I may have gone out of my way to avoid setting up sources of intelligence. I still think that knowledge found its way to me enough that this would not be a surprise."

Tony came back holding it, and lowered herself into a cross-legged sitting position that struck Nathan as entirely too casual. But then, he reminded himself, she wasn’t Five-Oh-First. "I’ve never heard of these things before, so for all I know it’s a souvenir from Cairo. Which is inexplicably cold to the touch, even through these gloves." She stroked it with her free hand, making the gatekeeper appear.

"You have need of me, new users?"

The officer studied it in silence as Nathan introduced the holocron to him. After a moment he launched into a barrage of terse, sharp-edged questions. The holocron answered in kind, the two of them going from question to answer to new question without pause, both of them speaking fast enough that the words almost ran together. While both of them spoke Basic, or English as it was called on Earth, somehow Nathan understood almost none of it; it went so fast and so technical that it whipped right over his head.

It was like ID-6981 didn’t have to stop to breathe or process responses; he always had a new question. He referenced people and events and technical terms that Nathan had never heard of as well as things he did know - the holocron, Kirchner, the facility, various staff members, thauma…

It went on for long enough that Nathan looked away, no longer even trying to follow the exchange. Tony’s face was obscured by the angle and by the holocron she was holding – he wasn’t even knee-high on her and she was sitting not at all far from him, so this wasn’t a surprise – but he could tell from her body language that she was staring raptly. Nathan sighed as inaudibly as he could manage. Maybe she was able to follow the exchange, maybe she was caught up in ID-6981’s mystique as a Thrawn. Maybe both. A significant percentage of people just tended to be fascinated by Thrawns. It was a piece of Phlebotinum that all of them had.

The other troopers had finished tending to the two prone ones and were standing together talking, looking serious. Nathan thought it looked like one of the prone troopers was participating, the other one was asleep.

What felt like ten minutes later, ID-6981 finished up and fell silent as the holocron bowed slightly and flickered out. He blinked, and in that same rapidfire sharp-edged voice said, "Do you have water?"

Nathan startled. "Yes! Yes, we’ve found some." His voice almost broke, so he took a second to clear his throat. "The other three are all carrying a bottle or two."

"I need some. Chase and Avari, too, need water." By the way he jerked his chin just barely at the prone troopers, Nathan assumed that he meant them.

"Uh, yes. Sorry." Out of the corner of his eye he saw Will and 8113 go for their water bottles without being told, and Tony was already stepping past him to offer. ID-6981 accepted the bottle gravely and drank from it on his own, very slowly but without it needing to be held for him.

"This is a real holocron," he said more gently after lowering the bottle. "It has told me that spiderhand screams affect other organisms through their ears. Have you tried improvising earplugs?"

"Earplugs? I – oh." Nathan stared at his hands as if they’d become fascinating, feeling his face heat up. Earplugs. For use against something with a paralyzing scream that appeared to be purely sonic in nature. Failing earplugs, rags stuffed into their ears, or something.

Tony said, "I have no idea why I never thought of that," her voice utterly flat.

"Think of it now," the officer said, suddenly icy. "I and my two men are incapacitated, but you can act. With a force as small as this, we must press every advantage."

"I’m sorry, sir."

ID-6981 exhaled slowly, seeming to fall back into limpness without having moved a centimeter. "Just do better," he said, sounding weary and a bit less imposing, like whatever had seized him had let go. "And take a look at what is inside that egg. I would have done it myself if I wasn’t an invalid."

Nathan was privately gratified to see that while 8113 went right up to it, Will made an automatic half start and looked to him. "Do it," he confirmed.

They broke into the egg. With two people who both knew exactly how to crack a revival egg working at it, even with the occupant itself being of no help at all, it didn’t take at all long before it split, and the humanoid thing inside slid to lie unmoving on the floor.

It was made of metal in red and gold. Nathan didn’t see much more than that before Tony made a strangled sound, not quite a gasp, not quite a protest.

"That’s my armor," she managed after a moment of trying. Her voice was tinged strongly with disbelief. "I’d recognize it anywhere. There are something like ten versions of Iron Man, but I know mine, and that’s it. Look, it’s damaged in the same places where I was hit before I… died." Egg goo was leaking out of some of the damaged parts, like the armor was filled with the stuff.

"Is it?"  ID-6981 asked.  "Interesting.  Did you program it to speak, or is that a new development?"

"There’s memory space and the kind of hardware that could support a fairly advanced AI," she said in a strange, distant voice. "No really advanced AI in it, though. Certainly nothing that could speak, not even one that could record and replay anything. Not autonomously. I’ve been burned too often by those things to put another one in my armor." In a much quieter voice, she said, "I have a really bad track record with them."

"Perhaps this was a quirk of rebirth," ID-6981 said. "Ideally, bodies are separated from their personal effects beforehand. Perhaps in your case this was not possible."

There was a pause while Tony considered this and 8113 looked up, angry-blank.

"Ah. So Tony gets split into two people while I end up a chimera," 8113 said in the most neutral tones imaginable, folding her arms across her chest. The semicomatose trooper closest to her jerked a little, and she winced, barely perceptively.

"So I was right," ID-6981 said softly, his expression unchanged. 8113, seeing his lack of surprise, said nothing. But she did look at him defensively, and apparently he decided to respond to that.

"You have Blaschko's lines creating a mosaic effect. Some of your skin cells produce more melanin than others." ID-6981 tilted his head very slightly in what might have been a shrug. "I would try sun exposure. The lines will always show under certain types of light, but perhaps tanning will make them harder to perceive."

8113 startled a little, her crossed arms loosening. "Do you think that will help, sir?"

"It might," the officer allowed. "But do take care that you don’t overdo it. Trust me when I say that skin cancer is more undesirable than being ostracized."

"Right. Yeah." 8113 shook her head. "Thank you, sir, but I’ll manage. It’s just frustration."

While this had been going on, Tony had been going over the armor, turning it over with Will’s help, dragging it against a wall and propping it into almost a sitting position, doing something to open

Tony took an arm’s length of coiled insulated wire from her belt and crouched in front of the inert armor, her back blocking Nathan’s view of what she was doing. He started walking to see what she was up to, struggling just a little with the litter of suedelike strips.

He was able to circle around far enough to see that she’d unbuttoned her uniform for some reason, and her artificial heart shone blue-white over the armor. One end of the wire vanished into her uniform while the other connected into the armor, which was open at the chest to reveal its wet interior. There might have been some kind of hum or climbing whine, or Nathan could have imagined that, but the armor’s small, dark eye lenses started to glow white - blue, first dimly, then with increasing brightness.

It studied her carefully, moving its helmet very slightly.

"Hello, Tony," it said at last. Anything else was cut off as Tony jerked with surprise and revulsion and swiped at the wire between them, making the end connected to the armor fall free. The glow went out as the helmet fell back.

Tony was breathing like she was being chased by Snuffles; from the floor Nathan couldn’t really see her face, but he could see her hands, and they were closing into shaking fists.

"Oh, fuck," she breathed.

"Reconnect and hear it out," ID-6981 called. "It will be useful."

"It’s not supposed to talk," she said vaguely, standing up.

Nathan would have expected the officer to be harsh again, but while his voice was firm, even sharp, it wasn’t unkind. "The world doesn’t adhere to ’supposed to’, Stark. Reality doesn’t care if you don’t believe it, and it doesn’t reconfigure to make itself more comfortable unless you make it change. I thought you could handle that."

Tony stiffened visibly. "Of course I can handle it."

"You know as well as I that we are terminally ill-equipped," ID-6981 said. "Any advantage must be pursued. If using your armor means dealing with this AI, then you must deal with this AI."

Tony shook her head, not saying anything.

After a moment of nothing, the Chiss officer shifted, going up on one elbow. "Today, please."

With a resigned growl in her voice, Tony said, "I’m doing it, I’m doing it. I just don’t like AIs in my armor." She crouched over it again.

"Duly noted."

She shot a glance back at him, but picked up the free end of the wire again and slowly, reluctantly, put it into the armor, doing something Nathan couldn’t really see.

The eyepieces glowed again, brighter and more artificial than ID-6981’s red eyes. "Tony," the armor said in a soft, hollow voice.

"Don’t move," she told it sharply. "I’m watching you. If you go for the repulsors - if you pull anything I’m yanking the wire again."

"I won’t," it said. It had a strangely resigned, even defeated air. "Will you let me sit up?"

She exhaled slowly through her teeth, then nodded. "The wire’s pretty short. Keep your fingers where I can see them and move very slowly."

"I don’t have much choice. There’s not a lot of power feeding into me. This wire isn’t very conductive." The armor very gradually pushed away from the wall, Tony moving with it and keeping a set distance away. Every movement came with a faint whine of servos and the clacking of metal on metal. It settled into a kneeling position, glinting wetly, hands loosely clasped in front of it.

"Now tell me why you’re here," she said. Nathan glanced around to see what the others were doing. Watching, all of them. He had the sense that ID-6981’s hands were clasped again, although they were crossed limp over his chest, one hand loosely gripping the other wrist.

The armor nodded slowly, jerkily. "Okay. I’m… I’m you. Sort of. I’m Kendall."

Tony said nothing.

The armor – Kendall – tried again, saying, "You… don’t know the name?"

"It’s familiar," Tony allowed, "but you’re not ringing any bells."

"Oh." Kendall waited, then said, "I guess you’re a Stranger, huh? That makes as much sense as anything else." She nodded reluctantly, and it went on slowly, painfully. "I was – I came to Xanadu as Tony Stark, but a woman. When I changed, usually I went by Tony, and despite myself I always resented how so many people assumed that I should have been a man. They gave all of us rooms, and I ended up in one where the mirror had been broken, so I threw the pieces away."

"That… sounds like me," Tony said. "Did you have to talk to a snooty man with a British accent about not having any finances?"

"Actually, he had a Welsh accent. I’m pretty sure that I died recently," Kendall said. "But I came back as Kendall, not Tony-Kendall. And as the armor, obviously."

"I see," Tony said.

Nathan felt Will’s footsteps as the other trooper came near him, knelt ponderously, and held out a hand. He stepped into it and braced his hand on Will’s thumb on the way up.

8113 had slung ID-6981’s arm over her shoulders and had him in a standing position, supporting most of his weight as she walked him over to where the other two troopers lay. Will took Nathan there, too.

"Should we move you and the others, sir?"

"This room has held up to attacks before. But if a more defensible place is found, it might be wise to take us there." ID-6981’s throat worked, and with some effort he said,

[placeholder]

17

They started across the floor and had turned several corners before anything happened. The triceratops Snuffles was nearby. But so was something else, a fast, heavy biped. According to 8113 and Will, there was a whirring hum with it.

First, skimming ahead into the intersection between two hallways, accompanied with a whir of rotor blades, came several droids of a design that Nathan had never seen before. Each one was a thin platform or wing with side by side rotors set in turbines spinning above, a small, crude-looking pincered arm slung underneath, and one roughly oval eye lens set in the front and center. They were no wider than Will or 8113 were across the shoulders and looked lightweight, but somehow unfinished, with fairly obvious weld marks and burns and some exposed wires. None of them were perfectly balanced.

As the first one saw them it pitched and leveled out as if doing a double-take, coming no closer, but watching, eye lens oriented towards them. The others, mostly on levels a little ways above or below it, also turned to watch them. It was then that Jan the Rabbot appeared, walking very tall on her cybernetic legs.

Jan looked different than he remembered. Obviously she’d been working on her nakedly robotic legs. They were even larger than before, now with ankle joints and two sort of toes, one facing forward, one back. The ankle joints made her walking pace much faster and more fluid-looking, although they were massive enough to send tremors up through the floor and up Will’s body until Nathan felt them.

Her ears had long segmented antennae in them, bulging through the thin cartilage at the leading edge, like she’d wrapped each ear around one and sutured it closed. Maybe those had been there before. It would explain why her ears had seemed so rigid.

He couldn’t tell if her mechanical arm was really different. It was incredibly bulky, but it had been like that before, too. Each multijointed finger, ending in something like half a plier with a rough, beveled grasping surface, was bigger than he was.

Many more cords and wires were on the flesh arm and hand than he remembered from the first time. Some had ends that disappeared into the fur and skin. Some connected a piece of metal on the back of her hand to the rest of her cybernetics. They had been applied without an eye for any sort of aesthetics, and while Nathan understood that, something about it seemed jarring anyway.

It probably had something to do with what she’d done to her face. There was a visor covering it now, from above her eyes down to her chin. There was a face on it, and it was proportioned very like how he remembered from the last time he’d seen her, though now there seemed to be faint circle patterns on it. But something about it made him think that it was a screen. The only feature that seemed real was her eyes. They were the most malevolent eyes he could ever remember seeing, utterly cold and alien.

They didn’t seem to move in arcs so much as point this way one instant, that way the next. Nathan saw them jerk across him and the others, surveying them coldly, impersonally, and very quickly. She must have noticed what had happened to him and that Tony wasn’t with them, but she said nothing about that.

"I have located the core of Sedaris’s pet project," she said without preamble, each word all but spat out, her lips lagging a quarter second behind each word.

"Could you try to be quieter?" he asked. "There’s a rogue dinosaur running around and it will find us if we’re not very, very quiet."

"That is not a concern," Jan said, her voice unmodulated. "My security drones will guide you to the core and assist you in eradicating it, neutralizing all of its tributaries. With Sedaris’s pet project inert, I can truly begin to take back this facility."

The drones continued to stare, hovering more or less in place. Their rotors were far quieter than Nathan would have expected, although they were still far from silent. They, and Jan, seemed to be waiting for him to say something.

"Are the drones armed?" Nathan wanted to know. They didn’t look armed. A second glance did reveal some kind of nozzle between the pincers of each one’s arm.

"They are. The core has taken precautions against my security drones’ armaments and against the effects of Nguyen’s experimental electroshock weapon; it has not armored itself against the effects of both in tandem." Contemptuous, she said, "I hope that you have not exhausted their charges."

Will had the one that Tony had used, and 8113 hadn’t fired hers at all. "We’re good," Nathan said. He hesitated. "Have you reactivated Catherine yet?"

Jan paused for long enough that he wondered if she’d crashed. If cyborgs crashed. Five Hundred and First cyborgs didn’t, though there were times when his joints seemed slow to respond. Finally, she said, "Yes. She has in turn reactivated her security drones and will guide them along the way. Ready yourself."

The other troopers shifted, and Nathan felt the vibration coming up through Will’s body. "I’m pretty sure the dinosaur knows that we’re here now. You’d better get ready to run," he said.

Both of the troopers looked to him, and he shook his head, trusting that the stormtrooper synchronity effect was helping them think along the same lines. They weren’t going to flee back to the incubation room. Not if that meant leading Jan back there to where they had three people helpless. The break room would work, or Section Ten. Maybe. Jan probably knew that the fish creatures were there, but something inside him still rebelled at showing her to where people who couldn’t really fight back were.

"There will be no running," Jan bit out. Her expression was unchanged, not sneering like Nathan expected from her voice. "I will kill it, and you will cease wasting time and get the job done." Her massive cybernetic fingers, each equidistant from the others, came together with a clack that seemed impossibly loud.

There was an answering grunt, and the triceratops came into view at a trot. It saw them, halted in place, and started to snort and toss its head, pawing the ground. Under Nathan, Will backed up a little, making sure that the furry cyborg was squarely between them and the dinosaur. Time seemed to slow to a lazy, syrupy pace, where details seemed crisp and colorful.

Jan raised her massive cybernetic arm, the fingers opening like a flower, wires and cables and cords swinging. As one, the drones parted, giving it a wide berth. This time she didn’t touch any controls built into it. In fact, her other arm didn’t move at all. Her cybernetic arm produced a bone-jarring whine that built from low to high and passed completely out of Nathan’s hearing.

The triceratops started to charge, column-like legs pounding. Ever time Nathan had seen this before, he’d been riding on Tony as she ran away, so he’d never quite picked up on the size and raw animal force of it, the inevitability of how it moved.

Jan’s arm ticked several times, staccato, almost like a sequence of drumbeats on a snare, and without any further warning it fired. Nathan saw no beam or burst, just a sort of ripple in the air that moved almost lazily to splash over the triceratops with a sizzle, of all sounds, catching it midstride.

A foreleg that had been in midair came down to connect with the ground, and the triceratops exploded. In an instant, it transmuted loudly from a running animal into a collection of blood and giblets and bone fragments. Horribly, it still had that momentum, so as the pieces fell they splashed and tumbled.

As they stilled, 8113 swore very quietly in Mandalorian; just three words, and not words Nathan knew, but Will turned his head towards her, briefly distracted, his mouth still open in shock, before turning back to the mound of steaming meat. It didn’t look like a triceratops now. It didn’t look like much of anything.

Still keeping his eyes fixed on the meat, Nathan studied Jan the Rabbot out of the corner of his eye. She was utterly unmoved. Not even nonchalant. Not like that point stormtroopers eventually got to, where they’d make a quip or complain about being interrupted. Like nothing whatsoever had happened. If he hadn’t had a bad feeling about her before, he did now.

"I think we’ll go find that core now," he said carefully.

As if they’d been waiting for that signal, the drones whisked off, one after another, back the way Will and 8113 and Nathan had come. They stopped in a group a few meters down, well within view, turning to stare back at them. After a moment’s pause, Nathan nudged Will’s neck with his foot, and they followed without a word. Jan did not watch them go, but loped on in the same direction she’d been headed before.

After a few minutes of following the drones, 8113 quietly said, "If she can do that, why does she need us? Why not destroy the core herself?"

No one had an answer. The drones took no notice, keeping up with that pattern of flying ahead, stopping, turning to stare at them, and waiting until they were close before flying ahead again.

"Careful what you say," Nathan told the other two as the thought dawned on him, in as soft a voice as he thought he could use while still being heard. "If the security drones are connected to Catherine and Catherine is close to Jan, everything we say might be passed on."

"If they’re receptive to sound, and if they can pick up what we’re saying," Will said in an equally quiet voice. "But yeah. Boss-man, did you notice that when you mentioned Catherine she stopped calling them her drones and started saying that they were Catherine’s?"

"I didn’t," Nathan said darkly. He wished they could ask ID-6981 about that. He wouldn’t hesitate to come up with the speculation that Nathan was suddenly hesitant to make. But they’d made some turnings and hadn’t even passed by the door to the incubation chamber, and even if they had, he wouldn’t have touched it. They had to stay hidden.

At least until Tony had fixed the armor enough to protect them. She could do that, he hoped.

At last the drones led them to a stairwell, and once 8113 had opened the door for them – it was the standard outward-swinging door, not one that retracted - they flew upwards and hovered at the first landing. For a moment the three of them stood and watched.

"I guess we go upstairs, then," Nathan said.

Will sighed and started to climb. "How big is this place, anyway?"

Two of the drones jolted in midair, swiveled to face along the upward-going stairs, and started to emit long, thin, wavery pale beams from that point between their pincers. Something snarled, and a krarl half ran, half crashed down the stairs and bowled into the drones, biting and slashing. Now more of them were shooting it, always with a sort of strange, low cooing or whistling sound.

Nathan sensed 8113 starting forward. "Wait," he said. "Let’s see what they do."

The krarl swiped, a diagonal downward blow that caught one of the drones squarely and drove it clattering to the floor. But the others had it now, sweeping their thin, lingering beams across its belly, mouth, and eyes. Its snarl turned suddenly into a yelp, and it spasmed, stumbled, and fell, flailing briefly. The drones beamed it for a few seconds more until it was still and then, as one, leveled out and swiveled to stare at the troopers.

The one that had fallen rose shakily, canted severely to one side like the rotors on that side had been damaged. A reek of scorched hair rolled gradually down the stairs to where they stood.

"All right," Nathan said when nothing else looked likely to happen. "Let’s go see what they did."

Will carried him up the stairs slowly. As ever, once they got close enough the drones turned away and whirred off to stop and stare at them, the damaged one a little behind the rest.

The dead krarl was covered in burn marks, as might be expected from the smell. While they had certainly made a dramatic impact on the animal’s fur, from the look of it they hadn’t gone very deep, and they had all seen how long it had taken to kill the creature.

Nathan felt 8113 and Will glance at him and knew what they were thinking. Jan the Rabbot had an arm cannon that could make a triceratops explode, and her security drones were armed with low-grade burning beams? Certainly, if they were security drones they might be expected to have relatively weak weapons so that people could be stopped without being killed if possible, and so others wouldn’t be hurt. But for something like this, couldn’t she have upgraded them?

What if they couldn’t take out Sedaris’ pet project? Very, very quietly, Nathan told the other two, "If this doesn’t work, we have to be ready to run." He met their eyes, 8113’s easily, Will’s with more trouble because he was so close. They knew what he meant.

They climbed onwards. Now both Will and 8113 had their security zappers out and in ready position. Nathan wanted to do the same with his, but he also didn’t want to fall off if things got rough, and he might need both hands.

The fourth floor seemed to be the highest. If not, then at any rate, it was where this particular stairwell ended. The drones clustered at the door here, too, like they couldn’t open it. Maybe they couldn’t. Those pincer-arms with the beams built into them didn’t look very well articulated.

Will and 8113 listened at the door, closing their eyes. Nathan leaned out precariously from Will’s shoulder to press his ear against it too, but other than the not-entirely-regular whirr of the security drones’ rotors, he heard nothing.

Finally the troopers pulled back. "Wet sounds," 8113 told him in an undertone. "It isn’t right outside the door, but it’s here all right."

"Yeah." Nathan sucked a breath in through his teeth and let it out in a rush. "Thirteen, Will. Are you ready?"

"Ready," 8113 said steadily, already holding her zapper in firing position, the prongs forward.

Will made a grimace that might have been a smile. "We don’t have much choice, do we? Yeah, I’m ready."

"Right. Right." Nathan took another breath, half wishing Tony was here, half glad she wasn’t. "Open the door."

18

The security drones clustered around the door slipped through one after the other the moment it had been pushed open wide enough, the last and slowest banging against the door and the doorframe both as it overcorrected.

It wasn’t dark on the other side, though it wasn’t terribly well-lit, either. The lights flickered quickly enough that they made everything, particularly the protoplasmic mass enveloping and caressing a computer station, seem to throb.

The mass stirred towards them, appendages reaching. The drones circled it from above, shooting those thin, lingering beams, which it cringed away from. Unlike with the krarl, they shot and adjusted their aim and shot again, though visually and to his ears they seemed like the same beams from before. Some appendages tried to follow the drones, apparently having trouble with how much they moved, getting longer and longer, more attenuated.

Will and 8113 both entered and positioned themselves with some distance between each other, hesitant to actually do something. They might hit the security drones. And this gave them a moment to study it.

This was bigger than the branch that they’d seen in the room with the backup generator. Nathan knew it wasn’t just because his perspective had changed; he’d had plenty of practice in evaluating size and distance. It took up more room, it was taller and wider, and there was less space between its main bulk and the floor. But somehow he didn’t think this was the core.

The beams burning it caused eruptions of very small pale bubbles under the surface, like tiny mountain ranges, and the bubbles were quickly obscuring the inside, making it opaque. He didn’t know if the core was supposed to have something strange and large hanging inside or not, but this piece of Sedaris’s pet project had nothing bigger than the nodes they’d seen suspended in that other branch. "Core" implied that it was special somehow, and bigger just didn’t seem to cut it.

It had one thick appendage trailing away along the floor, as big around as Will’s leg. The appendage or umbilical went through a doorway into another room, with a swinging door that was mostly closed – unlike the other three levels, the staircase for this floor didn’t open directly into a branching mess of hallways.

The umbilical could have just fed into some drains. But Nathan wasn’t willing to bet on that. "We’re going through there," he told the others.

"Leaving this one?" 8113 asked.

"Yeah. For now." He didn’t trust the security drones. The other two must have felt the same. They circled around the branch of project being harried by drones without another word. Although this one reached for them while they went by, the drones had most of its attention.

Through the door, staying well clear of the umbilical and watching in case it spun out any appendages of its own, there was… another hallway. But this one was small, almost cramped, and lit the same way as in that first room. The umbilical trailed out to another cracked-open door. In the opening it merged with two other umbilical appendages of similar size, which trailed out, one to another door within view, one going around the corner.

"Take a quick, very sparing check of this floor, and don’t touch any of the doors," Nathan said, barely loud enough to let them hear. 8113 went left. Will took him right, stepping very gingerly over the umbilical on the ground. The surface of it stirred, but it did nothing.

Will paused near the door it was going into. Not the door all three led up to, not yet.

Nathan stood up. "Hold me up to the door, but be ready to pull back. I’ll look inside."

Nodding, Will came closer and made a platform of his hand. Nathan stepped onto it, legs far apart and bent to lower his center of gravity and give him the best balance possible, and peered in through the cracked door.

After a moment he signaled for Will to withdraw, and after settling back into a crouch on the other trooper’s shoulder he said, "Another branch, just like the one the drones are distracted by. It’s going over what I guess is more machinery."

"Right. We keep going?"

"For now, yeah."

They met 8113 just a little ways further on; apparently the bit of hallway here was just a single square. "That must be all there is to this floor," Nathan said. "Now I guess we take a look at where all the umbilicals are going."

One of the drones zipped out of the doorway that they’d come from and met them on the way back, hovering noisily at eye level. In something like Jan’s voice, it snapped "What do you think you are doing?"

"They can talk?" Will blurted.

Behind this drone, the others spread out while liquid project flowed passively from the doorway, the umbilical rippling and contracting like an earthworm. "The security drones are merely an instrument of my will. They act as my eyes and hands, and their programming gives them no option but to obey me." Jan’s voice was distorted by the drone, with what almost seemed like an echo playing just after each word. "What do you think you are doing?"

"We were scouting," Nathan said, a little unnerved.

Jan, her voice glitching, said, "Your task is to destroy the core. The closest branches must be destroyed first, or they will encircle us." Without so much as a pause for them to acknowledge, the drone spun off and joined the others that were nudging open one of the doors.

Will and 8113 looked at Nathan, who shrugged. "I guess we take the branch that they’re not getting, then."

Will led 8113 back to the door that Nathan had peered through, and after a pause to let them all steel themselves, he opened the door.

Sensing them, maybe because opening the door took it away from the umbilical, that branch of Sedaris’s pet project retracted all of its appendages and sort of reared up like a wave about to break.

8113 fired her security zapper and hit it dead on, cutting off the bolt almost instantly. The project rippled and throbbed and collapsed into a liquid, flowing out across the floor and into the hall, swamping Will’s legs in the process.

8113 cursed and made a kind of sideways leap away from the retreating umbilical, bending to peel up her bodysuit. "It brushed my ankle," she said through clenched teeth. "Burns."

There was an angry red welt in her flecked skin, already swelling. 8113 carefully daubed some of the remaining egg salve on it, standing on one leg with the other awkwardly held above the pool of liquid.

"So it’s just the live project that does that," Will said, looking down at his splashed legs. "When it’s liquid it’s harmless. I see why we’re not supposed to melee this thing."

Nathan was useless here. His condition made him worse than useless – it made him dead weight. He wasn’t likely to even get hurt unless things were so bad that 8113 and Will were in really dire straights. Realizing that he was clenching his fists tightly enough that they hurt, he made an effort to relax.

After a moment, he said, "Let’s head back and see if Jan’s drones took out their branch."

"Right." Starting back towards the stairs, Will said, "Raw recruits could do this. I mean, shoot it and it just goes down. That’s… kind of pathetically easy." He sounded troubled. Nathan found himself nodding agreement.

Her voice dark, 8113 said, "Yeah, it’s never a good sign if you can’t tell if these things are easy or deceptively easy. I’m pretty sure – well, the memories are sort of jumbled. But I think Eric got killed when things were deceptively easy."

"Eric?"

8113’s expression didn’t change. "One of my parents, or components, or whatever word got repurposed for this." Her hands tightened on her security zapper. "Because in case you can’t tell from my damned face, I’m a chimera."

Nathan winced. "I’m sorry."

"Not your fault," she said, artificially casual.

They turned the corner and found the drones waiting in a knot around the last door. There weren’t any umbilicals extending out of it now, but the floor was damp from when they had retracted back into it.

"The nearby branches have been eliminated and will not interfere. Now you must destroy the core," Jan said through one of the drones, Nathan couldn’t tell which.

They parted in unison to let the troopers reach the door, which was still cracked open. Will reached for the handle but dropped his arm back down to his side. The drones made a sound that could have been a hiss of impatience.

Nathan looked at 8113 and Will. "Are we good?"

8113 nodded. Will exhaled slowly and rolled his head on his neck, making his vertebrae crackle. "Yeah. Fine." He reached out again and pulled the door open.

"Get out of the way!" he cried immediately, backing up. 8113 went with him, both of them knocking into drones that were slower to respond.

Sedaris’s pet project filled the doorway completely, thin sticky strands connecting it to the door itself. Nodes, thousands of them, in much higher concentration than any of the other branches had had, hung suspended in it so thickly that they blocked all view of the room itself, but Nathan was willing to bet that the project filled it utterly.

Will kept stepping back away from it, and the project started to bulge out of the door, into the hall.

The drones all hovered higher, the damaged one a little slower than the rest, and started to fire their thin beams. Nathan was closer this time, able to see that they seemed to be aiming at the nodes.

"Shoot once," Nathan ordered. A bolt hit the project, but although some part of it throbbed and jittered furiously, then liquefied, most of it stayed together, pulsing malevolently towards them. Now it started to extend appendages, thick and branching.

"Fierfek," 8113 muttered. "Nodes insulate it?"

"Looks like," Nathan agreed. "Get really far apart. Two fronts, now. We’re faster than it, but keep alert anyway."

Sedaris’s pet project roiled and spread out, not bothering to hold itself up but oozing across the floor, new appendages rising, lengthening, reaching the edge, and then lying along the ground to be reabsorbed as it flowed outward. It split to send one half in 8113’s direction, the other towards Will and Nathan. The doorway was still filled, and there was no way of knowing how much project there was. Will was backing away to keep ahead of it. 8113 was doing the same.

Nathan looked around wildly. The drones were zagging in elaborate patterns above and around the protoplasmic mass, juking out of the way of its appendages. They had split too, each focusing on points close to either 8113 or Will and Nathan. Wherever they shot, bubbles formed under the surface.

"Be very cautious with your shots," he called out so 8113 would hear. "Think when the drones have picked off enough nodes we’ll do more damage. Use discretion."

"We’re playing the waiting game?" Will asked. "We’ll have to keep retreating like this, and we really can’t retreat all that far before it gets to the room with the stairs."

"I know," Nathan said.

Something emerged from the doorway, embedded in and covered by meters of the project and being dragged along by it. Nodes obscured his view and it was fairly distant by this point. Underneath them, he could see, it was a pale amber shade, and fairly large. Maybe that was the core? He didn’t see how they could get at it, though.

The drone that had been damaged before dodged a little too slowly, and a reaching appendage was able to seize it and drag it down into the mass. But what Nathan really noticed was how as the appendage stretched out, the surface around it lowered and depressed. Made sense. Sedaris’s pet project wasn’t openly flaunting the law of conservation of mass; the protoplasm that went into a lengthening appendage had to come from somewhere.

That was it. As Will fired a short bolt, Nathan cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted "JAN!"

One of the drones broke out of a run, swerved repeatedly to avoid reaching appendages, and whirred close, at about Nathan’s eye level. "What," Jan snapped in that distorted voice, the word sounding less like a question and more like a demand.

"I have a plan," Nathan said, "and I need your help." He explained it, keeping one eye on the advancing project.

The drone Jan was speaking through was silent for a moment, the only movement being the slight wobble as it hovered.

"Very well," she said, though the way she pronounced the words made it sound like she was agreeing to something very unpleasant. "Take this drone."

Will took one hand off of his zapper and transferred Nathan to the drone’s single delta wing, which made for an unsteady, constantly-moving platform. Nathan got into an awkward position, kneeling with his legs spread wide for balance, free hand hooked on one of the loose insulated wires, other hand gripping his zapper.

Before he was properly braced, the drone started moving, and he slid. He would have pitched off if not for his grip on the wire. As it was, his legs slid cleanly off the edge. He shouted, and the drone stopped, still leaning and wobbling in the air.

Nathan pulled himself up with his hand on the wire and his other arm’s elbow, wincing as the eggtooth clacked and bent painfully against the metal. "Can’t you keep steady?" he gasped. The project was uncomfortably close, an appendage swelling up to reach for them.

Jan said nothing, but this time the drone didn’t move until he’d positioned himself to be as stable as he thought he could get. Then it took off, swerving violently around the appendage.

The drone flew Nathan over the mass of project, hugging the ceiling close enough that Nathan couldn’t have stood even if the drone was steady enough. Even so, the surface of the project heaving and pulsing under them seemed far too near. It was still flowing out of that door, and if it was slowing yet he couldn’t tell. The core was rather large but seemed to be well buried, nodes clustered thickly around it.

Nathan swallowed against the sudden doubt. "Are you ready?" he asked.

Again, Jan said nothing, but four other drones stopped flying their elaborate patterns to join his, forming up in almost a wing.

Very grudgingly, Jan bit out, "I will make the attempt on the count of three. One. Two. Three."

Still in formation, all five drones dove as one, leaving his stomach behind and skimming the surface of Sedaris’ pet project. It roiled under them and surged in pursuit, making a wave that lowered the level around it.

"Don’t put them in formation! It’ll just make a column and hide the core in it! We want lots of smaller appendages!" he said. The drones split.

"Tell 8113 and Will to hit it from where they’re at too. We want to split its attention as much as possible."

[argh. Write it later, then. Six drones survive.]

That did it. "Now! Now!" Nathan hissed. The drone he was riding shot the nodes directly over the core, and he got into position, lifted his hand away from the drone, sighted along the security zapper, started the tiny flicker of electricity, and fired, hoping very sincerely that it still worked at this scale.

It did. He hit the core squarely, electricity flowing in a high, writhing arc. All of its appendages collapsed into it. Project rippled and roiled away from the core like he’d hurled a rock into a pool of thick syrup, splashing up and forming concentric wave-circles, the nodes all sinking while the surface heaved and convulsed. He could hear Will and 8113 firing, creating waves from their points.

The surface bucked up and slammed into the underside of the drone he was on, forcing him to stop firing and drop to his knees, desperately trying not to fall off as the project swelled and pulsed. The drone’s turbines whined as project got into them, and Sedaris’s pet project carried it and Nathan up like a boat on a wild sea, not remotely level.

The right wingtip of the drone collided with the ceiling and Nathan was jolted off his knees, swinging by that same loose insulated wire. The project welling up the left side of the drone got to his feet and stuck to them and his ankles, clinging like thick mud.

He thrust his arm through the wire, bent it so that he hung by his elbow and could use that hand, and took aim with his zapper. The project was starting to pull him down, and he could feel the slight tingle that would precede incredible pain. He fired, squeezing the trigger and the body with all the strength he had, directing the bolt through the swell of project, down to the still-floating core, clenching his teeth and trying not to scream or cry out as the project tightened and conducted some of that electricity back into him.

Something popped inside the zapper and the electricity cut off, but it didn’t matter. At last, quietly and without a fuss, Sedaris’s pet project liquefied in a rush, flowing out in all directions as the level dropped, leaving the floor covered in maybe twenty centimeters of chunky, steaming protoplasmic fluid. The drone spun lazily as it rode the surface down and hit the node-littered bottom, turbines still whining. Standing on the drone, he wasn’t much more than head and shoulders above the new, passive surface. He let the drained zapper drop.

The core, now steaming more heavily than the fluid, turned out to be a pale amber mass encased in something opaque and rubbery. The mass looked suspiciously like a jumble of human bones. Past it, the doorway that had been filled turned out to lead to what looked like a communal shower, with tiled walls and a great many drains. Project seemed to be swirling and gurgling down those drains, but it was a slow process.

Will and 8113 waded through the remains of the project, Will stooping to pick Nathan up. He’d been splashed by the project as it liquefied. 8113 had too.

"Is it over?" Nathan asked. Liquid project seemed harmless enough, but the syrupy consistency and faint chemical smell wasn’t what he’d call pleasant.

19

A voice came from one of the drones, like Jan’s voice but different somehow. "No."

The drone Nathan had rode stayed under the surface with its turbines whirring and grinding, not quite level thanks to that underslung arm. But a handful of other drones had survived, and they approached at a slow, menacing pace.

Three of them positioned themselves into the corners of a triangle while the others moved to flank the troopers. Each of the drones in a triangle sent a flicker of light to the others, and a sort of screen developed between them. On that screen a face formed. It was like the face that had been on Jan the Rabbot’s visor, but more angular and in shades of steel gray, with green highlights and features that were more human. Around the face there seemed to be many dark bundled cords, and the patterns that had been hinted at before were now stark and clear.

It was a moment before she spoke.

"Y-you-y-y-you have done exactly exactly ex-act-ly as I have wished as I have wished, insects." That voice. Same tone that Jan had been using all along, but that stutter like a glitching voice chip, the way it sounded like several voices in disharmony, some droning slowly, some repeating words, some high and rapid, always with almost an ‘an-a aaa-na’ even when the other voices were silent…

He knew that voice. They all knew that voice.

"I am SHODAN."

"Mother of fusst," Will muttered. 8113’s teeth were clenched together; Nathan could hear them grinding. He himself felt a wash of horrified nausea. They hadn’t thought about this. It had never even crossed their minds.

"What happened to Jan?" he demanded, forcing the words out one at a time. "Did you kill her?"

"Jan is jan is jaaaaaan is only mem-memory on-ly meeeemory," the AI hissed. "I was able to survive and function I was IIIII waaaaas I was able to survive and function funct-ion when the power went out by stealing stealing stee-ling onto the sys-tems of this cyborg. She did not survive the process did not sur-viiiive the prooocessssss."

"I thought she was your friend. Catherine’s friend," he challenged. "I’m assuming you were Catherine."

"Ca-c-c-c-Catherine Cathhhhhherine has been eliminated has been eliminated eliiim-in-ated. If-if-if-if she ever was ever was if she ever was real." The image of SHODAN’s face changed, the corners of her unmoving mouth and eyes turning down in a weird parody of an expression. "I created cre-a-ted Icreatedafalseface with which to in-in-in-in with which tointeractwith aaaaaaact wiiiiith and facilitate com-munication with the huuuuman insects. My resources were too few to a-a-a- toallowmetomeet my goals myyyyy goooooaaaals."

Nathan parsed that much more quickly than he would have thought possible. "You set all this up? This whole facility?"

"It was at my will mywillthat that this f-f-f-f that this fa-cil-i-ty waaaas cooonstruuuct ed and experiments began. WhenIfirstmanifested manifested when I first manifested on your world, the falseface faaalse faaace challenged but could not overcome couuuld nooot ooovercooome my true na-ture. The cy-borg calledJan Jan Jan the cyyyy-borg called Jan suspected, but I re-direct-ed her suspicion suuus-piiiiiiii-ciiiiion until it was too late." SHODAN’s expression, if an expression it had been, changed back to what it had been before.

"Perhaps perhaaaaps the de-tails ofthisgrandexperiment of this graaaand ex-ex-experiment were not all as planned notallasplanned plaaaan-ed. The huuuman experimenters werenot were not were not undermycontrol under my control. The mastercomputers mas-ter com-puters on this floor were never at my discretion – at my discretion. Sed-ar-is’s petproject Sedaris’s pet project was not a suuuuuitable subject suitablesubject. But I have prevaaiiiled."

Nathan fought past the creeping unpleasant sensation to say, "What will you do now, then?"

"I h-have tailoredadisease a dis-ease that will prepare this wooooorld for my rule my rule. The animals – animals – you call s-spiderhands are but an earlyresult result an early result. The dis-eeeeeeeaaaase will be releeeased willbereleased within the next s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s withinthenextsixhours, when the deliverysystem is system is prooooogramed. Rejoice. You have as-assisted me and shall be spared – sp- spared – that fate." The image cut off, and the five drones locked their pincered arms up.

8113 was fastest, ducking under the beams and bashing the closest one, but Will was barely slower. He ducked too, firing his security zapper, and a drone’s turbines exploded. The zapper’s energy ran out, and with a curse Will flung it at another drone, knocking it off balance, and dived away from a new beam.

Clinging to the harness, Nathan glanced hurriedly down and shouted "Get project in their turbines, they won’t be able to fly!"

Will lurched under him as he kicked a gout of liquid project over the closest one, making it sputter and sink. Nathan risked a glance and saw 8113 smashing a drone like her club was an axe, driving it down into the fluid.

That left two, both hovering close together. 8113 charged, Will in close pursuit, and while 8113 clubbed, Will dived for the other, all but tackling it into the project underfoot. The impact, even muffled by Will’s body, was jarring.

"Ow," Will muttered as he picked himself up and swayed to his full height.

"Are you all right?"

"They got me a few times, but I didn’t let anything near my eyes," was the reply. "We’ve got a little salve left. I’ll be fine." 8113 seemed to be in a similar shape, angry red burn marks standing out in her exposed skin.

The drones that had been downed by liquid project couldn’t shoot and couldn’t fly, but they still snarled SHODAN’s displeasure as the troopers broke them. They seemed to be of fairly shoddy material, crunching with a well-placed stomp from Will.

One hissed "You def-def-def-def- you defy me yooo-" before 8113 bashed it. Another said, "Insects! Youwillnotdenyme wiiiill not de-ny me the master computers!" The last active one, the one Nathan had destroyed the core with, told them, in what was a clear voice for SHODAN, "Cel-e-brate your seeming your seeming v-v-v your seeming vic-tor-y victory while you can. I will come for you, and you will pay – andyouwillpay for your in-in-in-insolence."

Will smashed it into the liquefied remains of Sedaris’s pet project and looked around. "I think that’s all. The ones that got caught when the project was – alive, I guess – haven’t moved any."

"So it seems," 8113 said. She stepped on one of them, and it collapsed wetly without her having to use anything like the force Will had been stomping them with.

Nathan couldn’t tell if they’d just been clogged or the project had dissolved some vital component, but as long as they weren’t going to get back up, he didn’t care. "To the stairway, now. We’re going to have to get out fast."

Project was heading down the drains, but it seemed like the thresholds of the doors to each room were keeping all of it from flowing out. Some had swamped out into the room connected to the stairs and was trickling down.

A drone, sleeker than the ones they’d seen before but no less haphazard-looking, zipped into view as they reached the door. It fired at Will’s face without hesitating. He jerked and screamed and clutched at his eyes, and 8113 lunged for the door and slammed it closed, knocking it against the drone. It clicked locked.

"I’m okay! I’m okay!" Will gasped, covering his face. "It didn’t get my eyes." Reluctantly he lowered his hands and turned his head, and Nathan saw that he was right. But it had been a near thing, and his skin was blistered and scorched.

"We won’t be able to get out that way," Nathan said, stating the obvious. "Back into the hall. Will, we go one way, Thirteen, you go the other, and if there’s another exit, we’ll find it."

There wasn’t. There were computers, plenty of them, and a lot of liquid project, but when Nathan and Will met 8113 at the other side, there were no stairs to report.

Nathan stared at the other two. "I don’t know how long it will be before they burn through the door to the stairwell. Get back there." The troopers splashed and pounded back through the project to the door, which was shivering now as something started to heat the metal.

"SHODAN really wants to get at these computers," Will said darkly. "I don’t know why she wants it; maybe this is how she plans to spread that disease. We can disconnect it and cut some cables. That will give us some time; they’ll have to get through the other doors, too."

8113 continued in the same tone. "We can’t get out. We will probably be able to hold them off for a while, but it’s not a terribly long while. I’m not a techie, none of us are, but we’ll have to try and use these computers to send an emergency message."

"No one will be able to respond in time. You know how capes are all caught up with supervillains, and they’re the only ones who’d be able to get here fast enough. There has to be a way through this," Nathan said, sharing their thought, his hands bunched into fists. "We can’t let SHODAN win. It’s a secret underground science facility! We can’t just let her take it over!" At and around Base and Xanadu there was enough trouble with a SHODAN whose resources were exponentially more limited!

Plus, there was the matter of that disease. Yes, Xanadu meant that there were a lot of people around who could and probably would create a cure before it could become a pandemic. But that wouldn’t help the people who got infected first.

Will had fixated on a point in the ceiling, near a wall. "We can’t get out. But you can." He was staring at an air vent.

Stormtrooper synchrony brought Nathan to the same conclusion with hardly any lapse in time. "I can head through the air ducts, find Tony, and get her and the armor to come back here and save you." He didn’t know if air ducts followed the plans of the hallways or not. Actually, he didn’t know anything about them at all. But it wasn’t like there was a choice.

"You at least will survive," 8113 said, standing against the wall. She crouched, holding both hands up like she was a groom making a step so a child could mount into the saddle. Will stepped into her hands, then onto her shoulders, and she stood with a grunt of effort, bracing on the wall. He started to work on the grill of the duct, which thankfully didn’t seem to have screws.

Nathan didn’t like the fatalism he read into her voice. "I’ll find them, and we’ll come back and you’ll survive too. Last it out. Stall for time."

"Sure, boss-man," Will said as he wriggled the grill out and reached his free hand to Nathan, who put his weight on it and was lifted up and in.

Nathan had to stoop a little to keep from banging his head on the top of the vent. They weren’t the extra-large size vents in movies, the kind that children and even adults of normal scale could wriggle through, but he could make it. He leaned out over the opening. "Thirteen, Will, I swear, if we come back and you didn’t fight to hold out every bit as hard as you could, if you’re not still alive…" He discarded the silly threat even as it came to his lips, shaking his head. "Emperor, guys. Don’t die."

The upper part of Will’s head filled most of the lower part of the grill; he was tilting his head back to see in, but the opening was small and the angle was bad. Nathan saw his eyebrows move. "One thing. Hold on." He looked down and grabbed at his arm. After a moment there was a harsh snap, a muttered curse, and 8113 saying, "You’re bleeding on me." "Sorry, Thirteen." Will’s upper face reappeared and his hand reached into the duct with something grasped between his thumb and fingers.

It was something like a curved knife, a rather large curved knife, at Nathan’s scale, probably less than a penknife at Will’s. It was made of bone – no, too shiny to be bone, some kind of enamel like a tooth – and the part opposite the point had been wrapped into a crude hilt with something like suede. Slightly bloody suede, kind of tacky in his fingers. All at once, Nathan realized what it was.

"You broke off your eggtooth?" he asked, his voice slightly higher and more shocked than he’d intended.

"He did," 8113’s voice said, while at the same time Will said, "Yeah. I’ve only had the one for how long now? It’s about time this one came off. Really, I’m surprised no one else has lost theirs yet."

"That’s because no one else here landed on their eggteeth," 8113 said in annoyed tones. "He didn’t say anything first, Nathan. We could have used one of mine."

"Thirteen, yours don’t have cutting edges on one side. Mine just make better knives," Will said, turning his head so that his face wasn’t in view. Turning back, he said, "We don’t know if the vents are clear or not. It would be such a stupid irony if you escaped only to be eaten by miniature shark-poodles or whatever else they made here."

Bloodied or not, there was something comforting about the weight of the knife. Nathan secured it to his makeshift belt and nodded. "Thanks."

"Can we finish and start barricading the door?" 8113 called. "This isn’t doing much for my back."

"Don’t die," Nathan said, determined not to prolong this anymore.

Will nodded. "Don’t die." His upper head went out of view as 8113 said, "Ow. Yeah. Don’t die, we have a beer date." This time Will didn’t come back.

Nathan heard them talking to each other as they started doing what sounded like moving furniture, making plans for the next half hour or several hours or however long they had. He took a deep breath and turned away, into the dark of the ventilation system. And it was dark. Other than the light that came through the ventilation grills, there was nothing. Darkness and dust.

Stormtroopers, just in general, didn’t take all that well to working alone. En mass or in small groups was fine, but except for Red Guards none of them thrived when working out on their own. All of them had autonomy, and it wasn’t that they just couldn’t function alone. But it wasn’t comfortable. Comrades in a stressful situation was a deep-seated need that even new recruits started to feel, just hours after conversion.

He was TX, a Black Hole stormtrooper, special forces. Unusual armor, black armor in particular, always meant that the wearer was dangerous. But he wasn’t in his armor now.

Not that that was important compared to getting the job done, he thought, adjusting Will’s eggtooth so it hung more securely. They weren’t his squad, and he wasn’t theirs, but he still couldn’t let them down. Half bent over, he set off, moving at a brisk pace that he knew he could keep up for a long time, almost indefinitely.

There was a fan going somewhere, blowing cool air steadily across his body, a little uncomfortable on the sticky moisture the project had left all over him. The fan didn’t seem to be in the way between where he was and where he was going, though, which was good. He wasn’t sure what he’d have done if he’d had to get through a fan.

He had to constantly revise his mental maps to figure out where he was in relation to where he’d been, sometimes stopping to look through the grills. This ventilation system seemed to run alongside the main rooms rather than going above them, which made this a little easier.

His hearing wasn’t quite good enough to echolocate, but he could hear how the echoes of his feet in the duct changed as he approached where the stairs were and got near a steep dropoff. Stopping at the edge, he looked down. It seemed like a terribly long way down. Of course it did. One story was a lot farther to fall when he had to tilt his head up in twenty centimeters of liquid.

It was also very dark; there was light at the bottom, but it was dim and distant. Nathan sat at the edge of the dropoff and carefully felt the walls of the shaft. The downward duct was definitely narrower than the ones that went along the walls. Narrow enough to rock-chimney down. Looking up, he saw a dusty fan. Probably circulated the air here. If it went on while he was moving under it, he’d get chilled very quickly.

He partly unwound his makeshift sandals; skin would stick to the metal where the sandal material would slip. Similarly, he took off the top of his bodysuit, not terribly surprised when it turned into a dusty security jacket that was still perfectly to scale, tied it around his waist over his belt, and rolled up the legs of his bodysuit. Then he started to rock chimney down, bracing his knees and feet on one side, his shoulders and upper back on the other, and his hands and arms on either remaining side, sometimes clashing his eggteeth on the metal. Holding himself up with his arms, he shimmied down with his legs, braced them, then moved his arms down, then his back and head, and started to repeat the process.

The slow pace got to him very quickly, so he started letting himself drop short distances, each time catching himself almost as soon as he started falling. This was dangerous and it jarred him, but it was also much faster. He couldn’t really estimate how far he fell each time, though, and he couldn’t see what was directly beneath him, so he was forced to keep to small drops until he was close enough to the bottom to see it.

But he did get to the bottom, and he stood up and stretched the kinks out of his body and got fully dressed again. Immediately he could sense that the duct system on this floor, the target floor where he wanted to be, was different from the sterile one above.

The air down on this floor was still. If there were fans going, he could neither hear nor feel them. The power coming back on should have reactivated them, which meant that something must have gone wrong. Certainly that might just be an electrical failure, but there was a smell in the vents that he didn’t like, a dank organic smell.

There wasn’t another option. He gripped Will’s eggtooth and went to peer down through the closest grill, where the light was shining through. He could hear a humming whir, and he knew before seeing them what he would find.

Drones flew in single file back the way he’d come, towards the stairs. But not just drones. There were other robots too, closer to man size, tripodal, tramping loudly, their servos protesting each step. Not as many as the drones, and slower, but they were there. Nathan felt his mouth dry, looking at them. He had no idea what they could do, and neither would or did Will and 8113. He had to hurry. Nathan took up a stooping run, not caring terribly that he made a racket doing so. There was a lot of ground to cover, and he had to compromise between speed and stamina.

The air ducts followed the hallway, which made it a little easier to navigate, since the ducts branched for every room and intersection. It did seem like the ducts were their own set of very long, dusty, cramped hallways, each stretch of it unusually long and featureless. They were almost enough to make him forget scale.

He hadn’t gone in a straight line from the incubation room to the stairs, so putting together where he was and which ways he needed to go to get there, at least if he didn’t want to retrace his path to where they’d met up with SHODAN’s drones, took a bit of effort. It was doable, though.

As he passed one of the openings that went into a room off the hallway he was following, he heard a startled scrabbling from it. Nathan kept moving, but turned and inhaled sharply.

Something scuttled out of the opening, toothy, squat and short-legged, with strands of stiffened hair erupting from around its constantly moving nose. It was dark, and it took a moment for him to register that it was a rat. While he was used to how things seemed to have different proportions at different scales, the air duct was tight enough to pass for some secret passageway, almost making him forget what it was.

The rat, thankfully, had frozen when it saw him the same way he had stopped when he saw it. Maybe it would just let him leave.

He took a careful half-step away from the rat, breaking the paralyzed moment. Without so much as a squeak it lunged for him, teeth glinting. He kicked it savagely, almost losing his balance, and when it came at him again he cut at it with Will's eggtooth, drawing blood.

Now it did squeak, an outraged sound, and Nathan was suddenly aware that the scrabbling of small claws in the ducts wasn't just coming from it. There were more rats up here, and they were investigating the commotion. How many, he didn't know. But if there were enough, they could overwhelm him and then Will and 8113 would die, with no one knowing to save them. Gritting his teeth, he turned his back on this rat and ran.

By the furious scrabbling in the dark behind him, loud enough to be easily heard over the thunderous pounding of his feet, the rats were chasing him. Nathan put some length into his stride. They were rats, and he was human. They would have a short burst of high speed, after which they would have to stop. He was slower, but he had endurance, more than almost any other animal. If he could outpace them for a minute or so, he could easily keep ahead of them after that. He could run for hours.

Of course, that short burst was going to be a problem. They gained on him. He shifted his grip on the eggtooth knife so the point was downward and strained to run faster, almost cutting his leg every time that arm pumped.

He had to turn here, and he did, slamming into the far wall of the duct with enough force to make the entire left side of his body brilliant with sudden pain, but he kept moving, clutching that shoulder with the hand that held the knife, his fingers pressing the hilt against his bodysuit.

The rats, by the multiple thuds happening even as he regained the momentum he’d lost, had also been unable to turn fast enough. Breathing from his mouth now, taking in great gulps and thirsty for more air, Nathan ran.

It felt good. He’d done almost nothing active, nothing physical, since the Pym Particles wore off; hanging on hadn’t counted. The rats galloped and scrambled behind him, all sound amplified hideously by the duct, most of them only trailing farther and farther behind, a few, the ones with the most stamina, closing in on him.

One of the rats, probably their champion sprinter, got close. He felt its breath and lashed out at it, not looking, just swinging wildly, and he hit it, and he kept going, fresh blood on his cyber fingers.

Still going by his mental map, hoping he was right, he turned another corner, grunting as he slammed the bruised side of his body into another duct wall. Then he spun, crouching, as the rats that were closest skittered while trying to make the turn and hit the wall.

He went after them while they were a little stunned, kicking their heads, trying to stab and cut them and not really caring if he killed them or just wounded the creatures. Of course, it wasn’t as easy as he’d hoped. Some did practically fall into his arms, but others recovered faster.

One bit through his foot, but there was no pain or blood, and it let go when he sank the point of Will’s eggtooth into the back of its neck. By chance there was an air vent near here and a little more light, and he was suddenly very aware that these were not actually rats. Or not normal rats, at least. Normal rats had fur.

He’d bloodied himself, the creatures, and this intersection pretty thoroughly, and the slower ones were coming closer. He had to lose them. Turning again, tapping his forehead painfully against the ceiling when he forgot to stoop, Nathan ran.

Not too long after that, when he judged he was in pretty close to the right place, Nathan stopped over a grill and listened hard. It was reasonable to assume that they were still following him. Tracking him by his smell and the blood. But they hadn’t been able to keep up a pace like that. If he kept moving, and if there wasn’t another gang of rat things, he’d keep ahead of them until he got outside.

He glanced at the foot that had been bitten, lifting it up in the dim light coming up through the grill. It was his cybernetic foot, of course. It had been a good thing that he’d kicked with it and not his real one. He’d have the leisure to check the damage later.

19

Now he turned out of the main duct and peered through the grill into the room below, seeing a floor littered with suedelike strips and fragments of revival egg. The angle was new, but this looked like the place.

"Hey," he said, his voice hoarse. "Is there someone in there?"

There was an exchange that he couldn’t really hear, and someone wrapped in a bathrobe elbow-crawled into view, squinting up at him.

"Oh, hey. You’re the Tampa Bay Squadron guy, right?"

Nathan sighed and started to work on pushing the grill out. "Yeah, that’s me. Look, I’m coming down." The grill fell to the floor with nothing like the effort he’d expected, almost taking him with it. He looked through the cleared opening uneasily. Somehow he hadn’t thought this part through. The floor was a long way down

The trooper elbow-crawled under him, picking up the grill and tossing it aside, then pushed himself into a sitting position with obvious effort. He raised his hands. "Jump, man. I’ll catch you."

"I’m sure you will," Nathan said, then mentally smacked himself. Fear of falling didn’t matter. He had to get help for 8113 and Will. With that thought, he pushed himself out of the air vent and dropped like a stone.

Being caught drove the breath out of his lungs and made his side sharply remind him that it had been bruised already, but the trooper knew what he was doing, letting his hands dip downwards at exactly the right moment to lessen the impact.

"You’ve run into trouble," ID-6981 said calmly from against the wall. "I will signal Tony and Kendall that it is time to return." He stroked the holocron at his side and spoke very quietly to the gatekeeper.

"Thanks," Nathan gasped when he was able.

The trooper let him stand on the ground, started to fastidiously wipe the blood from his hands, and said, "Eightyone sent Tony and the armor to hunt for survivors who aren’t those fish people. And anything else they think we can use. Apparently he can get the holocron to make some kind of signal that the armor can pick up." He sank back down into a prone position and propped his head up with his arm. "I’m Chase, by the way."

"Nathan." He shook his head and looked to ID-6981. "Sir, Jan and Catherine are SHODAN, Thirteen and Will are trapped upstairs, and we have to save them."

"The signal is being broadcast," the officer said, "and we had neither the time nor the tools to properly interface this holocron and the armor, so they can communicate with us not at all, and I can only direct them to stay away or return." Despite his tone, the skin around his glowing eyes tightened. "Tell me what you can."

Nathan did, and ID-6981 had just started to get him to elaborate when Tony returned in the armor.

It was still damaged armor, parts of her body showing through holes. But even if it had been intact, Nathan would have known that there was something a little different about this cape. She seemed more uncomfortable than the other ones with armor like that.

She came in, not closing the door, and her helmet sort of split at the seams, lifting the faceplate and turning the sides away from her face. While that happened, she said, "I keep getting attacked by robots. Boss-man, you’re back."

ID-6981 said, "There’s no time for that now. Take Nathan and go."

A fainter, less human voice said, "Go where?"

"I’ll tell you on the way," Nathan told… them, he supposed. The other voice had to be the armor. "We have to be very fast. There’s not much time."

Tony, or the armor, or both, scooped him up, and hesitated. "Carrying you isn’t very practical. But hey, cold water gets blood out of clothing," Tony said, and her helmet clanked back into position over her face. "What’s a little intimacy, anyway?"

Before he could ask what she meant, Nathan found himself bodily shoved into one of the rents in the armor around her midriff, squeezed between the smooth artificial surface of the armor and Tony’s overwarm security jacket.

There were a lot of things that he hated about his condition, he reflected with his jaw set, bracing the his back against Tony and his front against the armor so he could see out and to keep himself from sliding down, but one of the major ones was how he got treated as a pet or a toy. But this was for Will and 8113, he reminded himself.

He started giving directions, and they left, closing the door.

The armor didn’t fly. But it did get up to a kind of pounding, unbalanced run, one boot jet sputtering on and off to push it forward, fast and unsteady. Not as jarring as he’d expected, though, which probably meant he was closer to Tony’s center of gravity.

A clearly artificial voice somewhere above him said, "I’m sorry that we won’t be getting airborne. Suit integrity has been pretty thoroughly compromised, so I’m not anywhere near my best."

"Good enough to fire repulsors," Tony said, her voice much more muffled, but sounding displeased, like this was a continuation of some earlier argument.

"Tony, I can’t move or see or think when you’re not hooked up to me," The armor – it had called itself Kendall, hadn’t it? – said. "I want someone to fix this, and I will take whatever precautions I can to keep you from getting killed, even when it means moving without your direction."

"Take a left," Nathan said, not in the mood for drama. He closed his ears to the argument and made as certain as he could that they were headed in the right direction.

When they found a line of drones and the bipedal droids Nathan had seen before, the armor was able to shoot them into so much scrap, firing what had to be "repulsors" from both of its hands, re-aiming and firing again before any of them could get more than a few shots off.

"Take the stairs. There’ll be more there," Nathan said, suddenly sick with dread. They couldn’t be too late. The line had been a lot longer last time he’d seen it, but they couldn’t be too late.

"Not a problem," Tony said, wrenching the door off of its hinges and charging in.

Fighting from this perspective was strange. He felt Tony’s body flexing under the security jacket behind him, and through the rent in the armor he could see her arms – Kendall’s arms? Their arms? – occasionally swinging into view and out again, he could feel the impact of feet hitting the ground, but this was much more unreal and impersonal than he’d felt while riding on an exposed shoulder.

Armored hands and arms shot down the enemy droids and covered the gaps whenever return fire threatened to get too close to the holes, and in short order they were climbing the stairs in furious bursts, destroying the drones and bipeds that were turning to deal with this new threat.

The door at the top of the stairs gaped open, the area around the handle melted and warped. Tony burst through, cleared the room, pounded through this open doorway into the hall, and started to fire on the droids that had spread out inside.

Whether it was accidental or not, this configuration was the best one to use against Tony. Their beams, both the thin ones the drones used and the thicker, arcing ones the bipeds spat, didn’t seem to do anything to the armor, but there were holes in that armor, and they couldn’t be covered when the fire was coming from so many angles.

Tony hissed and jerked as, presumably, a beam came too close to a vulnerable spot. She was, he realized, too used to being basically invulnerable in armor.

"Duck into the doorway and use it as cover!" Nathan shouted over the whining discharges of repulsors.

"Right," Kendall said, backing up. Tony didn’t acknowledge except with a barely audible curse.

The droids, or SHODAN controlling them, were tactically savvy enough not to stay splayed out like that, and there might have been a drawn-out firefight if 8113 hadn’t distracted the enemy by shouting and smashing something.

[placeholder! Lots of robots get destroyed. It’ll take a quite a while before reinforcements show up.]

"So you fixed your armor problem?"

"Not really," Tony said lightly, in unison with Kendall’s "It’s on hold."

8113 blinked, then shook her head. "Get in here. There’s a few things you have to know."

They went in, and Nathan grabbed Tony’s armored hand as it fished him out and brought him to stand on a stretch of countertop.

"We thought you’d never get here," 8113 said sardonically, but her blankness had cracked, and she was smiling. Smiling tightly, but smiling. "You look like hell."

"Good to see you too, Thirteen. There was a vermin problem in the air ducts, and thought could help a little."

"There didn’t seem to be an intercom feature here, but we were able to make a call to the outside," Will said. "We were able to connect to someone on Project X."

"Is it over then?" Kendall asked hopefully. Nathan noticed Tony’s uneasy expression when the armor spoke.

Will shook his head. "I doubt it. Not yet, anyway. The dispatcher said that all of the big capes are off on some crisis, because one of them found a big asteroid and decided to bring it back without telling anyone, and some of the hoods decided it would be fun to band together and make it hit Earth."

"Which hoods? How much of a ransom do they want?" Tony wanted to know.

8113 gave her a look. "We didn’t ask and the voice on the other end didn’t tell. We’re a little busy right now."

"Point is," Will continued, "anyone who could just fix everything in ten minutes is out in space saving the world, and the ones who could get us out in an hour or less are on something else – lesser-powered hoods decided to take advantage of the confusion, see. Project X found out where we are, and we’re being sent some people, but it’ll be a while before they can get here. We’re kind of far from HQ, and they’re not set up to respond quickly to distant events."

"So we have to get this ourselves," Nathan said, not terribly surprised. Knowing Tony and Kendall didn’t know, he quickly filled in what they were up against and why they had to get this done quick. Neither of them seemed to recognize what SHODAN meant.

"These computers control power, water, and the air system," 8113 said when he was done. "I’ve shut down air exchange and we’re now basically sealed against the outside. Water’s self-contained, and the actual exits are sturdy and currently locked down. But the master computers also get feeds from some of the same security cameras that SHODAN uses."

Will nodded, heading back to the computer and mousing around until a camera feed filled the screen. "They were working on this when we first found the feed, and they haven’t stopped yet."

For a moment they all stared at it, at the little droids swarming purposefully over the larger shape held off the ground. Spots of welding flared and died and flared again.

"If I’m not misreading it, that’s some sort of rocket," Tony said very slowly.

"That’s our guess," 8113 muttered, then raised her voice. "I know something about SHODAN. Putting the disease agent in a missile that would explode high in the atmosphere has to have occurred to her. It would spread much faster this way. And she’s probably building more than one."

Something larger moved ponderously into the frame, carrying what could have been a fuel canister.

Tony frowned. "Is that Jan?"

"It was," Nathan said, his throat tightening. "It’s not anymore. We can’t – when we left you and ran into her, she killed the triceratops like that." He snapped his cyber fingers; the sound was sharp and loud enough to be heard even with his condition. "Going and actually getting to these rockets is suicide. But we may have to do it anyway." He would go with them, of course. Useless as he was, it would be worse if he stayed safe.

"What if we cut the power?" Tony asked suddenly.

"What?"

"Cut the power," she said. "Independent AIs, even simple, totally obedient ones, aren’t exactly easy or fast to build, and I’m willing to bet that she controls most of these machines remotely. Cut the power and she’ll have to either spend time trying to get it back or do it herself, and either way, the work will slow down, and wherever she plans to launch from, she’ll have to change her plans."

"Without power, we’re not getting out unless a cape takes pity on us," Will said, his tone reflecting how likely he thought that was. "The master computer has data on the exits. They’re actually up to Imperial prison standards. Kirchner must have submitted the design, unless there’s some other Imperial traitor involved."

Nathan rubbed his jaw with his cyber fingers, wishing ID-6981 was here to make the decision. "Cutting the power isn’t a bad idea," he thought out loud. "Probably the best course of action, really. We brought the auxiliary generators up, we take them down again. But the problem is, that leaves us in the same situation we were at in the beginning. No way to get out or contact the surface, no clean water, all the people in Section Ten about to die, and krarls and spiderhands running around unchecked. SHODAN would be limited again, but we’d be trapped in here with her."

"She would be trapped, though," 8113 pointed out.

"Yeah. Better we all die here than let her out," he agreed, crossing his arms. Chase, Avari, and ID-6981 would die with them, unless ID-6981 could pull some miracle out of his Name. They were Five-Oh-First, though. The Section Ten people, that was worse. They were civilians who’d displayed some poor judgment.

But that was a few dozen lives against, potentially, hundreds or thousands. No decision at all.

"I have a power source. A rather major one," Tony said abruptly.

"Aaaah," the armor intoned, making her scowl. "I was wondering when you’d bring it up."

Nathan blinked. "Wait, what power source?"

"I thought you knew," she said, frowning.

"I don’t. What power source?"

"This." She tapped her chest, where there was a sort of window that her artificial heart glowed through. "It’s an arc reactor. It produces exactly as much power as I need. Usually that’s just enough to keep me alive, and otherwise it’s enough to power my armor. But it can generate as much as three gigajoules per second. For as long as you need."

Nathan blinked again. "Were you ever planning to tell us that?"

"It’s a day of secrets," Tony said with a smirk. "Besides, I thought you knew. Practically everyone who sees it and asks about it knows it’s an arc reactor."

Pushing aside his irritation, Nathan said, "Can it power just communication, doors, and whatever keeps the Section Ten people alive?"

Now she hesitated. "Depends. It’s kind of an issue of wiring. I’m assuming Section Ten life support and the doors or communication aren’t right next to each other. Just plugging in means powering the whole complex, which defeats the purpose. I think I can break the connections between one system and the rest, but it’s not like I can make a channel between the systems we need. The enemy will find and either tap or sever it."

8113 put her hands on the table and leaned forward. "Do we need to power doors and communication? Project X is already sending us people, and it will be a matter of hours before they get here. We can call again and tell them the doors are up to Imperial prison specs, and they can bring along someone from the Five Hundred and First who knows how to crack them without actually, uh, cracking them."

Nathan considered this, trying not to notice how the others were all looking at him. It wasn’t ideal, of course. But, all things considered, it was their best chance. They might just live through this. He raised his head. "All right. Let’s do this."

And they did. The call didn’t take long. Cutting the power with the master computer was done quickly. Picking their way back through a facility that was once again lit by nothing more than emergency lighting, that took longer, but was uneventful. Nathan opted to have Will carry him again. It was more exposed than riding with Tony, but less humiliating.

Once they’d gone down the stairs to the floor where everything they needed was, though, things got a little more complicated.

"Oh, no," Will muttered, his head going up. On point, 8113 froze before turning to look back at them.

Tony’s helmet turned. "I don’t – oh, don’t tell me she let the spiderhands out from downstairs."

"All right, I won’t," Will muttered. 8113 left point to bunch up with them.

"What are spiderhands?" Kendall asked in its hollow voice, and as 8113 gave a terse explanation Tony made a soft, exasperated sound.

"Giggling?" Nathan asked Will, knowing what the answer would be.

"Yep. Lots of it, boss-man. They’ve spread out."

8113 still had her club. Will had nothing. Nathan looked to Tony, anonymous under her helmet. "Can you take them, or do we head back upstairs?"

"I can take them."

"All right, let’s get our backs against the wall," he said, and they got into position to wait.

Nathan took a deep breath. Waiting again? If they just set off in one direction or another they would be attacked from behind, he knew, but waiting never sat right with him. He could hear them now, retching giggles trilling up into squawking shrieks

And then he saw the first ones, lit dimly by Tony and the emergency lighting. Looking, as ever, just human enough to be horribly off, walking awkwardly on malformed feet, tattered clothing hanging off their emaciated bodies, they were more nightmarish in the dark. A little strafing with an E-11 would have taken them all down, he thought longingly as the noise built.

Some of the spiderhands were wailing already, making a sound that seemed to wrench jarringly back and forth.

8113 very deliberately stuck herself with her own eggtooth, then offered her other elbow to Will. He took it and used it to cut his hand with a barely-visible wince. Pain had worked against a wail before, but that had been one spiderhand. This was a horde.

The spiderhands stopped in a circle around them, cackling, as more and more of them worked up to a higher pitch. Tony’s hands moved several times, like she was trying to figure out the best shot.

[placeholder: loud, Tony’s affected, dark spot]

"No," Kendall said, barely audible over the sound. Nathan saw Tony straighten, extend her arms, and start shooting.

It wasn’t a fight, it was a massacre. The spiderhands were caught completely off-guard, falling one at a time. Hands clamped over his ears, barely able to keep his balance, all Nathan could do was watch.

The armor took them out more slowly and messily than a strafing E-11 would have killed them. Repulsor blasts were clearly more powerful, driving the creatures into walls and each other, smashing them like vermin. The pitch of that collective scream changed, becoming higher.

And then it started to die down until the repulsors were whine-thumping into the dark and only crashing sounds came back, and Nathan stopped feeling like his eyeballs were about to vibrate into jelly. Tony’s arms – the armor’s arms – lowered then, and Kendall said, "I think that’s it. If there are any more, they’ve run off."

Its eyelights went off as its helmet opened and Tony rubbed the bridge of her nose with armored fingers. "Could you warn before you do something like that? I’ve certainly told you often enough how I hate it when you move on your own."

"Sorry, Tony. I don’t want to subvert you, I want to keep you alive so someone can fix this."

8113, her face a blank-hostile mask, shot a glance at them and stepped over the closest corpse. Nathan nudged Will after her in time to hear her snort something about reverse-chimera bickering.

He did also hear Tony, bringing up the rear, grudgingly mutter, "Thanks."

20

[placeholder: to the incubation room]

[placeholder: move the people to Section Ten, bolt the doors, hurry up and wait]

[placeholder: ohshi-]

[placeholder: hooray!]

[epilogue]