Location Unknown

SHE LAY FACEDOWN in a puddle of oily fluid, head turned to one side, the black slop leaving weird rainbow patterns as it rose and fell against her helmet’s visor.

For a long time Tania Sharma did not move. She just watched the strange pool of oil that obscured half her visor, right up the middle. Gradually the space around her came into focus. It hurt to focus. She blinked a few times, and tears fell away. She could see now. A bit. Grimy walls encircled her. A silo, or tank, perhaps?

Her head pounded. Her legs felt as if a lead blanket had been draped over them. Submerged in the thick goop, she guessed. Slowly Tania brought her arms up and pushed herself onto all fours. The slick fluid rolled off her armor. The drops did not so much splash as merge with the pool below.

Tania rocked back to a sitting position, her legs folded underneath her. She put all her effort into focusing on the display inside her visor.

SUIT INTEGRITY: GREEN. She breathed a sigh of relief.

WATER SUPPLY: 2.4 LITERS. Not great. In fact, very disconcerting. But she couldn’t worry about it just yet.

AIR SUPPLY: BEST BAND EVER. “Argh, Prumble, you wonderful imbecile,” she said, the corners of her mouth turning up into a grin despite herself. Why they had let him design the interface she couldn’t quite remember. What she did distinctly remember was his solemn promise to take the task seriously.

AIR LEVELS: 40%, but the number ticked up to 41 as she watched. That was good. The suit was pulling in what it needed from the atmosphere in the room. Better still, the outside air, in a worst-case scenario, would be breathable. Cold, thin, and a bit weak oxygen-wise, but breathable. A very good sign.

NUTRITION RESERVES: 4200 KCAL. Only a few days’ worth. It could be stretched, of course, but not nearly enough. Tania could not imagine succeeding here in a matter of days. But she’d die of dehydration before she starved, so there was that, at least.

COMMS: NO LINK. Of course not. Tania tried activating it, anyway. The system was already on, it turned out. She just couldn’t establish a connection with anyone. Either they were out of range, or something was jamming the signal. Could be a problem, could just be the walls of this…What was this place?

Debris lay in the opaque fluid around her. Chunks of orange cushioning from her spherical pod, the edges frothing as they melted away. She tried to recall what it had looked like before climbing into it. Like a…black egg, really. The cushioning inside had inflated to secure her from the violence going on all around. There’d been two, actually. Prumble had entered the other. Maybe, just maybe, the others had been similarly expelled.

Inside there’d been something else, too. A small pedestal. Like a miniature aura tower, or a shard cleaved from one of those giant versions she’d seen back on Earth. Tania glanced frantically around, looking for it. Overwhelmed with the need to find it. Water, food, air…none of that mattered here if she had no protection from the horrors that the Scipios could infect her with.

There, next to the wall, a lump of blackness concealed in shadow. Tania pushed through the slick goop around her to the device and knelt in front of it. Seemed intact. No obvious damage. But how to know for sure?

The visor, she realized. Had to be. She studied the remaining readouts and saw it, there, at the end.

AURA: ACTIVE.

Tania let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. She reached out and gave the little tower a nudge with her finger, watched it glide just above the surface of the oily muck, until it was pressed against the wall of the room. Someday she’d figure out how they did that. The tech still amazed her, after all this time. All that mattered right now, though, was that it worked. She stood, satisfied, and skimmed the rest of the data on her display. The remaining information all concerned her suit’s weaponry. A full supply of energy for the beam weapons on her arms. A few mortar rounds. She shook her head at that. At everything. To take on an entire world, with supplies that would last her a day, maybe two if she encountered only a few enemies out of the millions that must live here.

Tania began to pace, her thoughts turning to finding a way out. Her foot brushed against something solid, floating in the pool at her feet. It bobbed and rolled over. She picked it up and waited as the incredibly slick fluid dripped off. The thing was small, about the size of a bunch of bananas, and slightly curved, too. Matte gray in color, in the Builders’ style. As she turned it in her hands her visor’s display drew a line to it and words appeared. NUTRITION RESUPPLY: 10,800 KCAL.

She went to her knees then, and began to grope through the sludge. Four more of the packages were concealed in the fluid. Water, food, ammo, and fuel. Enough for a week or so now, she thought. “Thank you, Eve,” she whispered. Of course, the AI had neglected to provide her with a means to carry the stuff. No, wait. Tania reached behind herself and ran a hand along her back, even as Prumble’s description of the suit’s full capability set came back to her. There were sockets along the spine, she could feel them. These packages had matching connectors. Tania tried one and sure enough, it snapped into place on its own, as if the two were drawn together by magnets. Which may well be the case, she realized. Instantly her display updated to reflect the change.

Tania attached all four and reviewed her supply levels anew, enjoying the warm confidence the numbers now gave her. Aura shard under one arm, she turned her attention then to finding the others, battling the competing emotions of anticipation and dread.

—

Her pod had crashed through the ceiling of some kind of storage silo, she discovered. She’d had to burn a bit of fuel to get out, using the thrusters in her boots to power a jump up to the hole at the top that her headlamp had revealed. The gravity was low, about one-third Earth’s, making the ten-meter hop that much easier. Tania carefully hoisted herself over the jagged metal edge of the hole in the silo’s roof, and crawled out onto it.

The chamber she found herself in was narrow, just wide enough to fit the silo, but very long. Similar vessels were arranged in a long row that curved off to the left at a gentle rate. She turned around and saw a mirror of this sequence going off in the other direction, implying a circular arrangement of silos with, she guessed, a radius of several kilometers. Larger than Eve, in any case, which confirmed what she’d already strongly suspected. The ship had ejected her in that pod. The question was, to where, though Tania felt the conclusion to that was obvious. Still, she had to be sure. She looked up, through the hole in the ceiling of this room. And up, and up. Deck after deck had been tunneled through by her arrival. She saw only the ragged edges of floors, interspersed with bits of dangling, shorn wires and pipes. And beyond, several stars.

Tania had to know. She powered on her boots again and flew up through the tunnel her pod had made. The decks flew past, falling away below her as she rocketed toward the stars. At the last second she let up, willing the suit to slow her ascent. It complied, and as she reached the initial impact point Tania came to a rest, one hand on the fractured edge of some kind of exotic hull plating. Stars, out there. A bluish moon. More important, she saw glimpses of a vast network of space stations, and hints of the space elevator network to which they were attached to the unseen planet she now knew would be below. Carthage, Captain Gloria Tsandi had named it. Home world to the race known as the Creators, now held hostage by the Scipios.

They’d made it, after all.

She pushed herself higher still, intent on going out and looking around, but an invisible barrier seemed to hold her in. Of course, she thought. A hull breach like this wouldn’t be left unaddressed. There was air around her, after all. Tania lifted one armored hand and pushed at the field. There was no ripple of energy or flickering light. Not even a repelling force, really. Just a subtle vibration that seemed to harden as she pushed against it.

What now? she wondered. Hit it with a mortar and try to push through before the field could reassert itself? Might work. Might not. No way to know, but what did seem certain was the Scipios would notice an explosion like that.

Or would they? She pondered the situation. Despite her arrival having torn a hole one hundred meters deep, she’d seen no sign of a reaction to it. The entry point had been sealed, yes, but from the look of things that was an entirely automated feature of the hull. A sensible one, in truth. Tech she’d wished they’d had on Anchor back home.

But, at least from the perspective of her own species, a severe wound like this to such a structure would have to be investigated, wouldn’t it? Repaired? Which meant a response, and soon. Tania wanted to be far away when that happened.

She pushed back down, past ten meters of mangled equipment, until she came to an open floor her arrival had exposed. Tania hauled herself in and flicked on her headlamp, taking in the surroundings.

The room was large, perhaps a hundred square meters and five high. Row upon row of rectangular structures. Silent gray masses that took up the entirety of the floor space. It reminded her of the computer farms on Anchor, only this place was dark, dead.

She turned in place. The hole her arrival had punched was roughly in the center, and while three of the distant walls were identical, one had a wide indented section with lines down the middle. A door. Had to be. She started toward it.

The silence unnerved her. Tania ramped up the audio amplification her suit offered. This only served to increase the distant hum of machinery, a noise she found soothing. It sounded like home. Her home. The hallways and shafts of Anchor Station.

And then a new sound. A distant, sharp clang, and a whirring of motors. In that same instant, she detected movement. Tania dove between two of the hulking silent boxes and waited, breath held, senses strained. Weak light spilled in from the direction of the door, and then more sounds. The whine of electric motors, and the friction of wheels on tiled floor. Not one, but a chorus. The sounds diverged, began to spread around her, as if surrounding her. She felt cornered, at the center of a closing perimeter, yet could not bring herself to move or even to look.

The room had only one exit. No, she thought, that wasn’t true. She’d come in through a hole that exposed multiple levels of the station. So go back, or fight her way out? Neither seemed wise, not knowing what approached. She risked a quick glance around the corner of the box, in the direction she’d been going. What she saw reminded her first of a police riot shield. Just a rectangular metal plate moving slowly down the aisle toward her, its surface pitted and scarred from use. There was a band of white near the bottom, with some odd curved bar code–like patterns splashed across one side. She stared at them, baffled as the pattern seemed to shift and twist as if reacting to her gaze. Some kind of strange paint that reacted to being observed?

No, she realized, this was no magical, auto-translating paint. It was just the suit’s visor, letting her know she was looking at something it could read. Recognizable English text flashed in the lower corner of the display. Eve must have programmed it to automatically translate Scipio writing into something understandable.

It read: [ERROR] BARRICADE.

Tania leaned back out of sight and considered this. Barricade made sense, it was a moving wall coming toward her, after all. Error, though? What did that mean? Was she the error? A foreign body detected within the Scipio apparatus that they’d come to purge? Or maybe the crash site was considered an error, the mobile wall part of some repair process.

She pushed herself deeper into the grid of machinery, holding her breath, ready to shoot at the first sign of danger and hoping desperately it wouldn’t come to that.

Twenty seconds passed before the error-barricade slowly pushed by, working its way down the aisle she herself had been walking along. As it passed she saw a small treaded machine attached to the back of it, electric motor whirring softly. The barricade itself was as thick as her arm, and almost as tall as the space between floor and ceiling. It did not turn to face her, but instead merrily trundled along toward the hole her arrival had made.

She watched in solemn silence for several minutes as a fleet of these mobile walls converged on the hole punched through ceiling and floor of the huge room. Their motions were like a dance, a bit of performance art, as each of the slabs they carried were maneuvered into place. Bands of light seeped between the sections, growing ever smaller. With a staggered series of clangs the segments came together and the light vanished. Tania’s world plunged into near total darkness for a moment, sending her heart racing. Then, a dozen brilliant stars erupted before her, sending showers of sparks in all directions, skittering across the tiled floor. Robotic arms with welding torches began to bond the movable barricades together.

“They’re sealing it off,” she said to herself. “An automated response. They don’t know I’m here.” It made sense: An orbital superstructure like this would be regularly bombarded by meteors, space junk, and who knows what else. The Scipios had made their prison self-repairing.

The knowledge flooded her with a sudden confidence, and an urge to remain hidden here until the situation changed, if only to gather her wits and think.

But her friends were out there, somewhere. Maybe in similar situations, maybe much worse off. She had to find them, and soon.

Tania slipped out from her hiding place between the towering objects and jogged into the darkness, the way only visible due to the augmented view through her visor. She ran until the door appeared in front of her, closed behind the mobile barricades.

The massive bulkhead, rectangular in shape, had an almost zipperlike joint where the two halves met in the middle. She saw no way to make it open. On a whim, she strode up to stand before it, positioning herself in the center in the hope a camera or another sensor would detect her and let her pass. Nothing happened.

Tania almost gave up, when she heard a thin click. She waited, anxious. Another click. It came from behind, not the door. She whirled, ready to fire, but saw only darkness.

Another click, then another. Then the noises became so frequent they blended together. Suddenly the first row of the gray towers that filled the floor space of the room lit up with multicolored indicators about a meter from their bases. The entire row, stretching off to her left and right for fifty meters, came on in unison, bathing her in their glow.

The second row activated, then the third. With each passing second another row came alive until the whole room was lit by the glowing bases of the machines. Each now hummed with some electric purpose, the lights along their midsection undulating for reasons she could not fathom. Indicators maybe, but of what was anyone’s guess. Now the resemblance to the computer grids inside Anchor Station was unmistakable.

In the darkness Tania could just make out the circular arrangement of barricades, wheeled into place evidently to cordon off the damaged area where she’d arrived. An entirely automated process, it seemed, and she was just fine with that. It did beg the question, though: Where were the Scipios themselves? From what information Eve had shared, Tania had imagined this place highly populated. A sprawling city above their captured world. Yet so far, only machines, and very few at that.

There lay the problem with Eve’s data. It was old. Very old. Virtually anything could have happened here since the Builders fled, or even since their last attempt to retake their planet. How ironic it would be to come all this way only to find the Scipios, experts in virus design and manufacturing, had succumbed to some disease.

A new sound reached her amplified hearing. A high whir and then, beneath that, a low sustained rumble. She spun where she stood and froze. The giant door behind her had separated in a jigsaw pattern down the middle, and were rolling apart.

So much for the extinction event theory.

Four Scipios moved into the room. Once again Tania concealed herself in the grid of now-humming machinery, her suit illuminated by the twinkling indigo and ruby status displays. She chanced a glance at the approaching aliens, and her breath caught in her throat.

They were upright, but did not walk, instead moving in a sort of fluid hop-and-glide gait unlike anything Tania had ever seen. Perfectly normal, no doubt, for their limb structure and diminutive size, especially in this gravity. To her eye they resembled a chimpanzee crossed with a bat, complete with flappy winglike structures that connected their arms to their torsos. They would hop a meter into the air and then glide several forward, all effortlessly, as natural as humans walking along a promenade. They were dressed, after a fashion, in outfits of varying color, though all four had a large white band around the midsection. Some kind of utility belt, maybe, for there were pockets and other containers all around.

As the Scipios moved across the gigantic room toward the improvised barricade, they chattered to each other. Alien sounds, but unmistakable as language. Like a mixture of birdsong and the clicks and whistles a dolphin made. An instant later, to Tania’s surprise and delight, a transcription began to flow across the bottom portion of her visor. Automatic translation was nothing special—humans had been able to do it for centuries. What surprised her was that Eve knew the Scipio language well enough to program it into this suit.

An imperfect knowledge, in truth. Tania understood now the bracketed word error translated from the bar coding on the repair machine. It was a substitute for an unknown word. No great surprise, Eve’s knowledge of the Scipio tongue would be woefully out of date. Still, she felt grateful. The words told her much.

One was saying, “Examination. Reconfiguration. [error] to be of returned [error] status.”

“Copious agreement,” the other three said in unison.

Then the group fell silent, continuing their hop-glide march to the site of the incident.

She heard the whir and grating rumble of the door, now sliding closed. Tania slipped back to the main aisle and propelled herself toward it. No time to look through first. Caution lost out to her desire to leave, so she powered through the gap seconds before the door closed. Her momentum took her to a wall on the opposite side of a wide corridor. Bending her legs to absorb the impact of landing, Tania let herself fall back to the floor, dropping to a crouch and twisting left and right. With one arm curled protectively around her aura shard, she raised the other, ready to fire, sure she’d find the area cordoned off by Scipio police, curious Scipio onlookers lining up behind.

What Tania Sharma saw instead brought tears to her eyes.

Standing beside the door she’d just come through, backs against the wall, were two men. They both stared at her, mouths agape.