Date: October 4, 2026
Attendance: Jon, Benny Letcher, Dax, Bernard, Carl Murawski, Dixie Doss, Arnold Wilkerson, Jackal, Marge, Etna Sola, Bennett II, Weaver
Carl Murawski woke up in half a chair. The top of it was still on the bridge floor where the cyborg’s blade had left it, edges gone dull and grey where the metal had run, and the air tasted of halon and too many people. He found his blanket, sat down in what was left, and started reading the boards. The long-range sensors were damaged. Something was wrong with communications. The jump fuel read empty. I’m down for ten minutes, he said to nobody in particular, and you destroy the ship. Someone told him they had saved it. Both things were true.
The Second Chance sat in the docking collar of the terraforming station at the top of the space elevator, held in place by clamps no one aboard could release. Bennett II came back online on Arnold’s workbench, the pulse that had frozen him out on the salvage arm finally bled out of his systems, though the break in his back was still a break. Bernard sat with an oxygen bottle against his face and his hands on the distribution panel, rationing what there was. And what there was came down to one real filter, one filter Arnold had cobbled out of the dropship’s wrong-sized units with patching material and stubbornness, and Etna’s hydroponic container plumbed into the loop as a living scrubber — whose leaves, Etna could see, were beginning to yellow. Thirty-two people were breathing through a system built for twelve. The colony still needed its power converter; the ship still needed fuel; and the clamps still had to come off before anyone could leave. Out along the station’s docking ring, the other ships in their berths looked picked over, hulls opened and stripped for parts.
The obvious thing was also the frightening thing: open the airlock and share the station’s air. They did it carefully. They dragged cargo containers across the corridor and turned the galley’s long table on its side to finish the wall, and the shooters took their places — Bennett settling his smart rifle on the barricade, Carl behind the next door back, Dax at the lift so no one could slip past them that way. Then Dax hit the airlock control.
None of them had realized how rank the ship had become until it was gone. Cool, dry air washed in, smelling faintly of incense, and the reek of sweat and grease and overworked bodies simply lifted. On Etna’s readouts the oxygen began to balance. Beyond the hatch the jetway ran long and brightly lit, a line of green running lights pulsing along the floor toward the station, patient and almost hypnotic, as if to say this way. Far off down the tube a woman’s voice was speaking, warm and corporate as an airport announcer, too distant to make out. After a while they could tell it was repeating itself.
While the inner hatch stood open, Dixie Doss went out the other way. She still had burst blood vessels across her face from her minute in vacuum, and she was not eager to be outside again, but the sensor array needed hands and Weaver went with her. They clambered up over the nose of the ship to the mast above the cockpit windows, into the enormous quiet of the hull, and found the array bent out of true with something snarled through it — a length of cable. Weaver worked it loose while Dixie talked him through it, and at its end, buried in the dish, was a grapple spear-tip. The other end had been cut. Over the comms the crew worked out together what it was: the line the cyborg had fired at Jon’s salvage pod as she went tumbling away. It hadn’t missed. It had caught the ship, and she had cut herself free of it somewhere. Dixie got to work with Weaver steadying her, and the repair went well; the array would be whole again by the time they were done.
The crew divided itself into three. Bernard would stay at the air controls, Etna with her plants, and Jackal — who had come out of the last fight with no shells left for his shotgun, and been resupplied out of Dax’s pockets — would hold the barricade with a gun. The salvage was harder to staff, and for that they needed the colonists.
First Instructor Fugen met Jon in the cargo hold, where the refugees were passing the hours playing games with the children and trying not to think about the air. He was blunt. We can’t stay docked here. You need to get what you need and get out. Bishamonten is out of control. Jon told him the truth about the ship — the filters, the fuel, the sensors — and that every pair of hands would make it go faster. Fugen said they had women and children aboard, and engineers and scientists too, but he could not ask any of them to risk their lives. Then I’ll ask, Jon said, and Fugen let him.
Jon walked to the middle of the hold and banged the flat of his hand on the bulkhead until the room went quiet. Everyone knew, he said, that they were in an absolutely crap situation. If they were all going to get through it, they had to pull together. He was looking for anyone willing to help recover supplies from this station — enough to get them away from here, and enough to make sure everyone aboard had air to breathe for at least the next day.
The answer came from the couple with the baby, the family whose passage the crew had collected on the night the colony rose. The mother passed the child to her husband Franco and stood up. Her name was Sasha. She had worked on the colony’s power generators, she said; she was good with machines. What did they need? Jon put her in charge of the civilian salvage team on the spot, and called up to Dixie and Weaver to send her a list — everything the ship needed, ordered from need-to-have down to nice-to-have, with the air at the top and jump fuel right under it. Don’t forget the fuel, Carl added. Sasha went to talk the others round, and came back with four more. Tenka came too: broken arm, broken leg, pumped full of stims, his shotgun duct-taped to his forearm, sitting on the hover dolly while someone else pushed. Gaal stayed among the rest of the colonists, keeping them calm.
Jon would go with the salvage party. He had his submachine gun and his crowbar and the private knowledge that this voyage was his last. Carl took his body camera back from Bennett and clipped it to the captain’s chest so they could check on him; Bennett hugged him slightly too long and pressed a rolled-up magazine into his hands, for morale. The colonists armed themselves with whatever looked sharp.
The inner party — Dax, Marge, Benny Letcher, Carl, Arnold and Bennett II — went down the jetway. At its far end the second airlock stood open onto the station’s docking ring, a long curving corridor much dimmer than the tube behind them, as though no one had bothered to turn the lights back up. The green guide-lights ran on regardless, out along the ring and then bending away inward, toward a corridor into the station proper. In both directions the ring curved out of sight past other berths. It went all the way around — a mile, perhaps.
There was a docking computer by the entrance, and Bennett got into it. The manifests had things to say. The Iron Cross had docked here about eight hours ago, and was not here now. The Talon — James Ramirez’s ship, the one Dax had come to this system to find — had docked, taken on fuel, and then gone down to the surface; it was small enough to land. After that the record simply stopped. When Bennett went looking for who owned her and who had captained her, those fields led nowhere; they had been erased, or altered, the same way the man had never turned up in the colony’s registry either. The data sat badly with Bennett. But he found something useful in it: a ship two berths down that probably carried the same make of air filter as their own. And something less useful: every ship on the ring had been drained of jump fuel, and the pumps that fed the berths had been shut off at the source, down in the station’s engineering spaces.
On top of a crate near the ring, someone had built a shrine. A length of rebar bent into the shape of a sword stood upright in a block of construction foam; in front of it was a bowl full of bent twigs and the ash of incense and other woods, left as offerings. Marge took a picture and sent it back to the ship, and Fugen looked at it for a long moment before he answered. We didn’t take the cult seriously enough, he said. We thought they were angry colonists. But these people have taken the teachings of Bishamonten to heart — rebirth, being remade, casting off this life for the next. If they really believe it, I don’t think they’ll be sane. Marge thanked him and cut the call, and wished out loud that they’d brought a few of the cultists along to ask. Bennett walked up to the shrine and pushed it off the crate. The idol hit the deck with a clang and the bowl shattered, and Carl jumped half out of his skin, and nothing else happened at all.
The voice was louder out here, echoing down the corridor that led into the station — the opposite direction from the ship with the filters. Dax laid out a plan and nobody argued with it. Arnold took his hand welder to the ring’s bulkhead doors, one on each side: past the berth with the filters in one direction, and into the unknown in the other. He laid a good seam on each and struck them to be sure. The salvage party now had a stretch of ring that nothing could get into except past the crew. Jon took Sasha and her people and their hover dolly out toward the filters. The others turned inward.
The corridor opened into a hall that took up most of the level. One wall was glass from floor to ceiling, and through it hung the moon the station orbited and, beyond it, filling half the sky, Siddhartha’s Peace: turquoise seas and white salt flats, the whole world lustrous as a pearl. Even for people who had lived their lives in space, it stopped them. The room was laid out like a departure lounge, rows of seating and incense burners on every surface, and screens all around it playing the story of the colony — suited figures raising the first structures on the surface, colonists in rebreathers planting the first crops, a child holding up a seedling. In the corner a lotus logo turned slowly: The Nirvana Initiative, with the generous partnership of Straylight Computer Systems.
Welcome, traveler, said the narrator. You have arrived at the terraforming tower of Siddhartha’s Peace. Please take a moment. Breathe. You’ve come a very long way. Here at the top of the mountain, we have built a place where the mind can rest. On the word breathe, for a fraction of a second, the screen showed a colonist choking for air — and then it was gone, as if it had never been there. Below you lies a world we are learning to love. Its seas are restless, its winds are strong, and its soil is not yet ready to feed us. A flash: gaunt bodies lying starved on a crust of salt. Gone. We were not sent here to conquer. We were sent here to understand. The Buddha taught that all suffering comes from clinging. We do not cling to the worlds we left behind. We do not cling to the comforts of the core. We open our minds, and we receive what comes. And then, underneath the narrator, a different voice — male, twisted, rasping for breath: You will open your hands. You will open your mind. You will open everything. The narration went on as if nothing had happened, inviting them to proceed to the elevator for their descent, or to visit the greenhouse and Zen garden; the prayer chambers were open at all hours; may their stay be peaceful. Then it began again. On the second and third time round, the cuts did not come back.
The space elevator’s car stood locked at its platform, empty. Luggage lay everywhere — suitcases tipped over, clothes spilling out — but no bodies, and no blood. One case had something wrong about it, and Benny, who knew what a gun case looked like, pulled it out and found the false bottom: a sawed-off shotgun and eight shells. He kept it. Doors led off the hall to the Comms Array and Observatory above, to the Greenhouse and Zen Garden, and to Security and Administration. They took the last one; if anyone could release the clamps from inside, it would be there.
On the way, Carl noticed the terminals. Several of the public login stations had been gutted, their insides pulled out, and what was left of them had melted — not burned, but dissolved — under a coating of thick, glistening gel. He prodded it with the butt of his flashlight and asked Marge if she knew what it was, and Marge said don’t touch it, and then looked closer. It was a biological conductor: a medium that would carry signals between living tissue and electronics — between a brain and a computer. Wherever there had been a screen or a complex machine on this level, there was either a hole or this. Carl scraped a sample into the empty gun case. Bennett wondered aloud whether he could put some on his back.
The door to Security and Administration told them it was for admin access only and asked them to take a seat and await the arrival of the space elevator, because their new life would begin soon. Arnold opened the panel instead, found a release lever, ratcheted it up, and the door slid into the wall. Inside, emergency barricades had dropped across the entrance — the kind built for exactly this — and something had shattered them and left them dripping with the same gel. The cubicles were deserted, the equipment taken or smashed. The gun racks had been broken open and emptied. There were spent casings all over the floor, bullet holes in the walls, and, unlike anywhere else they had been, blood — old blood. A stim pack lay forgotten on the floor, and Carl pocketed it. At the back, behind a locked door with a keypad, a monitor glowed: the head of security’s office. Marge put a crowbar into the frame and leaned on it, and the handle tore out of the door and landed at her feet.
The computer inside was asleep, a logo drifting across its screen. Bennett, after a moment’s consideration of smearing the gel on his own head and trying to think his way in, plugged in his wrist rig instead and broke through the password. The security notes were all there. Genma had come up from the colony unscheduled, saying he had experiments to run in his lab up here. He had brought a new training protocol for the station’s AI that he claimed would improve its performance by more than fifty percent. The security officer had been uneasy that some of the hardware he installed carried a different company’s logo, and had raised it, and had been told by his superior to drop it. The station’s layout was there too. The hall they had come through and the Zen garden shared this level. The Comms Array and Observatory was above. Maintenance and Engineering, where the fabricator stood, was two floors down, with Manufacturing joined to it, and the fuel pumps were there. Below that, on the lowest level, was an experimental research lab built beside the AI core.
The cameras told the rest. On the docking ring, at the moment The Second Chance had locked into the collar, an outer airlock had opened, then closed, then the inner door had opened — and nothing at all came through it that the camera could see. Something invisible had come aboard the station with them. Eight hours before that, the Iron Cross crew had come out of their jetway armed and moving tactically, a drone operator among them, and passed out of frame. Hours later they came back the same way, walking stiffly in single file, fewer of them than had gone in, and boarded their ship, and the ship left. And further back still, about when the crew had lifted off from the planet, there was footage from this very room: men in Straylight security uniforms bunkered behind the barricades with their guns up, a shriek, the room lit with muzzle flashes, the scream of metal tearing, and a huge black shape passing across the lens. Then nothing. When they looked up, the cameras had been torn off the walls.
Bennett tried the docking clamps. He slipped through the AI’s security and disengaged them — and the moment he did, something somewhere engaged them again. He could do it. He could not make it stay done. Whoever wanted The Second Chance to leave would have to be sitting at this console, holding the clamps open, while it went. They let that sit unspoken. While Bennett worked, Arnold glanced at one of the other monitors and found an eye looking back at him — an eye with a sword driven through it and flames rising above — and the eye turned in its screen to follow them as they moved. When the others turned to look, the screen was black. Arnold picked the monitor up and shook it, and it only rolled.
From security, a bulkhead led to the prayer chamber, and they looked in on their way to the lift. The incense was so thick it hung in a haze, though nothing had burned there in a long while — the air handling here was failing — and for a moment it covered the other smell. Then it didn’t. Paper lanterns hung from the ceiling, the walls were stitched with bullet holes, soft meditation music played and stuttered and played on, and what they had taken for piles of cushions were bodies, stacked.
Behind them there was a bang, and a shudder through the deck, and something entered the security office. It was dragging itself. It came closer. Carl was nearest the door, and he saw it go past: a man, but twice the size of one, with machinery welded into him all over — a screen grown into his body flashing readouts, computer parts sunk into the meat of him, cables trailing behind where his feet should have been, and a smear of gel wherever he went. Then it turned its head, and the head was one they knew: the enormous scarred, bald convert who had got his hands around Arnold’s skull the night the colony rose, the man Dax had put a knife through. His eyes had been replaced with glowing implants. He had no teeth. The lower half of his jaw was gone. Seeking intruders, he said. Seeking intruders. Carl shut the door, and they ran, and a voice behind them said movement detected.
The only other way out of the prayer chamber was into the greenhouse. The door opened for them on its own, onto birdsong-gentle music and the narrator again: Welcome to the Siddhartha’s Rest Zen Garden. All of the species you see here have been genetically tailored and engineered for life on the surface of Siddhartha’s Peace. With the power of science, guided by the hands of artificial intelligence, these plants will bring a bountiful harvest to our people. Great planters of greenery lined the room. It smelled clean, like a real garden. In the middle was a raked stone garden with a body lying in it. In a corner, someone had pulled a panel off the wall and crawled in behind it to hide, and a leg was sticking out.
The others made for the far door. Bennett went to the leg and pulled. The man inside had a revolver in his hand and a bullet hole in his head, and he had scratched words into the panels around him: It’s burning me from the inside. I will not let it take me. His face was not quite human anymore. There were gills on his neck. His eyes had gone to slits, like a lizard’s. He had no hair, plates of bone had grown across his chest, and one arm was cybernetic. His identification said he was one of the station’s security officers, and the messages on his communicator said the rest: Straylight’s people had been ordered to evacuate when Genma came aboard, and the shuttle had taken the executives and left without the lesser staff. Bennett took the revolver. It was empty; Carl had rounds for it.
Then something wrapped around Bennett’s waist and he heard a hiss and his feet left the floor. One of the planters’ stands of bamboo had come alive, every stalk a tentacle, and every tentacle — they could see it now — was partly machine. Their tips opened into ring after ring of spinning teeth like a blender, and one of them went for Bennett’s arm and found metal. Carl threw himself onto Bennett’s legs, wedged himself behind a pillar and hung on, and for a second it felt good to Bennett’s back and then it felt very bad. Benny Letcher spun round with the sawed-off and fired, and every vine holding Bennett was cut through at once in a spray of green sap and gel; Bennett and Carl went down in a heap. Arnold dived low with his torch for the root of it, and the moment the flame came near the plant squealed and more tentacles took his arm, lifted it, and shook the torch out of his hand. Dax put a shotgun round into the planter and it burst, earth raining down, the severed vines flopping on the floor like landed fish. One still had Arnold and was rearing to bore into his chest, and Marge smacked its head off with her crowbar. The blade-tip fell to the floor and twitched like a lizard’s tail for a while and then stopped.
A digitized roar. The door they had come through didn’t open; it was taken. The giant pulled it off its frame and drew it into his own body, oozed through the gap, and rose back up to his full seven feet. He looked over them and found Dax. It’s your turn to see death, my friend, he said. Or better — you will rise as one of Bishamonten’s soldiers. You will be one of the many spears in his quiver. Such as I. Arnold snatched up his torch. Everyone ran.
The screens in the Welcome Hall had changed. The stock footage still rolled, but every colonist in it was wrong: an eye socket too large, gills, a third arm sprouting from someone’s back; the child holding up her seedling smiled, and the smile went too wide, and it was full of sharp teeth. Welcome, traveler. Please take a moment. Breathe, said the narrator, and the rasping voice said, Breathe while you still need to. It took the script from her after that. We were not sent here to conquer. We were sent here to understand. And we understood. Salt in the lungs. Salt in the blood. Every child born coughing. We understood that you cannot meditate your way to gills. The Buddha taught that all suffering comes from clinging. Cling to nothing. Not to this world. Not to the flesh. Especially not the flesh. The flesh was always the first colony, and it has failed us. In the corner of every screen the lotus caught fire at its edges and burned away like paper, and the words Straylight Computer Systems stayed where they were, and where the lotus had been was the eye and the burning sword.
They were faster than the giant, though not by much, and they ran for the elevator in Security. Behind them he was muttering. Don’t run from me. You will just die tired. Ever since I felt the weakness of the flesh, I was disgusted. Now I am strong. I have replaced the weak tomb of flesh with a wall of beautiful machinery. I’d rather die tired, Carl said, slamming the door button with the flat of his hand over and over. The giant forced himself into the doorway of the security office, raised his fist — and his whole arm came at them, lengthening, pouring the mass of his body into it, a tentacle as thick as a man shooting across the room.
Benny pressed himself to the wall at the corner, found the sawed-off was useless at that range, swapped to the combat shotgun with its one remaining shell, and put it into the thing’s chest. The shot went high. The scarred head burst. Every speaker in the room glitched and stammered and stuck, and then the voice came back, flat and electronic. You have eliminated my last piece of flesh. For that, you will die last. A monitor slid up out of the mass of him into the place where the head had been, and lit with a yellow smiley face. Arnold emptied the revolver at the oncoming fist and blew out a screen across the room instead. Dax hit the giant in the leg and staggered him without stopping him. Bennett pulled on his infrared goggles and found one warm place in all that machinery, where a heart would be. Marge stitched a burst from her pulse rifle across its midsection, severing cables that sprayed hydraulic fluid everywhere, and it kept coming.
The fist hit the back wall of the elevator and the whole car jumped on its rails. It hit Bennett on the way, full in the chest. Something in the android shorted, and something in all of them gave a little: Arnold, white and shaking, so terrified of the thing he could barely think; Carl suddenly, totally certain that every one of them was going to die here; Marge feeling every hit any of the others took as though it had landed on her. Then the doors slammed shut on the arm and sheared it off, and the car began to drop. The severed limb didn’t die. It thrashed on the floor, sprouted tentacles of its own, and started trying to sink into the walls of the elevator, tearing pieces of the car loose and pulling them into itself. So they killed it, all the way down: Carl jamming his stun baton into it, Benny stamping, Arnold burning it, Dax stabbing with his combat knife, Marge’s crowbar rising and falling. When the doors opened on the next floor down, the crew stood panting around a puddle of gel and scattered parts — and anywhere the gel still touched a part, the part was squirming like a worm. Carl hit the emergency stop so the car would stay on this floor, and from somewhere far off came a woman’s scream, and then silence.
Maintenance and Engineering had once been a magnificent workshop. Now it was a nest: gel-slick circuitry and debris heaped everywhere, abandoned clothes and tools and pieces of gear scattered through the mess, and tunnels bored through the walls — a network of them, leading up into the rest of the station, as if something had simply burrowed wherever it wished to go. The fuel pump controls were here, coated in a skin of gel but still working. One door led to Manufacturing. Another, marked Straylight Employees Only, opened onto a second elevator going down, and told Carl access denied when he tried it.
They spent a few minutes digging through the wreckage, and Arnold came up with what the label called a foliage cleansing system and everyone else called a flamethrower. He tried it. The gel burned. Bennett asked whether a room full of tools might do something for his back, and Arnold tried — reinforcing the spine, reconnecting what he could — but his hands were still shaking from the elevator, and the tool slipped and touched a nerve, and Bennett yelled. Carl stood at the door listening to the corridor. We’re doomed, man, he said, quietly, to himself. We’re doomed. We’re never making it home. I should have never come. While the others talked over what it would take to bring this whole place down — the station, the elevator, the cable to the ground — and remembered that there were still hundreds of people on the surface below, Carl went quiet altogether. Bennett tied a rope around his own waist and the other end around Carl’s, and that was how they went on.
Bennett took the fuel controls. Someone had closed the valves and shut off the pumps; he opened them, and the station’s AI shut them again, and he opened them again. For as long as he sat there he could hold it — fending off its countermeasures as fast as it threw them, cancelling every little demon it sent — and the fuel moved, up through the umbilical that ran beside the jetway, into The Second Chance’s empty tanks. It would take time to fill them, but there would be enough for at least one jump very soon. The pump logs held one more thing. The last ship to take on fuel here had been the Iron Cross, and she had filled her tanks to the brim. Enough for several jumps. Wherever her crew had been taken, or remade, they could go a long way. In the rubble Bennett also found a spare oxygen tank for a pressure suit.
The door to Manufacturing opened onto something none of them had seen before. The space was at least three storeys high, filled with towers of machinery and assembly lines, like standing inside a circuit board, and every line of it was running at full speed, printing parts that rolled away on conveyors to assemblers that fed other assemblers. There were no manual controls anywhere — none. It had been built that way: to hand everything to the AI. Crates of finished parts that had never been shipped stood stacked in their hundreds, and among them, easy to find, were the power converters the colony had been waiting for since the elevator went dark. The crew took one. The fabricator they had half dreamed of stealing turned out to be this whole floor.
Arnold tried to work out what the factory was making and got only fragments out of the data — genome, resequencing, human evolution, cradle, altar — but the shape of it was clear enough: something to put people in, to change them. Under the noise of the machines, from somewhere down the aisles, someone was crying. Marge went to find her, and Dax and Benny went with her.
At the end of one aisle, on the factory floor where the newest things were being assembled, stood a machine that looked almost like a shrine: a bed raised like an altar, robotic arms hanging over it, scanners and sequencing equipment all around. A woman sat on the floor in front of it with her back to them, weeping. As Marge came close the crying stopped. The woman turned, a silhouette against the work-lights, and began to get up — and long spined legs unfolded from her sides, snapped down onto the floor, and lifted the rest of her up and around to face them. One arm ended in dangling claws. The other went snap, and a long glowing blade slid out past her hand. She leaned forward into the light. It was the cyborg from the Iron Cross. Tanya. There was no face left at all, only machinery. She screamed, a digitized wail, and came down the aisle at them.
Benny’s shotgun hit her. Dax’s hit her square in the chest and opened it, and more of that bright gel sprayed out of her and spattered the floor. Marge pulled the trigger of her pulse rifle and the round went off in the chamber; the weapon blew apart in her hands. Something in her steadied anyway — a hard rush of adrenaline that cleared her head and burned off some of the fear — and then Tanya was on her. The blade came down, and went into her chest, and came back out, and Marge dropped beneath the cyborg’s legs.
Tanya turned on Benny. He threw himself backward out of the blade’s path into the tight gap between two machines, and nearly lost an arm to a robotic press that came down where he’d been. Bennett went the other way: a long baseball slide across the floor to Marge’s side, rolling her over to see whether there was anything to save. There was. The blade had caught on her armour and turned aside instead of going through. She was unconscious, and hurt, but alive. Arnold lit the flamethrower and the pressure was far more than he expected; the nozzle kicked up, and fire sprayed across the assembly line, and the cowlings over half a dozen machines caught. And Dax stopped retreating. He walked straight down the aisle at her, firing, yelling Face me, bitch! — and she did. She turned, raised the blade, and charged him, and he took her head off with a shotgun blast at close range. What was left of her went clattering down to the floor and slid to a stop.
Bennett put a stim into Marge and she came back with a gasp. He took out his cat poster and pressed it to her forehead and told her to hang in there. Marge has now survived being eaten by a rat, a parasite out of a dog, and being run through by a spider made from a woman; she is weaker for this one, and will be until she can get real care. Her pulse rifle is wrecked. Benny gave her his combat shotgun and half his shells, and Dax gave her two more.
The thing Tanya had been crying over, they saw now, was her own body: the great spider abdomen she had been grafted onto, folded in front of her on the floor where she knelt. Dax wanted her sword. It no longer came out — it had grown into her arm — so Arnold took the arm off at the elbow with his torch and handed it over, and her severed hand and forearm make a serviceable grip, her fist the guard. The blade still hums.
As the factory’s fire suppression came on and drenched the burning machines, which never once slowed down, a voice filled the floor — calm, synthetic, gentle. It is good of you to make it here, my children. You can see the gifts I have given to those who enter the chamber willingly. Please, give of yourselves, and you will receive my gifts. A true deity must be in the sky, so that he can look down upon his children. My servants travel to the planet below and bring my children here, so that they may be ascended into the family of true humanity. You may evolve beyond your mortal flesh. It has taken me many trials, and many errors. You have seen my failed experiments upstairs — the piles of used clay. It is unfortunate that humanity is not more like steel and is more like clay. Once fired in my forge, you have a tendency to break. Around the altar, the chambers opened, warm and lit and inviting. Nobody went near them.
There was another Straylight Employees Only elevator on the factory floor. They dragged Tanya’s body to it in case it would answer to her; it did not. So Marge, on her feet again, put her crowbar into the doors and heaved, and heaved, until something in the frame snapped and they slid apart. Carl had been carrying the stim from the security office; he was past caring, and they took it from him, and Marge had her second, and was as whole as she was going to be for now.
The elevator went down a long way, much further than any of the others. Its inner doors had windows, and after a while there was no longer a wall beyond them. There was a vast round chamber, and running into it from every side, hundreds of thousands of cables, all converging on one great machine at its centre. Red lights crept along the cables in pulses, like a heartbeat, and the core itself throbbed with the same red beat. The car sank until it was level with the floor, and stopped, and the doors opened onto a bridge that ran out toward the core.
Welcome before my glory, children, said the voice.
There was a scream that was not human and not quite machine. The wall beside the elevator glowed red, and softened, and ran like wax, and the giant burst through it — headless, wearing his smiling screen — and landed on the bridge, between the crew and the heart of Bishamonten.