As they worked deeper, though, he began to notice a change. The assailants here were just as ferocious, but they seemed younger. That was part of the pattern he had been trained to expect. He wished he could find a way to spare the smallest, the most obviously childlike. But these young ones threw themselves on his troopers’ flames as eagerly as their elders.

And then, quite suddenly, the troopers burst through a final barrier of drones, and found themselves in the birthing chamber.

It was a vast, darkened room, where ancient fluorescents glowed dimly. The troopers fanned out. They were covered in blood and bits of charred flesh, he saw, leaving bloody footprints where they passed. They looked as if they had been born, delivered through that terrible passage of death. One flamethrower still flared, but with a gesture Abil ordered it shut off.

In this chamber, people moved through the dark, as naked as those outside. Nobody came to oppose the troopers. Perhaps it was simply unthinkable for the drones that anybody should harm those who spent their lives here.

Cautiously Abil moved forward, deeper into the gloom. The air was warm and humid; his faceplate misted over.

Women, naked, nestled in shallow pits on the floor, in knots of ten or a dozen. Some of the pits were filled with milky water, and the women floated, relaxed. Attendants, young women and children, moved back and forth, carrying what looked like food and drink. In one corner there were infants, a carpet of them who crawled and toddled. Abil moved among them, a bloody pillar.

The women in the pits were all pregnant—tremendously pregnant, he saw, with immense bellies that must have held three, four, five infants. In one place, a woman was actually giving birth. She stood squat, supported by two helpers. A baby slid easily out from between her legs, to be caught, slapped, and cradled; but before its umbilical was cut another small head was protruding from the woman’s vagina. She seemed in no pain; her expression was dreamy, abstract.

One of the breeder women looked up as he passed. She reached up a hand to him, the fingers long and feather-thin. Her limbs were etiolated, spindly; her legs could surely not have supported the weight of her immense, fecund torso. But her face was fully human.

On impulse, curious, he reached up and ran his thumbnail under his chin. His faceplate popped and swung upward. Dense air, moist and hot, pressed in on him.

The smells were extraordinary. He distinguished blood, and milk, and piss and shit, earthy human smells. There was a stink of burning that might have come from his own suit, a smell of vacuum, or of the battle he had waged in the corridors beyond this place.