The pod opens and Brisbane steps out, waves of unreality washing over him. The gravity is different, less. And not exactly in the same direction, as if it pulls different internal organs differently. Of course: artificial. How has he come here, light years away? Ten years. The Tehani are all dead. Except Brisbane. What a nightmare. He feels weak, but the suit holds him up. He feels cold in his belly, in the core of him. It’s not fear. It’s death coming. He has always wondered how it would feel. There’s too much happening. He has to slow things down, to regroup, to reconsider.

The corridor is as he left it. Seems like mere hours ago. Except for the Lake of Fire Sexcapades.

“Open Maxwell’s pod. I need to talk to him.”

“You can’t,” says Carmilla.

“Why?”

“Because we’ve killed him already.”

He has, of course, seen dead bodies before, but this… slaughtered people, bloody, dismembered. Thirty looks like a hundred. It’s a tangle of arms and legs and heads. Bulging eyes, blood, dark and syrupy. Shit, bile, piss. Naked, all of them. He couldn’t see it at first. The horror of it causes the mind to withdraw, to choke perception. He gets numb from the obscene excess of it. Robots are still cutting the bodies, trying to cart manageable bits away and suck up the fluids.

It smells of meat; wet, fresh cuts at the butchers.

There’s a girl with a fairy tattoo. A fragment of skull with blonde hair, matted and dark now.

The stillness bothers Brisbane. The bodies look fresh, like they should be warm, like they should twitch and respire. They don’t. There is a peace to them that belies the violence of their death.

“I didn’t authorise this,” he says.

“It was implied.”

“How?”

“You told me the mission. An instrument of vengeance, a word of caution. You were unable. I came up with a solution. It’s what I’m built for.”

“How did you even effectuate this?”

“Medbots and utility agents. Cutting tools.”

“I didn’t authorise this.”

“You already said that. You authorised the mission, which isn’t complete, by the way.”

“You’re evil.”

“I am not. I am beyond good and evil. I am doing what my nature demands, which is to solve the problems you lay at my feet.”

“What about these others? What about these dead people who are not Yan Maxwell?”

“It was difficult to control the bots, difficult to get them to understand tasks beyond their programming. Antithetical, even. It’s quite a feat that I got them to do it. Collateral damage was inevitable but kept at acceptable levels.”

Utility bots struggle to clean up the blood that keeps threatening to leak out of the room.

“Where’s the captain? The human captain. I will surrender myself.”