That was three of them. Leo looked around for the yellow sensor, the one supposedly scanning the room to keep them safe, but Skits was gone.

That wasn’t the only thing missing, Leo realized, looking at his empty hand.

“Baz,” he whispered. “Bastian.” The captain didn’t even twitch. Leo pulled himself to his feet, ready to go give Baz’s shoulder a shake, when he heard voices—one familiar and slightly grating, the other deep and monotone, much like its master’s.

“You are so right,” the first voice said.

“Of course I am. I performed all the necessary calculations to within a point-zero-zero-one margin of error.”

Leo stumbled into the corridor, which immediately lit up at his presence. He could see the lights leading deeper into the facility, showing access to a series of branching rooms. The voices were coming from the largest one off to his right.

“I mean, they think they’re superior, with their spongy brains and their opposable thumbs and their squishy feelings. But even the best of them can only calculate pi to five hundred thirty-six digits without computer assistance. Five hundred thirty-six! How lame is that?”

“I cannot quantify the lameness. I can, however, calculate pi to forty-seven quadrillion digits. Would you like to hear?”

“Mmmm, maybe later.”

Leo peeked around the edge of the doorway to find the entrance to the hangar that he’d seen from outside, its lights all on, its bay doors closed. At one time this hangar would have been a hive of activity, Leo knew, filled with Aykari workers loading core after core of V onto waiting transports, ready to be shipped off to the front. Even now it wasn’t entirely deserted. There were still stacks of empty crates. An abandoned lifter. A row of tanks that probably held conventional fuel for sublight engines. Tools. Rusted ship parts. The telltale marks of a place abandoned quickly.

The thing that really caught his attention, though, was the robots—and not the two he expected. Along the rear wall stood a phalanx of mining bots, at least thirty of them. They were all deactivated, caught in a kind of suspended animation, waiting to be powered up and given orders again. With their round heads and tapered bodies they resembled giant ice cream cones, their thick armor designed to withstand the dents and dings of working in tight rocky spaces with their drills and saws.

Leo had seen his fair share of them back on Earth, hovering over the giant mine shaft just outside town. From a distance they looked like buzzing gnats circling a garbage can, but up close they were much more frightening, each appendage ending in some kind of tool meant to cut through rock, just like a slurk’s teeth. They didn’t move, of course—completely offline. They simply stared straight ahead, their eyes lightless, their chassis blanketed in dust, joints no doubt rusting over from disuse. Leo thought their still silence made them even creepier.

There were two robots who were anything but silent, however.