“All the refinery’s sensors just failed,” Tyle said, a strong hint of panic in hir voice. “I’m working to restore them.”

“She’s still in here then,” Kandara said, pulling herself along inside the accessway. The size of the refinery was going to give Cancer a huge advantage, she realized. Without sensors, they could spend a week moving around trying to find each other—and that was assuming Cancer would seek a confrontation. “She’s going to want to escape,” she said. “If she goes down into the extractor rig below, will she have a better route out?”

“Not particularly,” Jessika said. “The extractor rig and refinery where you are have a physical gap between other modules. She’ll have to cross that gap somehow.”

“We’ve got active sensors on all sides of you,” Oistad said. “If she makes a break for it, we’ll know.”

“And if she switches them off, as well?”

“I’m hardening the network,” Tyle said. “But if she does disable some, at least that’ll give us an indication of where she might be.”

Three minutes later Kandara was at level seventeen. If it hadn’t been for Zapata’s guidance graphics, she wouldn’t even have known which way was down, Bremble’s gravity was so slight. She gripped one of the accessway’s struts and held herself motionless. Her helmet sensors scanned around on their maximum magnification. Nothing.

“Do the G8Turing have control over the refinery’s mechez?” she asked.

“No, I shut them out when I restricted the network. We’d have to open up a lot of bandwidth for that,” Oistad said. “That’ll give Cancer more channels to route a call out.”

“Who’s she going to call?” Kandara muttered. “All right, this is how we play it. Reopen the network as much as you need and move every mechez on the refinery inventory to level fifteen and level nineteen. I want every accessway physically blocked, so no one can get through those levels. Are there enough of them to do that?”

“Yes,” Oistad said.

“Right. Once that’s done, start moving them in to this level. Get the noose around her, and start contracting it.”

While the team started organizing the remotes, Kandara snaked along the accessway. Every time she reached an intersection, she left a drone, then moved on. The one place she didn’t venture into was the control center. She was worried Cancer might have booby-trapped it. In fact, she was surprised there were no smart mines concealed somewhere in the accessways.

Or perhaps there are, and I just haven’t come into trigger range yet.

The thought made slithering along inside the dark, winding accessways a nervy experience. She didn’t usually suffer from claustrophobia, but this was pushing her close.

“Kandara, we might have a problem,” Jessika said.

She froze, surrounded by misty green thermal outlines, with the power cables forming an irregular glowing web around her—none of it real. The refinery’s vibration was still present in the strut she was holding. No sign of a human heat signature. “What?”