The mini-grenades exploded in silence, violet light flaring in perfect intersecting hemispheres, consuming the fragile shell. A swarm of fizzing shards twirled out from the impact. Then the glare was fading, and Kandara’s suit sensors revealed the irregular hole seared into the side. Her thrusters fired again, refining her trajectory, and she soared through the narrow gap, wincing as she went past the still-glowing jags.

There was no light inside other than the weak illumination seeping through the grenade rent. Her sensors switched to infrared, revealing a three-dimensional matrix of machinery and cables and pipes rendered in green and black. Directly in front of her was a narrow curving gridwork, approaching fast. She grabbed a crosspiece and jerked to a halt, straining her deltoid muscle. The refinery machines were producing a constant vibration, which she could feel through the gauntlet. High-voltage cables gleamed sunset orange as the sensors picked up their magnetic field.

“I’m in.”

“We’re getting sensor glitches on level seventeen,” Jessika reported. “That’s two below the control center she was in.”

“Okay, going down.”

Zapata splashed up a schematic of the refinery. Kandara started to haul herself along, using cables or support girders, whatever she could grab. Sometimes the equipment was packed so tight she could barely get through the gaps; then she’d be in empty spaces bigger than her apartment. Finally she found an accessway—a tube made from a composite grid allowing mechez and humans easy transit. There were dozens of the tubes winding their way around the interior of the refinery, as if some piece of rogue cybernetics had dug itself a warren. Looking at it all, she’d never felt more like a field mouse lost in a construction site.

“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.”