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?”

“Something’s blocking an extractor rig ice-feed chamber. Eight levels below you.”

“You mean a feed inside the extractor rig?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you said there’s no way out down there?”

“Oh, shit. The feeds, they bring in ice.”

“Ice?”

“Yes. The refinery process uses a lot of water.”

“Where the hell does ice come fr— Oh, fuck! I said shut down all the portals.”

“One of the harvesters on Verby is malfunctioning,” Oistad said. “The ice feed has shut down. Sensors are offline. I can’t see the damage.”

“The damage is her, going through,” Kandara realized. “Where the hell is Verby?”

“It’s one of Lanivet’s moons,” Zapata informed her. “The surface is covered with extensive ice oceans. The water has a low mineral content, and is therefore an excellent resource for both industrial systems and habitat biospheres.”

“Mother Mary. Jessika, give me a route down to the ice-feed chamber. Fast!”

“Coming through now.”