“During the contact with the hollows in block 2-8, we were infected.”

The word seems to hover.

“But?”

“It re-wrote our behavioural platform, started changing us.”

King glances at Mer Sah’s expression, raises a hand. “I don’t understand. What’s important about that?”

“The behavioural platform is the closest thing a shell has to a personality,” says the knuckledragger. “It takes input from the jockey and turns it into work. Walking, flying, whatever.”

“But they don’t normally re-write themselves.”

“It isn’t possible. The system’s architecture prevents any alteration from the outside.”

I shake my head. “The platform is personality and prison. A shell won’t change itself because it’s not in its nature to change.”

“But the infection is doing exactly that,” she says. “How did you survive?”

“We kept changing.”

Mer Sah chews on her lip. “The Juno is intelligent…” She needs to hear it out loud. “And the hollows are too. This ‘flood’ is intelligent.”

“It was able to adapt past our safeguards.”

“So your machine wrote its own?”

“It—we—” I breathe in, let it out slowly. “We couldn’t fight them on our terms, so we used theirs. They tried to wash us away, but you can’t flood the sea.”

“No shell should be able to do what you’re describing…” She trails away, and it’s a moment before she picks it up again. “That should be impossible. There are blocks against it.”

“To keep the shells from turning on us?”

She nods, slow and deliberate. “Your machine was an awareness tester. Probably from one of the original Clusters: the ones that caused NorCol to build those blocks in the first place. The program was terminated for a reason. Several reasons.”

“They were treated like prisoners. Tools.” Not all of the anger belongs to me. “You know how that feels as well as I do.”

Mer Sah watches me a while longer. “All right.” She tries again, a little more sure of herself. “All right, but I don’t understand how this helps us solve the problem. I can’t make a shell think any more than King can make his jarheads think.”

The ground-pounder spreads a grin. “You’re missing the point of marines, Sah.”

Half a smile is all he gets, but Mer Sah doesn’t give anything without meaning to. “So what’s the plan?”

Andrade clears the deck, gives me space.

I have to force myself to take it.

“My first operation in the froth was on an object called the Lighthouse. Just after landing, I saw this—” I signal the Werewolf. Eyes glow around the room, lighting up as Andrade shuffles files across the net.

The first image is a blurry still from our hull-cameras, heat-shimmer in our infrared, half-heard echoes from our passives. The shadow is deeper than I remember, more uncertain. The froth clings to it, clouds its outlines.

The observer.