~Please remain/be on full alert within the immediate physical environment with particular regard to extraneous anomalous audible and general vibration signals, extending your sensor/effector abilities no further than the elevator car’s and the shaft’s own monitoring and activation circuits. I’ll continue monitoring and trying to affect further afield.

~My on-board expert systems precedents set indicates strongly we might be in a definitional pre-attack phase and so close to the point at which some sort of physical measure may become advisable.

~Agreed. Currently eliminating all chances this could be happenstance before taking any irretrievably physical action.

~We should warn/prepare Ms Cossont.

~Also agreed. I am in the process of interrupting her.

“‘Un-promis—’?” Cossont was saying as Berdle talked over her, saying,

“Strong likelihood this is hostile. I’m activating your eSuit and neck-helmet. Please do not be alarmed and remember to put all your weight first on one foot and then the other.”

“‘—ing’?” Cossont finished, as something happened all over her body.

Her underwear consisted of a millimetre-thin body suit which only left her feet, hands and head uncovered. The ship had insisted she wear it, and that they perform a drill before she left to see what would happen if it deployed. Before her eyes, even before she’d put it on, the eSuit had grown an extra set of arms as easily as though it was a big complicated balloon the ship was blowing up, and these had been the last bits to unstick themselves and inflate.

As it had during the practice on the ship, the suit puffed up a little all over, while the thick hems at ankles and wrists unrolled, the suit quickly covering all her hands and fingers in thin gloves and slipping between her feet and shoes in turn as she did as she’d been told and performed a side-to-side stepping motion to allow this to happen; what felt like thin bootees now enveloped her feet.

The thick necklace had unrolled at the same time, extending quickly downward to bond with the collar of the suit while blossoming and closing round her head before shrinking back again to rest lightly on her scalp and most of her face, leaving her eyes, nostrils and lips free under small bulges in the material; the bulges over her eyes were transparent. The first thing she did was tear off the restrictive formal jacket, freeing her lower set of arms. She got tangled in the strap of the shoulder bag, finally setting it securely back in place over her head.

~The problem is located in the primary shaft control node, Berdle told Parinherm. ~It is under continual and dynamic effector load from apparatus it is beyond the abilities of our local assets to counter. I am sending a missile component to the location to attempt some sort of intervention.

~A missile? Are we escalating to—?

~Your pardon. Missile as in, for example, scout missile. Decimetre-scale, field-powered, non-expendable.