“Neither of them would go down without a struggle,” Elena said. “Especially not Hans. He’d fight about anything – what to have for dinner, whether to use the Oxford comma, if beer was better than wine. If his life were in danger, he would fight, hard. Ibn wasn’t as pugnacious, but he was once a soldier. They had their weapons when they were swallowed, too. Maybe they were able to defend themselves.”

“The station doesn’t seem too concerned about disarming us,” Callie said. “That makes me worry we’re not as terrifying as I thought.”

“When my people were enslaved, they did not have weapons,” Lantern said. “At least, nothing that could hurt their masters. I doubt the bio-drones are programmed to disarm their captives. Remember, the thing that swallowed us, it doesn’t have a mind – nothing like a consciousness. Drone behavior is just a series of tropisms, responses to stimuli, like a plant turning toward the sun or roots reaching out to water. The drones are deployed, they pick up anything organic that moves, and they bring them back to a set location, then go dormant until they’re activated again.”

“Systems like that should be pretty easy to hack,” Ashok said. “Maybe not if they use pheromones or something, but if they’re activated by sound, or light flashes, or some other kind of physical stimulus…”

“You may be right,” Lantern said. “Let me see if I can find any diagnostic data in the records. If there are procedures for dealing with malfunctioning bio-drones, that might reveal–”

They all dropped to the spongy floor with a series of muted thuds.

“The gravity came back.”

“Good observation, Ashok. Thanks for the update. Where are we, Lantern?”

“It appears we have departed the service tunnels, captain, and arrived at our destination.”

The bio-drone scurried along over bumps, and they lurched around inside its belly for a while, until the motion abruptly halted.

Elena said, “Lantern, this thing swallowed us to get us in here. How do we get out? Speaking as a biologist, if this is the equivalent of a stomach, or, say, a bowel, there are only a couple of possible points of egress.”

“We’re not getting out where it wants us to, anyway,” Callie said. “Whether it wants to puke us up or shit us out, we’ll probably end up in a bucket full of brain-spiders, or an electroshock pit, or some kind of lobotomy factory. I say we take the side door instead.”

“What side door?” Lantern said.

“Ashok? Shall?”

The repair drone moved around Ashok, and the rest of them huddled behind the comforting bulk of Shall’s temporary body. “In case there’s ricochet,” Callie said. “Who knows how tough this thing’s skin is?”