Ashok pressed the barrel of his shotgun up against the side of the drone and depressed the trigger. There was a great boom, shatteringly loud even through their helmets, and a long pause, and then another boom.

Then light streamed in to the dimness. Ashok had blown a ragged hole about a foot across into the fibrous hide of the bio-drone. The beast didn’t make a sound – maybe it couldn’t – but it did stumble away in the direction opposite its wound, as if trying to shy away from the injury, and they all wobbled and stumbled against each other.

Ashok kept his footing, pistons in his legs adjusting gyroscopically. He lifted the barrel of the gun high, stepped aside, and made an “after you” gesture.

Shall scuttled past him, grabbed the edges of the tear with his vicious manipulator arms, and began to rip the hole into a fissure two meters high and one meter wide. Ashok went through the opening first, then shouted “It’s safe!” a moment later. Lantern went through, and then Callie, and Elena, followed by Shall, who tore an even bigger opening in the course of his emergence.

The bio-drone lurched away from them, its multitude of legs folding up under it, then lay still, slumped against the far wall.

They stood in a space the size of a ballroom, with silvery walls and a gleamingly reflective floor and a ceiling seven meters overhead that seemed to consist of a single light panel: the brightness was intense. The humans instinctively moved together in a huddle, feeling exposed, with Elena in the middle, and Ashok and Callie and Shall facing out with their guns. Lantern crouched a little distance away.

“Is that thing dead?” Callie trained her guns, one in each hand, on the fallen bio-drone.

“According to the infosphere, the drone has shut down and gone into self-repair mode,” Lantern said. “I don’t think the station will dispatch another drone to this location: the task is marked as complete.”

Elena turned slowly around and realized only three of the four walls were silver metal. The fourth wall, near the bio-drone’s drooping head, was some kind of thick glass. The transparency was marred here and there with spattered fluids that looked, to Elena’s experienced eye, like dried blood. A thick gray mist swirled beyond the glass, shrouding the interior completely. There was no telling how big the space beyond was, or what might be lurking inside.

“The bug was going to put us in there.” Callie pointed, and Elena followed her gesture. A circular hatch was irised open, five meters above the floor. “The bug was going to stick its star-lily head through that hole, and barf us out into the fog. What’s behind that glass, Lantern?”

“Reconditioning,” the Liar said.

Chapter Twenty-Three