“The opening is sealed, Callie. It severed our cable cleanly. We’re trapped in here. Ashok is gesticulating on the other side, but I cannot understand what he is trying to convey.”

That explained why Ashok wasn’t chatting away on the comms, Elena supposed. The glass wall had sealed and cut off their communications. This place was a series of Faraday cages.

“Shit,” Callie said. “OK, let’s get our backs against the wall. That cuts off one route of attack. There are five spiders. I can shoot two for sure. Shall, can you get the rest?”

“I will do my best, Callie.”

Elena blundered forward, and suddenly the wall was there. Ashok was indeed on the other side, waving and pointing toward the bio-drone. Elena just raised her hands in a gesture of confusion and Ashok waved and hurried toward the bug.

Callie pulled the machine gun off Ibn and gave it to Elena. “You said you’d used this once or twice in training?”

“Yes, but–”

“Better than never. If you see a spider, shoot it. If it’s too close to shoot, which it might be in this fog, punch it, like I told you.” Callie stood shoulder to shoulder with Elena on her left, and Ibn slumped against the wall on her other side, with Shall standing over him like a guardian.

I’m guarding the right flank, Elena thought, almost giddy with her fear response. She knew what was happening in her body. Her adrenal gland was releasing epinephrine to dilate her blood vessels and norepinephrine to increase her heart rate and dump energy into her system, and a flood of cortisol was hard at work providing her with more blood sugar. Her body was preparing itself to expend energy in fighting for her life or running for her life. Good old biology, doing just what it had evolved to do over millennia: enacting nature’s worst-case contingency plans.

Elena wanted to prepare herself mentally, too, but she was surfing a wave of terror chemicals, and there was no time, anyway: Callie raised her sidearm and fired once, then pivoted a step, and fired again. Her gun was different from Elena’s: it didn’t seem to fire a bullet, but some sort of white-hot pulse. Plasma? Physics wasn’t her area, and the physics of weaponry even less so. Elena thought she heard something, a clatter of metal on metal, and she pointed her own gun into the fog.