“Your ten o’clock!” Callie shouted, and it took a moment for Elena to realize what she was talking about: she’d heard that sort of thing shouted in old war movies, and it indicated a position, relative to Elena’s own, where she should direct her attention. She tilted sixty degrees left and aimed at the ground and fired blind, the gun jerking upward in her hands when she did. The gun was set to semi-automatic, firing bursts of three bullets at a time, but it only spat out two bursts and then stopped: Ibn must have used up the rest of the clip earlier. The bullets struck the floor and whanged off in wild ricochets, out into the fog. A silvery spider the size of a dessert plate appeared at her feet, entirely unharmed, and began to climb up her leg.

Elena unthinkingly beat at the spider with the butt of the rifle, which at that point had become nothing more than a heavy metal club. Striking the spider didn’t seem to do much damage, but it did make the spider tighten its grip on her leg. The tough material of the environment suit dimpled, and she felt multiple points of sharp pain, but the suit wasn’t punctured – all sorts of alarms would have gone off in her helmet had the spider punched through.

Elena drew back the gun to smack the spider again, but it was too fast, scuttling up her chest, and then to her head. Her faceplate was mostly obscured by its circular belly, and her ears filled with the sound of its scrabbling legs trying to get through the sides of her helmet. The spider wasn’t made to tear a helmet off a human, though: it was made to latch onto the head of a quiescent slave the size of an octopus. The little robot was doing its best, but this was beyond the scope of its programming, which gave her a chance.

The spider’s belly irised open, and a myriad of small arms unfolded from within the cavity and began to tap at her faceplate, like fingernails drumming on a table top. Did Liars have skulls? Were the spiders made to punch holes in Liar skulls, so they could reach the tender blob of ganglia within?

Elena took a deep breath, extended her arm, bent her elbow, and punched herself right in the face.

The angle was awkward, and as such it wasn’t a very powerful blow, but it was enough. Her gloved fist, with the brushed titanium rings on her first, middle, and ring fingers, smacked into the back of the spider. She actually saw electricity arc inside the spider’s exposed interior, a blue flash of minor lightning, and then the spider fell off her helmet and landed inert on its back. Elena brought the heel of her boot down on the spider, hard, and twisted her heel, grinding its internal workings to fragments.