“The spider took a bunch of bullets right through its body. Looks torn up pretty bad.” Ashok leaned over close, the lenses over his eyes whirring, and Elena had a terrible vision of the spider leaping to life, jumping at his face, burrowing its tiny appendages into his eyes and ears and mouth–

Ashok shook his head. “No heat signature, the mechanisms are all busted up… looks like dumb metal to me. I took a look at the one we recovered because I was afraid these things might be nanomachine cradles – like, maybe they work by barfing lots of tiny machines into the brain? But all I see are electrodes and magnets, so I think it’s a combination of deep brain stimulation and transcranial magnetism designed to alter thought processes and behaviors. That stuff is macro-scale, so it can be totally busted up with a bullet. I don’t think this one is gonna come to life and kill us all or anything.”

“Agreed,” Lantern said. “The Axiom were capable of manipulating matter at the molecular level, if not the atomic, but they were careful to keep such technology from their servants. My people would have used such technology against them, after all, to unmake their works.”

“So there are vaults full of sleeping alien nanomachines somewhere in the galaxy?” Elena said. “That’s not comforting.”

“Yet another reason we must prevent anyone from entering areas that were once under Axiom control.” Lantern sounded almost prim.

Elena switched back to the open channel and heard Callie finishing up her instructions. “The canoe will be back in a minute. Shall, you escort Ibn and the body back to the ship.”

“Are you sure? Drake can bring the canoe back by auto-pilot–”

“I don’t want to leave Ibn alone in the canoe with his dead crewmate. Not that a giant hull repair drone is necessarily a comforting presence, but you can help them get in and out on the other end, at least. I’d send back Elena, but I doubt she’d go.”

“Correct.” Sebastien was still in the station somewhere. And Uzoma, though they hadn’t looked so good the last time Elena saw them, and she was a little worried about meeting them again. That intellect and focus in the service of the station would be a terrible thing to confront.

Callie said, “I don’t want to give up my heavy artillery, so we’ll wait for Shall to come back before we go looking for the control room.”

“Very well, captain.” Shall gathered up Hans, holding the body close to his underbelly with a few manipulator arms. Elena swapped Ibn’s air bottle with a fresh one from Shall’s supplies, though the jaunt was so short he could have held his breath. The others helped Ibn climb on Shall’s back and get strapped in place. “We should install a jump-seat up here at this rate,” Shall said.