“I can go in first, Callie.” Ashok thumped his chest. “I’m a whole lot of metal under here. Something shoots at me, there’s a good chance it’ll just bounce off. And good luck to any brain-spiders drilling through the plates in my head.”

Callie shook her head. “The kind of weapons they have here won’t be slowed down by a little body armor. I appreciate the offer, but I think stealth is the better approach until we know what we’re dealing with. Is there another entrance, one close to the control room, but that doesn’t lead directly inside? An anteroom, a hallway, anything?”

Lantern consulted the infosphere. “Fifty meters down, I see an entryway into a space designated as surplus storage. Supplies, I think, for the control room. There’s a door from one, leading to the other.”

“Take me there,” Callie said.

The kaiju scuttled a short distance, and then Callie checked her weapons, gave Elena’s arm a squeeze, and said, “We’re probably going to lose radio contact, but don’t worry. I’ll come back here within half an hour. If I don’t, burst in and blast away, because that means something killed me, and you’ll need to get off this horror station without me.”

“She’s terrible at giving inspirational speeches,” Ashok said. “One time, before we broke into this compound on an asteroid to capture an escaped murderer, Callie goes, ‘OK, nobody embarrass me by dying’. She’s just really bad at it.”

Elena gave her a hug and said, “Come back to me, Callie. I’m not done with you yet.”

“Now that’s inspiring,” Ashok said.

Callie slipped out of the side of the kaiju and turned on her active camouflage. Her suit shimmered, tiny projectors mimicking the background behind her with a lag measurable only in picoseconds. If she stood still, she was totally invisible. If she moved, she was mostly invisible, apart from an almost subliminal shimmer. Her suit cooled itself until it matched the ambient temperature, which would hide her from thermal vision. Her transponder stopped transmitting, and her radio shut itself off: no signals were emerging from her anymore. The technology was custom-made and cutting-edge. Callie’s was the only prototype in service, and she’d made a lot of promises and done a lot of unpaid work in exchange for getting to keep it once testing was done. The bureaucrats higher up in the TNA had been opposed, but Chief Warwick had come through in the end. She always did.

Always had.

Callie floated out into a round, dim tunnel, just barely big enough for the kaiju to move through. What happened if two of the bio-drones had to pass? Did one just back up until they reached a branching corridor? Or maybe the drones had been so tightly controlled, the problem never came up.