The kaiju tapped its head against the wall, and a round hole big enough for the bug to fit through opened. Callie sidled past the creature and moved inside, adjusting to the new gravity with a bend of her knees.

The space was lit dimly by infrequent pale orange panels in the floor, arrayed in no comprehensible pattern. She’d heard the words “storage” and pictured something on a human scale. A closet full of boxes. Maybe a shed stuffed with old tools and crates and spare light bulbs. But this was nothing of the sort: it was more like a warehouse, with shelves and bins and racks rising to the ceiling, but the shelves were only about a quarter filled, like regular resupplies had stopped at some point. Most of what remained was tanks and drums in various colors, covered in markings she couldn’t understand. Food? Chemicals? Not spare light bulbs, anyway.

She moved forward and to the left, passing between shelves, slow, not stepping on the orange light panels, though she knew they were probably sturdy enough. As a kid she’d always jumped over ventilation grates in the floor and sewer grates in the street, too. Just superstition. But anything that made her less tense right now was beneficial. Every sense she had was on high alert, and her suit hadn’t even pumped her up with combat readiness chemicals.

A small door, bigger than Liar-sized if not quite large enough to be comfortably human-sized, stood open on the far wall. A bright green drum stood next to the door, its top levered open and shoved half off, like someone had checked the contents.

Callie eased up toward the door and looked into a roughly round room full of lights, panels, and screens: it looked like any control room anywhere, except the controls were low to the ground, and the screens weren’t rectangles but irregular shapes, blobby, like molten glass had been poured out and allowed to settle on any shape fluid dynamics dictated.

The floor was a screen, too, and so was the ceiling, though much of it was blocked by trailing wires. An ungainly machine the size of an industrial 3D printer stood at an awkward angle near the center of the room, patched crudely into the walls with cables.

A human stood next to the machine, filling a beaker with a peach-colored slurry from a nozzle. He wore a dirty white jumpsuit and boots. No environment suit, no gloves, no helmet. He clipped the nozzle into a recess on the machine, took a sip from the contents of the beaker, made a disgusted face, shrugged, and glugged the rest down.