Page 5 of Deep Alien Obsession

"They were told there would be a second shift."

Nobody says anything for a moment. I have restored a great many dead machines. I have never before walked into a room that was still waiting.

The dispatch station wakes when I bridge it to a field cell, which it should not do after six centuries, and I am too pleased about that to be properly suspicious of it. The index loads. Four thousand four hundred thirty-one maintenance records, indexed sequentially, the whole operating history of the sublevels below.

Then I actually read it.

"Tomas. Come look at this."

He leans in. "It's a list."

"It's a list with two hundred and forty entries missing out of the middle, and the list doesn't know it." I pull the index structure up beside it and let him see both. "Corruption leaves holes. It also leaves the shape of the holes — bad sectors, orphaned pointers, checksums that scream. This index counts perfectly. Somebody lifted a whole block of files out and then went back and renumbered everything after it so the arithmetic would come out clean."

Tomas straightens up slowly. "That's a person."

"That's a person with clearance, a technician's patience, and a reason."

Darius has gone very still beside me. "What range?"

"Twenty-one hundred through twenty-three forty. Consecutive." I check the surviving neighbors. "The entry before the gap is a routine filter swap. The one after it logs a hose replacement. Whatever those jobs were, they happened underneath the ordinary."

He doesn't answer. He's looking at the ceiling.

The mount comes out of a recess above the concourse arch with a sound like a latch releasing, unfolds on three joints, and paints us all with a thin red thermal wash.

Then everything is very fast.

Tomas is shouting. Darius has my arm and the world swings. The first burst takes the dispatch station apart behind me and the second walks across the deck where I was standing, sparks chasing us in a line, and there is no thinking in me at all — only floor, only run, only the doorway getting closer.

Service passage. Steps down into black water. Cold clamps around my knees, my hips, my ribs, and drives the air out of my lungs in one ragged push.

"Keep going," Darius says. "It can't traverse past the arch."

Chest-deep, then. Wading in a stooped crouch through a passage built for maintenance drones and short people, my light throwing broken circles off the water. Behind us the mount fires twice more at nothing and stops. The silence it leaves behind is worse than the noise.

Forty meters on, the roof gives.

I hear the crack and I have time to understand it and no time to act on it, and then I am not in that space anymore. Darius has folded himself over me against the passage wall, one arm braced above my head, and the ceiling comes down across his back and shoulders in pieces the size of my fist.

It lasts maybe four seconds.

When it stops, the water around us is thick with grit and his arm is still where he put it, and my face is against the front of his jacket, and neither of those things was a decision anyone made out loud.

"Are you hurt," he says. Not a question, quite.

"No. You're bleeding."

"Yes."

We find a dry junction chamber two hundred meters on and stop there to wait for Tomas and a ladder. Darius sits on an equipment plinth with his jacket off and lets me look at his shoulder, which has a laceration in it the length of my hand and about as ugly as I expected. He doesn't flinch while I clean it. He doesn't perform not flinching, either, which is a different thing and rarer.

"You didn't decide to do that," I say.

"Do what."

"Put yourself over me. There wasn't time to weigh it. You just went."

He considers his hands. "Would you like me to apologize?"