Page 67 of Sixth
Locus hit the hatch at a run, breath fogging in the hot air, suit seals hissing where he had half-closed them after checking exterior feeds. He didn’t slow. “On the right,” he said. Warrior cadence. No hesitation. No fear. He took the printed limb at the joint and drove it down. Metal screamed. The arm tore and hung by a few stubborn strands.
Winn slid in behind him with a plasma rod cradled against her chest. Her voice rasped but held. “Tell me where.”
“Control bank,” Emmy said. She pointed past the churn of motion to the column of ports that fed commands to the forge. “There. The top row.”
Winn moved like a ghost in a heat shimmer. Her eyes were keen and intent. She planted her feet, took a breath, and jammed the rod into the control bank. The lights across the panel went white and then dead. The room smelled of hot metal and scorched insulation.
The printed chassis lunged toward her. Locus was already there, body between. The thing hit his shoulder and shoved with power disproportionate to its mass. He held the ground by inches. Emmy saw the ripple of force pass through him and wanted to cry out. She didn’t. Instead, she moved.
“Core,” she said. “Mirror him. Wherever his signal is strongest, reflect it back. Strip his advantages.”
“I will try. He is braided through me. He moves when I move. He hides where I cannot look.”
“You have permission to burn anything he touches,” she said. “If we need it, burn me to get to him.”
“I will not harm you,”Core said, shock in thetone.
“You can. You will if you must. Do you hear me?”
Apex glanced at her once. The look cut through heat and noise. It said he trusted her to know what she risked and to risk it anyway. That look settled in her pulse like a second heartbeat.
The half-born Voss twisted. The sockets brightened with a red glow that looked like an idea of eyes.You made a mistake,the voice said, now routed from the raw speakers embedded in its chest.You carried me with you when youran.
Lume answered with another burst of light that hit the optics and scrambled them again. The head flicked to track her and failed.
Hannah’s voice came through the comm, thin and fierce. “I can reroute cooling fluid. If it floods the floor, the temperature will drop fast. Ican force the metal to seize.”
“Do it,” Emmy said. “Give us ice.”
“I will open the lines,”Core said.“On your mark, Emmy.”
The printed leg braced off the tray and pushed. It moved with a stutter that made Emmy’s skin crawl. Jo’Nay caught the arm again, this time with both hands, muscles standing out along his forearms. The sharpened digits tried to bite into his skin, snapping like teeth. He set his stance andheld.
“Now,” he said, his breath shaking only a little. “Now would be correct.”
“Now,” Emmy said.
Cold mist roared across the floor as the cooling lines dumped into the bay. It hit the molten heat and boiled, then fell. Frost crawled in a ring around the base of the forge and raced out like a living organism. The half-born Voss slipped. Its right leg locked at an angle that should not have been possible. Metal squealed.
Jo’Nay twisted and pinned the arm at the elbow. “Strike,” he said to Apex without lookingaway.
Apex drove his blade down through the rib lattice and into the core casing buried in the chest. The sound wasn’t like metal. It was like something living getting its last breath cut in half. The red in the sockets flared and went dark. The speakers screamed and went silent.
The floor shuddered. The vents slammed open and shut. Doors down two corridors cycled hard enough to make the ship sound like it had coughed. Voss’s voice came from everywhere at once.You cannot kill what is already beyond flesh.
Emmy’s skin felt too small for her body. She set her hands to the main console and dragged up the deepest access Core had. “Show me the infection. All of it. Do not gate me.”
“I am opening every lock to you,”Core said.“I trust you. Ido not know if I can trust myself.”
“You can,” she said. “But you are allowed to be afraid.” Assuming a machine could experience fear. Somehow, she thought Core could. That the AI existed beyond mere machine-dom.
Heat waves shimmered above the console. Lines of code scrolled. Red threads pierced through system after system, ghosting. Voss had not come as a block of code that could be lifted. He had come as an intent that hid in language androutines, avoice that called itself maintenance and found the open doors.
“Mirror,” she said again. “Reflect everything that looks like him into an empty process that eats itself.”
“I am building the mirror.”
Jo’Nay grunted as the pinned arm bucked. The chassis tried to pull free. Locus went low and took the leg out from under it with a sweep of his own, simple and efficient. There was a crack that made Emmy’s teeth hurt. The printed spine twisted too far and stuck.
