I released the ladder and pushed astern. Theseus swung lopsidedly around me. Sarasti convulsed in mid-air; clicks and hisses and choking sounds stuttered from his mouth. His eyes were so wide they seemed lidless. His pupils were mirror-red pinpoints. The flesh twitched across his face as though trying to crawl off.
Ahead and behind, battlebots held their position and ignored us.
"Bates!" I yelled up the spine. "We need help!"
Angles, everywhere. Seams on the shield plates. Sharp shadows and protrusions on the surface of every drone. A two-by-three matrix of insets, bordered in black, floating over the main ConSensus display: two big interlinked crosses right in front of where Sarasti had been hanging.
This can't be happening. He just took his antiEuclideans. I saw him. Unless…
Someone had spiked Sarasti's drugs.
"Bates!" She should be linked into the grunts, they should have leapt forward at the first sign of trouble. They should be dragging my commander to the infirmary by now. They waited stolid and immobile. I stared at the nearest: "Bates, you there?" And then—in case she wasn't—I spoke to the grunt directly. "Are you autonomous? Do you take verbal orders?"
On all sides the robots watched; the Captain just laughed at me, its voice posing as an alarm.
Infirmary.
I pushed. Sarasti's arms flailed randomly against my head and shoulders. He tumbled forward and sideways, hit the moving ConSensus display dead center, bounced away up the spine. I kicked off in his wake—
— and glimpsed something from the corner of my eye—
— and turned—
— And dead center of ConSensus, Rorschach erupted from Ben's seething face like a breaching whale. It wasn't just the EM-enhance: the thing was glowing, deep angry red. Enraged, it hurled itself into space, big as a mountain range.
Fuck fuck fuck.
Theseus lurched. The lights flickered, went out, came back on again. The turning bulkhead cuffed me from behind.
"Backups engaged," the Captain said calmly.
"Captain! Sarasti's down!" I kicked off the nearest ladder, bumped into a grunt and headed forward after the vampire. "Bates isn't—what do I do?"
"Nav offline. Starboard afferents offline."
It wasn't even talking to me, I realized. Maybe this wasn't the Captain at all. Maybe it was pure reflex: a dialog tree, spouting public-service announcements. Maybe Theseus had already been lobotomized. Maybe this was only her brain stem talking.
Darkness again. Then flickering light.
If the Captain was gone, we were screwed.
I gave Sarasti another push. The alarm bleated on. The drum was twenty meters ahead; BioMed was just the other side of that closed hatch. The hatch had been open before, I remembered. Someone had shut it in the last few minutes. Fortunately Theseus had no locks on her doors.
Unless the Gang barricaded it before they took the bridge…
"Strap in, people! We are getting out of here!"
Who in hell…?
The open bridge channel. Susan James, shouting up there. Or someone was; I couldn't quite place the voice…
Ten meters to the drum. Theseus jerked again, slowed her spin. Stabilised.
"Somebody start the goddamned reactor! I've only got attitude jets up here!"
"Susan? Sascha?" I was at the hatch. "Who is that?" I pushed passed Sarasti and reached to open it.
No answer.
Not from ConSensus, anyway. I heard a muted hum from behind, saw the ominous shifting of shadows on the bulkhead just a moment too late. I turned in time to see one of the grunts raise a spiky appendage—curved like a scimitar, needle-tipped—over Sarasti's head.
I turned in time to see it plunge into his skull.
I froze. The metal proboscis withdrew, dark and slick. Lateral maxillipeds began nibbling at the base of Sarasti's skull. His pithed corpse wasn't thrashing now; it only trembled, a sack of muscles and motor nerves awash in static.
Bates.
Her mutiny was underway. No, their mutiny—Bates and the Gang. I'd known. I'd imagined it. I'd seen it coming.
He hadn't believed me.
The lights went out again. The alarm fell silent. ConSensus dwindled to a flickering doodle on the bulkhead and disappeared; I saw something there in that last instant, and refused to process it. I heard breath catch in my throat, felt angular monstrosities advancing through the darkness. Something flared directly ahead, a bright brief staccato in the void. I glimpsed curves and angles in silhouette, staggering. The buzzing crackle of shorting circuitry. Metal objects collided nearby, unseen.
From behind the crinkle of the drum hatch, opening. A sudden beam of harsh chemical light hit me as I turned, lit the mechanical ranks behind; they simultaneously unclamped from their anchorages and floated free. Their joints clicked in unison like an army stamping to attention
"Keeton!" Bates snapped, sailing through the hatch. "You okay?"
The chemlight shone from her forehead. It turned the interior of the spine into a high-contrast mosaic, all pale surfaces and sharp moving shadows. It spilled across the grunt that had killed Sarasti; the robot bounced down the spine, suddenly, mysteriously inert. The light washed across Sarasti's body. The corpse turned slowly on its axis. Spherical crimson beads emerged from its head like drops of water from a leaky faucet. They spread in a winding, widening trail, spot-lit by Bates' headlamp: a spiral arm of dark ruby suns.
I backed away. "You—"
She pushed me to one side. "Stay clear of the hatch, unless you're going through." Her eyes were fixed on the ranked drones. "Optical line of sight."
Rows of glassy eyes reflected back at us down the passageway, passing in and out of shadow.
"You killed Sarasti!"
"No."
"But—"
"Who do you think shut it down, Keeton? The fucker went rogue. I could barely even get it to self-destruct." Her eyes went briefly deep-focus; all down the spine the surviving drones launched into some intricate martial ballet, half-seen in the shifting cone of her headlamp.
"Better," Bates said. "They should stay in line now. Assuming we don't get hit with anything too much stronger."
"What is hitting us?"
"Lightning. EMP." Drones sailed down to Fab and the shuttles, taking strategic positions along the tube. "Rorschach's putting out one hell of a charge and every time one those skimmers pass between us they arc."
"What, at this range? I thought we were—the burn—"
"Sent us in the wrong direction. We're inbound."
Three grunts floated close enough to touch. They drew beads on the open drum hatch.
"She said she was trying to escape—" I remembered.
"She fucked up."
"Not by that much. She couldn't have." We were all rated for manual piloting. Just in case.
"Not the Gang," Bates said.
"But—"
"I think there's someone new in there now. Bunch of submodules wired together and woke up somehow, I don't know. But whatever's in charge, I think it's just panicking."
Stuttering brightness on all sides. The spinal lightstrips flickered and finally held steady, at half their usual brightness.
Theseus coughed static and spoke: "ConSensus is offline. Reac—"
The voice faded.
ConSensus, I remembered as Bates turned to head back upstream.
"I saw something," I said. "Before ConSensus went out."
"Yeah."