The corridor had thick enough trees to qualify as a wall. Sovan balanced his weight on a root and used a metal bar to pry two stalks apart. Sweat soaked his uniform. His muscles were sore but with his heart thumping at full throttle, he felt amazing.

“If we keep this up, we’ll reach the reactors in a month”, he said with a grin and looked over his shoulder. Blank faces stared back at him.

“Look, I’m sorry if this isn’t how you wanted to spend your days. Without power, we can’t operate the drones, without those, we can’t even begin to fix this mess”, he stepped off the root and walked towards his seven-headed crew.

“You are the best chance we have at making it out alive. Let’s work together and we’ll survive. It’s what we humans do best”, Sovan reached out a hand towards the closest crew member. The large man swatted his hand away and growled.

“Save the speech. We want to help! But - we’ve been at it for four hours, boss”

The nano-technician paused mid-gesture and focussed his attention on a tiny screen in his mind. It blinked with several yellow lights warning him to take a break. A second overlay popped up and showed him the status of his crew. It was crimson red.

“Aight, good point. We rest”

He walked over towards them and then flopped down on a root. Now that he finally relented, his body came down with a crash. Exhaustion washed over him and he became conscious of how much he reeked. Not just him, his entire crew could use a bath and probably a massage.

“What we do is important but don’t ever be afraid to tell me when I mess things up. We should have taken a break an hour ago. I’m sorry”

No one answered him. They were all busy wheezing and gasping for air. Sovan pulled a small bottle from his belt and took a sip. Strehin’s parting gift tasted horrible. Part of the issue was just in his head, the big bad dragon had cooked the water, probably with her fire-breath. He smirked. Sterilizing the water was the smart thing to do. Survival now, amenities later.

“Heart, can you give me a local map?”

.: Are you sure you want me to do that? :.

“Pretty please?”

.: Map has been compiled from memory and uploaded to your implant. Up to date information is not possible due to extensive sensor damage. :.

Sovan suppressed his shudder. There was a little truth stewing at the back of his mind. While everyone had been asleep in stasis, he had gotten a couple of eternities courtesy of the command golem. During his dreams, he hadn’t even once questioned their platonic relation but now that he was awake, he felt dirty. Whatever it was, it had changed the golem. Made it - no. It made her more alive.

The map sprung up before him. It came packed with a neat little animation of first showing the entirety of the station and then quickly zooming in on his position. The reactors were just a couple more corridors away but those corridors had a cute case of tree infestation going. Sovan looked back down the corridor as far as the ambient light allowed him. Their destruction reached back about a hundred meters but that distance had taken them hours. At the current rate, it wouldn’t be a month –but a week was likely. Sovan pressed a hand against his head. Maybe it was time to actually play the gravity card.

“Would have done this from the start, had I known the trees were this bad down here. Heart confirm that you can’t give an estimate on how far these trees go?”

.: That is correct, Sovan. Internal sensors are malfunctioning in the majority of my body. :.

“So it could be trees all the way to the reactor”, he said and looked at his exhausted crew, “Change of plans. Heart, Prepare to adjust reactor output to safe levels, lower power supply to the gravity core in turn. Include a five per cent tolerance. Inform both Kathrain and Strehin and get me uh... what was her name? The drone operator?”

“Sarina”, a woman from his crew added.

“Right, Sarina. Get her on the comm”

.: Information has been sent. Establishing a connection. :.

Sarina rested in a chair. Her physical body was a mess. It pained in places she didn’t want to know about and that dwarf of a woman hadn’t left her alone in hours. Her stomach rumbled with hunger, a familiar feeling she loathed with all her being.

.: Incoming connection. Sovan Terastris. :.

Sarina didn’t move a muscle, a mental command was enough to establish the connection while suppressing her picture. She was more than a bit conscious of how she looked.

“How’d you like to operate a heavy lifter?”

Slow, cumbersome beasts of burden. Lumbering chunks of metal that lacked the elegance of the finer drones. Sarina raised one of her arms and even that much was already exhausting. She’d take a worker drone over this any day.

“Lieutenant Sarina, are you there?”

“Yes”

“Yes, you’re there or yes, you agree?”

She wet her lips and forced her mouth to cooperate, “Yes, I agree.”

“Alright, I’ll have Heart pipe the connection through to you. You should probably lie down too, gravity is going to shift just as you’ll dive in”

“Thank...”, she began her answer but her words got stuck in her dry throat.

“No worries. We’re looking forward to having you down here with us. Sovan, out”

There was a pain in her stomach. It needed food, more than it had gotten. Eating would mean moving her flesh-suit. That would be exhausting. She could probably go a bit longer without nutrition. Sarina leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. The shift in gravity came gradually. Her body started to hurt less and her breathing relaxed. The heavy steps of the doctor got lighter and changed in pace. She pretended to not notice them until something pressed past her lips. Her eyes fluttered open and Sarina stared directly at that despicable dwarf woman.

“You’ve been warned. If you’re not going to eat on your own, you will be fed via a machine”

And I won’t be there to feel any of it you butcher, Sarina added in her mind.

.: Establishing drone connection. The Falkenhain HL-910 will be ready for control. :.

The sensations of her body would soon not matter. She leaned back and relaxed her body. She would ignore the tube. A needle was inserted down her neck and the neural interface changed her perspective. The connection came with a sudden influx in senses and a short moment of vertigo.

.: Operator has assumed full control. :.

Her body was a work of art. A perfect machine several tons heavy. Sarina stretched her back. Four massive metal legs screeched with hydraulic pressure and her viewport reached the upper end of the room. She turned the optics dome and gazed in the direction of her prison. Her meat body was somewhere behind all these walls. Somewhere at the back of her head, she still felt it chuck along but nothing of that had any meaning.

Sarina lowered herself back down and unfurled her two multipurpose arms. A variety of tools was implemented in them, from simple forks for archaic lifting to fully modelled hands that could wield normal human tools. She gave them a quick check and took a deep breath. A weird double sensation overcame her bodies. The meat-suit heaved in the air while her metal body simultaneously stretched its back like a giant cat.

Her steps were gentle and slow at first. Heavy tonnage thumped on the ground as she crawled out of the storage compartment. Her observation dome supplied her with a constant feed of sensor input. Infra-red, overlay information from the golem, a full-scale scanner, audio, radiation, touch, so much more than her feeble meat-sleeve could do.

Once her thick body had pressed out of the storage section, she turned to her right and accelerated. Four spider-like limbs flew in rapid succession. The shift in gravity was easy enough to compensate. Sarina raced down the corridors. Her mind subconsciously picked up something smacking her metal frame on either side while a green light indicated that there was no reason to slow down. Chunks of wood rained down on her, giving her the sensation of gentle rain.

Her icon followed the intended path from Heart and she soon turned a corner to find a long hallway. It was covered in chopped off trees and eight humans staring up at her. Remember your training, Sarina, she thought. You are a machine goddess but normal people dread meeting a living metal monster. She lowered her frame until her observation dome was on the same level as the smiling man with the caramel skin. One look at his fit body was enough for her to dislike him. Jealousy, she admitted deep within. She let her mind reach towards the speakers and activated them with a simple thought.

“OPERATOR SARINA AT YOUR SERVICE”

The man winced, “Nano-technician Sovan now successfully deafened. Turn it down, will you?”

“AFFIRMATIVE”

He winced again and Sarina smiled. It was an innocent gesture, perfectly encapsulated by the cheeky little blink of red light on her observation dome. The man, Sovan was his name, rubbed his ears and then gestured down the corridor.

“Here’s the problem. We need to reach the reactors but as you can see, we need someone strong to bail us out”, he said with a smile. He wasn’t flinching away from her, which gave him a few points on her scale but not yet enough to make up for that well-kept flesh-body.

“THEN I WILL REMOVE THE OBSTACLES. STAND ASIDE, KEEP A COUPLE OF METERS SAFETY DISTANCE”

Sovan blinked up at her and screamed, “OKAY! THANK YOU”

It barely registered as a blip on her audio sensors. Sarina chuckled and her machine body swayed along. She gave the meat-dings some time to jump aside and then floated past them with graceful motions from her four legs. Something cracked underneath her feet, sensors told her she had stomped down roots. She shrugged her shoulders, which looked like a wobble on the outside and then unfurled her tool arms. The observation dome lit up to a full grin as she crossed her arms in fork mode and suddenly accelerated.

Sovan rubbed his ears with a melancholic sigh. That had hurt. He and the rest of his crew had enjoyed a couple of meters of safety distance. As chunks and chips of wood rained down on them, they extended the safety zone by several dozen meters.

He remembered a motion to outlaw drone use for war a couple of years back. Seeing this metal hulk toy with ancient trees nudged him to agree. The spider bot piled into them like a projectile with a grudge. There was a certain perverse beauty in seeing several dozen tons of power carve a way so easily. He watched the machine dance around while using the long arms to tear trees out of the walls, along with several meters of roots. What had cost his crew hours, Lieutenant Sarina cleared in minutes. Then, the noise suddenly stopped.

“YOU BETTER SEE THIS”, called the machine.

The nano-technician signalled for his crew to stand back then made his way through the sawdust. Each step turned into a leap as the decreased gravity played tricks on his muscle memory. Sarina and her machine stood in the entrance to the reactor room. Her massive searchlights illuminated the room beyond but he couldn’t make out any details from his position. Each step he took, his anticipation grew. What would he find? Reactors, like most technology, were made to continuously repair themselves. How had eleven reactors all failed to a point that they couldn’t recover?

He walked past the bend and gazed into the large room. At first glance, it all seemed as it should have. Twelve egg-like shapes were arranged in a circular pattern. There were no trees but the reactors had suffered extensive damage, even though the damage looked planned – not accidental. He climbed over a couple of tree stumps near the door and leaned against the machine for balance. The large lifter shifted ever so slightly as the searchlights swivelled around and finally revealed the cause of the problem. Everything suddenly stopped.

“Oh, bloody king of Orion...”

The cause wasn’t something but rather someone.

Kathrain shot another glance at the Lieutenant. She would need to have a word with the boss dragon. Operator decline was a known problem. It wasn’t like she didn’t get it. If you could be an all-powerful machine with no pain but also possess a rush of intense sensory sensations, who’d say no? Still, there were limits and Sarina had broken them all.

The doctor noted the long cable inserted in the Lieutenants neck and then finally turned around. Simple machines were feeding the operator, there was no need to stay and watch at all times. Her next patient was warded off in a room of her own.

“Alright. We’ve got a moment of quiet, what can I do for you?”

The woman sitting on the chair was none other than the illustrious iron dragon. Kathrain rolled her eyes. Her. Best friends they would never be. The woman was a force of nature, annoying like a thermal storm and as tenacious like a rash of... Kathrain decided to not let her mind wander there after all.

“Well, aren’t you just a lovely little asteroid in a low-g race. Open your mouth, talk. It’s a sort of magic trick - one you’re very good at until you have to talk to me. What’s the issue? Tell me, show me if you must”

The Strehin in front of her was a different one from the iron dragon outside. When they were alone, the living legend was frail and vulnerable. Instead of an answer, the former stellar mage unwrapped bandages from her hands and held them out to her.

“Illustrious lights of Lanterna! What did you do?”

The hands were in a bad state. Something had cut them open in several places, dried blood was crusted around the fingertips where the nails had been scratched too far. Kathrain reached for a bottle of actual alcohol and walked up to the strangely quiet woman. She began cleaning the wounds in silence. Strehin was a mystery to her. How could a war-monster like her have a phobia of doctors? She ran her hands along the fingers, while she carefully observed the cuts. None of them were bad enough to need stitches. As she felt the knotty flesh around the hand, Kathrain stopped and looked at Strehin. That’s why she feared doctors. They had clipped her wings with incompetence.

“Well, it’s cleaned up. Just keep the bandage fresh. Don’t worry about...”

.: Incoming call from Sovan Terastris. :.

“Hold on, gotta take...”

.: Incoming call from Sarina Istengrad. :.

Kathrain watched the administrator fish a small device out of her uniform and hold it up. A small screen indicated calls for her as well. Strehin flicked a holographic button and a moment later, another symbol popped up in Kathrain’s head.

.: Incoming call from Administrator Strehin. :.

Kathrain glared at her.

“Really now?”

The tall woman shrugged and the connection established itself a moment later. First to talk was the drone operator. Instead of her actual face, the woman used the icon for the heavy lifter she had possessed.

“There’s something down here that might change a couple of things”

“We should get Xim in on this as well”, added Sovan.

“Stop wasting time. Get to the point”

No guessing who that blunt command had come from. She watched Strehin glare at the device with a look that might just snap it in two. Kathrain reached out a call to Xim but the man didn’t answer. She refocussed her attention on the conversation just as Sovan raised his hands.

“Alright folks, bad news first. The reactors are done. Funny news second. We’ve found some tools that don’t belong to us”

“Confirm for faction markings” barked Strehin.

“That’s just the thing. I’m not sure it applies to them”

The small picture of the technician suddenly vanished to make room for a larger one. Kathrain noticed the erratic movement of eyes, this was a direct feed from his ocular implant. She didn’t know a lot about reactors but even she understood these were gone by the amount of perfectly rectangular holes in them. Sovan then knelt down and looked at the floor. The shaky movement made it hard to focus until the technician had settled.

“We proudly present the death of a paradigm”

Sovan calmed his breathing in an attempt to keep the feed from his eyes stable. A strange leather sleeve lay on the ground. One side was open, like a sort of glove but lacking any indentations for fingers. The other side ended in a primitive metal cylinder, with a long leather string for a trigger. He used a stick to turn it over and then pointed at it.

“Check this out”, he said with a jovial tone, “the thing at the end looks like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s a spiral that is decorated with odd markings. That’s not the funny thing though. Here’s the trigger”

Sovan lowered the stick and then wrapped it around a long string that came out of the cylinder. One end of the string had a metal loop attached to it.

“The assumption is that this thing is operated by pulling on the string. I’m not keen to try it out... what’s really curious though is...”

“IT’S A WEAPON OR CUTTER FOR BIRDS!”

Sovan rubbed his ears with a grunt, “I beg of you, turn down the volume? Please?”

“THE SLEEVE WOULD FIT A WING AND THAT STRING IS A TONGUE TRIGGER. THEY COULD BYPASS THE REQUIREMENT FOR THUMBS OR FINGERS”

The comms remained silent. Sovan shook his head before realizing that several people were watching from his point of view.

“Sorry, for that. Allow me to interject. While the general make could very well be alien in nature, which is what Lieutenant Istengrad is suggesting, this here is decidedly not”

He quickly upturned the sleeve and pointed the stick at another cylinder. This one was perfectly round and of much higher quality than the rest. A black cat and a gear logo were imprinted on the side and the words Black Sun Forge emitted a gentle blue glow. Sovan’s voice had taken on a droning quality.

“Standardized cartridge for plasma cutters, industrial quantity. It’s jury-rigged tech. Whoever made this had no idea how to properly seal a plasma cartridge. There are scorch marks to either side of the sleeve. And that same person, thing, whatever it was used a similar approach with our reactors”

Sovan stood up from the ground and walked up to one of the large egg shapes. The light from the heavy lifter followed him along until both his eyes and the light pointed at a rectangular hole in the egg.

“They cut out everything they could, including the waste reservoir for the dormant grey particles. This was the work of an amateur. Maybe sabotage, maybe something else”

“LIKE ALIENS!”

He sighed and tapped a finger against his forehead. A flicker in his vision told him that his eyes were his alone again. Like that, he leaned himself against the reactor and waited. At first, there was silence. The occasional sound of breathing reached his ears but that was about it. The first to unfreeze was the iron dragon.

“Can we repair it?”

Sovan piped up. Of course, the dragon would cut through all the speculation.

“Negative. It’s the same problem as before. We need significant power to fabricate the spare parts. There’s also another issue. Heart list reservoir status for grey particles and transmit to call”

.: There are currently no grey particle reservoirs remaining. :.

“Let me spell this out. Absolutely no chance to repair this unless we get help, steal, beg, salvage or trade with whatever is out there”

This time, he didn’t have to wait for long before the iron dragon’s voice manifested again.

“New orders. Sovan, go and get the scanners working. Lieutenant, remain seated and accompany the technician and his crew, clear the way as needed. Kathrain, any input on potential psychological damages?”

The picture of the doctor flared up in his mind, “Keep the alien angle buried. Scientific consensus says there is no alien life beyond bacteria. Let’s not invite another Titan riot until we’re absolutely sure. As for the reactors, people will figure it out. Give them work and it keeps their minds busy.”

Sovan remembered the Titan riots from history. Some scientist had claimed to have found alien life on Titan. Within weeks, the situation escalated into all out war as factions battled for the meaning of what had been found. In the end, it was much ado over nothing, the scientist was a fraud but the riots had left a mark on history. He looked back at the massive machine and noticed the large machine looking at the object from all angles. Sovan smiled and the lights on the observation dome lit up in response. He chuckled and made a mental note to read up on drone facial expressions.

Sovan rested a shoulder against the heavy lifter while staring at the ground. A cold shiver ran down his spine. The strange object had been recent. There were no signs of decay on it and it obviously wasn’t running on Heart’s self-healing protocols. Someone had traipsed around them, stolen parts of their reactor and then made off with it. The sooner they got internal sensors back online, the better.

The man lifted his chin up and nodded towards his crew, “Congratulations, we’re all going to suffer spontaneous amnesia. That thing over there – it doesn’t exist. Don’t talk about it, don’t mention it ever”

He looked every person into their eyes before he finally nodded. It didn’t take long to instruct five of them to maintain the remaining reactor and for the rest to follow him. With neither tram nor elevator operational, he wasn’t particularly happy about the coming journey.

“Just wondering, can that machine of yours climb?”

“DIFFICULT AND NOT WITHOUT CAUSING DAMAGE”

Sovan winced. A permanent ringing had taken up shelter in his ear. On the upside, he no longer heard the whine and hissing of the heavy lifter either. Climbing up the spine would have been the fastest route while the tram was the scenic route even on the best of days.

With Sarina and her machine in front, they made good way towards the tram station. The heavy lifter jumped off the platform and used the searchlights to examine the closer surroundings. As the Administrator had said, no plants got near the tracks, which struck Sovan as odd.

“THERE’S A TRAM CAR FURTHER DOWN” Sarina thundered and then ran off into the darkness. Loud rumbling soon announced her return. A single wagon shuddered down the tracks with incessant whining and screeching. The brakes had a red glow while the heavy lifter effortlessly pushed the tram forward. When it finally came to a halt, the noise had stopped.

“You did consider the brakes, right?”

“OOPS?”

Sovan smacked his forehead and sighed. He gestured towards his remaining two crewmates and boarded their coffin of doom. Just as soon as they had sat down, it buckled and then accelerated. The bobbing searchlights of the lifter up front created a dizzying light pattern while the wide leaps of the machine meant an uneven rhythm.

“What a strange awakening, isn’t it?” he said with a subtle smile.

No answer came from the other two. They were fast asleep.

“Miracles and space magic”

At first, he just wrapped his arms around his chest and leaned back into the seat. Without the imitation leather, it was barely a comfort. As his body slowed down, his mind kicked into gear again. What leaps humanity must have made, he pondered, maybe we’re all flying spaceships now with our mind strapped to machines like the lady up front. He shook his head. Too simple.

“Maybe teleportation... like a miniature version of the stellar drives” he mused and pointed at the opposite end of the tram. Zoom, he’d be there and then back, just at a random thought. Perhaps everyone was immortal now, every disease cured and no question remained unanswered. He grinned. What would music be like? Dissonant noise from the Stars mixed in with a genetically modified horse that meowed in rhythm?

“I bet Marsian Rifts is still running. They might even have found the depths of human depravity yet”

Maybe. Probably not. The reality-show hadn’t found it in twenty-nine seasons of love, procreation and public drug abuse. As his mind wandered through golden fields of nostalgia, a strange mood took hold of him. It was just a nagging feeling at first. What if? As time went by, that feeling increased in intensity.

“It’s going to be a whole new world out there”, he whispered.

“TOTALLY!”

“LIEUTENANT SARINA. IF YOU DON’T TURN DOWN YOUR BLOODY VOLUME RIGHT THIS SECOND, I’M GOING TO CUT OFF YOUR SPEAKERS AND THROW THEM OUT THE AIRLOCK!”

He stared at the heavy lifter pulling them down the tracks. The observation dome blinked a couple of red lights in his direction.

“Relax. See? It’s quiet now”, the machine said with a whisper. By sheer magic, the other two had slept even through that.

“Thank you. Say, what would you miss most?”

The machine continued on for a few seconds before the dome swivelled to either side in what looked like a headshake.

“Probably not a lot? I’m more excited about technological advances. Maybe everyone can just download their mind into a body like yours”

Sovan wrinkled his nose. That was certainly one way to kill a conversation. Suddenly all too conscious about himself, he closed the jacket over his uniform and looked back at the machine.

“I get that notion. It’s also a bit scary, isn’t it? Decades of learning how to program and operate tiny swarms of nano-machines and all that could be completely pointless”

The lifter blinked in agreement, “Well with the advances in procedural programming, I doubt you lot were around for much longer anyway”

“Well, you’re a cheeky metal sheep”, Sovan commented with a frown.

“Not normally, no. But I’ve got the dwarf on my comms and she’s been telling me to distract you or else you might snap”

He listened to the words and let them linger for a bit. Great, Kathrain considered him unstable. With his head still lowered, he called out.

“Ask her how we know each other”

“She says you don’t and that you should forget about it. Hey I’m not playing comm-line for you two, get a conversation of your own”

Sovan grinned. Maybe the doctor was right. His thoughts had taken a dangerous turn. The machine up front suddenly wiggled the bulky hind segment.

“Stop staring at my curves all day, you’re making me self-conscious”

“You’re piloting a Falkenhain drone!” he interjected.

“Exactly. Hrrrmm, twenty-three tons of pure heavy metal temptation”

His laughter finally managed to wake the two sleepy heads. They grumbled at him and immediately went back to it.

The tram slowed to a halt. Bright light welcomed them to a deck far up the central spine. This one wasn’t from artificial lights but rather from a couple of screens that were still intact. The scene they showed was an idyllic picture of the planet below but the glitched out icons told him it was an old recording anyways.

With Sarina taking point, the small group made their way towards the observation deck. It was located just below one of the habitation modules. Which proved a slight construction mistake since several kilometres of the city tended to mess with sensory input.

“With a bit of good luck, we can just throw a switch. There are surprisingly little plants up here as well” he said out loud.

“Don’t think so, boss” one of his crew remarked. Sovan struggled to remember his name and failed.

“Heart could just reboot the system in that case” the man added.

“It’s probably the hack-job we did on the instruments. Nothing should be routed around an entire habitation module”, the second person in his crew said. She was a young technician he had worked with before. Anna something, something.

“Imagine we came up all this way, just to press a button”, Sovan said with a grin, “Admit it you two, we’d be disappointed”

“I’m telling you, it’s the routing around the module that’s doing it. Let’s bet on it”, said Anna something, something. What in the emperor’s unshaved cat was her last name again?

“Nah, remember the power surges? The system has been temperamental even before we were done building this monster. We check the connections and this thing lights up”, the man said.

Sovan tuned out of their discussion until they reached their destination. It wasn’t so much just one observation deck but rather a series of them. Each was layered on top of the other and cross cut with a row of pillars reaching from the bottom to the top. Large circular walkways framed the various levels and were crowned by hexagonal chambers on all sides. Not a single light came out of the room, however.

“LOOKS LIKE AN ASTEROID CAME KNOCKING”

“Sarina!”

“Sorry. Old habit.”

She wasn’t far off. Her searchlights illuminated a series of panorama screens with fist-sized holes in them. Sovan knelt down before one of the holes and glanced through it. The path of destruction went up three levels before the lack of light made it too hard to see where it had come from.

“Heart, any idea about the source of the damage?”

.: Unknown. I’m not aware of anything going on in that room. Stay safe Sovan. :.

He walked around a wall of displays as far as the light carried and found another hole. This one was bigger than the other but it too followed a path of destruction all throughout.

“Well, nothing to it”, he finally said and stepped back into the light, “My guess would be debris punching through the shields before everything was wrapped up in stasis. Sarina, can you give me eyes on the wall section over there?”

Sovan pointed and the heavy lifter inched around the displays with a grace that belied it’s massive size and tonnage. The spiderbot then whirred as it stretched up and directed the lights at the indicated spot.

“Debris. Definitely. It’s just... the explosion started in the docks so the angle of impact is wrong” he said and scratched his nose “well let’s get to work. You two, check up on the primary and secondary systems. Sarina, can you lift me up? I’m going to see if the external routing is still working”

“You’re all getting your hands on my machine, aren’t you?” the machine said and wiggled the two tool-arms.

“Right now, I’m about those seductive cables. Up top. Get me there”, he said.

Sovan stared in wonder as the machine actually managed a convincing ‘tssk’. The lieutenant had a rather crass humour for his tastes. The tool-arms folded back into the main body and in their stead, two lengthy arms with humanoid hands extended. Sarina and her machine approached Sovan with one arm on either side and then grabbed him with surprising gentleness. In comparison with the sheer power, he was a mere toy.

One that used the leverage to reach for an access port up top. Sovan reached down for his tool belt and picked up something archaic that never once went out of fashion. A screwdriver. No fancy tricks either, just some nano-coating so you didn’t lose the screws by accident and some minor deconstruction protocols to ease up stuck screws.

“Actually, it’s pretty high tech all things considered”

“DRONES SURE ARE!”

He glared down at the lifter and heard a chuckle come out of the speakers. Sovan shook his head and went to work. The vent easily opened up but just as he was about to reach up, a loud laugh rang out from below.

“Well... this I didn’t see coming”, the second man in his group said. Sovan’s ocular implant indicated an incoming picture.

“This has to be some sort of cosmic joke”

“Afraid not”, said Anna something, something. He felt a pang of regret for not recalling her full name. It probably didn’t come close to the regret of the rat that had managed to fry itself on some juicy scanner equipment just as the stasis came down. The result was a curiously glittering statue of a fried rat. Sovan sighed.

“Get that thing out of there, restore the connection. Let’s see if this...”

Lights sprung up around him. Several screens came back to life as power flowed into the observation deck. Elation made way for horror as gravity vanished.

“No one move, it’s bound to come back any second now”, he shouted as loud as he could while trying to keep his movement to a minimum.

“Heart, collect a full sensor sweep of the surroundings, then shut down observation deck and restore power to the gravity core”

.: Affirmative. I’m sorry Sovan. It was the only thing I could do. :.

“Don’t sweat it, just...”

There it was. A lovely punch to the stomach as gravity settled back in. It had only been a few seconds but nausea crept up his throat from the sudden changes. The observation deck turned dark once more and the heavy lifter carefully put him back down on the floor.

“Tell me you got something for us”, he said with a weary voice as he leaned his body against a broken display.

.: I do - but it has been put under lock by the authority of Administrator Strehin. :.

“Oh come off it” he growled. His face twisted in anger.

.: Sovan Terastris, I’m sorry to inform you that this central command golem has malfunctioned. A copy of the sensor report was accidentally uploaded to your ocular implant. :.

A smug grin crept on his face. Maybe it had perks spending eternity with a slightly crazy golem. Several icons begged for his mental attention and he activated them in turn. With curiosity at first but as more images opened up, that quickly changed to horror and then a solemn mood. Debris surrounded the City of Citadels on all sides, some of it clearly came from broken Terran ships. The cloud of wrecks swirled around the station in a several kilometre long wall of destruction. The station itself was floating around a planet as part of the asteroid belt.

There were visible structures in orbit and on the surface, none went beyond the most primitive of space age technology and their build didn’t look like anything he had ever seen. There was something else. Sensors had picked up a lone ship on a rendezvous course. If that rackety rocket ship could even be deemed space-worthy.