“Shit,” Andromeda muttered. “Shit, shit, shit, shit…”

“What’s wrong?” Carina asked, concerned. “Are they hurt?”

“You’ll never guess who they ran into,” Andromeda sighed.

David’s eyes widened. “You’re kidding.”

“I wish.” Andromeda had a brief thought of just leaving them there and flying away. Acidalia had known what she was doing when she signed up for this mission; she knew perfectly well the risk she was taking, and Andromeda had absolutely no qualms about cutting ties with people for her own survival. Then she realized that if Acidalia was captured, they’d all be in a world of trouble.

Would she give anything up? Andromeda wondered. Acidalia had constitution. She wouldn’t release information to the enemy to save her own skin. She’d probably try to kill herself before she let the Nova interrogate her. If Acidalia was captured, Andromeda might feel slightly guilty, but it wouldn’t be gnawing at her day and night. There was no real risk there.

But Andromeda knew nothing about the other girl, Lyra—the Cantator. She was a completely inexperienced newbie. She hadn’t cracked under the pressure of this mission, and if her childhood was anything like Andromeda’s own, she was tough. But was she Nova tough? And were her allegiances even cemented yet? Andromeda worried that Lyra would give the Nova everything she knew after five minutes of pain.

But did Lyra have anything they couldn’t afford to lose?

She weighed her options for a few minutes. She could go in and try to rescue Acidalia and Lyra, possibly facing death in the process. Or she could abandon them and accept the risk that they would be captured and interrogated.

“What do you think, Praetor?” David asked.

Andromeda groaned internally. David was an idiot and he liked Acidalia. If Andromeda tried to abandon her, David would try to go in there and rescue her himself, and then they’d have two dead leaders.

“I don’t know yet. Give me a minute.” She switched on her headset. Acidalia was breathing sharp, shallow breaths, sounding thoroughly panicked.

Jesus Christ, what a priss, Andromeda thought. She’d been faced with so many life-or-death situations she’d stopped taking them seriously eons ago. She knew better than to panic at the sight of an aggressor. But Acidalia… well, go figure. She hadn’t been through half the hell Andromeda had. She was a Cipher; she wasn’t made for combat any more than Andromeda herself was made for politics.

“All right, I’m going in,” Andromeda sighed resignedly. “I have no idea what the Trinity labs are like, so Carina and Athena are coming with me.”

“Woah, you want both of us?” Athena asked.

“Yeah, ‘cause she’s a weakling and you’re incompetent. Together you might make one functional soldier,” Andromeda snapped. “What the hell are you waiting for? Ditch the dresses and let’s go.” She kicked off her stilettos. Her cybernetic feet didn’t have pain sensors; she didn’t mind walking barefoot.

“Hell yes,” Athena exclaimed, pumping her fist. “I get to do cool shit!”

“Move your ass before I revoke that offer,” Andromeda demanded. “We don’t have the time for this.”

The two scientists looked at each other, then scampered off to find better clothing.

“David, if anything happens to me, get the Revelation back to base,” Andromeda ordered.

“You realize I’m the Secretary of Agriculture on Mars, right?” he asked. “I’ve never flown a Terran ship in my life, Andy.”

“Well, figure it out.”

David looked around confusedly. He’s so useless, Andromeda thought.

While the two scientists argued over something in the background, Andromeda called the captain of the escort ship Cheyenne and told him to prepare his soldiers for battle. There was no way in hell she was going into the Terminal without a full-on, centuria-sized backup plan. Acidalia was self-sacrificial enough that she wouldn't really care about her own death, but Andromeda wasn't ready to go just yet.

"Let's move," Andromeda called out. Athena twirled a gun around her finger, completely ignorant of the fact that it was on and loaded. Carina stared out the window with a vacant expression.

"God dammit," Andromeda sighed. "Carina, get yourself a weapon. You're wasting daylight."

"But I don't know how to—"

"You point it at whatever you want to kill and then shoot it, how hard can it be?"

Carina looked nervously at the standard-issue, medium-size laser pistol Ace offered her. It did look ridiculous; she was a tiny, nerdy astrophysicist who probably had never seen the outside of the laboratory until a few days ago, and the gun was massive compared to her. But Andromeda had been tiny once, too, and she'd learned regardless.

Andromeda dragged the Scientias onto the Revelation's ladder, not wanting to make a big show about landing by opening their staircase. Once they reached the ground, she looked at the ship for a few minutes, floating in place in the sky. Then David switched the cloaking back on—at least he figured that part out—and it became an iridescent triangle, then vanished completely from sight, reflecting the dark sky around it.

"How do we get in here?" she asked.

"There's an entrance for pharm maintenance workers on the left hand side," Carina said, "but it's kind of gross."

"Farm?" Andromeda asked.

Carina shook her head "Pharm with a ph—pharmaceutical farming. This one grows blood, lymph, plasma, spinal fluid, and the like for medical and research purposes."

"So that's what that floor is for," Athena said.

"What else did you think the giant, sloshing vats of blood were for?" Carina asked.

Athena shrugged. "I dunno."

“Will we trip any alarms?" Andromeda asked. "I don't want to make a big entrance just yet."

"Nah," Athena laughed. “Wait, give me one second." She took her shoe off and started digging around in it. “Hang on..." She emerged triumphantly with a squished badge in her hand. "Got it. My ID card."

"Great. How many researchers do you think are in there?" Andromeda switched her cybernetic eye to thermal mode, but the machines were warmer than the people, and whatever fluids they were growing in there must have been kept hot, because she couldn't see any clear human outlines.

"Not a lot, a big part of the process is automated," Carina said. "Fair warning, though, that's because it's disgusting in there."

"I can deal with disgusting," Andromeda said "I can't deal with an ambush. Here's what we're going to do."

She envisioned the entire laboratory complex in her mind as a three dimensional model. She took note of every entrance and every window, and whether a man could fit through each. If she took Carina and Athena through the blood pharm, she could disable the alarms and allow soldiers to follow her, then they would hopefully have enough men to surround Alestra and take back their fighters.

"All right, let's go," she decided. "Athena, you have the ID badge, you go first."

Athena threw open the door excitedly and swiped her badge, which didn't work the first six times because it was sweaty and crinkled. The seventh time, the door swung open.

"Squish close to me," Athena said, pulling Andromeda out of the sight of a laser beam. "You're not supposed to let other people in under your badge, but everyone does anyway."

The laser beam scanned the room while Andromeda and Carina squeezed in close to the door. It flickered occasionally, stopping to rescan the same stretch of wall it had before, then switched itself off halfway through. It appeared run down, more so than Andromeda expected.

"Budget cuts got rid of like half the security a while ago," Athena explained. “You know Alestra and the money she poured into the Nova. Everyone whined about things like 'being exposed to dangerous pathogens' and 'allowing just anyone into the lab,' but I personally didn't mind it. I don't even know what a pathogen is, anyway."

“Aren’t you a scientist?” Andromeda asked.

“Astrophysicist.”

Once the laser beam finished its scan, the interior door opened with a slick whoosh sound. The first thing that hit Andromeda was the smell. It was metallic and slightly sweet, like blood, but there were also notes of something else, something sharp and alien.

“It stinks in here,” Athena complained. “I always wondered what that smell was.”

“Well, if it’s a farm for growing bodily fluids, it’s not going to smell great. The bigger question is what the hell is all over the floor.” Andromeda looked down at her feet. Something milky and white seeped up through the grates in the ground, coating the floor and pooling in the cracks between the tiles. She noticed shoe covers on the side, but it was too late for that. The liquid was already soaking her socks.

“Looks like chyle,” Carina said, wrinkling her nose.

“How do you know that?” Athena asked. “You’re not even in biology.”

“We all took basic bio classes. Besides, there’s a sign over there that says caution: human chyle.”

“Oh.” Athena looked at the ground sheepishly.

Pulling the plastic shoe covers onto her feet, Andromeda drew her weapon—just in case—and rounded the corner. Then she saw where the chyle was coming from—a plastic bag with a tube leading to a massive vat of foul-smelling liquid had burst, leaking fluid all over the floor.

Andromeda put on one of the blue rubber gloves from a dispenser in the wall and dipped a hand into the translucent, white substance. It burned, and she noticed suddenly that the label on the tub read CAUSTIC. She pulled her fingers out and tore the glove off. “What is that?!”

“Human lymph, apparently. Read the sign.” Carina’s voice had a slight edge of annoyance, which Andromeda supposed was fair.

"I thought that stuff was in your body," Athena whined. “Why would it hurt?!”

“I don’t know.” Carina stepped over a drain on the floor. “We should be careful. There’s—“

“Hey!” someone called. A worker in a lab coat drenched in blood and some other mysterious stains knitted her eyebrows. “Who the hell are-“

Andromeda shot her point-blank in the chest. She didn’t remember whether she’d set her laser pistol to stun or kill, and she really didn’t care. Carina and Athena looked at one another nervously, but neither of them stepped forwards to check for a pulse.

“Let’s go.” Andromeda pushed the two shocked scientists forwards.

The rest of the lab—factory?—was similar, with conveyor belts of materials combining into vats of organic fluids. Most of the vats contained blood, or at least some precursor liquid that might eventually become a component of blood. Most of it was gooey, greenish-yellow plasma being combined with bags of cells in a gigantic mixer. An extruder collected the fully-stirred blood into plastic bags, then squirted some type of alcohol compound into them and passed them through a freezer. They emerged in frozen bricks of blood and ice crystals. Andromeda picked one up. It was cold and wet.

RH-null, the bag read, followed by a list of other unintelligible classifications. Andromeda set it back down on the conveyor belt, and it proceeded along its way to a packing center, where more machines stacked it neatly into a freezer box. On went the cycle, combining strange plasma with neon-red powders to create the stuff of life.

“This place is like vampire paradise,” Athena said, looking at the various machines. “I mean, look at that stuff. A vampire would totally eat those bags like popsicles. I didn’t know so much stuff can be synthesized from blood.”

“They’re cutting corners, though,” Carina pointed out. “There are absolutely no safety measures anywhere, and most of that blood will be useless when it’s thawed. The cells will burst from the cold. They’re literally making blood money.”

Andromeda rolled her eyes. “Corporations not caring about consumers is the last thing on my mind right now.”

“It’s still unethical.”

“Ethics, shmethics,” Athena said.

Carina glared at her.

There were noises coming through the walls now—unintelligible, distant screaming. Andromeda couldn’t make out any person in particular’s voice, but she knew one of those people was Acidalia. She tried not to think about it too much. She and the scientists continued throughout the complex, trying not to slip on the unfamiliar wetness covering the slick metal floor.

“Ew, ew, ew, ew, ew,” Carina muttered under her breath, wringing her hands. She hadn’t so much as touched anything, but she was somehow covered in blood anyway; it seemed to just permeate everything here. Andromeda was starting to feel slightly sick, so she pulled the helmet down over her face. The Scientias both took the hint.

“Much better,” Athena declared. Andromeda could hear her take a deep breath. Then she heard the sounds of screaming coming through the headset again—wherever Acidalia and Lyra were, they were clearly not safe. However, it did sound like they were both alive—that had to mean something.

“Oh my god,” Carina yelped. “Are they okay?!”

More unintelligible yelling.

“What did you expect?” Andromeda asked. “I’m going to be real with you, they might be dead or gone by the time we get there.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean gone. Captured. The Nova wouldn’t want to kill them. Acidalia knows too much for them to really want her dead. It’s far more likely that they’d take them prisoner.”

“Isn’t that better, then?” Athena asked, splashing through a puddle of some mysterious translucent yellow liquid.

Andromeda snorted. “Hell no. Are you out of your mind? I would rather kill myself than get captured by the Nova. They’re insane. They would torture you in the most horrific way possible, then kill you in the most painful way they could come up with. They don’t take POWs too often—it’s not their style. But someone like Acidalia… if she were captured, she’d have a bad, bad time.”

“But we could rescue her, right?” Carina looked alarmed underneath the lens of the mask.

“We could, but we wouldn’t,” Andromeda said.

Athena and Carina looked at each other, shocked. “Why not?” Athena asked.

“Because it would be a useless waste of time and people,” Andromeda replied. “Don’t get me wrong, Acidalia’s useful. She’s a great politician, and at this point she’s honestly kind of a living biological weapon—that’s how the Ciphers are, with their magic DNA powers or whatever the hell she calls them. Some bullshit about CRISPR and nanoviruses; I don’t know. But Acidalia’s not worth invading a Nova base and losing hundreds of thousands of lives in the process, especially because now that they know she’s on our side, the whole DNA mod business is kind of useless. The cat’s out of the bag; Alestra knows what’s coming now, or she will when it kicks in. There’s no element of surprise.”

“But she’s your friend,” Carina said.

“There are no friends in love and war,” Andromeda replied.

“Well, she acts like you’re her friend,” Carina argued.

“And she acted like a completely innocent princess for six years even though she was already in the Revolution. Acidalia’s a pretty good actress.”

“But—“ Athena began.

“But what?” Andromeda asked. “Listen. If I could save everyone from the Nova, I would. But the fact is that we are at war. There’s no time for sentimentality. If it comes down to the life of one person I happen to know, or the lives of five hundred thousand of my men, I’m going to choose the option that saves the most resources. Acidalia, at this point, is not as valuable as the lives of a bigger battalion of soldiers.”

“Is she, though?” Carina asked.

Andromeda raised an eyebrow. “Enlighten me on why she’s worth enough to rescue her, if and when the time comes.”

“Well, I, um,” she began. “I can’t debate about ethics. I’ve never even taken a philosophy class. But DNA modification—what Acidalia’s shown us of it, at least—is incredibly powerful, and she seems to be pretty good at it. She may have already used the trick where she makes DNA-destroying bacteria or viruses or whatever that was, but that isn’t the only thing DNA could do.”

Andromeda shrugged. “It always seemed like kind of a one-trick pony to me.”

“But it’s not. She could splice together bioweapons. She could make your soldiers unstoppable killing machines. And you know that Alestra can do the same thing. Letting Acidalia die would be letting Alestra get the upper hand.”

Athena nodded. “A double upper hand, since Aleskynn’s a Cipher, too.”

Andromeda sighed. “You know what? You’re right. But that still doesn’t mean I’m going to lead my men into a massacre for the sake of Acidalia. Besides, you know that if I, or you, were captured, Acidalia would let you die. Hell, she let her own brother die. It comes with the territory. If you’re not willing to make some sacrifices… this isn’t your kind of movement.”

The Scientias didn’t say anything for a few seconds. For a long, awkward moment, the only noise was the sound of plastic-covered shoes on a fluid-covered floor. Then Carina said softly, “That’s horrible, but… I understand it.”

“It’s horrible now, but you’ll get used to it,” Andromeda said. “They always do. But before we keep waxing poetic about the philosophy of war, we actually have to fight it. And that means finding the alarms systems so we can disable them and send in the calvary,” she added pointedly.

“They should be someplace around here.” Athena looked around, but the only things Andromeda could make out were more vats of liquid and more assembly lines carrying the raw materials that made a human. Alarms blared from somewhere, but they sounded rather distant. Based on the fact that they’d already snuck two extra people in and shoved their hands and feet into multiple places where they shouldn’t have been, part of Andromeda doubted this place’s security system even worked, but the larger part of her didn’t want to risk it. Her men could probably take on a legion of Magistratum, but she wanted to have as many living soldiers as possible to take Alestra’s guard down.

Then Andromeda had an idea. She pulled apart a pipe leading from one substance to another, spilling chalky red goo all over the ground. Then she kicked at a metal basin, making a metallic clang that sounded throughout the lab.

“What are you doing?” Carina whispered urgently.

“Making some noise.” She pulled a plastic blood bag out of a machine and jammed it into a conveyor belt that looked intricate and complicated. The gears tore the bag up for a few seconds, then they stuck and became immobile, spraying plasma into the air in spurts. Because that seemed to work, Andromeda did it again, bigger this time; she pulled off her jacket and shoved it deep into a different machine, then started flicking random buttons in the hopes of causing a noticeably big problem.

Sure enough, a worker came barreling down the corridor, clipboard in hand. “What do you think you’re—oh, god. Athena.”

“Hi,” Athena said sheepishly.

“What did you do now?” the worker asked. “You and Kalyn, I swear to god. Why are you even on this floor? Aren’t you in astronomy?”

“Astrophysics, but that isn’t the point,” Athena said quickly. “Listen, we… uh, we need you to show us where the alarms are, and then turn off the alarms. It’s super important. Consider it a personal favor for me, okay?”

“Why would I ever want to do a personal favor for you?” the worker asked, raising an eyebrow. “You nearly got me fired three times because you kept sneaking in my lab to smoke cigarettes!”

“I didn’t smoke them!” she said indignantly. “I tried one and had an asthma attack!”

Andromeda sighed. “We don’t have time for this. Show us where the alarms are, now.”

“Who are you?” the worker asked.

Andromeda drew her gun. “Don’t ask stupid questions.”

The worker’s eyes widened. “Is that real?! What the hell, Athena?”

“I also might have joined a violent revolution and we might be on an important mission right now, which might involve rescuing Acidalia Cipher,” Athena said all at once.

“Acidalia Cipher is dead.”

“She will be if you don’t move your ass,” Andromeda snapped. “Go.”

“All right, all right, Jesus,” the worker muttered. Then, softly, she whispered, “blink twice if you’re being held hostage.”

“Don’t you dare,” Andromeda snapped.

Plans thwarted, the worker continued along, casting cursory glances at the equipment Andromeda had ruined. Occasionally Andromeda prodded her with the gun, which didn’t seem to shock her as much as she thought it would. Athena had ruined any chance they had of being taken seriously; this worker probably didn’t even think the gun was real.

“Here you go,” the woman said begrudgingly, throwing open a door to a control room. “You know you could go to jail for assault with a deadly weapon, right?”

“Like you’ll report me,” Athena scoffed.

“Well, when I get fired—because they will fire me for this—you’re either paying my rent for the next year, or you’re getting reported to the police.”

“Well, I wouldn’t worry too much about rent right now, because you have bigger issues,” Andromeda said. “Carina, disable these.”

Carina quietly went to work, looking like she had no idea what she was doing. She’s a scientist, she’ll figure it out, Andromeda thought.

“What do you mean, ‘don’t worry about rent?’” the worker demanded. “Athena, who is this person?”

“Are they off?” Andromeda asked, ignoring the worker.

Carina nodded. “I think so.”

“Then let’s start this rescue mission. Move out, Cheyenne.” Andromeda tapped her headset. “Alarms disabled. Let’s go, we’re wasting time.”

“You need to leave,” Athena told the worker. “Like… now. Leave now. Get out and hide someplace.”

“Why?”

“I need you to turn the other way and run as fast and as far as you can or I will shoot you in the head right now.” Andromeda brandished her gun. It was too big, too dangerous, and too unwieldy for this type of mission—not that she actually minded. Apparently it looked just as dangerous as it was, because the girl stared open-mouthed for a millisecond, then tore off down the corridor at record speed. Her clipboard fell and clattered on the tile floor as she ran, sending notes on perflurocarbon flying into the air.

Someplace on the other side of the complex, Andromeda could hear boots marching. She wasn’t half as lenient with her troops as she was with Acidalia’s stupid friends; they were trained with the military precision an army needed. They didn’t speak as they moved, and nobody dared fall out of formation—they were as quiet and stealthy as was possible for an entire centurion of men. They were composed and calm in this cold, academic bloodbath; Andromeda hoped they’d be just as proficient in an actual one.