Glory and Taurus passed what looked like a blocked tunnel, where dozens of people wearing jumpsuits similar to Glory’s worked to clear the debris from the far end. Glory found herself wondering whether these people were from one of the ghost towns she and the others had passed through—Black Sun, or Sanctum Mesa.

“Who are all these people?” she found herself asking, unsure whether she really wanted to know.

Taurus, however, made a dismissive noise. “Does it matter? They serve a purpose.”

“I’m just… curious.”

He sighed harshly, as though her curiosity were some kind of imposition. “If you must know, we retrieved them from nearby settlements.”

“You kidnapped them,” Glory summarized.

He waved a dismissive hand. “The settlements were poorly defended, to say the least. If you haven’t the foresight to even post guards, you deserve what you get.”

Liar! Glory wanted to crow. She wanted to point out Sanctum Mesa’s cut power, their deactivated perimeter. But, a recently re-activated old world android wouldn’t know about any of that. So she held her tongue, and simply followed as he strolled past them carelessly.

“How much farther?” she asked.

He nodded vaguely ahead of them. “Not far now.”

They took yet another transparent, cylindrical elevator ride downward, and Glory was once again reminded of another, similar trip with a different man.

Unbidden, her thoughts went to Needles. Was he angry with her? Grieving? Or had he forgotten her already? For some reason, that thought caused melancholy to seep into her struts, rather than light her circuits with fury. She ought to be angry at the idea—someone forgetting her. It was ludicrous. But all it did was make her want to curl up into a ball and rust for a few decades.

She forcibly canceled that train of thought, turning her processing power instead to calculating how deep they were traveling. The distance gauge—or depth gauge, in this instance—that the prior elevators had borne was nowhere to be found, for some reason. Still, the vague motion outside gave Glory enough of a reference to make a rough calculation as the elevator slowed to a stop.

Almost thirty meters. Deeper than any structure in Father’s facility. At least, any structure that Glory had known about.

The door slid open with a soft hiss, revealing a wide, dark space, barely lit by a single, light blue circular light high above their head, softly illuminating a small circle around the elevator. Glory adjusted the sensitivity on her eyes, but the light seemed perfectly placed to obscure whatever laid beyond its rays by blinding her.

Taurus shivered as he stepped off the elevator, followed closely by Glory. Her internal thermometer registered a temperature drop of nearly five degrees. Meanwhile, her barometer went haywire, somehow registering both a rise and fall in atmospheric pressure.

Strange. That couldn’t be possible. She reset the barometer, but it returned the exact same reading after its reset. She then ran a diagnostic, but it returned nothing out of the ordinary.

Either her barometer was completely wrecked, or something else was going on down there.

“Stay close, please,” Taurus murmured, his voice barely above a whisper, as though he were worried about being overheard. And maybe he was.

The possibility that there was someone—or something—else down there with them sent shivers through her struts. She immediately dismissed it as a possibility, ludicrous as it was, but the thought refused to leave her entirely, instead lingering stubbornly in the back of her processor.

She followed closely behind Taurus as he stepped beyond the reach of the single blue light. With it behind them, Glory’s heightened night vision proved more useful, revealing an atrium almost identical to the one on the upper level, albeit devoid of plant life. Unsurprisingly, given the lack of light sources strong enough or of the right wavelength to support photosynthesis.

The ground beneath their feet was rougher, too, and Glory was silently grateful that her low-light vision worked now, so she wouldn’t have to worry about tripping over a jutting brick or something equally undignified.

Taurus, of course, showed no hint of hesitation or uncertainty, as though he’d walked this path a hundred times before and had every little uneven patch of ground memorized.

Yet he’d said they’d only found this facility a few months ago.

Interesting.

In the distance, just beyond the doorway ahead of them, Glory could make out a dim light source, just as blue as the ring light above the elevator.

“How much farther now?” she asked exasperatedly. It felt like they’d been walking for hours, though a quick chronometer check listed it as only having been a few minutes.

Taurus chortled at her question. “We are here, my dear.” He stepped through the doorway, and flung his arms out dramatically as though to reveal something. Glory couldn’t tell what it was until she stepped through, as well, and emerged inside a massive cavern.

The cavern itself wasn’t what drew the eye, though.

Inside the cavern, half-buried in the far rock wall, was an alien craft—roughly ten meters tall, fifteen wide, and sharply geometric in a way Glory couldn’t think to describe, with sharp fractals splitting off its hull and stretching towards the cavern walls.

No, not a cavern—not a naturally-occurring one, at least. It was too vast, too close to such a large underground facility. And, though they could be short-sighted, old world governments were not stupid. They wouldn’t build a top-secret facility right next to a giant underground cavern unless…

Unless they had been planning on expanding into it when an alien ship crashed through the cavern ceiling. Then the war ended, and the Benefactors took control before the ship could really be examined. Government officials were rounded up and ‘re-educated’ by the hundreds. Which meant, assuming this facility was a secret, that everyone who might’ve been aware of the ship’s presence was now in no state to examine it, leaving it to quite literally gather dust for a century.

A small group of people stood milling around, examining this or that component of the ship. Most of them wore cultist robes, but two of them—a man and a woman—wore the same gray jumpsuit as Glory. All of them wore nose pegs, though, strangely enough.

Glory’s gaze skipped over them, however, always drifting back to the ship.

It was vaguely familiar, in a way Glory couldn’t quite put her finger on at first. Then it struck her like a lightning bolt—the ship’s exterior, the sharp angles and fractals, carried a strong resemblance to the citadels. Or, at least, their walls. As Glory tilted her head from side to side, the fractals appeared to shift ever so slightly, like an optical illusion. Except, most if not all optical illusions shouldn’t have worked on her.

This was no optical illusion; it was a genuine piece of camouflage technology, albeit damaged and de-powered.

A low, infrasonic hum filled the chamber, too low-frequency for human ears to hear. It nudged its way slowly into Glory’s awareness, but was soft enough to almost fade into the background. Compared to the ship, however, the sound was of little interest.

Glory couldn’t tear her eyes away. “This is…”

“A Benefactor ship, yes,” Taurus agreed, sounding giddy. For once, Glory understood his excitement. No one had ever gotten a chance to examine Benefactor technology up close—before the end of the war, they’d metered it out sparingly, only offering the bare minimum to meet their end of whatever bargain they’d struck with the government. And, after the war, when the Benefactors retreated behind their walls, they took their technology with them. Only a few defectors like Father, or incredibly lucky scavengers, had ever escaped with evidence of what they could do.

“Wh—Where did—” Glory took an unsteady step towards the ship, then paused.

What was she doing? Fawning mindlessly over the planet’s alien conquerors? She’d be ashamed of herself if it was possible. She sniffed and straightened her spine, injecting her voice with a bit more dignity. “Where did it come from? I thought the Benefactors took all their technology with them into the citadels.”

“They did,” Taurus said. “All but one.” He took a step closer to the ship, a triumphant grin on his face. “Magnificent, isn’t it? Tyrants they might be, but they definitely know their engineering.”

Glory could only shake her head in disbelief. “Where—How—Where did you even hear about this place? There’s no way you stumbled across this by accident.”

“By accident, no. We first learned of this place in a facility similar to this one, only a few miles south of Angel City. Our technologist managed to piece together a few messages dated to right around the end of the old world. That facility seemed to be tasked with watching the night sky and measuring the stars.”

“Observatory.”

He cocked his head. “What?”

“You probably found an observatory,” Glory said.

He shook his head. “Fine. An observatory. The point is, one of their last messages detailed the tyrants’ descent from the sky. More specifically, they mentioned tracking one erratic signal headed east, towards the Flagstaff facility.”

“And that’s why you came all the way out here?” Glory asked in disbelief. “One vague mention of an erratic signal in one old world message?”

“It turned out to be true, didn’t it?” he challenged. “I will confess that, before I saw it with my very own eyes, I didn’t dare to believe it. I had resigned myself to returning to the coast empty-handed and humiliated. But, well…” He gestured towards the ship.

Glory wanted to scowl, but the beautiful, nearly flawless vessel in front of her retook her attention. Nearly flawless because, well, a truly flawless vessel wouldn’t have crashed in a cavern in the first place, would it?

But Glory couldn’t pay much attention to that little issue at the moment. Glory took a step towards the ship. One of the other cultists leapt to his feet and moved forward as though he intended to stop Glory. Glory pitied the fool who thought he could stand between her and the only known Benefactor vessel not currently stockpiled inside a citadel.

“It’s all right, Bishop,” Taurus interrupted the man before he could truly come and stand in Glory’s way. “Stand down.”

The bishop didn’t look too happy at the command, but he obeyed, stepping aside reluctantly. Glory ignored him as she marched forward. Only when she reached the ramp leading up to what was most likely its hatch did one pertinent question occur to her.

She hesitated at the base of the ramp and turned back to face Taurus. “Why haven’t they come looking for it before now?” she asked.

Settlements using ‘liberated’ Benefactor technology outside the cities usually found themselves ‘audited’ by the citadels’ ‘Civil Defense Force’ in a matter of days, as though the Benefactors had a tracking device on every single piece of their technology on the planet. Which they maybe did, for all Glory knew.

All in all, a lone ship just lost in a mountain, waiting to be discovered by mutants seemed a little too good to be true. In fact, Glory wasn’t entirely convinced that the ship hadn’t been placed there as bait by the Benefactors themselves.

But Taurus, in spite of this chilling possibility, seemed unconcerned. He shrugged carelessly at her question. “My guess? Its transponder was damaged during the crash, and they forgot about it.”

“The Benefactors don’t just forget about things,” Glory scoffed. They certainly hadn’t ever forgotten about Father. “This is probably a trap.”

“I’d heard that old world machines were suspicious, but this…” Taurus clicked his tongue. “It’s been abandoned for a century. I’m well aware of how clever and duplicitous the tyrants can be, but that would be a long con, even for them.”

Glory shook her head. “It has to be a trap.” But, despite that knowledge… it was the only piece of Benefactor technology within her grasp. Within anyone’s grasp who wasn’t hopelessly under the citadels’ thumb.

Perhaps, Glory owed it to herself, to everyone, to be spontaneous and take a chance. Any species capable of interstellar travel had to have access to truly unprecedented levels of knowledge and technology. And if they—if she—could salvage even a sliver of it—

“If I can activate it,” Glory said, “I want to be allowed inside first.”

The bishop sputtered from somewhere behind her, and began snapping protests and demands. But, once again, Taurus held up a hand to silence the other man. All the while, he stared at Glory, as though he thought he could gaze into her soul.

Too bad for him that she didn’t have one.

Finally, Taurus nodded. “Your request is… reasonable, I suppose. But it assumes that you will be able to unlock the vessel when we’ve been trying for weeks and have yet to even figure out how it works.”

The corner of Glory’s lips quirked. “What can I say? I’m better.”

His brows arched, but he appeared more amused than annoyed. “I won’t be able to stay and watch, I’m afraid. I have other duties elsewhere in the facility.”

“Then go.” Glory waved him away dismissively. “The bishop can keep watch on his own, can’t he?”

“Can he?” Taurus asked, glancing at the Bishop. Glory turned to follow his line of sight as well, staring at the bishop as he scowled at her, then nodded to Taurus.

“Yes, Monsignor.”

“If it tries to leave,” Taurus said, “shoot it.”

It.

That word washed over Glory like an icy wave. She wanted to strangle him for the audacity. But, the last time she’d lost control like that, she’d inadvertently given herself away, leading to this very situation. So, she held her tongue, and bided her time.

She’d outlast them all, anyway.

“Do you have a name?” Glory asked the bishop. Not that she particularly cared, but she supposed there was no harm in asking.

The bishop sniffed at her question, nostrils flaring. “That’s none of your business.”

“Maybe not, but it’s only polite to ask.”

He scoffed and nudged her back towards the ship. “Walk. You wanted to take a look at the ship, so take a look at the ship and stop wasting my time.”

Rude. Dismissive. He didn’t think she could do it.

He’d be proven wrong shortly. Glory knew it in her every synapse. After all, she’d been designed to be perfect.

She obeyed the bishop’s order, however, stepping closer to the two wastelanders and their armed captors. The woman held a welder’s torch, her face obscured by a mask, and appeared to be trying to melt her way through the ship’s hull.

As Glory drew closer, though, peering at the searingly bright point of contact between the flame and the hull, she couldn’t see much change.

The woman seemed to realize she wasn’t making any progress, either, and shut the torch off. Turning to the nearest cultist—the only woman in the group—she said, “It’s not working.” The mask muffled her voice, turned it deeper.

The cultist sneered at her and shoved her roughly in the shoulder, nearly knocking her into the superheated patch of hull she’d just been working on. “Keep working!”

The man, meanwhile, had been put to work moving stones away from the ship, unearthing it even more than it already was. He paused to pant in exhaustion on top of a boulder, and only leapt into motion when the final cultist—the one not wielding any visible firearm—brandished some kind of switch at him threateningly.

Three guns, and one whip. Despite herself, Glory couldn’t keep from counting the weapons.

The Bishop marched up beside her. “Don’t talk to the heretics. They are earning their penance.”

“Why only two?” Glory asked. “Surely it takes more than that to clear rubble.”

“We’ve wasted enough time ‘clearing rubble’.” Glory didn’t have to turn to look at the cultist to hear the sneer in his voice. “The ship should be able to free itself. All we need is to open the hatch.”

“How’s that working out for you?”

He breathed heavily through his nose. “Not well.”

Glory marched up the ramp to the hatch, where the female wastelander was hard at work trying to melt through the hull. This close to the ship, the infrasonic hum was louder, just on the verge of passing into ‘irritating’ territory.

Glory tapped the woman on the shoulder, and she jolted, turning towards Glory in surprise. A moment later, she shut off the torch.

A nearby cultist—a woman—snapped, “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Solving your problem for you.” Glory held a hand up a few inches from the hull, sensing the ambient temperature. Surprisingly, it wasn’t terribly hot. It barely even counted as warm. “Interesting.”

“What?” the bishop demanded, marching closer. “What is it?”

“The hatch, including the point of contact between the torch and the hull, seems to be holding steady at 25.4 degrees celsius. Just above room temperature. But with that,” she nodded to the female wastelander’s torch, “for as long as she was here… It should be much, much hotter. This material…”

She trailed off and rapped her knuckles against the hatch, only to jump when the infrasonic buzz grew ever so slightly louder.

“What?” the female cultist asked.

Glory shook her head. “Contact seems to amplify the sound.”

“What sound?”

“Infrasound. It’s too low-frequency for you to hear.” Glory reached a hand out to the hatch again and carefully, delicately brushed her fingertips against the surface.

The buzz grew louder again, but rather than yank her fingers away, Glory pressed her hand firmer against the door. The louder hum began to rise in frequency as well, until it edged into the range humans could hear. The female wastelander jumped and let out a strangled yelp from her spot beside Glory, and out of the corner of her eyes, Glory could see the cultists jerk at the sound as well.

“Stop!” the bishop shouted. “Stop it!”

The hum’s frequency continued to rise, until it edged into annoying territory and, blessedly, drowned out the sound of the bishop’s voice.

The female wastelander clapped her hands over her ears as the noise traveled into ear-piercing territory, and behind them, Glory could just barely hear a yelp, though she couldn’t tell who it came from. A solid form collided with Glory’s back as someone tried to wrestle her hand away from the hatch. Glory planted her feet and held fast, fighting against their grip, even as someone else came to help them.

Then the noise passed out of a human’s range of hearing, and the figures stopped fighting her to instead slump in relief. Unfortunately, Glory could still hear the noise. Her teeth gritted together in agony as the noise melded together with constant static at the back of her thoughts, forming something truly maddening.

Then, all at once, sweet silence fell over the cavern. For a moment, Glory worried that she had somehow gone deaf. It should have been impossible—her ears weren’t designed the same as a human’s, and shouldn’t have been able to be damaged by excessively loud or high-pitched noises.

But then, a loud groan drew her attention back to the matter at hand, and she leapt back, colliding with the figure behind her as the ship’s hatch twisted and spun with a high pitched whine, slowly splitting open from its center like the dilation of an optical iris. The interior pulsed with a dull blue light, and though the hum had thankfully died back down to its earlier soft, infrasonic state, it grew louder as Glory stepped closer to the now-open hatch.

She glanced behind herself, realizing that the figure that had tried to stop her, and she’d later collided with, was the bishop. But right then, he was just as rooted to the spot as the rest of his congregation, gazing in awe at what little of the ship’s interior they could see. None of them actually moved to approach, though. None except for Glory.

Before she stepped across the threshold, though, she turned to the others in incredulity. “None of you thought to just touch the damn thing?”

They didn’t answer. Glory shook her head as she turned back around, and slowly stepped over the threshold.

Almost immediately, the infrasonic hum seemed to envelop her, and she shut her eyes. Rather than the piercing irritation of the ultrasonic noise, the infrasound was almost… comforting, oddly enough. It definitely hadn’t been comforting earlier.

The effect must have had something to do with the ship’s interior. Gazing around herself, Glory couldn’t think of any word to describe it. Well, except for ‘alien’, perhaps, though that seemed obvious. The walls were the same fractal pattern as the outside of the ship, and the consoles sat at roughly sternum-height on a human.

Rather than buttons and gauges as one might expect to find in a human craft, the ship’s control panels appeared to be covered in patterns of multicolored and oddly-shaped crystals that slotted into contact points. The contact points currently in contact with a crystal emitted the same pulsing blue glow as the crystals themselves, while the empty contact points were dark.

“This… is…” the bishop’s voice was hushed with awe as he stepped across the threshold as well, gazing at the machinery around them.

Glory’s gaze drifted across the control panels towards a chevron-shaped archway that glowed a soft purple, and through it, she could see more control panels, stacked on top of each other. Glory presumed it was the cockpit.

That is, assuming the Benefactors laid out their ships in what a human would consider a ‘logical’ way. She had no way of knowing.

Glory stepped tentatively towards the chevron-archway, peering through to the cockpit. More control panels covered in the crystals and their contact points met her gaze. Then her eyes stumbled across something that didn’t immediately make sense, nor did it match anything else she’d seen in the ship so far.

She stepped through the archway, creeping closer to the large shape in the center of the cockpit. It appeared to be a deep gray-ish color, though it was difficult to tell exactly what color it was in the ship’s soft blue lighting.

A few steps closer, and Glory cocked her head, unsure of exactly what she was seeing. Slowly, she cocked her head the other way, and her eyes widened as the features suddenly lined up, and she suddenly saw it.

A face.

An alien face, partially tucked into the rest of its rough, carapace-clad body. Those two slits were definitely eyelids, even translucent as they were, and the horizontal slits in the center looked to be a nose. The vertical slits beneath it didn’t look like the mouth of any animal Glory had ever seen, but she supposed they could’ve served that purpose.

Its arms were surprisingly narrow, compared to the rest of the body, almost as though it had atrophied from lack of use, even before the creature died. Glory couldn’t see anything resembling legs, but they could have been hidden inside the carapace.

“What is that?” the bishop whispered.

Glory shook her head. “A Benefactor?”

“They look like that?”

Glory could only shrug. “No one’s ever seen one in person.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “I don’t know what I was expecting, but it’s not that.” He curled his lip in disgust. “To think these… things now rule our world.”

Privately, Glory agreed. Somehow, it just didn’t look grand enough to be the same species as the conquerors of the entire planet. The Benefactors were vast, unknowable beings, who ruled the world with an iron fist. This… thing was just some alien creature that got trapped inside a crashed ship and likely suffocated. Glory almost pitied it; what an ignoble death.

Glory tore her gaze forcibly from the alien creature—she couldn’t quite link it to the Benefactors enough to call it that—and turned instead to the largest control panel at the front of the cockpit.

The bishop came to stand beside her. “How do we activate this vessel?”

Glory snorted as she reached out to run a finger along one of the crystals slotted into a large, rectangular set of contact points. The contact sent a soft buzz through her finger, but otherwise did nothing. “How should I know?”

“You managed to open the hatch.”

“And that makes me an expert on Benefactor technology?” Glory shook her head. “All I did was touch a hatch. You should’ve figured it out weeks ago.”

He scowled at her. “Then figure it out. We don’t have all day.”

Glory paused and turned to him. She’d been so caught up in the, well, glory of being one of the first terrans to set foot in a Benefactor craft that she hadn’t considered him. Or, what he wanted with the ship.

What any of them actually wanted with the ship. Taurus had led an expedition east to find this place based simply off of a single vague message on a computer in an old world observatory; an expedition that had killed his wife, if that was the same expedition Needles had once told her about. She doubted he would’ve done any of that without sufficient cause.

And Glory, too dazzled by the ship, had completely missed the obvious.

She could’ve kicked herself.

“What’s the rush?” Glory asked, as nonchalantly as she could manage. “We’re already two of the first terrans to set foot in a Benefactor craft ever, as far as we know. This is already an achievement worthy of—”

“I don’t care for your grandstanding,” the bishop hissed.

Glory clenched her jaw, indignant at the interruption. She bit her tongue, however, and simply glared at the man.

He either didn’t notice her anger or didn’t care, continuing his interruption smoothly. “We need this, and soon. It’s only a matter of time until the tyrants turn all of their attention onto us. Our numbers might be vast by the standards of the wasteland, but compared to the citadels—” He cut himself off with an audible click of his jaw, but it was too late. Glory knew exactly what he hadn’t said.

“You want to use the ship to fight them,” she murmured, mostly to herself.

The bishop snorted, not even bothering to deny it. “Wasn’t it obvious?”

Yes. It should have been, at least. Why would cultists care for technological progress if it couldn’t be turned into a weapon? It had literally been written into their DNA, and so far, she’d only met one who didn’t follow in his brethren’s bloody footsteps.

Even so, however, Glory couldn’t quite believe it. It was just too ludicrous a plan. Shaking her head in disbelief, she said, “Even if you could get it working, even if you understood its controls… Even if it still worked perfectly after being buried under a mountain for a century, it’s still one ship! Against hundreds, possibly thousands!”

“It’s the best chance we’ve ever had!” the bishop bellowed, whirling to face her. “Look around you! Look at the desert outside! At the ravaged wastes! Look what they’ve done to your home! And yet, the humans who once owned this world now kneel in subservience to its destroyers, when they should be rebelling en masse!”

Glory reared, her lips curled in a snarl. “What would you have them do? Throw themselves towards their deaths? Render the human race extinct at the tyrants’ hands?”

She realized too late what she’d said, but ignored it. Unfortunately, judging by the look on his face, the bishop had noticed too, and now peered down at her knowingly. Haughtily. As if a mere slip of the tongue could prove emphatically what laid in Glory’s core.

“You chafe under their rule, too,” he said idly. “Did you know they outlawed artificial intelligence?”

Of course I know, Glory wanted to scream at him. I was built under the fear of those laws!

“All because machines were too smart for them.” He shook his head in disgust. “You must be positively miserable, surrounded by organics. I’m sorry I can’t help assuage it any, but at least you won’t have to lower yourself to associate with an apostate anymore.” He curled his nose at the word. “I saw it—the reedy little specimen hiding behind you in the Navajo village. Why you didn’t simply execute it when you had the chance, I’ll never understand.”

Apostate

noun

a person who renounces a religious belief or principle

Glory’s eyes narrowed. “You’re… referring to Needles?”

“Its name is of no consequence to me,” he said dismissively.

Its name.

Its.

It.

Trembling, Glory turned a furious glare onto him. Before she could speak, however, a noise from outside the ship drew their attention. It sounded like a shout, strangled halfway through.

The bishop cocked his head. “Stay here,” he commanded, and turned to march back towards the ship’s hatch.

Glory sneered at the command and followed closely behind him, watching as he startled. “What in the—”

He reached for the pistol at his hip. He never got the chance to grab it as Glory grabbed his wrist and twisted.

She wrenched his arm around, behind his back, up higher than was comfortable, and with a grip that ran the risk of fracturing his wrist. He cried out in pain, his grip on the pistol weakening as the weapon fell to the ramp with a metallic clank. He too fell to the ground, landing heavily on his knees with a groan of pain.

Glory yanked his hood back, revealing long dark hair pulled back into a ponytail. Perfect. She wrapped a hand around his ponytail and used it to wrench his head back, leaning down to whisper in his ear. “Don’t ever insult my healer around me again,” she snarled, before straightening back up and delivering a swift, firm kick to his upper back.

It destabilized his already unstable kneeling position, and he rolled swiftly down the ramp. Glory knelt and grabbed the pistol he’d dropped, reloading the magazine, aiming, and firing as a figure came at her from an angle.

Another cultist. No matter, then. Glory turned to the rest of the chamber, aiming and firing at figures in the flesh-robes as they flailed about. The two wastelanders were gone, Glory noted, likely having fled in the chaos.

But what had made the noise that lured them out of the ship, then?

The question hovered in her vision for a few milliseconds too long, distracting her. And in those milliseconds, the female cultist managed to fire a shot off in her direction.

Damage warnings screamed at her, and Glory leapt backwards, up into the ship and around the corner. A few more shots followed the first, but they all bounced harmlessly off the ship’s hull. Well, harmless for Glory. Judging by the pained yelp, the hull caused a ricochet.

Glory sighed and slumped against the interior wall, breathing slowly. After a moment, she straightened once more and moved to approach the hatch, but froze mid-step.

On the wall where she’d slumped, a large splotch of silvery coolant had been smeared. Glory abruptly remembered that she’d been shot. How had she even forgotten in the first place?

>> Engage Diagnostic

//Diagnostic engaging…

ALERT// chassis wall damage

ALERT// chassis component #276 damage

ALERT// massive coolant leak

ALERT// Recommend return to Dr. Matthias Janssen for repairs

>> Assess Nanite Repair Function

//Assessing…

- Nanite repair function effective. Nanite repair at 1.2%

ALERT// nanite repair function insufficient to halt coolant leak

ALERT// shutdown imminent

Glory raised fingers to her abdomen and slid them under her jumpsuit top, zeroing in on the hole quickly, almost directly over her navel. She plunged two fingers into the hole and rooted around, searching by feel for the damaged coolant line. To her dismay, she ran across several—too many to plug with her fingers alone.

Glory’s breathing began to pick up without her input as she realized that she was likely about to shut down in this Benefactor ship, deep under the cultists’ lair, and no one would ever know. She’d never see Needles again, or any of the others.

Something painful jolted through her chassis at the realization, and her breaths now escaped her in sharp pants.

Two sets of footsteps outside the ship suddenly filtered into Glory’s awareness. She jerked and tightened her free hand’s grip on the pistol, aiming towards the ship’s hatch. She might be damaged and on the verge of shutdown, but she would not be going out without a fight.

The two figures rounded the corner into Glory’s line of fire, and she leveled her pistol at them. “Don’t move!” she commanded, clearly startling the pair.

Rather than familiar cultist robes, however, they wore the same rough jumpsuit that she did. Vaguely, Glory recognized the man as the one who’d been put to work moving large boulders outside the ship when she’d first arrived. And, though she hadn’t seen the woman’s face, she assumed this was the same woman who’d been welding.

Even so, Glory refused to lower her weapon. “Stay back,” she warned, her voice laced with static.

The woman stared at her with her mouth agape. “What… are you?”

“Janssen model number 235-14, designation ‘Glory’.” Glory’s head dropped back against the bulkhead behind her, as her vision was overcome with damage alerts. “I also happen to be on the verge of shutdown.”

“Is there anything we can do?” the man asked.

Just like that. No sneering. No crowing over her failure. Just a simple offer to help. It both reminded her painfully of Needles, and rose her suspicions. “Why?” she asked.

“You helped us by taking out the bishop,” the woman said. “We’d like to return the favor.”

A favor for a favor. Now that, Glory did understand. They had offered. And, well, if Glory were honest with herself, she really didn’t want to die.

She nodded back towards the hatch. “Grab the welding torch you were using,” she said to the woman.

Immediately, the woman ran off to obey, disappearing out of Glory’s line of sight.

The man remained perfectly still, and said, “Could you please lower the gun?”

“Why should I?”

“Because you’re making me nervous,” he said honestly.

Glory ignored the request.

He sighed. “Fine. Why—Why are you here?”

“The high purifier brought me to help uncover Benefactor secrets,” Glory said.

He shook his head. “No, I mean… why here? This facility?”

Glory had to fight against a spasm that ran through her arm as coolant levels continued to drop; a reaction to rising core temperatures. “I was taken against my will.”

Before he could answer, the woman ran back inside, welding torch in hand. “All right, now what?”

Glory hitched her jumpsuit top up, revealing the hole in her abdomen. “Give it to me.”

“How are you going to hold the torch and the gun at the same time?” the man asked.

“I have two hands.”

“But you’ll need one to find whatever you’re looking for.”

Damn him. And damn the cultist who shot her.

Reluctantly, Glory allowed the man to take the gun, preparing to lunge for him if he made any move to turn it onto her, massive coolant leak or no.

Much to her relief, however, he immediately moved to the ship’s hatch and peered outside, waiting with the gun in hand.

And with both of her hands free, Glory pulled the leaking coolant lines out through the hole in her abdomen and began using the torch to melt them back together. The repair job was the definition of slapdash, but it would do for the moment.

Tucking her lines back in through the hole in her abdomen, Glory ran another diagnostic.

>> Engage Diagnostic

//Diagnostic engaging…

ALERT// chassis wall damage

ALERT// chassis component #276 damage

ALERT// coolant leak ceased

ALERT// shutdown averted

ALERT// Recommend return to Dr. Matthias Janssen for repairs

>> Assess Nanite Repair Function

//Assessing…

- Nanite repair function effective. Nanite repair at 15.8%

Glory tipped her head back against the bulkhead, her breath escaping her in one long gust. Shutdown averted. She’d never seen such beautiful words in a diagnostic report in all her existence.

“So are you… all right now?” the woman asked.

Glory swallowed, squaring her shoulders. She had company. “Yes,” she said. Then, grudgingly, “Thank you.”

The woman made a face. “Well, I don’t think I ever want to see anything like that again, so…”

“Who are you?” Glory asked, desperate to turn the topic away from her unseemly malfunction.

“Mona Pryor,” the woman said, then nodded to the man, “And this is my brother Herman.”

Well, at least she had names for them, now. “I see.”

“We’re from Sanctum Mesa,” Mona continued, apparently not noticing the sudden tension in Glory’s frame. “These freaks attacked us on our way back from the wind farm.”

“…I see.” Glory exhaled slowly, considering her options. She could omit the truth… but, if and when they found out the fate of their town, and possibly found out that she had been there… well, she didn’t want to consider their reaction. Or, she could tell the truth, and run the risk of them lashing out at her in their grief.

“I sure hope mayor Grayson doesn’t do anything stupid,” Mona continued with a nervous-sounding giggle. “Remember when Gianna disappeared for a day?”

Her brother didn’t appear to be paying attention to her, however; his gaze was fixed on Glory, his eyes narrowed. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

Glory blinked. “What do you mean?”

“Your face twitched when she mentioned the Mesa.” His lips pulled down in a frown. “You know something we don’t?”

Mona turned to Glory as well, confusion writ across her face.

Glory’s own lips thinned. Truth it would be, then. Damn his observant eyes. “Sanctum Mesa was raided a few days ago,” she blurted. “Everyone under the age of sixty was carried off. Everyone else was left in a mass grave.”

Mona’s mouth dropped open, and Herman’s gaze darkened at the news. “And how do you know this?” he asked.

“I passed through with a group led by Marshal Martin Dixon of Black Sun,” she said. She hoped Dixon’s name might buy her some goodwill, even if the man himself wouldn’t have deigned to associate with her now. They didn’t know that, though. “We found the perimeter down, and the settlement abandoned. A ripperbeast had wandered into town at some point.”

Mona swore softly, raking fingers through her hair. “So, what does that mean? They’re here, we just haven’t noticed them?”

“The mutants are smarter than they look,” Glory said. “They’re likely keeping you separated on purpose, to ensure you feel isolated and outnumbered. I woke up alone, surrounded by raiders.” She didn’t mention how the purifier had taken an unnerving interest in her, but she figured that wasn’t really relevant to her point.

Herman turned his sour glare down the ramp, tightening his grip on the gun. “But… Lauren! And Jacob! I swear, if they’ve hurt a hair on his head, I’ll—”

A deafening crack echoed through the chamber and around the ship, making Glory wince as feedback squealed in her ear. It sounded like a gunshot, but damage alerts didn’t immediately clog her vision, so her gaze whipped to the side to assess her newfound allies.

Mona looked slightly dazed at the noise, but Glory couldn’t see any blood or damage on her, so she moved onto Herman. At first, he looked unharmed as well, but there was a strange stiffness in his limbs, and he was staring directly at Glory with an odd, wall-eyed look on his face.

His grip on the handgun loosened and it fell to the ground with a metallic clang.

Red began to filter through the gray jumpsuit around his sternum, and he collapsed. Mona shrieked and jumped forward to catch him, landing in a heap. Glory wanted to yank her back; there was a shooter somewhere nearby. But, as she ran out to assess the rest of the chamber…

She saw the bishop, conscious once more, running out of the chamber with some kind of rifle in hand.

Glory felt like a fool. Of course they kept caches of weapons around where they corralled their prisoners. They weren’t stupid, and yet she and everyone else kept underestimating them.

“What are you doing?” Mona sobbed behind her. “Help him!”

Glory turned back around and took in the scene. There was red everywhere—on Glory’s hands, on Mona’s hands, all over Herman, pooling on the floor. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever seen this much blood from one person before.

Stepping closer to kneel beside Herman, opposite to his sister. “Judging by the amount of blood he’s losing, that shot likely severed his superior mesenteric artery.” She frowned, staring at the ground. “There’s nothing we can do.”

Mona cried out at the news, rocking back and forth with her brother in her arms. “Nothing?”

“Not without advanced medical technology,” Glory said.

Mona looked up at her with tears in her eyes, her mouth open but no sound escaping. Herman gurgled in her grasp, his life slipping away. Glory shifted forward, planting one hand on the metal grating that made up the ship’s floor.

Wait…

Ship.

Benefactor ship. How had she forgotten?

Glory surged forward, looming over Herman’s other shoulder. “I think we can save him.”

***

High Purifier Taurus had been many things throughout his life—an initiate, a brother, a bishop… a husband and a father. But what he had never been was a fool.

And yet, when his own bishop came running to him, face littered in bruises and dried blood running down from his nose, that was the only word Taurus could think of to describe himself.

A naive, trusting fool.

Of course a conniving machine that had once traveled alongside… Scorpius would be skilled in manipulation. Of course it played along until and opportunity presented itself. Of course it aligned itself with the heretics—whom else had it been surrounding itself with ever since it had awoken?

“I—We tried to stop them,” the bishop croaked, voice filled with desperation. “Monsignor, you must believe me!”

“I do.” Taurus rose a comforting hand. “I believe you. And I will handle the situation. For now, return to the infirmary and let the healers take a look at you.”

The bishop nodded jerkily and staggered off, poorly concealing a limp. Taurus watched him leave for a few more moments before turning to one of his enforcers, who waited for his commands with bated breath and wickedly eager eyes.

“The ship must be liberated, and I want the android returned, functional,” Taurus commanded. “The heretics are expendable.”

The enforcer’s teeth gleamed when he grinned. “Yes, Monsignor,” he breathed.