Diaz

The station's halls were a clean, surgical white that contrasted sharply against the flat blacks and intermittent greys of the squad's armor. More than once, Diaz would peer down intersecting hallways, or through transparent view-portals built into some scant few doors he passed, looking for anything of note. But the rooms he could see into were much like the rest of the station, sterile and devoid of life. He tried to keep the swaying of his arms to a minimum as he walked.

He would have rather this not-so-mysterious package been some bio-weapon or particularly unstable chem-bomb. The idea forced a grim twitch of his lips. He'd rather die with his flesh rotting away or drowning on his own blood than facilitate something stranger than his limited worldview. It wasn't his place to judge or even understand his employers' motives as a hired gun. Weapons—even the really nasty ones—were something he understood, but this… It was unnatural, like watching someone eat shards of glass or lie on a bed of nails. That was what made his teeth itch, not the morality of it. He'd had one question answered by looking in the box, only for a dozen more to surface.

None of that mattered. Princess wanted to be in charge and he certainly wasn't going to back out of anything she asked him to do. If she said jump, he'd respond with the age-old 'how high' and do it. Some habits were too old to ignore. What felt like half a lifetime of following orders had seen his standing quickly rise once he'd signed on with the Shadow. Being a merc and being a soldier had a lot of common ground. It was a good fit for a man like him. Flexible morals, a strong back and steady aim would see him to a wealthy retirement or an early grave, and that was good enough for him.

The robot eventually entered an open room akin to an oversized airlock. As far as Diaz could see, the only thing out of place were the four retracted turrets in each corner of the ceiling. Princess indicated all four on the squad's HUDs without betraying her interest outside of her helmet. So far, she wasn't anything exceptional as a leader, but she would have been a good soldier. As it stood, being a merc wasn't all that different in times like these. See a threat, inform, react as needed.

"What are those for?" Tony said over his suit's loudspeakers to their guide, causing Diaz to wonder why Tony would ask such a stupid question. The answer to his own question was simple. If a question could be asked, regardless of how ridiculous or obvious, Tony would be the one to ask it. To answer Tony's question, it was common practice for black sites like this to kill any potential leaks before they escaped, so of course they would have automated defenses, you eejit. All this flashed across Diaz's mind in the time it took their guide to retrieve the programed response from the station's servers.

"Containment and failsafe measures." The robot said as the room cycled a chemical cleaner through the air. "The rooms beyond this point are air sealed. You are advised against cycling your internal air supplies. Failure to comply may result in illness, injury or death."

"That's welcoming." Tony muttered on the squad's net.

"Don't ask if you don't want the answer next time, gobshite." Diaz said.

The room finished its cycle and the door at the far side hissed open, screeching from age or poor maintenance, both of which seemed equally probably given their guide's state. The robot trundled forwards, and he saw why they were advised against breathing the station's air— or lack thereof. The thin atmosphere was filled with ghostly-hued vaporous compounds. It could have been his imagination, but for a second, he could swear he saw Princess flinch when she first peered into the mists. He checked the atmospheric data on his suit's HUD, several unknown compounds registered. The few that his armor did recognize promised a slow and painful death if he got contaminated. What about a person who could breathe vacuum? Diaz shook the thought from his head as soon as it surfaced. It was best not to think such preposterous thoughts, for the time being at least.

The white surgical panels that defined the halls and rooms so far had been abandoned for industrial grey insulation as they delved deeper into the station. He hadn't been in many rock-bound space stations before, but this one was by far the most chilling. The swirling mists sporadically coiled into ghastly specters, seeming to claw at the robot in front of him. He expected them to dissipate as the group marched through them, yet they remained intangibly solid, tricking his eyes into thinking he was pressing through a dense crowd rather than thin atmosphere.

Giving his head a shake, he pressed through the illusion. The specters continued with their tantalizing dance, some scrapping low while others leapt high, and for a time he was lost within the vapors, his eyes pulling semi-solid shapes from thin air. It was only when their robot guide had stopped and pointed that Diaz snapped out of his waking dream. He followed the guide's humanoid hand to a low slab of metal that reminded him of a very spartan altar, its plateau easily six meters square.

Zoning out was one thing, but his suit's clock said he'd been walking over a half hour. It had felt like two minutes to him. He bit down on his cheek and focused on the pain, which always helped to keep him from nodding off. He was so familiar with pain that it was almost comforting.

"Deposit the cargo here." Their guide said. "Self-designate Princess, you should be receiving new instructions shortly." He reversed his grip and turned so he was looking at Jhordan before they heaved the package onto the slab and stood motionless, uncertain of what to do next but unwilling to ask in front of their guide.

Princess gave some sloppy hand signs, and he ran through his suit's blackout protocol with drilled precision in response. Princess was diverting more attention to the conversation she was having inside her helmet than she was to her squad. The others took longer to grasp her intention, but they all figured it out in short order. He thought he heard someone speaking just at the cusp of his hearing. It was hard to be sure since their guide was rattling so loudly. Why anyone would want a robot that obnoxious was beyond him.

"Your isolation has been noted." The robot said. "You three are to return to your ship now. This unit shall guide you." It had pointed at Nye, Tony and him before trundling back the way they had come.

The three of them all turned to look at Princess in unison, who nodded after a second of hesitation. He fell in at the back of the column and spared a parting look at Princess and Jhordan. Princess used her arms to signal he should watch the time and team, which meant she'd noticed it too. They were already deep within the station while she was going deeper still. Naturally, he had to keep the other out of trouble while she was away. He bit down on his cheek hard enough to draw blood and turned away, losing sight of Princess and Jhordan in the mists of the station.

* * *

Princess

I was busy listening to the Client as my squad walked away. It was annoying that we had to limit the communication to our suit's speakers. It wasn't anything we couldn't handle but yelling what you're doing tends to be a bad idea when bullets were flying. Not that it would come to that. I hoped.

As the voice droned on, I realized why the Captain had been so eager to take on this contract, as well as several other things that had struck me as odd. The job, which had been deliberately vague, started to gain clarity but the general disreputable nature of the job persisted. Yet none of the information provided answered the question I was most concerned by. Why did the Client request me?

As the voice finished, I could only stammer out that I understood my instructions and the consequences of failure to comply with them. Anyone who called the people they abducted 'research materials' wasn't someone I wanted to get on the bad side of. Some things were better left unknown, and the fate of the man I'd brought here was one of them. What I knew with crystal clarity was that we needed to get the hell off this station as fast as humanly possible and never look back.

"Should I be flattered or insulted I get to be included in this?" Jhordan asked over her suit's loudspeakers. She would have been boisterous regardless, but her armor made her even more blaringly loud than usual. Another resigned sigh occupied my helmet, just another downside of our current arrangement. That didn't stop me from wishing I could turn her volume down. I tapped into my annoyance and leveled my voice.

"I doubt the client is interested in your feminine charms," I stated coldly. "He's sending another bot to guide us deeper into this rock and preparing our package now. You're just the muscle who gets to carry it since you've got the biggest suit, and he wants as few people to see as possible."

"But they'll see it when we get back to the Cat anyways. Why hide it now?"

"The station, not the package. That's why it's you and me."

"Figures, never send a man to do a woman's job, right?" Jhordan gave me a light nudge on the shoulder with her elbow and received only the blank stare of my black-mirrored visor in response. "Right, you don't like to be touched. Sorry."

These infra-reflective vapors were getting on my nerves, more so than Jhordan was. The thin atmosphere barely held any heat, but the minute amount it did was cascading off the room's specters like an inverted waterfall. I couldn't tell if the others could see it, and I didn't feel like singling out my pentachromatic eyes by mentioning it. It wasn't their fault their unmutated eyes were weaker, but most norms couldn't understand there was so much outside of their range of vision. Where they saw whites and blacks and greys, I saw a palette of color in each.

One thing I was sure no one else saw were the ripples left by something akin to ball lightning playfully chasing after one another on the upper edges of my ultra-vision. Even with my freak eyes, I couldn't make any precise observations about the wisps, only that they were there. Every time I turned my head, I saw a semi-solid lake of iridescent slime that kept having boulders thrown in it, assaulting me with a brutally brilliant kaleidoscope of noxious colors.

In those nauseating mists, Jhordan stood out like a vibrant grey island in the swirling rainbow menagerie. The silence hung in the thin air, haunting mists flickering, while I watched her fidget and found humor in seeing the typically bubbly, sociable girl at a loss for words. It was a rare enough sight to be noteworthy. I should stare daggers at her more often if that's all it took. I smiled to myself but didn't let amusement into my voice.

"If you do that again, I'll space you and take your share of this job."

"It's one thing to joke about casual murder. It's another entirely to threaten a woman's livelihood." She said, feigning dismay. "So, assuming I live long enough to carry it, what's this second mysterious package supposed to be or do we know yet?"

"It's an AI core." I was watching her already, otherwise I would have missed the moment her fidgeting stopped and her armor went rigid.

"A real one?" She said incredulously, hefting her huge long-barreled rifle and checking the action. She already had a round chambered, and though her clunky thumb reached for the safety, she refrained from clicking it off.

"Yes. Not a dumb one but a real, smart AI with a personality and everything. That's what this station does, they either build cores or they get them somehow for any non-guild Ice-Breakers so they can star hop off the books. We're getting one as the second half of our payment."

Jhordan had to chew that one for a while. I was still thinking it over too. AI were supposed to be a big no-no as far as anyone who ruled less than a star cluster was concerned. Ice-Breakers were the only exception; their guild managed all the transit between stars, and apparently, AI were a big part of that. Considering the math needed for mundane space flight, was it really any surprise AI were needed for faster-than-light travel?

"That's crazy! Those things are worth more than the Shadow and everything on it, but these guys are just giving us one for smuggling some freak-"

"A Package," I interjected in a low growl, before pointedly checking our surroundings. "Nothing freaky about it or whatever its contents might be, Jhordan."

"There's no way this is legit. The nanosecond we plug that thing in, it's going to go rogue and kill us all! Smart AI always go insane. Half of them start out botshit crazy and get recycled anyway. For scraps-sake, they're the one who launched the first rods and wiped thirty star systems off the maps!"

She wasn't wrong.

"It's the Captain's call on what we do with it. If you damage it in any way, you will answer to him, after I'm through with you. Now shut up before the Client's next bot gets here. We're professionals here on a job. We can't let our opinions get in the way." Even if that meant I needed to turn a blind eye to what they were doing to people like me here. We'd taken the job and our word was our bond.

From the slight motions of Jhordan's helmet, I could tell that she was venting her frustration but still had the decency to keep her complaints sealed in her suit. Whatever the reason, it was true that most of the galaxy's smart AI were either shackled into solo terminals or ships with limited connection to the physical world. Everyone had learned from the synthetic revolution that an AI's curiosity could be a blessing or a curse depending on how much they cared to act upon their ideas and how much freedom they had.

A faint humming coupled with the sound of rubberized padding scuffing against a stone finish heralded the arrival of the new escort robot. Keeping my high-caliber shotgun shoulder slung, I motioned for Jhordan to do the same with her own weapon, which she reluctantly stowed after a moment's hesitation.

The robot was massive compared to my above-average build and it even dwarfed Jhordan's Bulwark Medium in width if not height. Its four legs were each thicker than my waist and every leg housed so many joints that they resembled a coiled serpent rather than the classic spider leg design that was so common now. A stylized octagonal girdle, roughly level with my torso, protected the join between lower and upper chassis. The torso was a practical mix of a sphere and a cartoon-shaped heart with shoulder-mounted semi-circular laser emitters. Centered on its torso, in blocky commercial lettering, HELPER-112 was painted dark blue, diverging from the glossy metallic grey finish on the rest of robot's body. One arm was a rotary pulse laser array. The other, a multifunction manipulator arm with either a gigantic industrial claw or a much smaller humanoid hand when the claw retracted onto the forearm. A single omnidirectional optic protruded from the top of its torso, scanning the room with wide arcs of infrared lidar before withdrawing back into its body. The robot walked with a disturbingly smooth gait, practically gliding, and stood in front of me before exposing its optics again and scanning me to its satisfaction.

"This unit is designated as Helper one-one-two. Verbally confirm that you are self-designated as Princess." Helper said, its blaring voice originating from somewhere I couldn't discern. Great, another loud one I couldn't turn down.

"Yes, I verify that I am Princess." I said, matching its volume over my suit's loudspeakers.

"Acknowledged, confirm you have received and understood the need for zero transmissions or receptions over the electromagnetic spectrum, as the area ahead contains secretive and hazardous equipment which could compromise both hardsuit integrity and-" I interrupted Helper with a wave.

"Yes, check the server log. I already confirmed that." I said, annoyed with the redundancy; especially when this big can was being so polite about it. It was just doing its job to the best of its limited abilities, same as me.

"This unit is not connected to any server systems. It is also hardened against electronic intrusion. It is unable to confirm with the facility servers at this time. Please verbally confirm your understanding."

"Fine, yes. I understand and have ordered a comms blackout for my squad. Our suits shouldn't pick up any signals and can't send any."

"Acknowledged, please follow this unit to your destination."

"At least this tour guide has a name." Jhordan said, braving another hostile glance from me as we followed Helper deeper into the station. This one didn't get a reaction out of her at all. She only had eyes for our new guide.

* * *

Diaz

"What are you allowed to tell us about this facility?" Tony asked their guide as the group was led into the decontamination room. This was the latest in a long line of unsuccessful questions directed at their put upon guide, but Tony's prattling voice helped keep Diaz focused, so he didn't intervene.

Tony had a talent for getting on people's nerves. It might have been his true calling, if you went for that kind of thing. Tony had been at it as soon as Princess was well out of earshot. At a minimum, the bot didn't seem to mind, but all bots were either ridiculously polite or mindless killing machines, so it was hard to tell.

"This unit is not permitted to exchange irrelevant data." The robot stated after a longer than normal pause. Diaz guessed its programing matched its hardware. It slowed further, grinding to a halt as the cleanroom started its decontamination routine.

"Fair, but I doubt there's such a thing as irrelevant data. All information is relevant to something, so we just need to find some agreeable parameters, right? You need to give me a left and right field-of-fire here. Is age taboo? What about collateral? Is there any human staff here? What do you do for waste disposal and recycling? Heat regulation and dispersion? Could you state what financial sector this place has the biggest impact on?" Tony asked, prattling on.

The bot's head stooped as if deep in thought, and the bot idled for some time. Then the loud humming of its internal circuitry reached the entire squad over the decontamination chamber's fans.

"I think you may have crashed it," Nye stated dryly. "Poor little can's bluescreened."

"I doubt it. It's probably looking for programed responses to my questions and not finding any. So it's either trying to find server-approved blanket statements, or it's making its own answers and checking them against the server's guidelines." Tony said, then nodded sagely, as if he had planned this all along.

"You sound pretty confident. Have you done this before?" Diaz asked. Tony just shrugged in reply.

"Do you think that Cat will be patched up when we get back?" Nye asked.

"I doubt it," Diaz said. "That hunter-killer mangled the ship's belly. That's not something a two-hour field patching will be able to hide."

The bot's humming grew louder still, and their guide's torso began to visibly shake in palsy as it overclocked its hardware, trying to make the most of its dated circuitry. The room finished its decontamination cycle, and without the fans forcing fresh air into the room, the humming crescendoed as it echoed on the walls.

"Let's just hope we don't fly into any more rogue bots on the way back then," Nye said. "What do you think the odds are it'll happen twice?"

Abruptly, the humming stopped. The echoes fading as the bot lifted its head slowly and looked around, as though it only now realized it had nodded off and was embarrassed.

"Do you really think your ship was attacked by chance?" Their guide said in a synthesized voice filled with polite malice. The room's turrets deployed, threat indicator lights toggling from grey to blue to amber.

Diaz was the first to react, skipping backwards to a wall and taking aim at one of the room's four turrets. He briefly thought of using his under-barrel submunitions, but this far in the station, he shouldn't over-penetrate with his 14.9mm rounds. Nye followed suit and Tony half-heartedly shouldered his heavy pulse gun while copying the backwards non-linear motions of his squadmates to a corner of his own. The turrets never tracked them. Instead, they stayed fixed on their guide.

The autoguns' barrels spun to life and a hail of fiery steel fell upon the robot—which was readying its limbs as crude weapons—shredding its thin cosmetic plating and eviscerating the time-worn robot. The echoing roar of the turrets ended within seconds and the stubby turrets retracted into their dormant positions as gun smoke and flakes of carbon lingered in the light faux gravity. Once the turrets toggled off, a hidden speaker keyed and a tired man's voice spoke.

"I'd trust that you can all find your way back to your ship now."