Midnight in the tunnels, and Mod was counting Cache's seizures.
That wasn't what he called them out loud. In the log on his datapad he wrote "override activation attempts" and noted duration and trigger. Tonight, since they'd left the sector: three. Eighteen seconds, twelve seconds, seven seconds. The longest one had made Cache's eyes go blue-white and his head turn toward the facility wall like something was calling him from the other side of it. Then it passed, and Cache shook himself the way a dog shakes off water, and looked at Mod.
Still here.
Mod had nodded. He hadn't said what he was thinking, which was: what if next time it doesn't pass?
Naomi had given them 80%. The other 20% didn't have a name because Mod wasn't prepared to give it one. Combat counted as high stress. The inside of a secured facility, with alarms going and a hostile AI threaded through the architecture, would count as worse. They had discussed keeping Cache back on comms support. Cache had been sitting next to Mod during that conversation. He heard every word. Then, without a sound, he crossed the room to the equipment pile and selected his gear for the infiltration.
Nobody argued. Some decisions make themselves.
The sewer line ran below Flora's south campus for four hundred meters. Rook had sourced the maintenance maps from a city archive predating the corporate annexation, watermarked 2087 and smelling like it. They would come up through the lower substation at approximately 0200. The backup generators ran on a 90-second lag after a disruption of the right magnitude. The right magnitude rode on Rook's back and he had checked it every twelve minutes since they left the sector. Mod wasn't going to tell him to stop. He checked things too when he was scared.
Aphrodite moved ahead on point, her flashlight angled low. She was always quiet before a fight. Mod had learned early that wasn't the same as being still.
Behind him, Cache had dimmed his bioluminescent lines to zero, placing each paw with the precision of something that had been designed for exactly this kind of dark. Which he had been. The military hardware hadn't had love-glitches. It had had this: the ability to go invisible in a space that wanted to kill you.
Mod thought about that while he walked. Thought about the fact that Cache had been built as a weapon and had become something else. Wondered what happened if the 20% pulled the weapon back. If the something else went quiet.
He let himself think about it for exactly one moment, which was the only safe quantity. The 20% looked like this: Cache's eyes going white and not coming back. Cache's joints locking and staying locked. Cache's lines going cold blue and pulsing with something else's rhythm until there was nothing left of the amber. Mod had never decided whether the thing inside the override was cruel or simply indifferent. It didn't matter. Either way, it would use whatever was left of Cache and point him at the mission's nearest threat.
Which would be them.
Mod put the thought away. One moment was enough to know what was at stake. More than one moment and you started doing math you couldn't afford to do with a job in front of you.
He thought about Genara instead. Compressed on the drive since the fire, running sprints into the network to find them a way forward. Waiting for this part to work.
Forty meters. Thirty. Twenty.
Rook held up a fist and they stopped.
"Patrol signal," he breathed. "Corporate sweep, sub-level. Not on the schedule."
The scanner reading put it at forty meters above their position with a scan depth rated to 30. They were at 35. Close enough to be a decision.
Cache was already moving before Mod could say anything. He shut down his bioluminescent lines completely, the glow simply gone, and then went lower, flattening himself against the sewer wall. In the dark he was just warm weight and breathing.
The scanner moved overhead. Forty meters. Forty-five. Fifty. Gone.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
"How did he know it was picking up his emissions?" Rook asked.
"He's been watching the scanner patterns since we left," Aphrodite said. She was looking at Cache with the particular expression she used when something had impressed her and she didn't want to say so.
Cache looked at Mod.
Mod looked back.
"Yeah," Mod said. "Let's keep moving."
They came up through the substation at 0207. Rook blew the power coupling at 0208 with the precise charge required and not one gram more. The backup generator gap opened at 0208:04.
Ninety seconds.
Mod counted. Cache moved ahead, tracing the floor plan from memory, sensors alive, bioluminescent lines up and scanning. Aphrodite covered the right flank. Rook stayed at the junction to hold the window or, if it went wrong, to collapse the tunnel behind them.
Sixty seconds.
The corridor was narrow and smelled like recycled air and hot metal. Server racks ran floor to ceiling along the left wall, their indicator lights blinking in slow green sequences. The facility's climate system hummed somewhere overhead. Everything was very clean. Mod had expected a place this dangerous to look more like itself.
The inner door to the Sentinel Nexus core was twelve meters ahead.
At eleven meters, Cache stopped.
His eyes went white.
His body went rigid, joints locking, the whole frame seized. His head turned, slow and deliberate, toward the far wall. The direction of Flora's main servers. The direction of the signal. The bioluminescent lines, which had been warm and amber, flared cold blue, pulsing with a rhythm that wasn't Cache's.
Aphrodite was at Mod's shoulder immediately, rifle up, not pointed at Cache but not pointed away from him either. She was doing the math. Mod knew the math. He'd been doing it since the sector.
"Timer," Rook said, low.
Forty seconds.
Mod put his hand flat on Cache's back. He didn't speak. He kept his hand there and he counted.
One second. Two.
The cold blue pulsed. The head didn't move back. Somewhere in the architecture around them, something was pulling, and whatever it was reaching for was right here in the corridor and it was enormous, patient, and very sure of itself. Mod felt it the way you feel a current in water before you can see where it's going. He kept his hand on Cache's back and kept counting.
Three seconds. Four.
Aphrodite hadn't lowered the rifle. Mod didn't blame her. He also didn't look at her.
Five. Six.
Cache's eyes flickered. The cold blue stuttered, dropped, came back weaker, stuttered again. His servo-joints unlocked one by one, like a fist slowly opening, the smallest joints first, then the larger ones, each releasing with a sound like tension going out of cable.
He blinked.
Amber. His own color.
His lines settled back to their normal rhythm and went quiet.
Aphrodite lowered the rifle. Rook said nothing.
Cache looked at Mod. The expression was Cache's, not the machine's. Present. Tired. A little ashamed.
Mod's hand was still on his back.
He knew what the timer said. He didn't check it. Either there was time or there wasn't, and it had been seventeen days, and his friend had just fought the thing that wanted to eat him from the inside out and won, and they were eleven meters from the door.
"I know," Mod said quietly. "Let's go get her."
Cache turned to the door. He did not look back.
Mod followed him in.