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Sweet, warm dreams were interrupted by suffocation and metal so cold that the skin was torn away when the back of his hand brushed against it.  It was a moment that demanded a shocked gasp for air, and there was such a lack of air to be had that he nearly blacked out from the trying.

Three machine legs an armspan thick were situated around the– bed?  pod?  container? that Orion lay within.  The machine itself was tubes overlapping tubes, bulging components, and various black spheres inset into the gaps.  A disembowelment of technical components dangling from a frame that connected the legs.  Insectile, multi-jointed limbs lined the sides, some holding pieces of Orion’s container.

The fourth leg shuddered and glowed, a foot from Orion’s ear.  A laser cutting apparatus.  Dismantling or disconnecting something that pinned Orion’s container down.  Orion had an eerie sense of the design, what it was for, what it was capable of.

It wasn’t real knowledge.  Orion knew that in a moment.  It connected to nothing, felt sterile, the edges of that knowledge were too neat.  Implanted.

Implanted knowledge told Orion that it had to be loud.  It would whine, components would bang, as they churned coolant through.  Or it would have been, but there wasn’t enough air to carry the vibrations.

Air.  That was a priority.

There had been–

Orion’s arm was tangled in tubes and straps.  Wet clothing made everything heavier.

I was breathing a minute ago, Orion thought, terror trying to paralyze his thoughts, which had already come to a near-halt with the near blackout.  Even pausing to recognize or think about those things was more delay.  How?

The bed jolted.

One connection severed.

Orion found the mask and connected tube but the component was caught beneath straps, now.  One of the massive legs had pinched the side of the pod, pulling wires and things tight.  Pulling Orion’s mask off.

So Orion plunged his face into the fluid, meeting it there.

One lungful of oxygen.

In the warm fluid, as Orion reached for straps to try to disconnect something, arm, hand, and sleeve brushed past his face, and droplets of moisture and tears at the corners of Orion’s eyes that had frozen now came off.  Skin throbbed.  The injury at the back of the hand especially.

I was dreaming about girls. 

Past the murk of the water, Orion could see more machines.  Each was different.  One was connected to a vent, and clawed away the debris that was pulled to the mechanisms of its underbelly.  Another was vacuuming out small debris, one nozzle roaming, the other attached to a vent.  Others were dismantling, moving, and collecting bigger pieces of the room and the containers.

There were other people out there.  Orion couldn’t see clearly.  Writing skittered across Orion’s field of vision, starting to say something, then stopped and started from the beginning when the movement and blur of the water obscured the view.

Life was always hard.  Everything took effort, even things that others didn’t blink at.  Even the girls.  Pursuing them, presenting myself to them, staying connected, staying mindful, reading signals.

The container that held Orion jolted.  From the way the head of it jerked, bobbed, and settled into a fading tremor that renewed with every jostle, it had come partially free.

That was what the dream had felt like.  The moment when it had all stopped, and there’d been– those long moments with girls that had felt like home.  Talking, letting defenses down.  The inside of the container had felt like that.  A long rest, without the struggle.

Orion had to leave the container, now.

One deep breath.  One moment to soak in the warmth and relative safety.

Then out.

His unused muscles were shaky as Orion slipped over the container’s edge.  The outer edge was as cold as the leg of the machine had been.  Taking bits of the tips and pads of fingers.

The floor- Orion’s feet were already on the way to the ground when the realization that the floor was metal that would be just as cold hit.  Except he was wearing boots.  He hadn’t known.

He didn’t know enough.  Even with the memories and self awareness he did have, it felt as though there was a roadblock in the way.  He had to stop, find a way to what he needed.

The act of standing felt unwieldy.  So did turning his head, taking in the fuller scene, eyes moving, putting it all in perspective. As if every movement went a little too far, then had to be pulled back in.

It was cold.  When Orion pushed his hands across face to get it dry, moving on to running fingers through his hair to get wet strands out of his face, hair was already stiffening.  Freezing.

The floor had a slope and the room had a tilt to it, which didn’t help.  Two containers had been smashed, the occupants with them.  Across the room, four people were clustered by a door.  Wearing masks and oxygen.

Nothing reacted or got in the way as Orion hurried to the next container.  The soles of Orion’s boots were gel-like, with a level of traction that made Orion feel as if he would stick to the floor and be left unable to lift his feet again, but they pulled away at the right moment.  That traction ended up being good, because the occupant of the next container had been stepped on by the same machine that had been accessing Orion’s container.  Lower body gone, organs and ropes of flesh tangled with tubes.  Shattered metal and fluids leaked onto the floor and ran down the sloped surface.  Clear, blue-tinted water refused to mix with the blood, forming spirals, whorls, and streaks.

Orion freed the mask from around her head, and leaned in to use it, face inches from the woman’s.  She was still alive, or some sparks were still firing.  Writing formed its jagged lines, then resolved into letters.  Pine.  That was her name.  Her mouth moved, teeth chattering slightly.  Or jaw jittering.

There was no recognition in her eyes.

Forehead resting momentarily against hers, Orion ran hands through her hair, which had the added benefit of warming them in the water.  It eased that already bone-deep ache the cold made.  He closed Pine’s eyes, then reached down.  Finding the tube, where it connected to the mask.  It fed off into the side.

The side and top of the container had symbols on it.  At the side, it was a circle with a square-shaped chunk taken out of the side of it.  Writing manifested again.

OXYGEN.

Orion hurried to undo the clasps, freeing it.  It had to be pulled free from inside the container.  Orion’s bodysuit had a place to slide it in, near the hip.

There were two more symbols at the top of the container.  A triangle with a triangle cut into the bottom edge, and a bar code script.  Both resolved into words.  Two cases nestled in beside one another.

PROVISIONS
PINE

Orion pulled them free.  Compact containers, metal, meant to be clipped to the belt and back.  Pine’s was heavy.

His eyes fell on the container he’d been in, still being dismantled.

The metal around the oxygen tank there had crumpled, with stress lines reaching across the case, obscuring the bar code.  He had provisions, and he had custom equipment.

Orion backtracked, one hand stiff around the handles of the cases.

The machines didn’t care.  They weren’t paying attention to anyone in the room.  It didn’t matter.  One massive mechanical leg moved, and it didn’t move slowly.  The laser cutter glowed, and paused to cool.  With no air, the heat of the machinery had nowhere to transfer to except further up the arm.  That limb moved dangerously close to Orion as he approached his container.

Two more cases.

A spark of light made Orion glance up.

The laser attachment was changing out, pulling inside the leg, with three rods extending.  Rails.  Other, smaller limbs pulled the oxygen tank out of the way.  Frost flecked off the metal.

He reached for the oxygen tank as it passed him, in case he could bat it out of the machine’s arms, but as his hand got close to the underbelly, a dozen of the insectile arms with thin, broad segments to them slammed into place over the dangling, tangled underbelly.

Protecting it from anything that might tangle with it or catch.

Orion had a sense of what the arm change and the magnetic rails were for.  That would be more of that implanted knowledge.

It made sense to go to the others.  Orion didn’t.  He cut across the space, beneath the hose of the suctioning machine, past the container where a mechanical foot had crushed the head of the occupant, the oxygen tank, and what might have been munitions or explosives inside the occupant’s personal case, leaving multiple scorch marks.  One chunk of the occupant’s head had rolled across the floor, leaving a very straight, dotted line before landing to sit there, blond hair attached to scalp, bloody on the underside.

Orion ran the other way, both hands full.  More frost flecked off of Orion’s clothing and skin, prompting the late realization that it probably wasn’t the vacuum itself that was freezing things.  The machine was using extreme cooling to manage the laser cutter.  There was probably a low amount of atmosphere, allowing that energy to transfer.

And to manage this.  The other tool.

Orion had to throw the packages over his shoulder, hand still gripping the handles, letting the metal of the cases knock his back, in order to get one arm up.  The bend of one elbow shielded his eyes.

The magnets of the rails constrained and directed the flow of a wavelength-altered plasma.  A column of what would have looked like liquid light cut a three-meter line through a plate of metal as thick as Orion’s chest was deep.  Cutting into floor.

The heat transferred across the floor, transmitting a glow that was white near the point of contact, then a dull pink further out.  The people at the other door clustered closer to it, three of them focusing on one, who was focused on the door itself.

Orion had to find another way.  The floor was hot enough to be soft, and he wasn’t sure about his ability to cross it.

He had to figure this situation out before the cold did real damage.  Prying Pine’s case open, he found chemicals.  Nothing he could make heads or tails of.

His own case had tools.  They included a smaller laser cutter that could double as a welding tool, a tablet, two tools, one of which was a hydraulic lever, some basic tools for convenience, and fuels.  No eye protection.

There was a door close by.

The tablet was just magnetic enough to stick to the metal.  It illuminated, giving Orion a view of the door, lines and edges highlighted in red, a textured hatching of increasing density for thicker and denser materials.  He found the lock, if it could even be called that.  Writing formed, noting thickness and length.  Seven point seven cm thick, thirty-two cm tall.  It extended across the inside of the door, barring it from the inside.

Pulling the tablet away, laser cutter in hand, he found the overlay on his vision kept those highlights and textures in place, locked to the right places on the door.

It turned out to be a non-issue that he had no eye protection.  The moment the laser cutter was on, his vision changed.

He didn’t know why he had these tools, this knowledge.  He had a sense of where he’d come from, but there was that block in the way, forcing him to reach for it, then pause to find his way to the next recollection.

The moment the cutter started to cut the latch inside the door, he felt most vibrations in the floor stop.  Three of the nearest machines had stopped, and remained poised.  The machine with the plasma cutter included, limb still glowing, the heat of it playing with the cold of the upper ‘arm’.

It reminded Orion of Pine’s blood mingling with the container’s fluid.

Steady hands…  When his hand wavered, he hit the door, instead of the piece of metal on the inside.

One of the machines turned and started plodding toward him.

Glancing over his shoulder, Orion could see the other group.  Court, Marte, Spur, and Sever.  One of them looked over at Orion.

There was little he could do but hope the laser worked.  By drawing attention, he’d made the machines stop.  Any spreading heat across the floor had stopped, letting the dull pink glow slowly transition to grey again.  Too slowly- still not enough atmosphere.  Maybe he’d bought the rest of the group time.

Reaching for the hydraulic lever, he slapped it onto the arm he was cutting with.  It wrapped around wrist and elbow.  He switched the cutter to his other hand, then used a spare thumb to turn it on.

It looked very small for what it was, with a component over his right wrist like a watch, a bar running from his right pinky to his outer elbow, and a wedge of metal sticking out the side, near his wrist.  A curved bar was poised to where he could have it over the back of his hand, or grip it in his fist.  He slammed the wedge into the gap of the door, turned it on, and let it work, applying many times the strength he was capable of.

The metal he’d been cutting wasn’t fully severed.  It strained, pulling, visibly glowing on the other side of the gap.  Air blew in, heated by the hot metal, filling the vacuum, only to get picked up by the suction machine.  He refocused the laser, to soften the metal and let it give more.

The machine was almost there.

The hydraulic tool snapped shut, and the door remained mostly open.  He grabbed cases, Pine’s still open, and ducked through the gap, beneath that band of hot, stretched, partially cut metal.

The machine slammed into the door behind him.  Machinery whirred.

It didn’t open the door wide enough to come through.  It remained on the other side while Orion lay there, panting for breath, frozen hair moving slightly with the rush of wind as air adjusted.

Something internal moved within the door, and it slammed shut.  The wind stopped with it.

The walls and floor were metal, and vibrated with the activity of machines on the other side of the door.  The air was cold, neutral, and not quite breathable.  If this was a hallway, and Orion wasn’t quite sure, then it was a wide one, and very, very tall.  Supporting beams criss-crossed high above.

Enough that it felt more like being inside the walls than it felt like being on a main concourse.  There was a lack of common conveniences that played into that.  The door didn’t seem to have handles at any level Orion could get to.  There were no monitors inset into walls, no windows, and no markings pointing a way.  Just a long hallway that curved slightly as it carried off into the dark high above.  Light so faint it could be a trick of the eyes came through vents and gaps in the panels of metal that formed the walls.

Orion approached one such panel of wall, slammed the wedge of the hydraulic lever into it, and powered it, prying the panel loose.  It fell with a clang, very nearly clipping Orion’s injured hand as it dropped.

The vibrations in the other room ceased for a moment, again.

Small lights were embedded where wall met floor, providing the barest level of illumination that let Orion’s eyes fill in the rest, drawing out faint lines to map out walls, struts, and other details outside his range of vision.  The wall had a layer of something that looked like a mixture of tar and moss on the other side, that had more of that faint glow to it.  With a whole square of it exposed, it cast a faint, greenish light that almost, but didn’t quite reach the far wall.

He wasn’t confident in touching it.  But from the look of everything, it was everywhere.

One bulging square warranted a closer look, though.  The green moss covered it.  There was a thin triangular piece of some coating or something that had covered the wall panel, that had remained and jutted out after the panel had fallen.  Prying that free, he was able to use it to scrape at the moss.

He reflexively shut his eyes as something jumped out at him.

In the same way he’d seen writing crawl across things, or translate simple symbols, he saw something here.  There was a label, with something on it, but a square of something distorted and unpleasant to look at covered it, jittering, constantly shuffling.

He accidentally kicked a small bottle as he tried to view it from another angle.  Pine’s things had spilled.

The image of Pine’s expression wouldn’t leave his head.  That shudder of her jaw.

Between the unpleasantness of the mosaic, the mental image of Pine, and all the accumulated scrapes, skinnings, the joint-bruising cold, and the way his exposed skin ached, he felt like utter shit.

He collected the bottles, unsure if they meant anything.

His own things were more intact.  He’d closed the lid and it had automatically latched.  There were a few G-pods inside it, which he could have tacked onto a container, so he didn’t have to bear the weight, but they didn’t have a lot of battery.

Better for holding a tool poised in the air for when he wanted it.  Pliers, tweezers, cutters, some spare material, welding epoxy.  He pushed everything into the places they were meant to occupy.

He sorted his things out.  The outfit he wore had straps built in, and the cases, with some trial and error, had places they were meant to go.  One at the leg, one at the left hip.  The other cases were a more awkward fit, but he strapped them together and had them dangle slightly from his waist, behind him.

Then, because his long sleeve kept tracing the injury at the back of his hand, where skin had ripped off on contact with cold metal, he removed arms from sleeves, and tied the oversuit at his waist.  He had a short-sleeved shirt on beneath it.

His arms were tattooed with an ink that included a metallic copper tone.  Flames, black lines, and, extending from left wrist to elbow, a message that was censored in the same way the component in the green tar had been.

It made it skin-crawlingly clear that this wasn’t his tattoo.  It belonged to the people who had sent him here.  The skills, the clothes, the equipment?  None of it was his.

Memories had been set aside.

He’d been dropped into the middle of this.

The walk down the corridor was long enough that he stopped to relieve himself twice.  There were no toilets.  No water fountains.  No signs.  He used the recesses where the largest panels of the walls didn’t quite come together, leaving passages too narrow for his body.

He wasn’t the only one.

One recess had what looked at first to be a leak of the green tar.  On closer inspection, there were masses in it that could only be someone’s waste, covering it in a thin layer.

He watched more closely for details after that.

The passage opened up into a bridge, just as wide as the hallway had been, crossing a gap, long enough it would take a few minutes to cross.  There were no railings, and he had a stomach-flipping view of a webwork of bridges, corridors, and suspended rooms.  Toward the bottom, it looked like there was stone.  On the walls, machines like the one he’d seen earlier were slowly ascending or descending, or finding a hallway and sliding inside, taking up nearly the entire corridor.

At the side of the bridge, he saw, someone had wedged in a piece of rebar.  A long, tattered length of cloth, the same material as Orion’s bodysuit, stretched out to where another piece of metal was wedged in.  Tied at both sides.  A cup-shaped piece of metal dangled.

He reached, moving the cloth, and the metal rang.

A bell.

“Don’t speak.”

The voice echoed through the space.  A woman’s voice.  A bit hoarse.

For that fast a response, they had to have been waiting.

“Don’t move.  Don’t give me any other indication you might be there.  Don’t thank me.  Don’t come for me.  Just… don’t.”

She sounded terrified, and the hoarseness of her voice compounded the emotion.  As if she really believed that.

Orion’s eyes scanned the surroundings.  She was somewhere above him.

“If you’re on the bridge with the rounded bell, which it sounds like you are, and you came from the sealed door, keep going.  If you came from the other direction, that’s mostly a dead end, turn back.  Either way, you should find the graveyard.  Go up the ramp.  There’s a chute you can use, and more instructions.  I’ve been sending people that way for a while.  Maybe you’ll find them, or find more messages.”

Rounded bell.  Orion confirmed.

“If you’re on the bridge with the square bell… keep going.  Do not go left.  I left supplies.  Take what you need.  Don’t go left.  You can get down to the ground level from the silo.  It’s easier to find food there, I think, but there are hunters there.”

There was a long pause.  Was she done?

“I don’t know if you know already.  There are two types of machine.  Some maintain and expand this place.  They’re bad enough, they’ll run us over or step on us and signal a cleaner bot to come for the mess.  The others hunt us, lay traps, search, hack us.  One of the bad ones is further ahead.  Move slowly, be careful.  She’s big.  Don’t look at her, or any of them.  Stay clear, find people, then help others.”

Orion remained silent.

“If you can destroy that fucking fox bitch… do it.”

Every silence felt like it was inviting a response, but she hadn’t wanted him to, right?

A bit of time passed.  She didn’t speak again.  Orion resumed walking, careful to not make a noise.

The provisions kit had water, in a container that would filter dirty water, and let Orion test for contaminants, pollutants, and poison, apparently.

It was good that water had been provided, because the walk was long again.

Eventually, he came to what she’d called the graveyard.

The corridor had another hallway off to the right.  Natural rock sat in the center of it, and it had been cut to a sharp geometric shape, an almost blade-like ridge between two ramps.  The ramps themselves sat on the chipped off bits of rock, among other detritus.

For whatever reason, people had chosen this place to inter their dead.  Bodies had been left in the spaces between the rock and the ramp.  The green-black tar moss covered the bones in a thin layer.  It helped illuminate the space.  Not that that was overly useful.

There was a window at the top of the stairwell.  Reflected light from the rest of the structure filled the hallway, enough that Orion didn’t need the assistance of whatever computer was assisting his eyes.

He walked up the ramp.  Past bodies, and past scratches or white lettering on the dark stone and metal.  None of them had names.  They were words.  Wall.  Ace.  Feather.

One, called Rake, had been left in a position where one arm had fallen across the ramp.  It looked like a machine had severed the arm where it had intruded onto the edge of the ramp.

At the top of the ramp, he saw corridors extending in either direction, the window, and, at the corner, just around the right bend after coming up the stairwell, more writing on the wall.  Clearly from two different individuals

The FOX and 3 DEER stalk this area
FOX is IIIrd generation hunter — adapts
DEER are Ist gen
They have animal shapes because we instinctively look to the face —speculation!
See its reflection in smudged up glass if you must see it
Trap it destroy it
If it gets near use the chute  — it does not chase

Arrows pointed to the chute.  It looked almost as if more writing and circles had been drawn around it to draw attention to it, but they’d been cleaned away.  The cleaning had left very sharp distinctions between what had been cleaned and what hadn’t.  Orion suspected it had been laser cleaning.

He turned to look out the window.  The structure was a detailed, complex ring, or part of one, extending perhaps a third of the way around the sun, connecting planet-sized spheres.

He sat, back to the corner, and got some food out of the box of provisions.

This wouldn’t last him forever.

The closest thing he’d seen to food had been the tar-moss on a turd.

His joints still ached, and blood vessels had broken in his skin from the cold, leaving hands bruised.  The pads of his fingertips and back of his hand weren’t oozing blood any more, but felt raw.  They looked worse than they were, honestly.

He’d been a troublemaker, hadn’t he?

And they sent him here.  To fight?  To do something?

No instructions, limited knowledge, minimal equipment.

He remembered causing trouble, and it had been big.  This was his sentence.  A death sentence of sorts.  If that scene outside the window wasn’t a lie… he could walk for a year before reaching the broken, still-in-construction part of the superstructure.

He was so caught up in that line of thought, still dwelling on how to even wrap his head around all of this, that he almost didn’t notice.  A blur of light on the window that looked at first like it came from the outside.

But it wasn’t.  It was a reflection.

It moved with care and patience.  As big as the machine he’d been dealing with.  But he didn’t want to look directly, after the warnings.  In a strange situation with a clear threat, he’d trust people.

That stirred feelings.  He’d trusted people and they’d turned on him.

He got his tablet out, shifting over a short distance, before holding the tablet at an angle.  With an extreme adjustment in settings, it painted a texture over everything, showing depth of volume and density of material.

It obscured and muddied the part he assumed he wasn’t meant to look at.  It looked like foxes he’d read about, but it was massive, with a body that was shaped roughly like a fox’s might be, but with that snarl of metal he’d seen in the other machines, mingled with flesh, fur, and bone.  And it was headless.  A collar of heavy metal started near the shoulder blades and extended a distance forward, and it stopped abruptly.  In place of the head was a violently flickering, shuddering set of images.

Orion looked for a second, and the same obfuscation effect that marked his arm filled his vision, along with a stab of headache that made him cry out.

It was like how people could see a face in a smudge or a cloud.  It built on that, sequences incorporating eyeblink fast flashes of light designed to catch the eye, keep it looking for longer.  And, Orion assumed, going by what the woman on the bridge had said, if he looked for too long, it did something lasting.

He’d been sent here tattooed, equipped with knowledge and tools, and with safeguards that he had to assume weren’t enough to hold up for long.

It had gone still.

It had heard.

Orion gathered his box of provisions, edging toward the chute.

There was a distant rasping sound.

If he hadn’t been holding the handle to open the chute, he wasn’t sure he’d have felt it.  The shudder.

It was moving through the walls?  To come from another angle?

He paused, looking back at the window.  In the process, he could see himself from a clearer angle, backed by the darkness of space.

The letters formed, just as they had when he’d looked at someone else.

PITCH.

Pitch and Pine.  Something told him that mattered.  That they’d come together, or named themselves and that they’d chosen names that matched.  They’d known each other.

He was not a good person.

He’d been a criminal.  She’d been a co-conspirator.  Maybe bad enough to deserve all of this.  The details were buried and had too many obstacles in the way.  But when he thought about it in those terms, it felt right in his gut.

He didn’t wait for the fox to jump out of nowhere.  He adjusted the case that dangled behind him, Pine’s, so it was in his lap instead, and so he could fit inside, and then took the vent, plunging inside and down.

He had to figure this out, now.

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