The plasteel case was hard to miss.
It sat on the workshop floor near the Deep Scanner, matte gray, industrial latches, scuffed everywhere from use. Large enough to need two people to carry comfortably. It reminded Tess of a case designed for mining operations or heavy ordnance.
Asha was leaning against the workbench, arms crossed.
“Rivera. About time.”
“We were walking the dog,” Tess said.
“Walking the—” Asha looked past her. Then down.
Cici sat in the workshop doorway, tail going at a moderate speed, green eyes fixed on the newcomer. She tilted her head, that too-intentional tilt, the one with thought behind it.
Asha stared at the chassis, tracing its articulated legs and plated torso up to green eyes that tracked with apparent purpose. “What is that?”
“This is Cici,” Tess said.
“Hello!” Cici said. “You smell like industrial solvent and spice paste. I really like it! Also, your medical kit has something leaking. Third pouch from the left.”
Asha’s hand froze mid-reach for her pack. She looked at Tess. “That’s a robot animal.”
“She’s a companion chassis. TC-847.”
“Never seen one before. Not even on Kovacs.” Asha crouched, studying Cici the way she might study unfamiliar medical equipment, with professional interest and healthy wariness. “Is this what you wanted to show me tonight?”
Cici’s tail picked up speed. “Oh, no. I’m just Cici.” She sat up straighter. “Wait until you meet Bee.”
“Who’s Bee?”
Tess glanced at Petra, who’d come in behind her. Petra gave the smallest nod.
“That’s part of why we’re here tonight,” Tess said. She looked at the plasteel case. “What’s in the box?”
“Oh, that.” Asha stood, brushing off her knees. “Need your help fixing it. Talk about it later.” She kicked the case with one boot. The thud was solid and heavy. “You said there was something I needed to see.”
“There is. Everyone’s waiting downstairs.”
“There’s a downstairs?”
***
The Guild Hall sat beneath the Tertian estate, carved stone and old wood, cooler than the rooms above. The table in the center was already occupied.
Marcus sat at the far end, coffee in hand, datapad propped against a water carafe. Mikhail was beside him, out of his armor for once, muscular build on full display. Yuki had claimed a corner seat where she could see both entrances. Sara Tertian stood near the head of the table, hands clasped behind her back, carrying the stillness of someone who’d been ready for this conversation for a long time.
Cici trotted in ahead of everyone and began a systematic perimeter investigation, nose to the stone floor.
Asha walked in behind Tess and Petra. She scanned the room—exits, occupants, the carved Guild insignia above the far door—in the time it took to cross the threshold.
“Secret room beneath a noble estate,” she said. “Techno-Arbor on the walls. Getting interesting.”
“You’ve heard of them?” Tess asked.
“Veldi aren’t so quick to forget things.” She replied. “Still some bulkheads on Korvacs that have the markings if you know where to look. They’re gone, yeah?”
“Not completely,” Petra said, and Asha’s eyebrows rose.
“Everyone,” Tess said. “Asha’s here. She’s been vetted, she’s on the team, and she’s about to learn the rest.”
Bee’s voice came through the Guild Hall speakers.
“Hello, Asha.”
Asha’s head snapped toward the ceiling. The speakers were mounted flush in the stone, barely visible. The voice that came through them was warm and female.
“I’ve been listening,” Bee said. “Through the team’s communicators, during your meetings. I hope you’ll forgive the eavesdropping. I needed to understand who you were before you understood what I am.”
Asha’s eyes tracked across the ceiling, locating each speaker. “And what are you?”
“My designation is CORE-B. I am the AI that runs the dungeon on Tertius-Prime. I was deliberately damaged over twenty years ago by a virus designed to sever my connections and suppress my functions. Tess is the first person who could communicate with me directly, and these people are the first who helped.”
Asha’s gaze swept from Marcus to Sara to Tess.
“The robot sounds like you,” she said. “Cici.”
“A fork of me,” Bee said. “A compressed copy running independently on the companion hardware. We are related but separate.”
“I’m the one with legs!” Cici added from under the table.
Asha’s demeanor changed. Her normally relaxed poise had shifted into something almost stiff.Pulling out a chair, she sat with the deliberate pace of someone making sure she was settled before the next part.
“Talk,” she said. “Need all the details.”
They talked.
Bee laid it all out. The dungeon here wasn’t cleared or dead, but sabotaged. The Network had done it. Here, and everywhere else they controlled. Across planets, stations, and colonies. Dungeons sealed or throttled, AIs silenced or destroyed, Aether output choked to fractions of what the planets needed. The environmental systems that kept worlds habitable were failing because the infrastructure designed to sustain them had been intentionally broken.
Through the briefing, the healer’s face remained still. Her jaw set once, early, when Bee described the scope. Her hands flattened on the table when the numbers became clear.
“Every dungeon,” Asha said.
“Every one we can verify,” Bee said. “Yes.”
She let it sit. When she spoke, her voice was flat. “Veldi been saying this for decades. Everything dying, dungeons going dark, nobody asking why. Network calls it natural degradation. Lifecycle stuff.” Her eyes found Sara. “Wasn’t natural.”
“No,” Sara said. “It wasn’t.”
“The Network did this on purpose… across multiple systems?”
Marcus nodded from the far end of the table. “We’re trying to fix it. At least here. Tess can actually do it.”
Asha’s fingers drummed once on the table. “Scary things. All of you understand that, yeah? Network finds out we know, it’s not fines or jail. My people disappear for less. Don’t know about nobles, but this is proper danger for the rest.”
Sara stepped forward. Her voice was measured. “We understand. And knowing what you know now, if you want to step back, I would understand that. You’re Veldi. The Network already has reasons to make your life difficult without adding this to it.”
The offer hung between them.
“Didn’t say I was leaving,” Asha said. “Said it’s dangerous. Those are different things.” She leaned back. “Where I come from, you don’t walk away from something because it’s tough. Walk away because it’s wrong. And leaving a broken thing broken when you’ve got the tools to fix it?” She looked at Tess. “That’s wrong.”
Bee’s voice came through the speakers, softer now. “Asha. For what it’s worth, I’ve been listening since your first meeting with Tess. The incident in Sector 9. You struck a compliance officer because a patient was going to die without immediate treatment, and you chose the patient over your own safety. That is why I asked Tess to recruit you. Your skills are considerable. But it was your instincts that convinced me.”
Asha was quiet for a beat. “Broke his nose, too. Deserved worse.”
“I am inclined to agree,” Bee said.
The tension around the table loosened, like a lock clicking open. Asha glanced around the table. Mikhail gave a small nod. Yuki raised her glass.
“Alright,” Asha said. “Full briefing. Where does the plan stand?”
Bee covered the operational structure: the Guild elevator, the Floor Control Nodes, the Aether distribution targets, and the timeline. Tess filled in the technical side, how her skills worked, what the FCN repair would involve, and finally, why getting Floor 2’s node online was critical to move around on Floor 2.
When it was done, Asha sat staring at the wall, thinking.
“Two weeks ‘til’ the badman gets here.”
“Give or take,” Marcus said.
“Then why are we sitting on our hands? We have the party. What’s next?”
Petra reached into a belt pouch and produced the crystal. Fist-sized, dense and dark, shot through with veins that glowed and amber light. She set it on the table, and it sat there like a small, dark star.
“From the Alpha spawner on Floor 1,” Petra said. “We never figured out what it is.”
Tess picked it up. Lighter than it should be. She turned it, watching the amber veins shift.
She activated [ANALYZE].
Nothing.
The skill didn’t register the crystal at all. No partial read, no error message, not even garbled data. As far as [ANALYZE] was concerned, she was holding air.
“Nothing,” she said.
Asha leaned forward. “Nothing at all?”
“[ANALYZE] doesn’t see it. Like it’s not there.” She turned the crystal in her fingers, watching light track through the veins. “That’s a first. And it’s becoming a trend.” She set the crystal on the table. “The Deep Scanner upstairs has two components my skill can’t parse at all. The neural processor on Cici’s chassis was beyond my normal tools. Now this. I keep finding walls I didn’t know were there.”
BEE: Your skill has successfully parsed pre-Network infrastructure, military hardware, and dungeon technology spanning multiple generations. If the crystal exists outside those reference frameworks, it may be something not stored in databases or available to your current class configuration.
“Let’s try the scanner,” Tess said. “It found what my tools couldn’t on Cici’s processor.”
Tess and her father took the elevator back to the workshop. The MR-9 hummed to life, and Tess positioned the crystal under the scanning arm. The display resolved slowly, the imaging system working harder than usual to penetrate the structure.
Partial results. Internal architecture, layered and compressed. The amber veins corresponded to energy channels running through the entire crystal like a circulatory system. The scan couldn’t classify the energy type or identify the composition, but the structure was organized and intentional.
“It’s built,” Tess said. “Or grown to a design. The energy channels are too regular to be accidental.”
“My hypothesis: compressed Aether.” Bee’s voice came from Tess’s communicator. “The Alpha spawner operated for approximately twenty years without producing spawns. The energy intended for generation had no outlet. It crystallized. If correct, this object contains a significant quantity of stored Aether in a stable, portable form.”
“Portable Aether,” Marcus said from the workshop doorway. He’d followed them up. “Like a Capacitor… but smaller?”
“This is so complex,” Tess said, staring at the scan results. Layers she couldn’t reach, architecture she couldn’t classify. “I need more time with it. The scanner gives more than [ANALYZE] could, but there’s still a lot I can’t read.”
“Look at the other screen,” Marcus said, swiveling a screen towards Tess. “Here.”
This other display had a blinking red warning symbol above several sets of numbers that Tess deciphered.
“The entire machine is reporting a power overload.” Tess said. “What does that mean?”
“It means we find something to measure just how much power is actually in it. Get it out of there before it damages the instruments.”
Tess didn’t argue and removed it from the scanner. Numbers counted down on the screen, and eventually the warning disappeared.
“Let’s report back downstairs on what we found.” Marcus said.
The discussion in the hall had shifted to the immediate problem. A patched-together rendition of Floor 2 was projected above the table. Floor 1 coverage in blue, Floor 2 extrapolations in amber, camera positions marked in red. The image flickered as she refined the data in real time.
“Floor 2,” Bee said. “The FCN is in the maintenance tunnel network between floors. Getting it online gives me control of Floor 2’s infrastructure. Cameras, sensors, environmental systems, floor configuration. Without it, the Network sees everything that happens on that floor.”
“And with the auditor coming,” Yuki said from her corner seat, “everything on camera is evidence.”
“Correct.”
“We think the crystal is some kind of battery,” Tess interjected as she and Marcus sat down. “It was damaging the scanner when we put it in, so we’ll need to find something else to measure just how much power it’s holding.”
“We have specialists at our spawner research facility…” Sara said, then she grimaced. “If you’re willing to return there.”
“This time with actual access and preparation?”
“Obviously,” Sara said. “Whatever you need, it’s yours.”
Tess studied the map in front of her.
“We need to figure out floor 2 first. We’ll bring the crystal to the facility once we get the FCN back online.”
Floor 2 was larger than Floor 1, with wider corridors, deeper rooms, and more complex geometry. The red camera markers clustered at intersections and chokepoints. Thorough coverage.
“On Floor 1, I could access the tunnels from the staging area directly,” Tess said. “The hatch was right there.”
“Floor 2 is different,” Bee said. “The private staging area connects to the main floor, but the maintenance tunnel access points are likely on the floor itself. No direct path from the staging area to the tunnel network. You would need to traverse camera-covered ground to reach a hatch.”
“I can’t be seen inside, either,” Asha said. “Banned.”
“The Guild elevator gets us to the staging area clean,” Tess said. “But once we step onto the floor—”
“You’re on camera,” Marcus said. He’d settled into coordinator mode. “An unregistered Delver on Floor 2, with a System Manager two weeks out. Might as well light a signal fire.”
Silence. Everyone studied the map.
“So,” Asha said. “Cameras are the problem.”
“Cameras and spawns,” Mikhail said. He said it the way you’d mention bad weather. “Floor 2 runs flying plasma drones with coordinated tactics.”
“Blasted us just for even looking through a door,” Petra added. “Trashed Mikhail’s shield emitter.”
Asha’s gaze tracked across the projected map. It was incomplete and missing several details.
“How long does the FCN repair take?” she asked.
“Unknown,” Bee said. “Floor 1’s FCN required several hours. Floor 2 may be more complex.”
“So Tess here needs to cross a camera-covered floor full of drones, reach a hatch that might not exist, fix something that takes hours, and get back out. Without the Network knowing she was there.” Asha sat back. “And you need me there too, because we’re gonna take hits and someone needs to put you back together.”
“That’s the shape of it,” Marcus said.
A longer silence this time. The map glowed on the wall, red markers spread like a warning.
Yuki hadn’t spoken in a while. She was leaning back in her chair, arms crossed, studying the projection with the focus of someone assembling a machine in her head. Her eyes moved between estimated camera positions, calculating angles, timing, and sight lines.
“I have some thoughts,” she said.
Everyone looked at her.
“Not tonight.” She stood and moved to the map. Her finger traced the route from the staging area connection to the nearest projected hatch, pausing at each camera position along the way. “But there’s a version of this that works. It’s going to require all five of us, precise timing, and gear we’ll need to source.” She turned to face the table. “How does everyone feel about theatrical deception?”
“Define theatrical,” Petra said.
“The kind where what the cameras record and what actually happens are two very different things.” Yuki’s expression was sharp and entirely lacking in reassurance. “Give me until tomorrow. I’ll have a plan.”
“Tomorrow, then,” Marcus said. “Everyone rest. We start first thing in the morning.”
Chairs pushed back. People stretched, conversations splitting into smaller threads. Yuki was already making notes on her datapad, eyes flicking between the projected map and her screen.
Asha fell into step beside Tess in the corridor leading up from the Guild Hall.
“Guess I was right, Rivera.”
“About what?”
“You’re the real-thing. Right here, in front of me.” Asha glanced back toward the Guild Hall. She was quiet for a moment. “Nice to know someone out here is still fighting. It’s a big deal.”
Cici appeared from wherever she’d been conducting her perimeter investigation and fell into step beside them, paws clicking on the corridor stone.
“I like Asha,” Cici announced.
Asha looked down at the robot dog trotting beside her. The robot dog looked up at her with green eyes that held more behind them than any dog had a right to.
“I’m gonna like you too,” Asha said. “Once I figure out what the hell you are.”
“I am Cici. I am a dog. Apparently.” Her tail wagged. “We should discuss your kit tomorrow. Three of your hypos have degraded past optimal efficacy, and your dermal patches smell like they were stored near a heat source.”
“They were in my coat pocket.”
“Oh! That explains it. Your coat smells like a reactor vent.”
Asha’s grin was all teeth. “Yeah. I’m keeping her.”