Tess keyed her earpiece. “Petra. Found the FCN.”
Plasma fire crackled through the channel. Then Petra’s voice, clipped between breaths. “How bad?”
“Four crystals, all degraded but intact. Cable damage from something that fought in here. It’s fixable.”
“Good. We’re deep in the eastern corridors, plenty of attention on us.”
“I’m on it.”
Tess pulled her goggles up onto her forehead and surveyed the chamber through [ANALYZE]. Data layered across everything she looked at: power traces in the cable runs, energy density readings in the crystal housings, structural analysis on the ribs arching overhead.
The mag-lev board sat against the far wall with the BFD on top. Her tool belt was already on the console so she spread it open and selected what she’d need: multi-tool, plasma torch, solvent, the fine probe she’d used on the door panel, connectors, conductive tape, friction tape, a lint-free cloth.
She started with the cables.
The weapon scoring from the corridor extended into the chamber, though less severe near the console itself. Scorch marks darkened the wall near the entrance, and two cable runs had been severed, their ends melted into blackened nubs. A third cable was intact, but its housing had cracked open, exposing the crystal filament to two decades of mineral dust.
Tess traced each cable with [ANALYZE], confirming which system it fed. Both severed lines routed to Crystal D, the signal amplifier. That explained the 15% functionality reading. The crystal wasn’t really damaged; it was just starving for power.
She set the plasma torch to its lowest temperature and stripped the melted cable ends back to clean filament. The crystal fiber inside was clouded but structurally sound. She crimped fresh connectors from her kit, cut a length of jumper wire, and bridged each gap. Conductive tape over the joints. The cracked housing on the third cable got a friction tape sleeve. It wasn’t pretty, but it would carry power.
She tested with [ANALYZE]. Crystal D’s power feed registered as live.
The crystal responded in seconds. A faint pulse of light cycled through the previously dark substrate, stuttering at first, then settling into a steady rhythm.
·········································Crystal D — Signal AmplificationStatus: Degraded — 47% FunctionalityIssue: Internal pathways require calibration·········································
From 15% to 47% on cable work alone.
The improvement cascaded. Crystal A’s sensor coordination ticked up from 35% to 42% as stronger signal amplification pushed through its degraded routing. Crystal C climbed a few points, too. More power flowing through the system meant better margins everywhere, and some pathways that had been reporting as deteriorated were just underpowered connections, not dead ones.
“Cici, anything?”
“Nothing has come near the door.” She was sitting at the chamber entrance, ears sweeping the tunnel in slow rotations. “Drone activity is distant. They seem to avoid this section.”
“Good. Keep listening.”
Crystal A’s housing was coated in a fine layer of mineral dust that had seeped through hairline cracks in the mounting seal. Tess cracked it open and found the source: crystallized particulate, pale yellow, packed into the contact points like grit in a circuit board.
Cici’s nose was working from across the room. “That smells like the tunnels but concentrated.”
“Some kind of powdered crystal.” Tess blew the worst of it away in a yellow cloud that drifted toward the ceiling and dispersed against the crystal ribs. Then she went in with the soft brush, working each contact point individually.
The veins of light running through Crystal A’s substrate brightened as she cleared them. Most of the routing pathways were intact underneath the buildup. The decay [ANALYZE] had flagged was surface contamination, not structural failure. Fifteen minutes of tedious brushwork, scraping caked residue from contacts the size of pinheads. Her fingers were getting sore from all the precision work. The mask was digging in where the seal met her cheekbone, and she had to adjust it several times to keep from tearing it off entirely.
Crystal C was similar work. Environmental Processing. Corroded contacts where moisture had reached the crystal, and three pathways fractured too deep for surface repair. She bypassed the dead sections by rerouting through adjacent channels, bridging with jumper filaments she soldered into place with the torch at its finest setting. The first filament overheated, and she had to strip it and start fresh. The second seated clean.
Cici’s ears snapped forward mid-rotation. “Something approaching.”
Tess froze, probe in hand. “Where?”
“The corridor. One drone.” Cici was on her feet, body low, nose aimed at the hatch. “It is at the door.”
A faint buzz came from the other side of the wall. Then a click as something tested the access panel. The lock held. Another click. Nothing. The buzz receded down the corridor and faded.
“It tested the panel,” Cici said. She sat back down. “It didn’t open. Weird!”
“Apparently this door doesn’t like the drones.”
“Yes.” Her tail gave one brief, satisfied wag. “I like this door.”
Tess turned back to her work. Crystal C’s bypass filaments were carrying signals. Three pathways dead, the rest operational. With Crystal D providing proper power, the environmental processing was handling its load. She could leave it.
That left Crystal B.
Camera Routing. The difficult one.
The housing opened to reveal the worst damage of the four. A greenish patina covered the crystal’s surface where moisture had been trapped against the substrate. [ANALYZE] showed gaps where entire routing sequences had been chewed away.
Physical cleaning first. Solvent into the corrosion with the brush, small circles, wiping the residue away with the cloth. The patina came off in greenish-brown layers. Underneath, the crystal was rough where it should have been smooth. Etching channels widened and shallow from whatever corroded crystal. Some channels were even completely gone.
Clean enough for what came next.
Tess placed her palm on the console and activated [INTERFACE].
·········································INTERFACE — ActiveConnected: FCN-2A (Floor Control Node — Sensors)AP: 9/9Tech Level: 9Access: Root·········································
The node’s architecture expanded across her awareness. Four crystal housings, each one a hub of instructions and pathways, all interconnected through the console’s routing substrate. At Tech 9, the resolution was sharp. Every pathway, junction, and parameter was sharp and readable. The last time she’d connected to an FCN, at Tech 3, the internal structures had been dense and hard to parse, like reading small print in bad light. This was daylight.
She started with Crystal A. The routing pathways were clean from her physical work, but several sections still showed suboptimal signal flow where the original parameters assumed connections she’d bypassed. She adjusted the routing tables, modifying the skill inside so the system sent signals through her bypass filaments instead of queuing them for dead pathways and waiting for responses that would never come.
One AP. Crystal A jumped to 78% and held steady. AP: 8/9.
Crystals C and D didn’t need [INTERFACE] work. Crystal C had climbed to 62% on physical repairs and the power cascade from D. Crystal D’s calibration could be handled through the console’s analog controls after she finished the crystal work. No AP necessary for either.
She turned to Crystal B.
She focused [INTERFACE] on the camera routing crystal and the structure unfolded. A web of routing instructions that told the floor’s cameras where to send their feeds, how to prioritize data, which sensor nodes to coordinate with. At Tech 9, she could read every line of it clearly, including the missing sections. Maybe a third of the routing instructions were partially or fully dissolved.
She could modify the remaining instructions to route around the gaps. Cheaper, but brittle. One more section of corrosion away from cascade failure. Or she could extract the whole routing structure, clean the substrate while it was empty, and re-embed what she’d pulled. The missing sections would still be there, but the surviving instructions would sit on clean crystal instead of corroded substrate.
“Bee, if I restore what’s left of the camera routing, can you compensate for the missing sections?”
BEE: If the core routing infrastructure is intact, I can configure individual feeds for cameras that fall outside the coverage. You will need to perform multiple repair trips to reroute to different camera banks, though.
“Good enough for me.”
She reached into Crystal B with [INTERFACE] and began the extraction.
The routing structure lifted away from the crystal in a cascade of light that flowed through her fingertips and settled into her interface. She’d done this before, once, at Tech 3, in a dark tunnel with three AP and shaking hands. The extraction had felt like a physical shock then. Static arcing up her arm, pressure behind her eyes, a weight she wasn’t sure she could carry settling into her awareness.
At Tech 9, it felt like picking up a wrench.
·········································EXTRACTION COMPLETESkill: Camera RoutingAP: 6/9 | Storage: 1/3·········································
The structure sat in her interface cleanly. No headache or pressure like before, either. Its architecture was immediate: the priority tables, the feed assignments, the gaps where corrosion had destroyed sections of instruction. All of it clear and manageable.
“Your eyes are glowing,” Cici reported. “Did you know they could glow?”
Now that the crystal was empty—
“Wait… what did you say?”
“Your eyes! They’re glowing a soft yellow. It’s rather nice.”
“I… am going to have to unpack that in a minute.” Tess said, going back in with solvent and the fine probe. She popped the crystal out, scraped the last traces of corrosion from each groove under it, and reseated it.
When everything clean, she re-embedded the routing structure. Light flowed from her interface back into the crystal, filling the etched channels. Most lit up in warm amber, tracing through the substrate in branching lines. Some flickered where the channels had widened from corrosion. And some stayed dark. Dead routes where the acid had dissolved too much of the skill crystal. No amount of cleaning could bring those back. She’d have to see if Sara had more of the blanks for her next repairs… why hadn’t she?
She modified the routing parameters to send signals around the dead sections through intact pathways. One AP. Crystal B settled at 67%. The dark sections would stay dark, but the camera feeds that still had routes would run clean. AP: 5/9.
Tess released [INTERFACE] and sat back on her heels.
“Aww, your eyes are back to normal.” Cici said.
“How has no one told me that up to this point?” Tess asked. “This can’t be the first time I’ve extracted a skill with someone nearby… can it?”
“Glowing eyes are normal! Mine are green.”
“You’re also a machine, Cici, I’m… me.”
Tess shook her head. The four crystals were now all operational, and she still had five AP remaining.
Through the console’s analog controls, she keyed in voltage offsets for Crystal D’s new cable configuration. Lower thresholds to account for resistance in the jumper wire, redistributed current across the repaired feeds. The amplifier stabilized, and the other three crystals responded with slight bumps in output.
“Bringing it online.” She looked at Cici. “Ready, Bee?”
BEE: Ready.
The restart sequence was mechanical switches, old design, built to survive when crystal interfaces failed. Tess toggled them them all off, then back on again.
FCN-2A activated with a whirring sound, and the feeling of static in the air.
The chamber shifted. Crystal ribs overhead pulsed once, bright enough to throw shadows across the scorched walls, then settled into a slow, even pulse. The console’s display filled with scrolling data faster than she could read, but [ANALYZE] processed the flood and formatted it across her vision:
·········································FCN-2A STATUS REPORTOverall Status: Operational (Degraded)·········································Floor 2 Sensor CoverageCamera Feeds ………… 61% OnlineEnvironmental Sensors … 74% OnlineSignal Amplification …. 58% Effective·········································WARNING: Camera Dead-zones Detected: 13·········································Connected Systems:FCN-2B (STRUCTURE) ……………………….. DISCONNECTEDFloor 2 Camera Network ………………….. ONLINE (Degraded)Floor 2 Environmental Sensors ……….. ONLINE (Degraded)·········································
It was a lot worse than Floor 1 when she brought the FCN-01 online, but it was a start.
BEE: Camera feeds initializing. Processing.
A pause. Much longer than usual.
“Bee?”
BEE: Tess.
“What is it?”
BEE: Floor 2 is significantly larger than Floor 1.
The text sat in her vision, flat and simple.
“How much larger?”
BEE: The sensor grid is reporting coverage across an area more than four times Floor 1’s total footprint. That is a conservative estimate based on active sensors only. The dead zones are in the outer sections, beyond my reach. The actual floor area could be considerably larger.
Tess stared at the stat block. “Four times. That’s not standard progression.”
BEE: No. It is not.
Cici had stood up, ears forward. “Is that bad?”
“The dead zones,” Tess said. “Bee, what’s happening in those sections?”
BEE: I cannot observe them directly. But environmental sensors in adjacent areas are reporting anomalous readings. Aether density drops sharply at the dead zone boundaries. Power flow ceases. Structural integrity readings are absent entirely, which means either the sensors are destroyed or the floor itself has degraded beyond the threshold for maintaining physical coherence.
“It’s falling apart.”
BEE: The core sections are stable. The areas nearest this node and the main corridors are structurally sound. It seems like the floor has been growing unchecked rather than resetting. The dead zones are areas where the floor could not sustain itself.
Tess looked at the crystal ribs overhead. Steady light. Strong here, at the core. But somewhere out in the edges of a floor that was four times larger than it had any right to be, whole sections were going dark.
“The Aether concentration in the tunnels,” she said. “There’s more to it than just being a floor deeper.”
BEE: It would seem that way. The floor is losing containment in its outer sections. Aether that should be maintaining structural integrity is bleeding inward, concentrating in the core where the power systems can still hold. The tunnels are saturated because Floor 2 cannot contain its own energy.
“So the longer we wait on FCN-2B, the worse this gets.”
BEE: Yes. I am scanning for FCN-2B’s position now. With these sensors, I should be able to narrow the search considerably. But Tess. There is good news.
She waited.
BEE: The Network surveillance feeds on Floor 2 are dark. Every active camera now reports to me. As far as the Network’s monitoring infrastructure is concerned, Floor 2 has no surveillance capability.
Tess let a breath out.
Finally, The cameras were theirs.
Cici stretched, a motion that started at her front shoulders and rippled back through her chassis, ending with a full-body shake she didn’t seem to have authorized. “Are we done?”
“With this one.” Tess started packing her tools, fitting each one back into its slot on the belt. “First time I repaired an FCN, I had three AP and I had to solve a puzzle just to make the numbers work.”
“A puzzle?”
“The crystals needed six AP worth of repairs. I only had three. Had to get creative with the order I moved things around.” She cinched the belt and pulled it on. “This time I spent four and I’ve got five left.”
BEE: The contrast is informative. At Tech 3, the FCN-01 repair consumed all available resources and considerable creative problem-solving to achieve 76% coverage. At Tech 9, you achieved 61% with resources in reserve. The lower percentage reflects the scale of Floor 2, not the quality of the work.
“That almost sounds like a compliment.”
BEE: I’m working on my complimenting skills. How was it?
Cici’s tail wagged twice before she caught it. “It was a good compliment. But maybe next time just say ‘yay Tess did it!’”
Tess keyed her communicator to the team channel. “Petra. Cameras are ours. Network’s blind on Floor 2.”
A beat of static. Then Petra, strained but relieved beneath the professional tone. “Confirmed?”
“Confirmed. Every feed routes through Bee.”
“Bee says she can get us to the private staging area. We’re banged up, but better than last time. Is Asha in there?”
Asha’s voice cut in over the radio. “I’m here, get moving. Don’t want to have to sew anything back on.”
“I’m on my way back,” Tess said. “Bee needs to find the second FCN.”
“Second FCN?!” Everyone said over the radio at once. Tess thought she even hear her father’s voice in the mix.
“Oh, yeah. I’ll explain on the way.”