23. Cassia #2
I keep my pistol up and my left wrist toward the nearest speaker, catching the audio on Elias's partition. The recording light pulses green against my skin. Junia will get this. Even if I have to crawl back through the rubble with the comm unit clenched in my teeth, Junia will get this.
The corridor widens into the chamber I saw from the access well, and the sight settles like lead in my chest. The mechanical lattice filling this space reflects the same horrific integration I witnessed in the sector nine tunnels, but the construction here reaches absolute completion.
These bodies are perfectly preserved. A woman's arm extends from a cable junction, her fingers curling around a relay housing as if still holding on.
A Kraaj male's torso bridges two machine clusters, his wings down to the membrane frame and rewired as heat sinks.
The flesh serves a deliberate purpose, a functional framework and raw material.
I count seven, maybe more, before charting the anatomy—a human female, mid-thirties, cause of death impossible to determine post-modification; Kraaj male, younger, with horn nubs suggesting late adolescence.
These were people who had names. They walked through the same market corridors I walk through and cursed at the same failing power grid.
And something down here harvested them like spare parts.
My gorge rises. I swallow it down and keep walking, because stopping means looking closer, and looking closer means seeing the faces.
"The purge sequence authorized by General Daxos aligns with our corrective protocols," the Hollow Signal announces, its voice now emerging from the infected nodes in the chamber simultaneously.
The air vibrates with overlapping sound.
"Thermal charges embedded throughout the tunnel network will reduce this infrastructure to ash.
The bonded biological material will be neutralized before the hybrid sequence can mature.
Acceptable convergence of organic and machine objectives. "
"Daxos is doing your work for you." My throat burns. "He thinks he's seizing power, and he's handing you exactly what you need."
"Organic leadership frequently serves machine objectives when properly motivated by fear and ambition. General Daxos requires no instruction. His hatred provides sufficient alignment."
I want to scream at it and put a round through the projectors and grafted cameras in this chamber until the voice stops.
Instead, my lungs draw a deep breath. The comm remains recording.
And I keep hounding, because this thing wants to talk, and the words it gives me are evidence that the people above us can use when this is over.
"The mate bonds exist globally, spanning across the worlds the Precursors seeded," I state, projecting the exact nature of their parameters. “That means this network extends beyond a localized containment issue.”
"Dormant in most populations. Active in fewer.
Luvon's environmental conditions accelerated the emergence.
Commander Rhykor's lineage represents the most concentrated expression of Precursor-linked markers our systems have recorded.
" The hologram flickers, and for a brief moment the faceless shape fragments into a chaotic mess before reassembling.
"We're tracking his trajectory to the sub-level.
Based on his internal thermal output, he's going to wreck the infrastructure when he hits the perimeter. He’s tearing down the barriers to get to you right now, just like our models projected. "
"Your models are wrong about him."
"Our models are informed by comprehensive operational records.
" The delivery shifts, and the holograms change with it, the faceless silhouette dissolving into a cascade of high-resolution footage that floods the chamber walls in cold, blinding light.
These files contain explicit battlefield recordings, entirely separate from standard supply manifests or authorization ledgers.
A younger Rhykor fills the projections. He is massive and crimson-skinned, with wings spread against a sky choked with orbital ash.
His hands blaze white-hot as he tears through defensive barriers, melting blast shields and cutting through infrastructure with mechanical precision, like a weapon pointed at a target and told to fire.
The footage cycles through campaigns, settlements burning, resistance collapsing, his vanguard past laid bare in absolute brutality, and his biological weapon relentlessly executed to clear sectors under high command directives.
"The emotional attachment you rely upon contradicts his inherent function," Legion says through a speaker framed in dried human skin.
"His operational record consists of systematic eradication.
He was designed to execute containment through extreme force.
The vanguard conditioning carved into his body persists regardless of surface-level behavioral modification. "
I stare at the footage. A twenty-two-year-old Kraaj commander walks through the ruins of a settlement with blood on his hands and nothing behind his eyes. He signs orders before standing over wreckage that used to be someone's home or their entire life.
The machine wants this to break me. It spent centuries studying emotional responses, and it's deploying the ugliest footage it has, expecting the horror to overwrite everything I've seen with my own eyes over the past months.
"I've read the authorization ledgers," I whisper, my voice steady despite a throat constricted by grief and an agony the machine could never comprehend.
"Facing him about those documents gave me a glimpse of the burden he sustains from those campaigns.
Still, he chooses to be something other than what they carved him into, a fact proven by every rescue and civilian he pulled from those burning corridors. "
The footage flickers and stutters.
"He walked an elderly man through a tunnel early in the morning because the man was afraid.
" My voice cracks, and I let it. “Beyond that, there was the moment he wrapped his wing around a child he'd never met. Before that, he stole military medicine and dropped it through my ceiling because people were dying and nobody else gave a damn. Ultimately, the refusal to burn four thousand civilians alive—even at the cost of being branded a traitor by his own command—proved that the boy they turned into a weapon had grown up and decided to be a man instead.”
The holograms fracture, and the footage breaks apart into shards of green and white light that scatter across the chamber walls like broken glass. The faceless shape reforms, larger than before, looming overhead, and the speakers in the chamber crackle with a distortion I feel in my molars.
"Emotional rejection of verifiable data," the Hollow Signal grinds out, and for the first time, the voice sounds strained, frequencies fighting each other within the synthetic surface.
"The bond amplifies his volatile energy levels.
His current trajectory confirms destructive engagement patterns consistent with archived behavioral models.
He will destroy this infrastructure to retrieve you, validating our projections. "