“Six minutes!” says Ellie. “I’d also like to inform everyone that an emergency relief fleet is outbound from our Network corridor and will arrive in approximately eight days. Those of you in lifeboats should be fine, but those in pressure suits might want to scavenge some canisters of your preferred atmosphere before then.”
Her mother whispers something, a broken sound in the silence of the dock.
“It’s going to be okay,” says Sarya, smiling through her tears. “We can both fit, and Eleven can fix you up.”
Her mother says it again, but again Sarya can’t quite catch it. She can’t hear much of anything, actually, over the low ringing that has been steadily building behind her. Something resonant, metallic, heavy and continuous—
Sarya whirls.
At the main entrance, something is moving. It’s not Hood mysteriously returned to life, it’s not Observer, and it’s nothing like either one. It flows, like a gleaming river of mercury, like nothing she’s ever seen. It pulls itself up and stands, if that is the right word, under a golden [Welcome to Watertower!] that rains virtual sparkles down onto its silvery surface. Sarya feels, very strongly, that it is looking at her.
And then the metal crashes forward like a wave and comes, more quickly than she would have believed. She turns back to Eleven, who has secured her mother in its interior. “Go,” she says, as calmly as she can. She knows, as surely as if she had been told, that this thing wants her. This is the latest in a string of incidents, not accidents. At this level of exhaustion it is far easier to accept the truth: today, her life on Watertower comes to a close, and there is nothing she or her mother can do about it.
She turns again to face the approaching silver tide. It’s hypnotically beautiful, washing over obstacles and between machinery. The ringing sound is not unpleasant; it’s almost a chime, a chord of tones that fill the air to bursting. She limps forward—one, two steps. She holds herself straight, like a Widow. She takes a breath—and then she hears a voice behind her, cracked and broken.
“Release me, suit,” says Shenya the Widow.
Sarya turns. “Eleven!” she shouts, her sense of purpose beginning to fracture into panic for the first time. “We had a deal!”
But the suit doesn’t answer her. Its straps unwind from around the Widow’s frame, and its giant arms pull her twisted shape from its cavity and set it at the base of its gangway. Shenya the Widow sinks to the floor, then struggles to raise herself. A stream of black fluid runs down one limb to the floor.
And then a clang echoes across the dock, and Sarya whirls to see a severed utility hatch sliding to a stop on the floor. From the hole it once covered gushes another stream of silver. The sound heightens as two rivers of mercury flow toward the little group.
“Three minutes!” says Ellie’s cheery voice. “To those of you still on Section F, it’s been a pleasure working with you all.”
“My child,” says Shenya the Widow, hauling herself upright. “Go.”
Sarya’s jaw clenches. “Mother,” she says quietly, in a voice brimming with fury and desperation. She points. “Get the fuck into the suit.”
“If you ever speak to me like that again,” hisses Shenya the Widow as she takes a tottering step past her daughter, “I shall be forced to discipline you.”
“I’ll never be able to speak to you again,” shouts Sarya, keeping pace. She has forgotten about her pain, about anything but getting her mother off this goddess-forsaken station. “Outside that suit, you will die. If you try to fight this thing, you will die. We can still escape if you get in the damn suit.”
“Not from this,” hisses her mother, clawing her way forward. “Go.”
Sarya’s eyes are fastened to the river of silver as she racks her mind for words, for something that will save her mother. It is one flow now, the two streams having merged beneath the gleaming ship. A third stream pours downward into the reflective pool, and the combined metal stretches upward into a new shape. It’s something more vertical, something that can reach for her.
“You are dangerous,” says Shenya the Widow, still clattering forward one blade at a time. “More dangerous than even the Daughter of a Widow. Now. Go.” And then she tilts her head to the side, the way she always does when she uses her Network implant.
And Sarya is off the ground again, shouting again, seized from behind by Eleven’s gigantic arms. She struggles, but her strength means absolutely nothing. She is pulled backward, packed into the suit like cargo, and the straps wrap her and anchor her. She screams, a long and wordless cry as she reaches for her mother. This is not how it goes. This is not how a Widow is treated. And then the hatch closes over her and Eleven begins rocking itself backward. The golden light of the planet below stretches across the floor and toward her mother as the hatch behind the suit splits open.
Sarya kicks the suit’s interior. She hurls punches that are arrested before they land. She tries to bite, but she can’t reach anything. Outside, in perfect fidelity, she sees what very few intelligences have ever seen twice: the Widow battle stance. It’s shakier than it was, it’s cockeyed, as if one or two of those limbs can’t quite handle what’s asked of them, but it’s there. Her mother has inserted herself between Eleven and this massive thing, between her daughter and danger—
But no. That is where Shenya the Widow has always been.
Sarya is not prepared for the war cry. It ascends like a living thing. It battles and conquers even this grinding chime of metal. It reflects off every surface, and Sarya forgets about everything but pressing her hands into her ears. She can barely see through the burn around her eyes, but she refuses to close them. She will not abandon her mother. She clenches her jaw against the pain in her head, against the ice-pick cry working into her temples.
Even that massive silver shape hesitates in the face of the Widow’s shriek. It draws itself up, towering above that black shape, and waits. But the cry does not stop. It shatters, it breaks into a wild peal of deafening Widow laughter. And then the metal reaches past her mother and her mother strikes more quickly than thought and when they both withdraw Shenya the Widow has one less limb. And yet she laughs, her cry of fierce joy ricocheting around the dock like lightning.
But her daughter is not laughing. “Mother!” Sarya screams, unable to help herself and forgetting everything but the fact that she must be out there, she must help somehow. She claws at the straps but it is too late because the suit has launched itself backward through a sparkling pressure field and into the black and gold of space.
(“Welcome to Network!” revision 5600109c, intelligence Tier 1.8-2.5, F-type metaphors)