The sun was once again closed off from this cold place whose dim lights shined with just enough light to see the rusted-out rails of a newly-renovated building and its endless stretches of gray-white concrete. There were a hundred thousand kilometers of space down here, or so it was said. An exaggeration, of course, but for all her days in the bunker Anya had never seen the end of it. Room after room, hall after hall, every day always new. Always the same gray-white and red, but never with the same details. All the little chips and signs of wear never stayed the same. Perhaps the walls moved! Or perhaps it was regenerative. It had never been clear just how the bunker was repaired, and its staff was far too small for such an enormous place. Perhaps it was a sign of the times, with war looming on the horizon. Perhaps she would be restationed soon.

But no matter how much the situation refused to change from day to day, now it had. It could no longer be forestalled. Anya had to face the reality outside. There were no sounds through the thick door, nor light from the absent windows. Only the looming dread that billowed up from her to displace all air in the large and empty room she found herself in today. In a panic, she began to run to the nearest comms station where she could issue the order to shut down the base. It wasn’t her position, of course, but even in the half-second that had passed in considering the impact of this situation too much time had passed. If they didn’t act quickly there would be no second chance.

For this reason as her legs began to fall forward her hand fell inward to the pocket deepest inside her outer coat to the pill carrier it should never touch through the course of a normal day. Her fingers twisted the lid from inside the pocket and removed a single one of her fourteen remaining pellets; each one was worth an unknown fortune but no matter how much Melissa chastised her for wasting resources, Raethor never complained and never issued the order to stop. He’d only tease her in a question like “How are the pellets today, Anya? Sufficient to task I assume?” It may as well have been an order to someone else, but to Anya the near-command never seemed to carry authority. In this case she was sure he wouldn’t mind, however.

The pill was sour, like the taste of spoiled milk, but went down quickly even without a drink, half-dissolved by the time it even reached her stomach, and coursing fully through her veins within the next handful of seconds. Her neck twitched as energy boiled up from within. Even after her surgery it was too much to handle. Her hands grasped at the air with twitching fingers and her toes curled through every running step. If it were normal physiology she was certain the ground would be damp with the pooling of sweat and her body would be screaming at her to remove every scrap of cloth from her body and find a chest of ice to sleep in, but the pills bypassed all that. Where did the energy come from? Certainly not from within, but in this moment it did not matter.

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Whatever purpose this building served, however hidden it was to her, it was Anya’s duty to protect it no matter the personal and material cost. No matter what damage these pills would do to her with time, it was more important that she and they survive now than to think about some uncertain future destined to never come if not protected in the present. So she ran and put little dents in the concrete with each step. There was noise and pain, but both would heal over time. Tomorrow the room would return to normal and the door would open and it would all be well. The carnage outside was just a test! An experiment gone awry! Military reinforcements would arrive soon and they’d restore order to the city as they always had. There was no cause for alarm. All the same, the dents in the concrete grew as her pace quickened. The rebar below began to deform, and as it did Anya’s heel began to grow bruised. So much force was not meant to travel through even the augmented body— not without proper secondary augmentation— but however much Melissa would chastise her for recklessly endangering her combat ability by damaging her feet and legs, it was necessary. It hurt, but she would regenerate.

In a bloody heap, Anya reached the com line and reached out for the jagged white link that would enable her to give the necessary order. Collapsed on the ground and exhausted, Anya shoved the toothlike connection into her wrist and shivered from toes to neck as it connected, twitching her bruised ankles and causing intense pain in the process. But at last, five or ten seconds after David’s death and five or ten seconds too late, Anya felt the base interweave into her senses.

The sensation was always overwhelming as the expanse of vision grew past its natural limits. Worse, the sensation of a thousand eyes of no moisture, many without light, was always disorienting in the worst way possible. The lack of humidity in some parts of the base made their membranes start to crack, and though the center visual field was not damaged and thus no maintenance was performed, the peripherals flickered with static. Compounded with darkness and vertigo Anya always tried to let go of her body before attaching the nerve as it was going to happen anyway, with or without intending to.

As the thousand stitches of consciousness melded their way into her brain, Anya could feel the soft trembling of flesh and the cold sensation of concrete scraping against a thousand pores emitting just enough lubrication to prevent damage. Cracked lips burned with the agony of not having had a drink in a thousand days as they opened and began to speak. There were no ears open to listen to the many responses as the information she would provide was of a sort that could not afford delays and the mental burden of processing response. Instead she left the ears closed as the lips and tongue and teeth began to vibrate from within the concrete walls.

“Code fifty-two. Code fifty-two. This is not a drill. Code fifty-two. Code fifty-two. This is not a drill. Report to Central Command immediately.”