We had a lot more space, but for some reason, it seemed like everyone was still crowded in my garage. I didn’t really mind, the machines were all linked and automated, and it wasn’t like anyone was resting their butts on the conveyors or getting in the way of the loader arms, so my stuff was still humming along. I just found myself using cam-drones to check on things just on the opposite end of the room so I wouldn’t have to walk through the others’ sprawling work-zones.

Lia was at one table, honestly not taking up much space. But she was on a call right now, with some poor dupe, so the rest of us had to be just a little quieter. It was funny that we could tell when she was working hard or hardly working just by how stiff and upright her body posture was, as though she couldn’t lie over the phone if she was lying in person.

Whitney on the other hand was viral in her spreading. Parts would start showing up on new surfaces, and if not curtailed, the next day she’d have a whole station set up there. I’d mostly given up on trying to contain her, and had instead finally gotten around to putting down some solidly-bolted wooden planks in the garage’s broad rafters. There was a bed for Whitney and a private workspace for myself at the top of a ladder, which also served as a barrier to keep her junk from spontaneously manifesting. Tem was up there now, just staying out of the way, as befitted her best.

And finally, wherever Whitney went, she seemed to drag Athan with her. Honestly, it was nice just having him around while I worked. I felt like I hadn’t seen him much since my reincarnation, which had hurt and confused me for a bit there…but then seeing how it’d gone with my past life, I understood. He was being careful, for my sake he believed. And while I thought that was mostly stupid, I also found it very sweet.

“Oh no, I’m not here to get you in trouble, sir. I’m investigating, not reprimanding.” Lea’s voice was as sweet as honey, even as she scrolled through a list of other marks who could replace this one in a heartbeat. “Uh huh. Yes. Well of course. Let me stop you right there, how much did this clown offer to pay you for all of this? What? That little? He does realize you’re a critical part of this institution’s security, right?“

Athan was eavesdropping just like I was, standing in the middle of the floor with what looked like bones unevenly taped up the side of his leg. Some kind of new project Whitney was working on, but whatever it was, it wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen. I fully intended to give it a thorough set of tests before allowing Athan to go running into combat in it, though.

“Look, how’s this sound. I don’t even want you to do anything. Just tell me where your money came from, and I’ll pay you double. Yeah. Yeah, of course. No, you’re just a symptom, a cog in the machine….why would we go after you? But you do understand we want to plug leaks.”

I shook my head. The guy was a critical part of security one second and a victimized cog in an uncaring machine the next. Sometimes I didn’t know how Lia got away with lying to people’s faces like that…and then I went out and talked to people and understood. Some people really were just that blind to any kind of self-awareness.

“Uh, triple? Up front? We can…probably manage that. Give me a second.“

She turned to me and snapped her fingers a few times to get my attention, pointing at her mobile. I shrugged, and then my mobile let up as she slid some details over to it.

Some bank account info, a name, an amount. A fucking ridiculous amount. Even Lia would go broke in a heartbeat if she was paying this kind of money out all down her list of suspects.

But she wasn’t. She didn’t need me involved if she was planning to actually pay them. I cracked my knuckles and got to work at once.

It was around three minutes later that I signaled Lia, who’d filled the dead air with relative small talk, probably just to keep the guy from second-guessing things.

“Alright Sergeant Benjamin. If you check your account, you’ll see it’s been updated a little more positively. We appreciate your cooperation and hope this is satisfactory?“

The fake deposit would be picked up within a month when the money failed to materialize, but a month from now that would be his problem, not ours. As much as I was a fan of not needlessly screwing up people’s lives, honestly, at the point where you were taking bribes from both sides of a conflict, you were really bringing it on yourself.

Lia hung up and seemed to expand as she melted out of her stiff work posture and became an human-shaped blob falling off of her stool.

“Blergh,” she commented.

“That good, huh?” Athan asked. Whitney was crouched at his side, working on the metal protrusion taped to his hip and making little annoyed noises every time he moved.

“It came back to one of our same guys again,” Lia complained. “I keep feeling like there’s someone else out there we need to find, someone who’s pulling the strings of all of these different sources, but everything’s just leading to the same places instead. We just need one break.”

“I mean, isn’t that someone just Dragon?” Athan asked. “Strings are getting pulled so he can break in to the XPCA.”

“Maybe,” she fretted. “But do you really think he’s just on a first name basis with half a dozen guys of moderate influence throughout the agency? Even if you were kinda a corrupt or selfish dude, doesn’t it flip a few red flags in your brain when a known, wanted, Sino assassin offers you a chunk of change?”

“Then it’s just all done over the ‘net,” I said. “They never meet him, never know what or who he is, they just get a payday and do what he says.”

“Maybe,” she said, her bare toes drumming against the edge of the workbench. “But that’s not how I think it’d work. Some of these guys are pretty up there. Lieutenant Colonels, Colonels, one-star Generals even. I just don’t feel like people that relatively important are going to take orders from some faceless holo.” She chewed her thumb. “But I dunno. Maybe.”

Athan shook his head. “If that’s what your gut says, I believe it, Lia. You’ve got good instincts on working with people.”

“It’d be a better vote of confidence if I could find something,” she laughed, and stretched, splaying her fingers and toes. “I didn’t get a date out of him either, his assignment as he understood it was indefinite.”

“Yeah we heard,” I said. “Heard all of it, really.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“It’s cool. But we all were just standing here.”

“Should I work in my own room then?” she asked standing and continuing her stretches. “Like, I think it’s handy to have you on hand. Never can be too sure when I might need an ice cream truck.”

“I’m a what now?”

“You’re a sixth string on a five string guitar. The very best one of the litter,” she said. I laughed but she looked totally serious about it. Some kind of analogy I really wasn’t getting here, and I turned to Athan for help.

“Don’t look at me, I’m not the one who’s fibbing the dice,” he said with a shake of his head. “It’s incalculable.”

“Uh. Okay.” I blinked at him wondering exactly what brought this trainwreck of metaphors crashing into my garage. At least Whitney seemed to be behaving normally, frowning with some small frustration as she tried to get some part inserted into the framework she was building.

And then looking around and grabbing a wrench. And then smacking the shit out of her device with it, right into Athan’s leg.

“Hey, don’t log-jam the last leg in an arms race!”

“If you were hunting the wild condors like the big spook intoned, I wouldn’t have to surfboard both ways,” she pouted.

“Guys, what the heck is going on?” I asked, as all of them began swaying and sweating with their increasingly slurring speech.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“It’s-s a fine…five-fingered firecracker,” Lia commented, before falling off her stool. I dove and caught her head before it cracked into the concrete, but the others were drooping as well.

My mind raced as to what was going on, and my first thought was Saga…but she wouldn’t do this, not even as a joke. There had to be something else…another Code-X? Or something biological that wouldn’t affect me?

I had a basic sampler to tell me the composition of the air, but it was really only there so I’d be aware if things smelled. Some toxin deployed might get right past it. Still I had no other leads to go on right now. If it was a gas, I had to get these guys out of it. I threw the Ashtons over my two shoulders and kicked in the door to the house, making a beeline for Saga.

And ran right into what must have been the source. Literally.

My body just stopped moving forward with a crash. Nothing was there, but…shit I didn’t know. None of my optics gave me a reading, it was like I just bounced off a wall.

The nothing I’d just hit seemed to shimmer slightly and then launched an explosion of metal tentacles in my direction, seemingly emerging from nothing, and tipped with clamps, like a thousand manacles. I was still standing there like an idiot, trying to figure out what I’d run into, and a dozen of the little arms latched onto my limbs with a harmony of tiny clinks as they locked into place. One or two landed on Lia and Athan…

…which I only realized when an explosion of energy erupted off of him and slammed into the source of the arms. Lightning crackled all up and down it, and I felt it crawling over my skin. Lia writhed and moaned, but they were both out now apparently. I hoped the drug did something to blunt the pain, but she was still shuddering as the bolts arced down across her, bruises and burns swelled on her skin.

Meanwhile the thing I’d run into, or rather the machine, because that’s what it was, seemed to materialize from nothing as Athan’s shock burned out its optical camouflage. Short, squat, roughly trapezoid-shaped with an egg-shaped basin on top, like some kind of overgrown kitchen scale. If a kitchen scale had like, a thousand grabby tentacle arms.

And asleep in that basin, her body twisted and held down by a dozen of the arms was Moon.

I threw Athan clear, and grabbed one of the limbs holding Lia, finding it almost impossible to break. It twisted and flexed under my fingers, like I was ripping a phone book, but even with my engines burning to life, I couldn’t shear it with raw strength. I looked around to find any kind of blade. Kitchen knives, not strong enough. I could smash up the table or granite countertops, but they wouldn’t be sharp enough.

My eyes landed on a piece of Whitney’s junk, a piece of metal rod about the size and shape of a human femur, but cut clean in cross-section, ending in a wicked point. Some wires hung out of it, but that was irrelevant — the honed casing would do.

I made a move towards the back door where it was sitting in a corner, but after a few steps found myself held by the arms on me. After another minute of struggling, I realized I was getting further away from it, and turned to see the snatching machine back to life, a single blue-tinted lens glowing at me ominously from the center of the device.

I spun and kicked at it, cracking the relatively weak plating, but the snatcher just exploded with tendrils again, catching my leg this time and drawing its limbs taut to keep me from being able to move. I pulled at it, bashing ineffectively with my one free arm. I may as well have tried breaking down a door with a wiffle bat.

And worse, we were still getting further from the sharp shard. Somewhere under the trapezoidal skirt of its frame, wheels turned, pulling Moon and me out of here, Lia dragged face-down along the carpet like an afterthought. I yelled and swore at the fucking thing, lashing out as best I could, but it was just stronger than me. My body, powerful as it was, was just no match for a machine designed to grapple.

Why’d Athan have to be out? He could have lightning’d this thing down again easily.

I reached out for anything else I had. A swarm of a dozen cam-drones melted out of nothing just as their optical camo turned off, and they crammed themselves into its sensors. But the damn thing hardly seemed to care and just kept its slow beeline for the door.

In the recesses of the garage, I began to initiate the boot sequence for the black metal body, the Úaine. It had no combat aptitude, but it was something…if I could just get in one good sneak attack on that thing’s eye, its plating was shattered and weak, I didn’t need much…

But Úaine would take entire minutes to boot and be drivable. It wasn’t designed for remote piloting, and I’d have to do some speed-of-light hackery to get myself running it somehow.

But what other options did I have? I couldn’t drop Skyweb on top of Moon’s sleeping body. I didn’t have any DOG units in this little residential neighborhood. I could call the police or XPCA or something, but again, that’d be a matter of minutes, and the door was maybe twenty feet away. It was slow but not that slow.

I settled for unloading my entire dictionary of explicatives at it. It wasn’t helping but I wasn’t exactly a perfect AI.

“AEGIS?” I heard a small voice behind me and turned to look. I felt blind without my cam-drones, but they were tied up being as obnoxious as I could manage.

Saga was standing there in the back door, looking gaunt and thin, her tan capris and blue sweater wearing her. She looked as swaying and drunk as the others had been, and I realized why I hadn’t seen her sooner. Even if she wasn’t breathing the gas, she was in their minds, and they were.

“Saga! Thank God! Help us!” I shouted. “And hold your breath, there’s gas!”

She shook her head. “I can’t…can’t get poisoned. I’m…resetting right now…all the time.”

The robot trundled for the door, but seemed to hesitate for a moment when Saga spoke up. I realized with panic that if it detected her, she’d just join us in its embrace.

“Okay Saga, don’t speak anymore, okay? Don’t let it know you’re there.”

She nodded and took a stumbling step forward. I was glad she was so light, she hardly made a sound moving.

Experimentally, I flipped through my optics and realized Saga was practically invisible on thermal. She was so thin and produced such little heat…and with my drones blocking the snatcher’s normal vision, she just might have a chance.

“Grab the sharp piece of scrap from over there,” I gestured as best I could. She stumbled once again, but got it, but we were already halfway to the door now. “Okay now…come over here…and without touching it, I need you to jam that thing as hard as you can into the glowing blue spot. You see it?”

“Yeah–I mean…”

“Shh, it’s fine. No need to talk. Just…just do it.”

She nodded and grit her teeth, advancing in a crouch like a primal hunter. As she moved, I realized every few moments she’d seem to flicker, her powers resetting her as the gas seeped in. We were lucky it took a few moments to set in, otherwise she’d be addled and useless too.

She crept forward, avoiding the swaying tentacles which swished aimlessly like a thousand tails of a thousand housecats. Slowly she closed on it, her footsteps uneven, her breathing halting, as though she wanted to hold her breath but didn’t know how. Despite her mental state, the look on her face was pure focus, her eyes never shifted from the blue glow, buried under my cam-drones. From their angle I could see her getting ever-closer.

She was a few feet away, and the snatcher was at the door. With machine precision, it turned, arms rotating to open the exit.

And some of those arms moving bumped into Saga. The machine spun back at twice the speed, its eye pointed right at her. She froze entirely, and I held my breath as it stared right at her.

One single arm snaked around with the deliberate movement of feeling out blindly, clinking as it patted against the ground as it swayed. It reached over towards Saga, probing the air, the clamping bits clanging as it repeatedly opened and closed like mandibles.

It was going to hit her. It was going to find her. We were so screwed.

Saga saw it too, and before the snatcher did, she jumped, closing the last of the distance with a determined little grunt.

Her arm was out, blade pointed true. But she never landed. The snatcher lashed out and grabbed her out of the air by her other arm, holding her dangling like a doll. It seemed confused what it found and she swiped uselessly, still a foot away from the core. So close, so fucking damn close.

She took a deep breath and then in one brutal motion raised her improvised blade and screamed her best. With a splatter of red and a thump, she fell to the ground, her detached arm still in the snatcher’s grip above her. It seemed confused still, unsure what it was holding and what was making all these noises.

And it died with that confusion still pulsing through its core, as Saga, one-armed, rammed the shiv through my drones, through the eye, right into the heart of the monster.

It staggered and flailed, sending Saga and myself both flying, but they were the death throes of a crippled beast, and as its power faltered, the flailing slowed and then stopped, and it came crashing down sideways, dropping Moon rolling across the floor.

“Goddamn,” muttered Saga, flush and out of breath, kicking her discarded arm on the floor, a new pristine one already in place.

“You fucking saved everyone,” I told her, wrapping my arms around her for just the briefest of hugs, before heading to disassemble the machine and make sure it stayed fucking dead.

“I…guess I did,” she said, sounding completely unsure. I mean, she’d just snuck up on a machine and crammed a blade into its core, there wasn’t much room for modesty or ambiguity here. She put herself at risk of capture again just to save others. “I liked that sweater, though.”

I grunted and there was popping and several electrical discharges before the machine’s core tore out of the frame, like I’d just ripped its heart from its chest. “There. We can go through the data later. How are these guys?”

“Super confused, super asleep. Both at once, somehow,” Saga said, holding her head as she sunk to the ground. “My head’s all foggy from whatever they were on. There’s uh…oh…there’s people arriving outside. They’re here to follow-up on it. I’ll…I’ll send them off I guess.”

“No,” I said, setting the core down and pulling the snatcher to the side to open the front door myself. “They came all this way, let’s let them in.”

“AEGIS?” Saga muttered. “I’m…I’m not in good shape to go fucking anyone’s mind right now. I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“Just bring them in the house,” I said, reaching back inside the robot and feeling around. I frowned as I fumbled blind in there, and then my remaining dozen cam-drones sprung to life and buried themselves inside the cavity like maggots.

“You’re sure?”

I wrenched free the part I wanted and held it up for inspection. Still plenty full.

“Yeah,” I said, brandishing the can of the knockout gas at her. “I think it’s time we stopped screwing around with subterfuge and went with a few good old-fashioned interrogations.”