Armless, Red-eye, and Vezkig passed through the massive door into a similarly gigantic room with another door at the other side. The door had closed behind them the moment they passed, and the other one similarly began opening the moment the first one closed.

The airlock was filled with racks containing things like primitive plasma torches, helmets with lights, respirators, and jumpsuits with armor plated haphazardly sewn or just glued on. There were even revolvers and shotguns, albeit misshapen and dirty. The lemons of mass-printed weapon batches, and the best protection slave-miners were afforded. They might as well have been dressed in bacon and thrown into a tiger pit, with how aggressive human security systems were towards armed intruders.

The walls were scrawled with a poorly-drawn iconography in oil and grime, depicting the Ecclesiarch as a messianic figure who spoke for the gods, with the wrecked ship itself being a holy trial.

None of them spoke, each in a different state of anticipation; anxious, calm, and grim respectively.

The inner airlock door began to open, and beyond they saw bright light. They squeezed into the gap the moment it became wide enough to pass through, the sight before them flooding their senses as more and more came into their fields of vision.

It was a looming hallway, stretching on for hundreds of meters towards another giant door. The floor was made from huge slabs of the same black material that made up the walls around the outside of the airlock, matte-black and pristine, not a single scratch upon its surface. The walls were plated in grey metal, huge chunks having been cut out by the Truthseekers. The skeletal remains of printed scaffolding still leaned against these wounds, polymer ropes still hung down in places.

There was a large mag-rail in the center, the platform all the way at the other end. There were walkways along the walls, doors, windows, seemingly split up into two floors of rooms that he approximated to be thirteen meters floor to ceiling each, if he were to guess by the positions of visible doors and windows. The walls at ground level were veritably lined with doors at regular intervals, most of which were clearly labeled in generic terms such as “Engineering” and “Crew Quarters”.

Red-eye was unfazed, as he’d seen it dozens of times before.

Armless was unsurprised by the sight as it matched up with the fragmentary image files that he’d seen in Amalgam’s databanks.

Vezkig looked around eagerly, but there was… A strange familiarity in his eyes. His gaze darted around eagerly, but there was no confusion, no seeking. He knew where to look for signs, where the windows would be, where the walkways would be.

“T-talk about scale,” he hissed, pointing to a gaping hole in the wall to their right. “Hopefully we’ll find what we need in M-medbay C-1.”

The tinkerer began walking towards the hole, eager to see what lay beyond and seemingly unconcerned by the possibility of violent security automatons or turrets. Perhaps he was emboldened by the fact that the path forward had been cleared already.

They followed in his wake, and as they walked, Red-eye piped up.

“We hadn’t managed to get through the door to the medbay itself when I left. I have no doubts that whatever we find will have value beyond just saving the old man’s life, if we do manage to get in,” he said.

“I’ve no doubts we will, Administrator privileges and all,” Vezkig replied.

The gunman chuckled, then retorted with “Given some of the things we did to try and get through that door, I wouldn’t be surprised if it failed to open even with the proper authorization. We’ll probably have to lift the whole bulwark.”

The hallway that led to the medbay had been stripped so completely that there was no paneling, no surface-level circuitry, only the underlying black-stone protected superstructure that the Truthseekers couldn’t get through. The same hanging bulbs that lit much of the tunnel they’d come from illuminated the corridor. At the end was a heavy-duty security door, covered in shallow scrapes, plasma burns, and religious symbology, plasma torches, handheld metal cutters and drills scattered on the ground. There was a heavy-duty keypad and hololens to the right of the door.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

The all-encompassing silence made every step feel heavy, but it seemed that Armless was the only one remotely disturbed by it. Something was wrong, he could feel it. Just in case, he roused Apeiron from its slumber and drew some energy into his system. He felt… Trepidation, perhaps? He wasn’t sure.

A wave of his hand against the hololens made the ancient machine hail him with “Administrator detected. Welcome, Ouroboros.” in a robotic, female voice.

The door moved upward, but got stuck almost instantaneously, leaving a gap barely big enough to fit a finger through. “Error: Door mechanism inoperable. Please perform a manual override or seek out a maintenance drone,” the voice chimed again.

He couldn’t help but chuckle. “You were right,” he said, turning his head to look at Red-eye.

“Door’s stuck?” the gunman queried.

Armless nodded, then lowered himself into a wide stance. “I’ll try to lift it,” he stated matter-of-factly, prompting the other two to step away.

He dug the fingers of his left hand into the gap, alongside Apeiron’s lower gripper, with the upper pushing up against the door as leverage. The door whined, his feet dug into the floor, and nothing happened. It was too heavy.

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Armless focused, willing Apeiron to supply more energy. Exotic particles began rising from his eye-lights, a faint glow suffused his musculature, and the world around him became more vivid. Musculature strained, his left arm’s herculean strength manifested itself, the floor panels buckled under his feet, and the door finally lurched upward with a horrible screech of metal on metal.

Bit by bit, centimeter by centimeter, second by second, Armless raised the superheavy, nigh-impenetrable bulwark of a door, the heavy-duty mechanism helping to keep it from moving back down. There was a wall only a few meters across from the door, and up against it a gaunt figure stood, stiff and slouched. When he raised the door far enough that his face was fully visible the figure lurched forward, lights flashing in its hololens eyes. Without so much as a thought, he let go of the door and slammed Apeiron against its stomach, grippers digging into its flesh and rending it apart from the inside-out as they closed in a snapping motion. Before it shut down, it buzzed “Wel-el-elcome, pl-e-e-ease u-use the au-au-augstation-on-ons-” in a stuttering, distorted tone. It had a serial number on its forehead.

“A medical homunculus! Looks all dessicated…” Vezkig remarked, equal parts amazed and startled at what was now just mangled circuitry and synthetic, greyish-white gore laying at his feet, its glassy hololens eyes staring up at the creature it was designed to imitate. It was as though the thing was accusing him.

“You would’ve done the same if I was a real person,” its empty glare said. His combat processors hadn’t kicked in, and he hadn’t mentally planned out his actions, yet he had just eviscerated what might as well have been another human.

“Let’s get the parts and get out of here,” he said, stepping over the remains and into the medbay. The room was an L-shape, and they were at the end of the long side of it. It was pristine, rows and rows of limbs and modules hanged from the walls, and the doors of lockers were embedded into the right-side wall. Around half a dozen medical slates with arrays of surgical tendrils hanging from above lined the wall to the left. He recognized them as augstations, semi-automated medical devices designed for body modification and the associated maintenance procedures. Vezkig slipped past him and began methodically plundering the medbay, opening up lockers that would let him and pulling on those that wouldn’t until Armless willed them to unlock. He picked out cables, bulbous modules, tubes, plugs, all seemingly depending on their serial numbers, as though he truly understood what each item did just by the cryptic labeling. Armless even saw the tinkerer staring at the parts with his left eye, the implanted scanner lens in the back of it blinking in staccato.

Armless took a seat on the nearest augstation while Vezkig rummaged through the medbay and plundered it for parts. He’d already planned to go after Orsha, but what would he do when he caught him? There was no blessing to burn out of him, nothing he could do to just magically fix him or get him to switch sides. Was he going to just beat Orsha into submission and drag him off? Perhaps he would have another episode and murder him for the sin of youthful idealism? Whether consciously or not, his gaze remained fixated on the gaunt, semi-skeletal remains of the homunculus. He felt a weak, flickering trace of void energy in its systems, an ancient capacitor that had been drained long ago and only subsisted on its own miniscule energy generation capacity. The homunculus was androgynous, had no hair, no particular facial features to speak of. Yet, his mind still projected the image of Orsha’s mutilated face on the thing, anchored by the shared trait of a hololens eye.

Red-eye, still stood in the door, look into the medbay for a few minutes before he finally stepped in, like he wanted to build a mental map of the room before he entered it. He hoisted the homunculus’s upper half over his shoulder, and put it down on the slate across from armless before sitting down next to him, to his right. “What’s on your mind all of a sudden?” he questioned, the seething lilac orb of his left eye fixated on Armless even as the gunman faced forwards and observed Vezkig with his living eye.

“You’re quick on the uptake.”

“Already told you, I can see into people. It’s rarely clear, but I can read you like an open book. It’s about the young one that ran off and ended up with the Truthseekers, isn’t it?”

Armless felt pressure rising in his chest, but not like before. It was a tightness, like the power conduits in his voicebox became tangled. His voice wavered and shook, despite being synthesized.

“It’s… Not just about him, but yes. What sort of man do you think I am?”

“A good one.”

“Would a good man thoughtlessly murder another of his own kind? That homunculus could’ve easily been another human, and I just cut it in half without so much as a second’s hesitation. Hell, I looked like that thing at one point.”

“We’re in a dangerous place. There could’ve been a security droid behind that door, and who knows what would happen if one of those got out of here.”

Armless shook his head.

“Don’t make excuses for me. I should know better than to thoughtlessly exert violence to solve problems. What if our allies go against me? What if the townsfolk get angry and harass me at the bar? Will I just slaughter them where they stand, just because I’m stronger than them?”

“You wouldn’t, you know that,” Red-eye retorted, his voice resounding with absolute certainty.

“Wouldn’t I? I’m stronger than ever now, I might kill someone without intention. I might like the sense of power. I might become like the Ecclesiarch.”

“Then you will burn. I’ll make sure of it.”

A sad chuckle escaped Armless’s throat as he looked up at Red-eye.

“You swear you’ll stop me if I ever become like him?”

“On my honor. Or what’s left of it. No, I’ll swear on my gun.”

Somehow, the promise of being murdered by Red-eye if he ever became like the Ecclesiarch reassured him. He made his eyes smile, and decided to simply sit there observing the engineer.

Vezkig continued rummaging through the lockers, but he’d already built up a pile far larger than he himself could carry. It took him another several minutes before he stopped, looked at the pile, and fruitlessly tried to pick up the whole lot. His cybernetics whined, steam vented out of his back, and he even got the pile off the ground, but the moment he took a step he fell face-first into it, prompting laughter from his companions.

Armless tried to hail whatever Virtual Intelligence might be running the medbay, and received a ping from the same network ID that had control over the door hololens. He requested a hoverslate, and his HUD briefly highlighted a particular locker near the other end of the room, one that Vezkig hadn’t yet opened.

When he got up and walked over to it to recover a hoverslate, he saw what was beyond the bend. Workbenches, more lockers, a particularly nice-looking printer, and a truly massive, semi-spherical machine all the way in the back. It completely filled the room floor to ceiling, wires and tubes winding around it, and connecting it to the walls. There was a large terminal next to it to the left, and a rack of dataplugs to the right. He didn’t dwell on it at the moment, but it was entirely unfamiliar, it stuck out like a sore thumb in a place filled with things he had at least a vague familiarity for.

Red-eye helped him load all the parts onto the hoverslate, whilst Vezkig ran over to the locker to retrieve one for him to ride on. As they left the medbay, he sat upon his slate with a strange expression.