Page 44 of Leviathan

I was alone.

Then the filaments were pressed up against my face. I squeezed my eyes and mouth shut, holding my breath as the filaments brushed over the bare skin of my face, like being poked and prodded by careless fingers that didn't think about where or what they were jabbing. It didn't hurt, but it was still uncomfortable.

Finally, the tunnel relented, opening suddenly to slide me out of an opening onto a floor. The prodding and pinching stopped, and I was released, freed into an open space. I took a deep breath, and I looked around.

I was crouched down behind the prone Vaurelcar. I could see the back of his smoky grey shoulders. I could see where the neurofilaments snaked into his spine and neck, plugging into his scalp like strands of living, glowing hair. The table of neurofilaments, where his body was suspended, blocked my view of the rest of the room.

I couldn't see the rest of the room, which meant I was hidden from the other Calicium, at least immediately.

"Why did the monitoring system go down?" a male voice asked, out of sight. It had to be the guard. It was deadpan, as if the person speaking were completely devoid of emotion.

"I rebooted it," the Vaurelcar said, his tone equally deadpan. "It will only be down for thirty more seconds."

He emphasized the last few words, sending a panic through me. Thirty seconds until someone could see I was in the room.

"Why did you reboot it?" the guard demanded.

There was a thick metal collar around the Vaurelcar's neck. It wrapped around his throat, and the back of it snaked up to join the mass of neurofilaments that sank into the back of his skull.

"I was ordered to turn it off and back on again," the Vaurelcar answered, giving the least amount of information possible.

I slid the cutter out of my pocket. It didn't look like any cutting device I was familiar with. It was a flat, narrow rectangle, the size of a cell phone, with a small divot in the center.

"Whoever ordered that is not linked into our network," the Calicium said. "They have no authority. Where is their location?"

"Behind me," the Vaurelcar replied.

I pressed the device against the collar, and it clicked onto it like a magnet. I pressed my finger to the divot, and as I did, I shot up to my feet.

I had to keep Calicium's attention away from the device.

The Calicium was already heading towards me, and he was terrifying. He looked like a Terminator mashed together with a pro wrestler alien, covered in a skintight suit made for a superhero. He had purple skin and four horns that sprouted from the top of his head and the sides of his cheekbones, arching backward behind his head. His outfit was shades of grey, molded to his body, with white hard plates on his shoulders and chest like piecemeal armor. I would have thought that outfit was his skin if it wasn't for the purple of his face. He had hair cut very short and close to his boxy meat head, and his expression was dull and lifeless, with eyes that focused on me as if they were looking at something else standing in my place instead of me.

I sidestepped wide, to pull his gaze along with me, away from the device I'd just attached to the Vaurelcar's collar.

"Hello!" I said, putting a bright smile on my face. "It's so nice to meet you. My name is Maria."

Lyrien had said that I wouldn't be able to lie to Calicium about being one of them, so I didn't bother.

I thrust out my hand.

"My species performs traditional greetings in this manner," I said as he stopped abruptly in front of me, his gaze dropping to my outstretched hand. "I am demonstrating that I am friendly and non-aggressive. Since I am clearly a fully biological being, you could label me as harmless, possibly even nonsentient, and fully unworthy of your attention. However, if you do deem me worthy of focusing on, then please tell me, what is your name?"

Lyrien had told me that the Calicium were cyborgs incorporating heavy technology into their biological bodies as a form of control and enhancement. The lower-ranking soldiers had embedded orders they followed like programming, but that had to be a weakness.

With any software, it should modify its responses depending on the input it received. Software couldn't come up with things on its own; it could only regurgitate standardized information in the set format allowed by its constraints. Right now, it had the fact that I was an intruder, so if I layered on other labels as fast as possible, I might be able to cause it to settle on a different response.

His eyes flicked down to my other hand, where I still had the Calicium weapon clenched in my grip, forgotten.

I had a heartbeat of a moment before his fist swung at me.

I flinched backward into the blow, but it still hit me like an overpowered kick to the chest.

I flew backward, hitting the wall of filaments behind me and crashing down to the floor, my weapon flying away from me. I wheezed through the pain, the shock of it scattering my thoughts, the wind completely knocked out of me. A foot stepped in close to my face, and I looked up to see the Calicium looking down at me, his palm pointed at me, fingers drawn back like he was telling me to stop.

Then the bottom of his arm dropped down, revealing a circular muzzle of what could only be some sort of weapon.

It glowed blue around the edges, energy gathering.