The white of the Valles Marineris Grid was a physical presence, a pressure against the eyes. It was a clean, engineered color that bled from seamless Luma-Core panels in the walls and ceiling, leaving no shadows, no texture, no place to hide. The air tasted of nothing, scrubbed clean of the ozone and scorched noodles and wet metal that made up the atmosphere of Ceres. It was the smell of erasure. Kaelen pulled the collar of his worn canvas jacket tighter, the rough fabric a familiar anchor in this alien perfection. He moved from the skiff’s sterile airlock into the clinic’s service corridor, his goal a single, burning point of light in the hollowness of his mind: find Corbin Vance.
Walter Bell moved beside him, a shadow of black composite against the blinding walls. The raven Uplift’s chassis, scarred and dented from the collapse in the Europa bio-dome, seemed out of place here, a piece of messy reality in a world of flawless theory. His footsteps made no sound on the polished polymer floor. He paused, tilting his head, the single amber glow of his custom optic scanning a junction ahead.
— Corridor clear for 30 seconds, — Walter’s synthesized voice was a flat line in the engineered silence. — Move.
They moved. Kaelen’s senses, once a screaming chaos of another man’s dying thoughts, were now a clean, sharp instrument. He could feel the flow of the clinic’s few late-night personnel, not as intrusive thoughts, but as simple pressures in the Resonance Field. They were distant, muted signals, the placid hum of minds smoothed into complacency by the Consensus. It was a profound and unnerving quiet. He felt the cold, useless weight of the Ghost-Eater Shunt on his neck, a dead port waiting for a final, terrible signal.
— Two personnel approaching, — Kaelen murmured, his voice a low rasp. — Maintenance caste. West corridor. Their route intersects ours in 40 seconds.
Walter processed the information without a pause. He stopped at a blank section of the wall and produced a thin fiber-optic cable from a port in his wrist, pressing its tip against a nearly invisible seam.
— Acknowledged. Rerouting.
A panel slid open with a soft hiss, revealing a darker, narrower maintenance conduit. The air inside was warmer, tasting of hot electronics and lubricants. It was the smell of the station’s guts, a brief, welcome return to a world that had function and decay. They slipped inside, the white panel sliding shut behind them, plunging them into near-total darkness, broken only by the amber glow of Walter’s optic.
They navigated the tight space in silence, the only sounds the faint scrape of Kaelen’s boots and the quiet, rhythmic click of Walter’s leg actuators. The damage from Europa had given the archivist a slight, almost imperceptible drag in his left leg, a tiny imperfection that Kaelen found reassuring. It was proof that things could break and still function. It was a whisper of hope.
Walter stopped, pressing his hand against the conduit wall.
— We are adjacent to the pre-operative wing.
Kaelen closed his eyes, pushing his awareness through the wall. He felt the minds on the other side. A handful of nurses, their thoughts a placid loop of procedural checklists. And deeper, a single mind, fuzzy and slow, drifting in a chemical fog. Corbin Vance. The signal was faint, unremarkable. A nobody. But tangled within it, so faint it was almost imperceptible, was a thread of something else. A resonance that felt like a distant echo of the ghost he had carried for months. An echo of Aris Volkov.
— He’s here, — Kaelen said. — Sedated. There’s something else. A machine. No consciousness, just a cold loop of instructions.
— The medical droid, — Walter stated. He was already working, his multi-jointed fingers interfacing with a control panel, bypassing the network that controlled the clinic’s internal security. A schematic of the pre-op wing bloomed in the amber light of his optic. A single room was highlighted. 3B. — Surveillance feeds in this sector are now on a 90-second loop. The door is a series-seven magnetic seal. Encrypted. One minute.
Kaelen pushed his senses again, focusing on the room. The droid’s instructional loop was simple, brutal. Identify target. Apply injector. Administer psychic wipe. He could feel the temporal marker in the code. The procedure was imminent.
— The droid is prepping the injector, — Kaelen said. — We don’t have one minute.
Walter’s fingers moved faster, a blur of precise motion. The low hum of the panel he was working on rose in pitch. Kaelen touched the back of his neck, his fingers tracing the scarred tissue around the dead implant. The memory of Zaina’s ship, a single flickering icon swarmed by corporate lanceships, burned in his mind. The price for this moment had been paid in her shield integrity, in the very real possibility of her death. He would not waste it.
A soft chime echoed down the service conduit.
— Door unlocked, — Walter said. — For 15 seconds.
They moved back into the main corridor, the perfect, shadowless white light a shock after the darkness. The hallway was empty. A sign on the wall read PRE-OPERATIVE WING 3. The door to room 3B was identical to all the others, a seamless white panel. It slid open as they approached.
The room was a perfect cube of white. In the center, Corbin Vance lay on a medical bed, a thin sheet drawn up to his chest. He was just as bland and forgettable as his file had suggested. An IV line snaked from his arm to a pole beside the bed, dripping a clear, sedative fluid. He was oblivious, a man dreaming of nothing on the edge of having a piece of his mind scoured away forever.
Beside the bed, a Sanitas-7 medical droid unfolded itself with quiet, fluid movements. It was a sculpture of polished chrome and white polymer, its multiple, slender arms ending in a variety of sterile instruments. One arm held the psychic wipe injector, a device that looked like a cruel, oversized needle. A soft, blue light on its chassis pulsed, indicating it was in the final moments of its pre-procedure checklist.
A calm, automated voice, the voice of the clinic itself, echoed from a hidden speaker.
— Psychic hygiene procedure commencing in five minutes.
They had made it. They were inside, undetected. Kaelen took a step into the room, the door hissing shut behind him. He felt a flicker of something, a change in the Resonance Field, a pressure that didn't belong. It was the psychic equivalent of a footstep in an empty room.
He turned. The door to the pre-op room was sliding open again.
