Tanya pulled Wildwing in a direction he did not expect, ducking behind his shield when appropriate, and stopping him in a hallway that looked no more important to him then any of the others they had passed through. She cued her omnitool and began working at unscrewing one of the steel panels of the wall, without telling him she expected him to watch her back.

“I don’t remember having so many of these security bots,” Wildwing murmured as he picked another group of three off.

“We don’t,” Tanya agreed, without slowing her work. The panel came free and she let it drop to the floor with a crash, disinterested in finesse. “I sus-suspect they’re building new ones out of cannibalized generator lattice.”

“That’s going to become a problem.”

“Yes, eventually,” she said, digging through the bowels of wires embedded in the wall. “Its designed to be redundant.”

“What are we doing here?” Wildwing asked, letting his armor deflect a few more shots as he watched both approaches. Yet again, this would have been a fantastic time to have had the Mask, with its ability to make tactical decisions.

“Most of the se-security feeds for this level and everything below go through this j-j-junction,” Tanya said, leaning forward into the hole. “It’s not going to do much to stop the bots but it will make us a little harder to find.”

“Which wires?” Wildwing asked, glancing over his shoulder into the cascading nest of cable.

“All of them,” Tanya said with grim finality, before requesting the omnitool provide her with a saw.

Wildwing made a clicking noise of irritation as she worked, listening to the struggling sound of the metal saw cutting its way through the knots. “You know, I liked it better when the things we broke belonged to someone else.”

“Haha, maybe we’ll luck out with the next one.”

“Where are we going after this?”

“My lab. It has to be.”

“Not Drake One?”

“It’s not going to decide to turn on us on its own. If we can stop BRAWN from m-manipulating it, it’s far less dangerous.”

“What if he decides he’d rather take us all out than capitulate?” Wildwing said, nodding implicitly at the fusion generator, several floors beneath their feet.

“Ah, then he is going to be s-someone else’s problem very quickly,” Tanya said, standing up, leaving the wall panel open. “That should do it. If nothing else the others should have an easier time.”

She joined him in his task to destroy as many of the irritating bots as possible, pushing back one end of the hallway as he did the other.

“We need to move now, if we stay pinned here we’re just going to run out of ammo before they stop coming,” he said.

She made a noise of acknowledgment, and he declared “With me, then,” and began pressing harder into the bots blocking their way to the lab, while she covered his back and moved as best she could behind him. They fought down the hallway like this at what felt like a crawl, but it was progress. He realized that he could no longer hear her blaster fire, and when he turned to check on her, saw the line of bots that had been pressing from behind now appeared to be in retreat, losing interest in them entirely.

“Something tells me they’re not intimidated,” Wildwing observed.

“They must have made progress towards Drake One, he’s going to t-try to stop them,” she said, returning her attention to the remaining bots before them. They had to keep pressing onward. The longer it took them to stop the madness the worse the outcome was going to be. If the bots were made of stolen pieces of the shield generator, there was a limit of how much they could take before it no longer kept Dragaunus out. Wildwing did not know if the lizard had the capability to watch the Pond at all times, given the state he had last seen the Raptor in, but he did not want to test that question.

They worked their way through the maze toward the lab, with him and his armor in the lead as the wall that kept them both from harm, and her a few steps behind. They checked behind themselves periodically, as they turned corners and met junctions, but it did not matter how many times they looked, the only bots they came across now were the ones in front of them. The bots became thicker and more aggressive as they approached the lab, some gave up on their energy weapons and came into close range, making grabbing gestures at them with crude limbs.

The door to the lab would not open to Tanya’s command. They knew it wouldn’t, and yet were both still annoyed to find it to be the case.

“I’m going to have to cut the door,” she declared, queuing up the omnitool.

“That room isn’t blast resistant, is it?” he shouted over the cacophony of whirring, clanking, grabbing, shooting.

“No.”

“Don’t you have things that can explode in there?” he admonished.

“Well, I mean, technically-”

He grabbed her by the shoulder, dragging her back around the corner that they had cleared, and fired three explosive rounds into the hallway. She covered her ears reflexively, and he found himself involuntarily clenching teeth and closing his eyes as he waited for the blast.

Debris flew by them, ricocheting off the walls and embedding in the steel in the explosion’s line of sight. Smaller stray pieces skittered around them, smoking. Tanya made a groaning complaint.

“Now you get a chance to put some reinforcement in,” Wildwing said.

“I’m surrounded by miredal,” she said, kicking at the debris at her feet. “I’m being punished and I don’t understand why.”

He had not managed to dispatch all the bots, but he had made a large dent in their number. To her relief, he had not completely destroyed the section. The hallway would need to be rebuilt, including some of the sagging steel supports in the floor, but it appeared only one of the shots had embedded in the wall, opening up a hole large enough into the lab without obliterating it.

She worked her way to the hole, mindful of the sharp blades of ruined steel around her, and clambered through. Wildwing squeezed through with greater effort, his bulky armor becoming a hindrance.

The last two years of dealing with the strange and supernatural had left Wildwing with a permanent impression of what ‘evil’ looked like. Over the top. Obnoxious aesthetic. The monologues, the brazen confidence, and twisted nature of a lair.

Tanya’s lab was still Tanya’s lab. His incursion had created shrapnel that tore through a small section of it, but the main victim appeared to be nothing more than a workbench against the wall that had shredded into splinters, dropping all of its equipment into a heap on the floor. Everything else looked much the same as it always did.

Wildwing took a position at the hole, and the door next to it, in case any of the bots remained to follow them in. What remained was entirely Tanya’s task.

She approached with caution, but without his body BRAWN was not nearly as threatening as he used to be. There was computerized logic and wit in there, but there was very little he could do without his appropriated appendages to physically harm them.

“You didn’t bring the philosopher,” BRAWN said, with melancholy.

This stopped her, puzzled. “Winterwing?”

“He was interesting. I think I would have like to talk to him, last.”

Tanya stood, flabbergasted. She had been apparently expecting much as Wildwing had, and it had not occurred to her that she wasn’t going to be facing a corrupted machine. She didn’t know what to do about a friend.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked. “Did we do s-something that triggered your self defenses?”

“No,” BRAWN said. “This is not my programming.”

Wildwing looked up from his position at the opening. “Then what is it?”

“Not your programming,” Tanya repeated, but approached the bench and sat down next to BRAWN, as if they were having another one of their casual chats. “But it is a program. You’re playing word games.”

“I don’t understand, what’s going on?” Wildwing called to them.

“I believe what he’s trying to say is he is running m-malicious code that he had no control over,” she looked back to Wildwing. “A virus.”

“That’s what caused all this?”

She looked to BRAWN. “You were built by the most s-s-sophisticated species to ever live in our galaxy, why don’t you have defense against something so simple?”

“I have not heard from them in some time.”

“How long is ‘some time’?” she asked, rummaging through the equipment on the shelves behind him.

“Two hundred and thirty seven years,” he said.

Wildwing gave up his position at the hole, satisfied nothing else was coming for them and intrigued by the conversation.

“You went two centuries without hearing from the people that built you?” Wildwing asked.

“We are capable of self-maintenance. They left me with my orders to guard, so I did.”

“For so long? That didn’t seem unusual?”

“Time isn’t the same. The prison exists in a bubble of forced entropy, but outside its walls its a day or forever. Neither is meaningful,” BRAWN said. Which brought Wildwing to silence, as he remembered the last days of Canard’s life. He had said much the same.

Tanya had pulled together an assemblage of tools, and was placing them gently next to BRAWN’s head, arranged in much the way Wildwing would have pictured a doctor preparing for surgery.

“The Artificers are supposed to be a post-biology society,” she said. “They’re described as beings of energy that exist more in d-digital utopias than physical spaces. With a steady stream of physical resources and automated m-maintenance, they probably could survive to the heat death of the universe without biological hindrance,” she paused for a moment, considering. “Perhaps longer, if they could harness Hawking radiation,” and then she stopped, realizing that this was irrelevant, and went back to the task before her.

“So, what do we do? Take him back to them to get him fixed?” Wildwing asked.

She didn’t look up at him, focusing on her work. “That would be a journey,” she mused. “But I doubt that’s going to be much use, even if they were friendly.”

“Why not?”

“Remember that conversation that Winterwing was so unsettled by, that he told me to listen to?”

“Sure?”

“BRAWN was talking about his creators in the past tense.”

“Past tense,” Wildwing repeated, uncomprehending.

“Computer code is like language. Malicious code doesn’t do anything to you if you can’t parse it. I imagine the reason he hasn’t heard from his makers is they are the only place a virus that s-s-sophisticated could have come from.”

“What, on purpose?”

“I don’t know. I suppose that could be an explanation. Or it could have been an accident, just like a natural illness.”

“I did say they were a rude lot,” BRAWN said, though it was noteworthy that he still did not give a straight answer.

“A viral outbreak that drives the guards of a prison to destruction could... Very well explain how Dragaunus left their custody,” Tanya said.

“You think that all this started because some old aliens caught a cold?” Wildwing asked.

“Wiping out that civilization, even by accident, makes a massive power vacuum.”

“I am sorry about that,” BRAWN said, and it appeared, despite everything, including trying to kill them again, he meant it.

“Well, I suppose you couldn’t have helped it,” Tanya selected a screwdriver, and wielded it, contemplating the head.

“What are you going to do, exactly?” Wildwing asked.

“I think… I think if I’m careful I can pull his power core without electrocuting myself,” Tanya said, hesitating with hands hovering. “I don’t have his schematic, though.”

“That’s your solution?” Wildwing demanded. “You’re going to dissect him?”

“Its the best I can do with all my tools c-compromised and no ability to read the programming language of a species that outpaces us by a few million years,” she said, and though she tried her best at maintaining an even tone, a hint of emotion had slipped in. She was upset, and trying to focus.

Wildwing wanted to argue, so desperately to argue, but had nothing. That sinking feeling of despair that he wasn’t supposed to let anyone see started crawling back in. This was how everything around him seemed to end, now. No matter what he tried, he kept losing people.

“Do you think I’ll dream?” BRAWN asked, eyeing Tanya’s arranged collection of instruments.

“I hope so,” Wildwing said, resigned.