Keeping up with Elara proved to be more demanding than Voy would have initially guessed. He’d toured the ship with quartermaster Dalisse when he first came aboard and while he wasn’t graced with a flawless memory he was more or less secure that he knew how to get around the ship afterwards. Perhaps without meaning to, Elara was tearing that confidence asunder. Where others moved through the ship like a city, with its corridors the streets and its rooms the various buildings lining them, Elara weaved through the ship with little regard for the intended flow of traffic.

  No maintenance hatch was off limits, no pipe forbidden. When she did pop out in a workroom or storage area she seemed well acquainted with those working there, exchanging quick but sincere greetings with busy laborers before leading Voy into some other winding ventilation shaft. On they went for several minutes until any sense of place Voy once held was thoroughly vacant.

  “Is all this really necessary?” Voy asked as the two began to slide down an inclined elevator shaft. Elara laughed beside him.

  “Moving too fast for you?” she teased as they reached the bottom and dropped down onto an open air lift platform. They were no longer in places not meant to walk, but this deck was free of the marble and gold the upper decks had in excess. The walls and floor were metal here, all of it carried an orange rust like hue. The uniformity with which it was applied made Voy wonder if it was perhaps an eccentric style choice rather than an indicator of poor maintenance. That raised new curiosity about just who dwelt here, Hembrandt didn’t seem the sort to let any part of his ship depart from his chosen aesthetic.

  “Wouldn’t we have gotten here faster if we’d walked through the regular halls and taken an elevator?” Voy asked as he took in the new environment. Elara opened her mouth to reply but stopped with the furrowing of her brow. Shortly after, she frowned.

  “Maybe. Perhaps. Possibly,” she muttered, “Where’s your sense of whimsy?”

  “Kept it in my arm,” Voy said, shrugging his left shoulder. Elara laughed through her nose.

  “Kept your sense of humor somewhere else I see,” she hopped off the platform and down to the rust-tinged corridor below. Voy followed shortly after. The Elevator shaft they’d ridden down came out in the middle of what looked to be an internal roadway, somewhere vehicles could drive to ferry heavier equipment and larger loads around the ship when it was docked. At the moment it was vacant in both directions, each side gently curving out of view away from the elevator.

  It caught him a little off guard. Every other deck of the ship always bustling with activity, always at least a few people in any given space setting about their work. Elara started walking to the left, Voy caught up to walk side by side with her.

  “How much further to engineering?” Voy asked.

  “End of this roadway, not much further,” she answered, “You ever met a Jeremayne before?” Voy had not, and though the name rang a bell he couldn’t assign more than a hint of recognition to it.

  “Can’t say I have,” he answered honestly, “that’s not an alien is it?” Voy meant it as a joke, but it occurred to him as the words left his mouth that the torchbearers already had a litany of broken laws to their name. What would one more be in service of their aims? He punctuated his question with a disarming smile and hoped she didn’t take offense.

  “Nope, he’s as human as anyone,” she eyed Voy with suspicion before switching to a more thoughtful expression, “Actually he may not be quite as human as anyone. You’ll have to ask him how he views it. Not alien though, just a bit weird.” Her suspicions seemed to disappear, much to Voy’s relief, as his own gestated. Was this ‘Jeremayne’ so far out of the way for a practical reason, or was he yet another bundle of broken convention with buried crimes?

  After some more walking wall to their left sunk in a bit to accommodate a set of massive reinforced doors, many times more robust than any other similar structures elsewhere on the ship. They were easily twenty feet high, reaching early to the top of the under road’s tunnel ceiling. Emblazoned across their surface were the numbers ‘1, 7, 5’ in stark white paint.

  Elara walked up to the door and rapped her fist against it in a short series of reverberating knocks. The door was unmoved. Elara frowned and raised her hand to repeat the process when a small hatch, no bigger than a fist, opened next to the door. A segmented silver colored metal cable shot out from the wall and homed in on Elara, swimming through the air until it was just inches from her face. A single unblinking green lens capped it’s end, and after a moment it began to ‘speak’ in a somewhat irritated tone.

  “Oh it’s you. What do you want?” It fired off with the sort of overblown frustration that couldn’t possibly be genuine. Elara narrowed her eyes and knocked against the door again.

  “Open up cog-boy, I’ve got a service request you might enjoy,” she said while tilting her head toward Voy. In response the tentacle snapped around to face Voy before it darted over. It moved in a jerky, erratic fashion around him as though it were searching him for something, lingering only a touch longer when it came upon his left shoulder and lack of arm attached to it. The lens which served as it’s eye narrowed telescopically there before delivering a satisfied ‘bu-beep’ sound. Finished with its spontaneous assessment, the tentacle lurched back in a perfect rewind of its investigation until it was facing Elara once more.

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  “I am intrigued. You may enter,” the tendril’s green lens flickered off as it retracted back into it’s wall hatch. Grinding steel gave way to the massive doors opening, splitting down the middle and cutting the ‘7’ in half. Once the doors had opened enough space for them to cross Elara slipped between them and ushered Voy in behind her.

  “Quick, before he changes his mind,” she grabbed his forearm and tugged him over the threshold. The second Voy passed through, the doors ground to a halt and reversed their motion to close behind them. Sprawled before them on the other side was a workshop space that felt entirely too large to be secreted away in the bowels of the ship. Yellow light from bulbs perhaps older than Voy was illuminated rows of mounted automated tool arms busy at work welding, grinding, molding, and shaping countless different components and pieces of equipment. Sparks flew in every direction, surely a hazard had there been anything flammable in the room to speak of.

  Everything bit of the pseudo-factory was adorned in the same rust-hue that the under-road tunnel was, save for the products being fabricated or stacked neatly around the assembly lines. What space was not occupied by moving machinery or cramped piles of parts and components was cleaned of dust and lubricants as much as function demanded and not a bit more. Smoke hung in the air, but rather than smell of engines pushed too hard and running to hot it smelled more woody and rich, something you’d sooner find in a smoking pipe than a production line.

  If Voy had managed to stumble across this place by himself he would not have imagined anyone lived here or even regularly worked here amidst the structured chaos. In truth he was still skeptical, but Elara was undeterred so he chose to mask his confusion and see where things went.

  “Oi, Undahiil! Make something of yourself!” She yelled out over the clank and whir of tireless machines. Rumbling moved through the floor, piles of stacked goods shook, machines paused their efforts. Loud grinding noises started up from one of the larger mounds of assorted machinery. Voy took a step back and realized he’d never grabbed his sword after waking.

  “Relax he’s just screwing with us,” Elara reassured Voy.

  “I most certainly am not!” a mechanical, distorted voice cried out from the mound of cables and debris. “One of my locomotion programs was debugging when you so rudely arrived unannounced. Give em a moment.” Scrap shuffled from the pile and the simultaneous hum of several machines turning on at once sounded from beneath. It was at this moment Voy realized the ‘scrap’ wasn’t scrap at all as the shambling mound of disordered metal structured itself, if only barely, and lumbered toward them. Loose components fell away and Voy saw the vaguest suggestion of a hooded head somewhere in the middle of the tangled steel. Where eyes should have been an array of green lenses similar to the one from the door instead sat. There wasn’t anything to accurately approximate a mouth or nose, calling into question how he breathed. Orate. Or spoke, for that matter.

  There was no uniformity or rhythm in his approach. Footsteps were replaced with the firing of pistons and clanging of pincer like claws against the vacsteel floor. Of his leg analogues there were too many to count as they appeared and disappeared beneath him. He less walked and more rode a wave of metal forward to move toward them. Once he’d gotten closer to the two another silvery metal tentacle slid out from the tangle of machine and stopped in front of Voy. Instead of a lens the end of it popped open and unfolded into an approximation of an open hand.

  “Undahiil Tandon, at your service,” he moved his ‘hand’ an inch closer and Voy realized he was offering a handshake. Hesitantly he accepted, giving it a polite but not unnecessarily drawn out squeeze and shake before letting his hand drop.

  “Voy Shatterborne, pleased to meet you.” Voy replied as Undahiil withdrew the tentacle-hand back into the mound of his being.

  “Well now that introductions are out of the way, do either of you mind telling me the reason you barged in on my allotted ‘leave me alone’ time?” Undahiil questioned, the distorted mechanical nature of his voice conveying his annoyance as easy as flesh and blood would have.

  “you claim twenty-four hours a day as ‘leave me alone’ time. It loses meaning when you do that,” she retorted.

  “I operate on a thirty hour circadian cycle which leaves ample time to reach me during the six hours not reserved for solitary duties,” he smugly countered.

  “Right. Anyways, Voy here needs a new arm,” she gestured over to Voy who had dedicated his full attention to the two discussing his missing limb. The Jeremayne turned his attention toward Voy. Several tentacles sprang out from Undahiil and hovered around Voy’s right arm, scanning, touching, and coiling around it at different points. Voy instinctively tried shooing them away as they tried to conduct their work.

  “Left arm gear-head, left arm!” Elara shouted. The tentacles froze mid process. Undahiil slowly turned his many eyed face once more to Elara.

  “You don’t say?” he mocked drily. “I have to scan his good arm for reference. I refuse to deliver some slam-chopped lowest-bidder drivel.” His tentacles resumed their work, with Voy now holding out his arm to help facilitate the process. “Do you have any utility requests for the appendage? Integrated weapons? Medical tooling? Data ports?” Undahiil asked as a hologram rendering of and arm began to coalesce in front of him.

  “Ooh, give him a saw blade!” Elara chimed in, sidling up to Undahiil and looking at the floating arm image, “And a big claw like they have in movies.”

  “I was thinking dexterity filaments and an energy shield,” Undahiil added, waggling a few stray tentacles at the mention of ‘dexterity filaments’. Both of them fixated on the projected model of Voy’s arm in front them as various modifications and upgrades began to materialize and snap onto the image. Voy furrowed his brow as he beheld the concept of his arm replacement transform into something that looked at home on the end of a construction vehicle.

  “I’m fine with just a hand, really,” Voy interjected into their frantic back and forth brainstorming. Both of them paused and turned to look at him. “You know, five fingers? One of which being a thumb?” Voy waved his right hand and wiggled his fingers as an example.

  “Pfft. You’re no fun.” Undahiil pouted, restoring the image to it’s original concept, a more or less one to one recreation of his arm in metal. Undahiil’s tentacles, which Voy now assumed were called dexterity filaments, withdrew from around his arm having collected a satisfactory amount of data. The Jeremayne pondered the floating render of his arm for a few moments before it suddenly snapped out of existence.

  “I’ll need a few hours to fabricate it, nerves take awhile to weave. Come back this evening -”

  “It’s nineteen hundred.” Elara interrupted.

  “Is it? Right, twenty four hour-ers. Come back in say… three hours. It should be ready by then.” Undahiil turned and clattered over to a table with a set of automated tool arms springing to life at his approach. Voy nodded and rejoined with Elara as they headed to the door.

  “Your brother is looking for you by the way,” Undahiil said over his shoulder. Elara flinched as if she was ducking under something thrown at her.

  “How do you know?” she asked while turning slowly on her heels back toward him.

  “Cameras, dear. I see most everything on the ship but the bathrooms and the bedrooms,” he answered with an amused edge in his voice. Elara finished her slow turn.

  “So you saw the training room then?” she probed.

  “No actually, what’s gone on in the… Oh my,” his work pace stalled somewhat.

  “Nothing! Just curious!” she shouted back with a wave of false positivity. “We should be going!” She grabbed Voy by his arm and darted for the opening doors, all but dragging Voy along with her.