“You said the physics get strange,” Uzoma said. “Am I to gather, then, that the interior of that object is not an empty box that accords to the observable dimensions?”

  “Axiom stuff,” Will said. “You’ll see.”

  “I’ll come.” I rose and turned to Uzoma. “You should stay, and keep the ship version of me company.”

  “Will,” Uzoma said. “Is our destination inimical to human life?”

  “Not inherently,” Will said. “There’s no nasty radiation or extremes of heat or cold. There are dangers, of course. I’d wear an environment suit to be safe. Some parts of the Drain have an atmosphere you can breathe, but overall it’s a little… unreliable.”

  “I will join you.”

  “I’m the President, and if necessary, I’ll order you to stay,” I said.

  “You are not the President. Not legally. You are a temporary autonomous node with no Presidential powers at all. Nor have we established any particular chain of command for this mission.”

  I groaned. “Okay. That’s true. May I ask you, as a friend, to stay here, where it’s safe?”

  “I value your friendship. However, I did not come on this journey in order to be safe. I will meet you in the shuttle.”

  I’ll say this for Uzoma: there was no rancor or irritation in the refusal. They were just telling me how things were going to be. I didn’t like it, but I wasn’t about to forcibly restrain them. They could make their own decisions about how to proceed. I just hoped I could keep them safe wherever we were going.

  I walked the Major down to the shuttle, a small four-seat runabout mostly meant to take people from orbits to habitations and back again. Uzoma arrived soon after, suited up in their personal black environment suit, not one of the basic ones in the Briarpatch lockers. Sometimes personal suits have interesting nonstandard modifications, and I wondered if Uzoma’s did. If nothing else, they looked stylish. “Nice suit.”

  “Thank you. Ashok designed it for me, and insisted on doing some last-minute upgrades when he heard I was going on this journey. I hope I do not explode.”

  “I wouldn’t worry. Much. Ashok’s creations almost always only blow other people up.”

  Initiating separation, I thought to myself. The version of me narrating this suddenly only saw through the senses of the Mayor, instead of the myriad sensors on the ship. The experience is a little like having your head covered with a thick black bag that also muffles all sound, but I adjusted quickly. My sensorium and intellectual capacity were suddenly far more limited, but I can still remember what it was like to be human, and this was nowhere near as limited as that.

  The me on the ship will keep his own records and they’ll be incorporated into this documents as necessary, but he will probably just sit there, staring at nothing, since he can’t even see the Drain, so don’t expect much in the way of shocking developments or startling insights from that direction.

  Once we were on board the shuttle, the bay doors opened and we dropped down. We made our way toward the asteroid. “Are we flying inside that thing, Will?” I didn’t like the idea.

  “We’ll walk,” Will said. “You can just land the shuttle next to the rim there. This rock isn’t ferrous, but your magnetic clamps will work anyway. Your magnetic boots should work, too.”

  “How?”

  “I assume it’s something to do with manipulating gravity. As for how the object knows you want to stick to it… I have no idea. Sometimes the technology in the Drain seems incredibly sophisticated, and sometimes it seems very stupid. Possibly I’m just too stupid to see how the stupid things are actually smart. But you’ve got a ship-sized brain, on an even bigger ship than we used to have, so perhaps your superior intellect will find my intractable problems trivial.”

  The shuttle got close to the object, and I engaged the magnetic clamps, meant for clinging to ship hulls. The clamps didn’t lock on, according to my board, but there was a gentle settling, and we were fixed to the rock. “Ready?” I said.

  “I am very interested to see what happens next,” Uzoma replied.

  We opened the shuttle doors. I went first, testing the ground with my magnetic boots, and they did indeed stick to the surface, though again, not through the usual methods. “It seems all right.”

  Uzoma came out, tethered to me by a thin but strong line that spooled out of the Mayor’s lower back – that was one safety measure I’d insisted on. We walked slowly toward Will’s body. He looked like a cross between an Axiom terror-drone and the hull repair robot he’d started out as, and he loomed over our human-sized bodies.

  “Brother! Are you an android now?”

  “This old thing? We call it the Mayor. I became a politician. If you’re going to be a person of the people, it’s useful, sometimes, to resemble people, or at least be able to relate to them on a comfortable level in physical space.”

  “A politician.” Will’s voice was curiously flat. “I knew we’d diverged, that we’d become different people, but I never expected that. Well, we can talk once we’re inside. Climb onto my body, you two. There should be plenty of handholds. Watch the pointy bits. You know how we thought the weird spikes and fins the Axiom ship-building station added to the Anjou when they repaired it were purely cosmetic, little flourishes meant to make the ship look scary?”

  “Yes,” Uzoma said.

  “We were wrong. They have functions. Oh, so many functions. Come on.”

  I helped Uzoma up, into the most comfortable spot. Uzoma doesn’t much like to be touched, even by androids, but they bore it for the minimal time necessary. Once they were settled, I took the second-best spot for myself, pressing my back against the broad side of a fin, a spike jutting up between my parted legs. “What sort of functions?”

  “Sensory, mainly. They just sense things that the Anjou’s system couldn’t interpret. I can interpret them, though. They’re very useful. They’re why I’m still alive. Down the hatch!”

  Will scuttled over the rim of the Drain and we plunged swiftly through the dark film.

  We were in another wormhole bridge, this one with less screaming and flashing, but only because any such systems had long since failed. The walls were pitted and torn, the dark spaces behind them full of floating debris, and the lights were smashed, so the only illumination came from the lights on Will’s body. Because of the way we’d entered, the bridge seemed less like a tunnel and more like a well. I felt like we were near the beginning of Alice in Wonderland, falling slowly down a rabbit hole, straight into the depths of the unknown. We drifted down through the dead bridge in silence, for twenty-one seconds… and kept drifting.

  At twenty-two seconds, Uzoma said, “This doesn’t end in another bridgehead?”

  “Nope,” Will said. “There’s just an opening at the bottom. We should be there in a few seconds. We’re not using this bridge to go somewhere else in conventional space; we’re using the bridge to get down to the place where all the bridges start.”

  A circle of light appeared at the bottom of the shaft, and we passed through. My sense of orientation shifted abruptly: we’d fallen down, but we emerged sideways, and in a place with real gravity, so that term actually meant something. The space was the size of a hangar bay on New Meditreme, vast and vaulted and way too big to be contained within the confines of the cube we’d entered. I reached out for the Briarpatch, but as promised, our connection was severed.

  “That was disturbing,” Uzoma said. “To enter a bridge, and not emerge…”

  “You get used to it,” Will said.

  “Where are we now?”

  “I’m not convinced we’re in conventional space at all,” Will said. “There’s no outside, as far as I can tell, just more rooms and more tunnels, or walls that can’t be penetrated even by the formidable Axiom weapons here. I think we’re in a dimension that is normally unreachable. This is the place where the bridges and the associated infrastructure are located. I call it the Bridgeworks.”

  The walls were dull gray silver, and all blank, except for two things. The wall behind us held the opening to the tunnel that led to the Drain, rimmed in a ring of silver.

  The wall in front of us was more interesting. It featured a tenmeter-tall mural of Callie, drawn in bold blacks and blues and reds, standing in a spacesuit, helmet tucked under her arm, her corkscrew hair in a cloud around her. She looked like a heroic figure in an old propaganda poster, representing courage or steadfastness or some other wartime virtue. “Wow,” I said. “That’s amazing. You made that?”

  “I sure didn’t hire it done,” Will said. “We don’t have a lot of artists around here. I figured out I could fabricate paint, and looking at these blank walls bothered me after a while. The Axiom weren’t much for artistic expression. My first few attempts were terrible, but I can fab dull gray metal-looking paint too, so I was able to cover my shame. You know we never had any aptitude or training in the arts, but I read once – we read, I mean, I sure haven’t read much here, not in a language you know anyhow – some artist said that if your eyes work okay, and your hands work okay, you can become an artist. It’s just about practice. So I practiced.”

  “Speaking of eyes,” Uzoma said. “Do you have biological visual sensors in your body? Since the Drain, as you call it, seems invisible to mechanical ones?”

  “I have Axiom sensors now, and they allow me to see all sorts of things. I don’t know why the bridges and some other things are hidden from our sensor the way they are. Maybe it’s a security measure against something, but who knows? I’m glad you’ve got blob-eyes, though, brother. To do what we need to do, you have to be able to see, and I was prepared for a long argument about the necessity of plugging some Axiom sensors into you, or porting you into one of my other drones.”

  “As someone who has had Axiom tech plugged into them, I do not recommend the experience,” Uzoma said.

  Will turned a cluster of bulging sensors toward them. “Oh, right, you had a brain spider in your head. Obedience compulsion tech, only it wasn’t made to work on humans, so it didn’t quite get the job done. Looks like your doctors took everything out – I’m not even picking up nano-specks in your brain. Well, the stuff I’m dealing with is less invasive, and let me tell you, being half Axiom tech by weight is a lot better than being dead. Hmm. Maybe that’s not true. If I’d stayed dead, I would’ve been… not happier, obviously, but at least less lonely and troubled. If I hadn’t come back to life, though, I never would have figured out the universe was in danger of collapse, and we wouldn’t be having this happy reunion. Life is funny, huh?”

  “May I make a suggestion?” Uzoma said.

  Will chuckled. “I’ve only been able to take my own advice for years. Please do.”

  “I believe we should discuss matters in an orderly fashion. First, is there an imminent threat? Some danger we must immediately begin to address?”

  “Not immediate, no, and not to us,” Will said. “We’re safe enough here, for now.”

  “Then perhaps you could fill us in on how you arrived at this place, what this place is, and the nature of the threat,” Uzoma said.

  “I guess I was meandering a bit,” Will said. “Sorry, you go a bit weird when you don’t have anyone to talk to for years except a giant mural of your ex-wife. I can still hear her voice, and sometimes it’s like she talks back, but I don’t have an organic brain, so I can’t seem to go the right kind of crazy where I really believe someone else is here. Gather round, my friends, and I will tell you a tale.”

  Uzoma sat cross-legged on the floor. I left the Mayor standing. I didn’t trust Will, and I wanted to be able to move fast if need be. (I doubt Uzoma trusted Will, either, but they surely knew they couldn’t possibly move fast enough to make any difference if Will meant them harm, so why not be comfortable in the meantime?)

  “When last we talked,” Will began, “I had just saved Callie from certain death, and I was feeling pretty good about myself, but I also knew it was all over for me. I was too beat up for my body to continue. Then, there you were, the over-me, on the ship, connecting to my mind, downloading my experience, reintegrating me, and then you shut me down. You probably didn’t even think of it as a mercy killing – you were just absorbing a temporarily autonomous node and ending its autonomy. I was no longer a separate thing; I was you again, my fleeting individuality gone. Except for that little secret I held onto, the one I expected to take to my not-really-a-grave.” Will turned, his main sensor cluster facing away from us, looking up at the painting of Callie. “Did Callie tell you what she said to me?”

  “She told me it was filthy sexy dirty talk.”

  Will chuckled. “Not exactly. But thank you. It means something to me, that she kept my confidence, even when there was no more ‘me’ anymore. Anyway, I assume you all left the vicinity during my period of unconsciousness. When my senses came back online, I was surrounded by a little buzzing bevy of Axiom repair machines, the same sort that fixed the Anjou, and, to be fair, stuck brain spiders in Uzoma and Sebastien. You destroyed that station thoroughly, but you didn’t atomize it, and there were still a few little bits functional. I saw them struggling to rebuild the station itself, but they soon gave up; that job was too big. I knew exactly when they gave up, because after they repaired me with Axiom tech, I could hear them, and understand them. Those repair drones weren’t intelligent, just little bots with programmed purposes, but they were networked, and they communicated, and when their assessment indicated that the station was a total loss, they joined together and opened a bridge back here. The best translation for what they call this place it is probably ‘the maintenance sector,’ but ‘Bridgeworks’ sounds better to me.” Will waved a manipulator. “Behold, one of the storage rooms of the Axiom custodial staff. I was pulled through the bridge to the Drain before I could stop them, and then I was trapped here.”

  “But you can open bridges of your own,” Uzoma said.

  “I can now,” Will said. “That’s a new development. I just got those systems back online. Believe me, as soon as I could, I called for help. You came. I appreciate that, too. I could have tried to deal with this on my own, but if I fail, someone else has to know about the problem. I’ve spent the past several years doing a survey of the situation down here, and it’s a mess. Whatever repair protocols were in place broke down long ago. My little bot-buddies flew around trying to fix stuff, but they were overwhelmed, and when they traveled into the infested portions of the Bridgeworks… they all got smashed up. I can fab more repair bots, but they’re of limited use, and I’m only half Axiom tech, so programming them is a little iffy anyway. I do best when I run them as remotes. I have about a hundred bots running around in various places in the tunnels right now. There was, ah, an engagement a little while ago, which is why I had to cut my welcome speech short – the situation needed my full attention.”

  “You’ve been repairing the infrastructure system for the bridges?” I said.

  “I’ve been trying. The Axiom built to last, but I think it’s been millennia since there were regular repairs. Even then, things would probably still be working fine, but… well. We’ve got rats in the walls. Chewing up the wiring. Shitting everywhere. Not literal rats, literal wiring, or literal shit, but you get the idea.”

  “The infestation,” I said. “That caused the, ah, damage we saw in the bridge that led us here?”

  “Sorry about that. I would have warned you, but to be totally honest, I was afraid a pitch that included ‘travel through a bridge in imminent danger of collapse’ might not be persuasive.”

  “It might have been more persuasive, honestly,” I said. “You were a little vague about the nature of the emergency.”

  “I wanted you to see,” Will said. “Saying the bridges are failing is one thing. Seeing that failure is another. I knew if nothing else, you’d hear the alarms. I think they’re based on the sound of an Axiom screaming.”

  “Do you have a sense of how extensive the damage is?” Uzoma said.

  “The Bridgeworks isn’t a place you can map, exactly, and the diagnostics I can access only halfway make sense to me, but… it’s bad. The big fixed bridges are the ones in the most imminent danger. The lights failed in there a long time ago, I think because the Axiom didn’t care much about them. Those bridges were used mostly by their servants, the Liars, since the Axiom didn’t trust them with personal wormhole tech. You don’t bother to make sure the servant’s corridors are kept clean, I guess. The fixed bridges are durable, like institutional grade, so they’ve held up a long time, but eventually they’ll stop working. The infestation is creeping into them, too, and I’ve fought them off, but once they get inside, they’ll destroy the infrastructure completely… and, worse, they’ll start to attack any ships that pass through. Eventually the colony worlds will be cut off from one another, just like the Vanir system, but it will be all the systems.”

  “We liberated the Vanir system,” I said. “Callie and everybody. We saved a lot of lives.”

  “Whoa, really?” Will said. “That’s… I’m sorry I missed that. Were the Axiom behind the system losing contact?”

  “Some of their servants,” I said. “They called themselves the Exalted. They worked for the Cleansing Corps – the Axiom exterminators, basically, in charge of eradicating upstart intelligent life in the galaxy.”

  “Ha. We could use some exterminators down here. Liberating Vanir… that’s impressive. But it will be cut off again soon, with all the rest.”

  Uzoma went hmm. “In such an event, there would be no more communication between systems, and no more commerce. Most of the colonies are self-sufficient, but… our unified culture would be lost. The civilizations would diverge, just like the two of you did, and of course, loved ones and friends would be forever separated. That would be a great tragedy, and we must try to prevent it. But, forgive me, Will… it does not sound like the fate of the universe is truly at stake.”