Doors down here seal but do not lock.

Inside everything’s cranberry, lit by single stripes of emergency diode three links down the failsafe chain.  It’s warm enough, by the grace of the geothermal, but nothing controlled by a bitwise system still has a switch intact.

“This is worse than I thought,” says Ashlock, shivering for several reasons.  She pops the topmost drive from the RAID, and its surface goes from warm to uncomfortably hot.  “Let’s get to the generator.”

Tach sees it first:  the awful mark of desperation, a wall-spray flecked with bone.  In red light, the blood barely glitters.