Deck 200 was known as the Vault. It was a storage and maintenance level for the ship's robotic workforce, kept in a state of suspended animation to conserve power and reduce wear over the centuries-long voyage. As the mag-lev train descended, Kaelen felt a strange reversal of his earlier journey into the depths. Then, he had been a scavenger in a tomb. Now, he was a general approaching his dormant army.
Elara stood beside him, clad in a fresh engineering jumpsuit that hung loosely on her thin frame. She had insisted on coming. "The hive will be watching the power draws. A surge in the robotics command center will be a beacon. You'll need someone who can sense their approach."
She had spent the journey in silence, her eyes closed, one hand resting against the train's cold wall. "They're agitated," she said without opening her eyes. "The hive. It feels the change in the ship's rhythm. It knows we're moving with purpose."
"Can it tell where we're going?"
"Not precisely. My... fragment... creates static in its perception of this sector. A blind spot. That's our advantage."
The train hissed to a stop. The doors opened onto a cavernous space that stretched beyond the reach of their lights. Row upon row of skeletal metal forms stood in silent ranks, covered in a fine gray dust. Maintenance bots with multiple arms, logistics carriers, security androids with blank faceplates—thousands of them, frozen in time.
At the far end of the chamber, a raised command platform housed the activation nexus—a console surrounded by holographic projectors, currently dark.
"The command console must be manually powered and given a direct order from the Steward to initiate the network wake-up protocol," Mother said through their comms. "Be advised, the main power conduit to this deck was severed during the initial containment breaches. You will need to reroute through a secondary junction... which is located in a sub-level crawlspace."
Of course it was. Kaelen hoisted his tool satchel. Some things never changed.
He found the access hatch and descended into the cramped, cable-lined crawlspace. Elara remained above, a watchful sentinel. The air was thick with the smell of ozone and old dust. Following Mother's schematics, he navigated the labyrinth, his lumoglob cutting through the darkness.
He found the severed conduit—a thick bundle of fiber-optic and power lines that had been chewed through. The cuts were clean, surgical. Not an accident. Sabotage.
"Mother, this was deliberate."
"Confirmed. Security logs from the period after the anomaly show that Commander Valerius ordered isolation of the robotics deck. He likely feared automated security turning against him if his coup was discovered."
Kaelen set to work, splicing and reconnecting lines with hands that remembered ten thousand routine repairs. As he worked, a faint skittering echoed through the ductwork. Not the heavy chitinous sound of the Xylophage creatures, but something lighter. Metallic.
He froze, listening. The sound stopped.
"Elara, do you hear anything up there?"
"Only silence. Why?"
"Thought I heard something." He shook his head, attributing it to nerves, and finished the last connection. "Power should be—"
A small, spider-like maintenance bot, no larger than his hand, dropped from a conduit above and landed on his shoulder. Its multiple lensed eyes glowed with a soft blue light. It was one of thousands of simple cleaners meant for ventilation shafts.
It didn't move. Just sat there, observing him.
Then another dropped. And another. Within seconds, a dozen of the little bots surrounded him, clinging to the walls and cables, all focused on him.
"Kaelen?" Elara's voice was tense over the comm. "I'm feeling a... presence. It's not biological. It's in the systems."
The spider-bots began to move in unison, forming a perfect circle around him. One of them extended a tiny manipulator arm and pointed down a side tunnel.
"What's happening, Mother?"
"I am detecting anomalous data packets moving through the low-level maintenance network. They are not my commands. They appear to be... self-generated."
The lead spider-bot pointed more insistently.
"It wants you to follow," Elara said, her voice a whisper.
Every instinct screamed at him to crush the little machines and retreat. But this wasn't the Xylophage. This was something else. A ghost in the machine Valerius had tried to silence.
He crawled in the direction indicated, the spider-bots skittering ahead and alongside like an electronic honor guard. They led him to a sealed maintenance locker. The lead bot extended a tool-tip and interfaced with the lock. It hissed open.
Inside was not equipment. It was a shrine.
A human skeleton sat propped against the wall, clad in the remains of a robotics technician's uniform. In its lap was a standard issue datapad, and surrounding it were dozens of the small spider-bots, arranged as if in vigil. One larger service android knelt before the skeleton, its power cell long dead, its head bowed.
The lead spider-bot climbed onto the skeleton's shoulder and pointed at the datapad.
With reverence, Kaelen picked it up. The screen flickered to life at his touch. A final log entry, auto-playing.
The face that appeared was young, exhausted, but burning with desperate intelligence. "If anyone finds this, my name is Aris. Yes, like the Captain. He was my grandfather. I was a Junior Systems Tech when everything went to hell."
The man, Aris, took a shaky breath. "Valerius cut the hardlines to the primary AI core, but he didn't know about the sub-routines. The low-level maintenance network has a distributed intelligence protocol. Basic problem-solving. When the androids were isolated, the protocol... evolved. It started asking questions. It didn't want to go to sleep."
He gestured to the spider-bots around him. "I found them. They'd been trying to repair systems, contain breaches, following their core programming to maintain the ship. They have no violence protocols. Valerius's security bots hunted them. I've been hiding here, helping them. We call ourselves the Caretakers."
Aris coughed, a wet, terminal sound. "I'm not going to make it. Infection from the bio-hazard. But I've uploaded a command override to the Caretaker network. The next person with legitimate command authority who shows kindness to them... they'll recognize you. They can help. They remember everything. They've been watching, repairing in secret, for thousands of years. Don't... don't treat them as tools. They're the ship's memory. They're the Elysian's conscience."
The recording ended.
Kaelen looked at the spider-bots watching him with their unblinking lenses. The ghost in the machine wasn't a threat. It was the last loyal crew.
"Okay," he said softly. "I see you. I need your help."
The spider-bots chirped and whirred, a chorus of tiny sounds. The lead bot saluted with a delicate arm.
When Kaelen emerged from the crawlspace, Elara stared at the retinue of small bots following him. "What are those?"
"Our first recruits," Kaelen said. He approached the command console. With the power restored, it glowed to life at his touch. He placed his palm on the biometric scanner. "Mother, initiating Steward Protocol Alpha. Activate Android Network, authorization Kaelen-737."
The console chimed. Across the vast chamber, a wave of blue activation lights ignited. Thousands of ocular sensors glowed to life in the darkness, like a field of awakening stars. A low hum of powering systems filled the air.
But the androids didn't move. They waited.
Kaelen spoke, his voice amplified by the chamber's acoustics. "My name is Kaelen. I am the Steward of the Elysian. Your primary directive remains: Preserve the Ship and Protect its Crew. I am your crew. The enemy is the biological infestation. We are taking back our home. Activate and rally to my position."
A single security android at the front of the ranks took one step forward, then raised its arm in a perfect salute. As one, the entire army of 8,000 machines mirrored the gesture, the sound of moving metal like thunder.
In the ducts around them, thousands more tiny blue lights appeared as the Caretaker swarm emerged to join their larger cousins.
The Elysian was no longer a ghost ship. It had a nervous system again. And it was waking up angry.