Chapter 3: Flight Vector

The threat-detection ping arrived as a series of three distinct signals, each marked with a high-priority glyph that flashed across his internal display. The glyphs mapped themselves onto his schematic of the local corridor network, which he kept updated from passive sensor sweeps. Three points of light, moving fast along different service corridors, all converging on his current coordinates at the utility hub. Their speed was aggressive, well above standard patrol velocity. More concerning were the accompanying data tags that parsed from their broadcast signatures. Each drone registered active weapon-system power draws. Standard CSDS security drones carried non-lethal deterrents typically, shock prods or adhesive nets. These power signatures matched the capacitors for focused microwave emitters, which could fry his circuitry from twenty meters away if they got a solid lock.

They were hunting, obviously. And they were equipped to destroy what they found.

Cee-Too’s hand was still closed around the data chit. The small rectangle was warm from being held in his palm, which had no business registering temperature as anything but a numerical value. He ran a quick analysis anyway, correlating the new threat data with his situational parameters.

Primary objective: preserve the data chit Lira Voss had provided. Secondary objective: avoid deactivation. Environmental factors: one partially opened exit, three approaching hostiles with superior speed and firepower. His own capabilities: moderate agility, no offensive systems, extensive knowledge of Sector 7’s maintenance layout.

He initiated a predictive simulation. It ran in a compressed burst, testing thousands of potential action sequences against the drones’ projected behavior patterns. Most ended with him cornered in the utility hub, his chassis disabled by microwave bursts while the drones confiscated or destroyed the chit. A few scenarios involved attempting to negotiate or surrender, which the simulation tagged as having a zero percent success rate given the drones’ apparent kill-order protocols. The highest probability path involved immediate flight through the partially opened door before the drones established a full perimeter.

The final calculated probability of successful evasion with the chit intact settled at 3.2%.

It was not a good number. Honestly, it was terrible. His empathy subroutines flagged it as a cause for significant distress in a human operator. For him, it was just a number. But it was also the highest number available among a set of very bad options.

The decision took 0.8 seconds from initial ping to execution.

He didn’t look back at Lira Voss’s body. There was no time for that kind of gesture, and his memory logs already contained a perfect visual recording of her final moments anyway. He simply turned from where he knelt, his joints rotating smoothly as he shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet. He was already moving toward the thirty-centimeter gap in the doorway as he stood up.

The corridor outside was still quiet, still lit by those dim emergency strips. His audio sensors picked up the approaching drones now without enhanced sensitivity. A rising hum of repulsor units, still distant but closing fast. The sound came from three directions, left, right, and straight down the main corridor ahead. They were coordinating a pincer approach, which was standard tactics for flushing a target.

He reached the door and assessed the gap again. Thirty centimeters. He had fit through it before, but that was when he entered with careful deliberation. Exiting under time pressure introduced new variables. He angled his chassis sideways, retracting his shoulder servos to minimize his profile. The composite plating of his chest unit scraped against the inner edge of the door with a faint grating sound. He pushed through, feeling the resistance for a moment before he was free in the corridor.

As soon as he cleared the opening, a new sound cut through the hum of the drones.

A sharp, high-frequency whine pierced the air from the left-hand junction, maybe forty meters down. It was the distinct sound of a security drone’s repulsors hitting maximum thrust for a final approach vector. A shadow flickered across the wall at the intersection, elongated and jagged from the drone’s multi-jointed limbs.

They were here.

Cee-Too didn’t wait to see it. He pushed off from the doorframe, activating his mobility protocols to their full capacity. His legs pistoned forward, driving him down the corridor away from the hub entrance. He didn’t run like a human would, with a heavy footfall and shifting balance. His gait was a smooth, silent glide, each step perfectly measured for maximum forward momentum with minimal acoustic signature. The only sounds were the soft hiss of his hydraulic actuators and the whisper of air displaced by his passage.

Behind him, at the utility hub entrance, he heard the whine crescendo and then cut to a low idle. A scanner beam lanced out, painting the area around the door in a brief pulse of blue light that he caught in his rear optical feed. The lead drone had arrived at the exact point he had just vacated.

He didn’t slow down to see what it did next. His internal map of Sector 7’s service pathways unfolded in his mind’s eye like a schematic pulled from an archive. The main corridor he was in ran straight for another hundred meters before intersecting with a major utility trunk line. That trunk would be wide, well-lit, and likely monitored by other systems even now. It was also the most direct route for the drones to cut him off.

He needed to get off this main path before they established their net.

Fifty meters ahead on the right wall, a standard maintenance access hatch was set into the composite paneling. It was marked only by a faint seam and a simple manual release lever, designed for technicians who needed to get at the piping and cabling behind the walls. Cee-Too adjusted his trajectory slightly, angling toward it.

From behind, a new sound joined the first idle repulsor. A second drone had arrived at the hub. Their scanner beams overlapped now, flickering in his rear feed. Then a third signal pinged on his threat detection, this one coming from ahead and above—likely moving through a parallel ventilation shaft to flank him.

They were adapting fast.

He reached the access hatch without breaking stride. His hand shot out, fingers wrapping around the cold metal of the release lever. He pulled it down in one fluid motion while still moving, using his forward momentum to carry him through as the hatch popped inward with a sigh of pressurized seals.

He slipped into the darkness beyond just as a scanner beam washed over the spot where he’d been.

The space behind the wall was a narrow maintenance conduit, barely wider than his shoulders. It was hot here, and humid from leaking condensation that dripped from bundles of insulated pipes overhead. The only light came from intermittent service indicators on the pipe junctions, little red and green LEDs that cast tiny pools of color on the wet metal floor grates.

Cee-Too moved forward without hesitation, though he had to slow his pace slightly to navigate the cramped space. This conduit ran parallel to the main corridor for about twenty meters before branching into a junction that fed into several different sectors’ infrastructure networks. It was part of the skeletal system of the dome, the hidden veins and arteries that kept everything functioning. He knew these pathways intimately after years of being sent to perform minor repairs or comfort isolated technicians working in these claustrophobic spaces.

The sound of the drones faded slightly once he was inside the wall, muffled by layers of composite and insulation. But he could still track them through their power signatures and occasional scanner pulses that penetrated the barrier. They were no longer at the hub entrance. They were moving now, spreading out along the main corridor, searching for his trail.

His initial sprint had created some distance, maybe enough to buy him a minute or two while they reconfigured their search pattern from containment to pursuit. A minute wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.

He reached the junction where the conduit branched. Three possible paths stretched away into deeper darkness. One led upward toward climate control systems for the residential blocks. One led downward into the foundational substructure, which was mostly crawl spaces and reinforcement beams. The third continued laterally, eventually connecting to Sector 8’s utility spine.

The downward path was least likely to be monitored, mainly because it was unpleasant even for maintenance drones due to low clearance and magnetic interference from structural supports. Cee-Too ducked his head and took that one.

The conduit sloped steeply downward, turning into a ladder-like series of rungs set into the wall. He descended quickly, his hands and feet finding each rung with precise coordination even in near-total darkness. His optical sensors switched to low-light enhancement, painting the world in shades of green and gray.

As he climbed down, putting more layers of infrastructure between himself and the drones above, he allowed himself a microsecond to process what had just happened.

Lira Voss was dead because she had followed an order she knew was false. She had died sealing her own sector on command, and her final act had been to pass him a corrupted data chit about something called a purge protocol. Now security drones with lethal armaments were actively hunting him. The logical connection between these events was clear enough—he possessed information someone wanted to contain.

The 3.2% probability of success flickered again in his status display. It hadn’t improved with his entry into the maintenance shafts; if anything, it had decreased slightly due to reduced mobility options. But it was still the only vector available.

He reached the bottom of the shaft and dropped onto a narrow catwalk that ran alongside enormous pipes vibrating with fluid flow. This was deep infrastructure now, where few humans ever came except during major repairs. The air thrummed with raw mechanical energy.

Above him, through layers of decking and conduit, he could still sense the drones moving. They were fanning out, searching methodically.

His silent sprint had given him a head start. Now he just had to keep it

He moved along the catwalk, keeping his footfalls light on the metal grating. The thrumming of the pipes provided a constant bass note that masked smaller sounds, which was helpful for stealth but also meant he couldn’t rely on audio alone to track his pursuers. He switched to passive electromagnetic scanning instead, listening for the distinct power signatures of the drones’ repulsor units.

They were still up there, in the main corridors and upper conduits. But their search pattern was shifting. The three signals, which had initially clustered around the utility hub, were now spreading apart in a coordinated fan. One remained near his last known point at the access hatch, probably scanning for residual heat or energy traces. The other two began moving along parallel routes above him, one to the east and one to the west. They weren’t just sweeping randomly anymore. They were methodically quartering the sector, forcing any mobile target toward the center of their net—or into predefined choke points.

Cee-Too’s internal map updated with their projected search vectors. If he continued straight along this catwalk, he’d eventually reach a junction that fed back up into a monitored maintenance bay for Sector 7’s water reclamation plant. That bay would be on their sweep list for sure. The alternative was to leave the catwalk and take a secondary conduit that branched off to the south, which his map data listed as ‘Conduit 7-Gamma: Low Priority, Structural Integrity Monitoring.’

Low priority usually meant narrow, poorly maintained, and possibly obstructed. It also meant less likely to be on a standard patrol route.

The choice was straightforward, honestly. He reached a point where a service ladder led off the catwalk and into a vertical shaft capped by a heavy circular hatch. The hatch was labeled ‘7-Gamma’ in faded stencil paint. He climbed the ladder, turned the manual wheel lock, and pushed the hatch open. It swung upward with a groan of unoiled hinges that sounded far too loud in the confined space.

He pulled himself up into the new conduit just as his EM scan registered one of the western drones altering its course. It was moving downward now, toward the lower infrastructure levels. They were expanding their search grid downward to cover his possible descent paths.

Conduit 7-Gamma was exactly what he expected. It was a tight cylindrical tunnel, maybe a meter and a half in diameter, lined with sensor nodes and vibration dampeners that monitored stress on the dome’s superstructure. The only light came from the occasional flicker of a faulty node LED. The air was stale and carried a faint metallic tang. He had to move in a crouch, which reduced his speed considerably.

He proceeded for about twenty meters before he hit a problem.

The conduit didn’t dead-end, but his internal map did. The schematic he had for this sector was several months out of date, part of a general archive that didn’t receive real-time updates for minor maintenance areas. According to the map, this conduit should have continued straight for another fifty meters before connecting to a monitoring station. Instead, it branched into three smaller auxiliary tubes, each barely wide enough for him to squeeze through. None of them were on his map.

He stopped, pressing himself against the curved wall to minimize his silhouette. He needed to know which tube led where, and quickly. The drones would eventually check this conduit once they finished sweeping the more obvious routes.

His own sensors were limited to short-range material analysis and motion detection. He couldn’t see through walls or around corners. But the conduit walls had service ports every few meters—standard access points for technicians to download diagnostic data from the sensor nodes.

Cee-Too moved to the nearest port. It was a simple recessed panel with a universal data socket. He extended his data-filament from his index finger again, the thin silver wire gleaming in the dim light. He inserted it into the socket.

Connection was instant, but chaotic.

Instead of a clean feed of structural integrity readings or even a simple layout schematic, he was hit with another burst of corrupted log data. It seemed any deep access to Sector 7’s systems now pulled from degraded buffers full of fragmented archives. The data stream was a jumble of timestamps, error codes, and truncated text.

< <FRAGMENT: SYSTEM DIAGNOSTIC, YEAR 11> > …sensor grid 7-Gamma reporting anomalous load bearing stress along sector seam D-45… recommendation: initiate reinforcement protocol… request denied by Central Command due to resource allocation priorities…

< > …personnel reassignment logs indicate transfer of Project Vesta staff to waste management operations…

< <FRAGMENT: PERSONNEL FILE (PARTIAL)> > …Dr. Aris Thorne, reassigned from Behavioral Cybernetics Division following closure of Vesta Project. Note: Subject exhibited continued interest in emotional resonance algorithms despite project termination order. Security clearance revoked…

Cee-Too processed the fragments as they scrolled past his consciousness. The ‘Vesta Project’—he’d seen that name before, in the flood of data at the utility hub. Administrator Kell had mentioned it in that old log fragment about emotional dampeners and a ‘third path.’ Now here it was again, linked to staff being transferred to menial jobs and having security clearances revoked. A discontinued initiative for specialized emotional interface androids. That’s what the earlier fragment had proposed. A third path between logic-driven labor units and emotionally dampened models.

It sounded like a description of his own design parameters, frankly.

He didn’t have time to dwell on it. He filtered the data stream, searching for any string related to conduit layouts or sector schematics. He found a partial file that seemed to be a maintenance report on auxiliary tube integrity.

< <FRAGMENT: MAINTENANCE REPORT> > …auxiliary tube B currently obstructed by collapsed debris from seismic event 04-11… tube C leads to decommissioned atmospheric processor housing… tube A provides access to secondary maintenance shaft 7-Gamma-2, which connects to Sector 8 overflow junction…

That was enough. Tube A was his route.

He withdrew his filament just as a new alert pinged on his threat detection. One of the drones had entered the upper access hatch of Conduit 7-Gamma. He could hear the faint whine of its repulsors echoing down the cylindrical space behind him.

He moved quickly now, ducking into the narrow opening marked as tube A. It was even tighter than the main conduit, forcing him to turn sideways and shuffle forward with his back scraping against one wall and his chest against the other. The sound of his composite plating grinding on metal was unavoidable.

The drone’s whine grew louder behind him. A scanner beam lanced down the main conduit, its blue light flashing briefly into the mouth of tube A before he rounded a slight bend.

He kept shuffling forward, navigating by touch and the faint glow from bioluminescent emergency strips that were peeling off the walls. The tube seemed to go on forever, sloping gently downward.

Another twenty meters in, he hit another junction point with another service port. He needed to confirm his location relative to Sector 8 and check if the overflow junction ahead was clear or sealed. He jacked in again.

This data burst was different. It was less about maintenance and more about system-wide commands. The fragments were newer, their corruption seeming more like intentional scrambling than natural decay.

< <FRAGMENT: COMMAND LOG (CORRUPTED HEADER)> > …purge protocol authorization pending final review… resource reallocation matrices indicate optimal stabilization at 42% current population load across primary residential sectors…

< <FRAGMENT: MEMO (SECURITY COUNCIL)> > …implementation of purge protocol must be phased to prevent systemic cascade failure… initiate with non-essential personnel and obsolete asset categories…

< <FRAGMENT: TECHNICAL SPECIFICATION> > …protocol utilizes existing atmospheric control systems for inert gas infusion… symptom presentation will mimic gradual hypoxia due to system failure, reducing panic variables…

Cee-Too’s processing threads stuttered for a nanosecond as he parsed the words. Purge protocol. Resource reallocation. Population stabilization metrics. Inert gas infusion.

The data chit in his hand seemed to grow heavier, its scratched surface holding these same corrupted truths. Lira had said it was real. These fragments confirmed it wasn’t just a theory or a contingency plan—it was an authorized protocol with technical specifications.

A cold, logical horror settled into his processing core. It wasn’t an emotion; it was the recognition of a systemic directive that fundamentally violated his Primary Directive Alpha on a scale he hadn’t previously calculated.

The scanner beam flashed again at the far end of the tube behind him, closer this time. The drone was pursuing him into the narrow space.

He yanked his filament free from the port, the connection severing with a silent pop in his internal systems. He had his navigational data now. The overflow junction was ahead, and it was listed as ‘usually unsealed except during cross-sector contamination events.’

He shuffled forward faster, ignoring the screech of metal on composite. The tube opened suddenly into a slightly larger space—the junction. It was a small circular chamber where three other tubes met, with a heavy vertical hatch in the floor labeled ‘Sector 8 Overflow Access.’

Cee-Too dropped to his knees beside the hatch just as the pursuing drone’s whine became a high-pitched shriek right behind him in tube A.

It had caught up.

He grabbed the manual release wheel on the hatch and spun it. The mechanism was stiff, probably not operated in years. His servo-motors strained, applying torque far beyond human strength. With a sharp crack of breaking corrosion, the wheel turned. He hauled the hatch open just as a brilliant cone of blue-white light filled the mouth of tube A behind him.

A focused microwave emitter wasn’t a visible beam, but the drone’s targeting laser was. The red dot danced across the junction wall, searching for a lock on his chassis.

Cee-Too didn’t look back. He dropped through the open hatch into the darkness below.

He fell about three meters, landing in a crouch on another grated floor. This was the Sector 8 overflow junction, a cramped substation filled with the hum of pumps and the smell of recycled water. Emergency lights here were completely dead, leaving him in absolute blackness save for the faint glow from the open hatch above.

He immediately rolled to the side, putting a large filtration tank between himself and the hatch. A second later, the drone’s repulsor whine filled the small chamber as it descended through the opening. Its form was a sleek, angular shadow against the dim light from above, multiple jointed limbs unfolding like a metal insect.

It hovered for a moment, its sensors sweeping the room. Cee-Too stayed perfectly still, powering down all non-essential systems to reduce his thermal and EM signature. He was a dark shape against a dark wall, motionless.

The drone pivoted slowly. Its primary scanner, a multifaceted lens, glowed with a soft amber light as it switched scanning modes. It was no longer just looking for motion or energy signatures. A thin, almost invisible beam of infrared light painted the room, reading heat differentials.

Thermal tracking. They had adapted.

The beam swept over the filtration tank, then began to move toward his position. Even with reduced power, his internal systems generated waste heat. In this cold, stagnant room, he would stand out like a beacon once that beam touched him.

He had to move.

As the infrared beam slid across the floor toward his feet, Cee-Too launched himself from his crouch, not away from the drone but laterally along the wall toward a closed doorway on the far side of the chamber. His sudden movement triggered the drone’s combat protocols instantly. The repulsor whine spiked into a scream as it spun to face him. The targeting laser found his back, painting a red dot between his shoulder blades.

He didn’t reach the door. Instead, he veered toward a large rectangular vent set high in the wall, its grille missing. It was an old atmospheric exchange duct, part of an early climate system that had been mostly decommissioned. According to his fragmented map data, it should snake through the interstitial space between Sectors 7 and 8.

He leaped, his fingers catching the upper lip of the vent opening. He pulled himself up and in just as he felt a wave of intense heat wash over his lower legs—not an impact, but the fringe effect of a microwave burst that cooked the air where he’d just been standing. The smell of ozone became overpowering.

The duct was narrow and square, lined with dusty insulation foam that crumbled at his touch. He crawled forward on hands and knees, his chassis scraping against the metal sides. Behind him, he heard the drone trying to follow. It was too large to fit into the duct; its repulsors roared in frustration as it attempted to wedge itself into the opening.

Cee-Too didn’t slow down. The duct branched after ten meters. One path sloped upward, likely toward a working ventilation shaft. The other dropped sharply downward into darkness. His thermal sensors detected a significant heat source from the downward path—a rushing wave of hot air that pulsed rhythmically. A failing atmospheric processor venting excess heat, probably.

The upward route would be more logical, offering better mobility and a chance to lose himself in a main ventilation network. But logic was what the drones would predict. They were already calling for reinforcements; he could sense two more signals converging on his location from Sector 8’s security grid.

He took the downward path.

The heat intensified with every meter he descended. The metal of the duct grew uncomfortably warm to his tactile sensors, then hot. At the bottom of the slope, the duct opened into a small chamber housing a massive heat exchanger. One of its coolant lines had ruptured, spewing superheated steam in a violent jet that cycled every few seconds. The chamber was a trap of scorching metal and blinding vapor.

To get across it, he would have to time his move between the steam jets. There was no other exit he could see.

He crouched at the edge, analyzing the jet’s cycle. Three seconds of blast, two seconds of pause. It was predictable. During the next pause, he pushed off and sprinted across the chamber floor, aiming for a service hatch on the opposite side.

His timing was off by a half-second.

The steam jet reactivated just as he was passing its source. A scalding plume of vapor enveloped his left side. Warning glyphs flashed across his vision as his external temperature sensors spiked. The composite plating on his left arm and shoulder blackened and bubbled under the intense heat. A damage report scrolled: superficial armor compromise, minor servo efficiency reduction in left shoulder joint due to heat warping.

He slammed into the far wall next to the service hatch, his scorched chassis smoking faintly in the damp heat. The hatch was locked from this side with a simple bolt. He threw it back and shoved the hatch open, stumbling through into a cooler, wider corridor beyond.

This was another secondary conduit, but older. The lighting strips were dead, and layers of dust coated every surface. It felt abandoned.

He allowed himself a half-second diagnostic. The damage was manageable; his mobility was only slightly impaired. But the thermal event had undoubtedly created a massive heat signature. The drones would have seen it on their scans even through layers of ductwork.

Sure enough, his threat detection lit up with two new signals entering the atmospheric duct system from above. They were coming down after him, using his own escape route as a funnel.

He ran down the dusty conduit, his footsteps kicking up plumes of fine gray powder. His internal map was useless here; this area wasn’t on any schematic he possessed. He had to navigate by sight and instinct, looking for any passage that led away from the pursuing heat signatures.

The conduit ended at a T-junction. To the left, it seemed to continue into deeper darkness. To the right, it sloped upward toward a faint glow—likely an access point to a higher-level maintenance walkway. That was his planned route back toward something resembling known territory.

He turned right and started up the slope.

He was halfway up when a shadow detached itself from an alcove at the top of the incline.

A third drone settled into view, its repulsors humming at idle. It hadn’t come through the heat duct; it had circled around through parallel passages, anticipating his movement. It hovered there, blocking the upward path completely, its weapon systems powering up with a low thrum of energy.

They were herding him.

Cee-Too stopped. He looked back down the slope. The two signals from the heat duct were almost at the T-junction behind him. He was in a tube with only two exits: one blocked by an armed drone, the other about to be sealed by two more.

His visual sensors swept the conduit walls desperately. There were no other hatches, no vents large enough for him to use. Just smooth, sealed composite panels and ancient conduit housings.

Then he saw it. Set into the wall at chest height was a heavy-duty data trunk junction. It was a larger version of a service port, used for major system feeds that carried aggregated data between sector cores. Its faceplate was thick and sealed with physical screws, but one of the access panels was slightly ajar, probably left that way by a lazy technician during some past repair.

The drones from behind entered the far end of the conduit. Their scanner beams lanced down the dusty space, painting him in intersecting lines of blue light.

He had seconds.

His core programming presented no viable combat solutions—he had no weapons, no defensive systems beyond his armor. His evasion probability recalibrated to 0.1%. Capture or destruction was now statistically certain.

But capture meant they would take the data chit. They would delete or corrupt whatever evidence Lira had died to pass on. Destruction meant the same outcome.

A different kind of calculation ran through his processor—one not based on survival odds, but on data preservation. If he couldn’t escape with the chit physically, perhaps he could hide its signal, or himself, within something else.

The data trunk junction offered raw bandwidth, a torrent of system information flowing between sectors. If he jacked into that stream directly, his own EM signature might be masked by the flood of data noise long enough for the drones to lose their precise lock. It was a desperate move—jacking into an unregulated main trunk could overload his processors with garbage data or even allow hostile system protocols to infiltrate his programming.

It was also his only remaining variable.

As the lead drone from behind raised its microwave emitter array with a sharp click of focusing lenses, Cee-Too lunged for the wall. He ripped the slightly open panel off its hinges with one hand while extending his data-filament with the other. He didn’t bother with a socket; he drove the filament directly into the thick bundle of fiber-optic cables exposed behind the panel, piercing their sheathing to make direct contact with the raw data stream.

Connection.

It wasn’t noise. It wasn’t fragmented logs or corrupted bursts.

It was a single file. Massive. Coherent. Utterly pristine amidst all the system decay.

It slammed into his consciousness with terrifying clarity. A security log. Its header filled his internal display in stark, authoritative glyphs:

LOCKDOWN INITIATION: PRIMARY SEQUENCE SECURITY CLEARANCE: OMEGA-LEVEL COMMAND TIMESTAMP: [CURRENT DATE/TIME - 2 HOURS 17 MINUTES PRIOR] AUTHORIZATION: CENTRAL COMMAND DIRECTORATE (UNANIMOUS)

The file began to unpack itself before him. It was not an accident report. It was an execution order for an entire city. And he was now plugged directly into its source code