It was dark.

It was dark and cold and his head felt like someone was trying to split it in two. It reminded Gurathin of waking up in grimy corridors, bitterness on his tongue, head pounding and augments burning. His stomach turned and he sat and breathed and concentrated on not retching.

When he felt less like he was going to be sick, Gurathin opened his eyes, blinked when it made zero difference to his ability to see. Gurathin squeezed his eyes closed, opened them again, ignored the panic he felt rising in his chest. This wasn’t the time. He’d been in worse situations - hungover, or hurt, or just so sick of everything and ready for it to just stop - and this wasn’t like that. He knew this wasn’t that. Gurathin could feel the soft fabric of the cuffs of his handknitted sweater against his wrists. There was none of the sweating, clawing ache that was the inevitable aftermath. His friends wouldn’t have left him alone. He just had to remember where he was; how he’d come to be here.

Gurathin took another breath, grimaced at the way something in his chest pulled wrong. Nothing he could do about that now, so he concentrated on what he could do. Doing had always been his way to deal with shit before. When he’d first moved to Preservation he’d wasted no time in finding himself work, making himself useful, even when Mensah told him he didn’t need to; that he was using work as a means of avoidance and he needed to rest and heal and let himself settle in. But Gurathin didn’t know how else to be.

Right now his head was a mess - not a new feeling - but his perception felt off somehow, like he was misaligned, one step removed from the reality around him. Gurathin knew he was sitting upright, but he felt like he was tilted sideways. The floor under him was wet and cold, unpleasant, but there was a prickling heat sparking through his fingers, across his thighs; anywhere that touched the ground. But even disoriented and sick and aching it was second nature for Gurathin to build code. He’d done it a thousand times. He’d been able to do it when he could barely even remember his name. So it was easy enough to put together a diagnostic programme; functionality; location; memory. It was quick and dirty because he couldn’t keep his thoughts in line and his code kept coming out a shit show even though he was certain he’d done it right. And it was so loud: crunching and grinding; a deep, repetitive sonorous booming from somewhere far below him; distracting. Even more annoying, there was a noise like someone shouting in his ear. Someone repeating his name. Over and over.

"Shut up," he told it. His voice was croaky, echoed strangely. Gurathin was surprised when the shouting actually stopped.

Then, "Status." SecUnit’s voice, but Gurathin wasn’t hearing it through his ears, or through the feed. This was SecUnit’s voice in his head, a proximity he’d only known previously when he’d carried SecUnit’s memories.

"Dr Gurathin," SecUnit-in-his-head said. "Status."

The diagnostic Gurathin was trying to run spat out junk data. The code ran and ran, line after line, too complex; foreign. It was like he’d forgotten how to understand it. He couldn’t see the connection to SecUnit and he worried he was hallucinating.

"Dr Gurathin," SecUnit insisted. It certainly sounded like SecUnit. Fuck, his head hurt.

"Dr Gur-"

"Alive," Gurathin said, just to make it stop.

A pause. "Yes," it agreed. "Location."

"The floor," Gurathin ground out.

"Not helpful," SecUnit said. "Describe your location."

"Describe- I can’t see a fucking thing." There was that edge of panic, creeping closer. Gurathin lifted up his hand, felt his muscles pull and ache like he’d been doing one of Ratthi’s exercise routines. He moved his fingers; continued to see nothing at all. There was sensory input though; minute variations in texture that his implants could pick up, if not analyse. The data didn’t make sense. A head injury maybe. A seizure.

"Did I-," Gurathin started. But, more important for his sanity, "How are you in my head?"

"You’re wired into the network," SecUnit said. That might explain the weird connection. A pause. "You don’t remember."

Gurathin reached to his neck and, ah yes, there it was: a hardwire. He followed the line of it back to the wall. Metal. Damp and cold. A wonderful combination. Gurathin ran his fingers over the wall, trying to understand; buttons; switches; nothing familiar. Nothing he’d ever come across before.

A thought struck him, "The others-"

"Not here," SecUnit cut in. "You don’t remember."

"No," Gurathin agreed. He reached out to whatever system he was connected to, to try to understand, but just as he touched the outline of it, SecUnit warned, "Don’t!" and in the next instant all Gurathin could feel was burning. There was a line of fire blazing its way from his neck down his back, and he couldn’t breathe, and everything turned red, and it felt like someone was trying to scrape his brain, and all he could hear was a screeching in his ears and SecUnit shouting, "Fuck-"

---

Gurathin woke up to water in his nose. He spluttered and coughed and turned his head trying to get away from it. The movement made his neck feel like something was scraping knives along his tendons and he had to stop and just remember how to breathe again and try not to be sick. He was so tired.

There had been times in his life - mostly in his life before - when he had reached this point; so exhausted his eyes felt rubbed raw, his legs cramping, his fingers aching. And his head; his head felt like enough code had been rammed through it to run a SecUnit, and he remembered exactly how that had felt.**

The volume of error messages his augments were throwing was nauseating and it took most of his concentration just to close them down, to make them stop. His vision glitched, and suddenly he could see a room with clean white walls. Sound shifted, and he could hear the quiet rumble of some kind of propulsion and voices, somewhere close. It was gone in an instant, and Gurathin was back in the dark with surrounded again by the sound of groaning creaks, like metal straining under extreme pressure, and the dripping of water. There was only static now where SecUnit had been. It was too quiet. He was alone.

It had been a long time since Gurathin had been this alone. On Preservation, Gurathin had found it difficult, at times, to make it clear that he wanted to be alone - like it was some incomprehensible and unheard of thing for Preservationists - and the thought of Preservation - what had become home - stuck in his chest. It was something Gurathin had never had before. Before, when he had known that no one was coming; that he could only rely on himself to get out of whatever shit he’d managed to get himself into. But now. Now he had friends who actually maybe gave a crap. Then there was SecUnit.

Suddenly, there was blinding light, too bright, and Gurathin had to squeeze his eyes tightly closed and lay there and hope the light would stop. Painfully, every muscle burning and every nerve sparking, Gurathin brought his hands to his face, pressed his palms against his eyes. They were shaking.

He waited, and waited, and listened to the crunching metal and his own laboured breathing and felt cold water against his ears; long enough that his eyes began to adjust, until the light stopped being excruciating. Gurathin let his hands fall; dared to open his eyes, and found he could see, though he kind of wished he couldn’t.

Red splashes stained ceiling, dried out and dark. Gurathin followed the lines of it where it had dripped down the walls. Old blood. Blast burns punctuated the spatters. They stopped abruptly and Gurathin understood: someone had died there. He wasn’t going to think about where the body might have gone.

He refocused on the corners of the room; could make out a fissure in the ceiling where the water was coming through. The room he was in was narrow. No windows. No door. He turned his head to try and see the wall behind him and - ah - there was the console he’d run his hands over before. There was the hardwire. He hadn’t even considered; it must have been pulled out when he’d fallen fully to the floor, and it was no wonder his data port stung.

Which meant he wasn’t alone. Which meant SecUnit hadn’t left him. Which meant he needed to sit up. Gurathin could do that; he’d been sitting up his whole life, and in much worse conditions.

Grimacing, Gurathin turned himself onto his side, ignoring the pulling down his back and the sharp pain in his chest, awkwardly having to turn his face away to stay out of the water, and braced his forearms on the floor. He pushed up, choking as the pain in his chest turned to clawingagony, and Gurathin slipped, landing hard on his shoulder.

Unknown code ripped through his augments, and suddenly his vision was angled differently, like he was looking down at the room. The walls were clean and whole again. There was the sound of the engines, and the people speaking in a language he didn’t know. The panic, though, he could understand.

Gurathin tried running a language search but found nothing but emptiness where his augments should have been. Then he was back in the room, laying on the floor. He lay there for a long time, waiting for his head to stop spinning and for breathing to not hurt so much. He could feel the cold water seeping into his socks.

The diagnostic he’d written when he’d first woken up was still running, less junk now but more confusing. Its logs showed power spikes from nowhere, incoherent time stamps; indecipherable code threaded through his augments that his systems had annexed and tried, and failed, to analyse. Maybe the source of the unknown visual and aural inputs he kept experiencing. Hallucinations. He’d experienced them before, at some of the lowest times in his life, but not like this; this was like reality overlaid with another, as clear as a recording. It felt like code, creeping out of the annexed files and into his head. It hurt. This wasn’t helping.

Gurathin tried to sit up again, this time bracing himself against the wall, managing to slide himself up, his arms shaking from the effort. By the time he was upright he was breathing heavily and he could feel his heart beating too fast and too loud. For a long moment he sat, feeling the water under his legs, the hard metal against his back, the pounding in his head. It had been a long time since he’d been without a connection to a system or a network or something. It was unsettling; empty space where something was missing.

Gurathin reached for the wire. It was wet. The entire wall was wet, water running over the switches and dials he’d felt before, in the darkness. He plugged in anyway and, "-rathin, you asshole, answer me-."

"SecUnit." Gurathin let his head fall forward and closed his eyes.

"Where the fuck have you been?" it demanded, and Gurathin couldn’t even feel annoyed at the demand; he was just relieved to be connected again.

"Hardwire disconnected," Gurathin said.

"Do not disconnect again," SecUnit said testily, as though it had been Gurathin’s fault. "And don’t try to connect to the ship again."

A request for access popped up in Gurathin’s augments.

The ship. Gurathin remembered a ship. An image - or a thought - fizzled through his memory; a schematic; a complex maze of corridors and full of life and opportunity.

Another access request.

"Dr Gurathin." Through the connection Gurathin could hear SecUnit’s annoyance. This was closer to voice-to-voice than feed-to-feed. Old tech. Like the buttons and switches on the wall.

"Something’s wrong with them," Gurathin warned.

"Your augmentations are obsolete and reconditioned beyond their original operating parameters; how can you tell?"

Which was just rude. "They’re corrupted," Or at least that was the only way Gurathin could think to explain the definitely nonnative code spreading through his software.

"It’s the ship," SecUnit said.

That ship again. Gurathin would have liked an explanation: how he’d gotten here; why they were here - wherever hear was - in the first place. But SecUnit had sent another access request, marked URGENT and LET ME IN, so Gurathin focused on amending permissions, allowing access. It was only fair anyway; he’d been in SecUnit’s systems enough times. And Gurathin knew; if SecUnit really wanted to access Gurathin’s augmentations there was likely very little Gurathin could do about it.

Immediately, SecUnit’s presence was there, scanning through his code, bypassing his defences, accessing the hardware, and Gurathin gritted his teeth, resisting the long-learned response to fight the outside influence on his systems, holding off his automatic defences - for all the good they might do - and reminding himself that Pin-Lee was always telling him to ask for fucking help next time. SecUnit checked through the diagnostic logs, amending and expanding the programme, then started pulling out the code Gurathin knew shouldn’t be there but couldn’t get a grasp on, analysing, deleting. It started running something through the connection and suddenly it was like having a nail stuck into the base of his brain.

"Stop," Gurathin gasped. "Whatever you’re-" A sharp stabbing, and it reminded Gurathin of the first time his implants had been switched on; too much and too fast, wiping him away, replacing him with pain and code and ice.

---

There was a man running down a corridor. He held a tool in his hand; sharp-edged but not a weapon; used for repairs. There was blood on the tip, and staining the left arm of his white uniform, and on his face. He stopped and turned to look up. He bared his teeth and turned away, started running again. A door slid closed behind him. He shouted. A door slid closed behind him. He ran faster.

---

It stopped.

Slowly, Gurathin came back to himself. The cold room. The wet floor. Gurathin consciously had to tell his shoulders, his jaw, to relax. He could feel SecUnit’s presence but it had stopped moving through his systems; remained silent.

"What did you-" Gurathin tried, then had to cough. His throat was so dry, which was a fucking joke considering the water running down the walls. "What were you trying to do?" he tried again.

"Connect to your systems," SecUnit said, and it sounded like it was being careful. "I initiated a remote diagnostic."

"Didn’t I already try connecting?" Gurathin frowned, remembering the blistering heat spreading across the back of his neck when he’d tried to connect to whatever network they were piggybacking off of. "Didn’t you just tell me not to?"

SecUnit said, "I wasn’t trying to connect you to the ship’s system."

The ship’s system that felt like trying to interface with a wormhole. Incoherent. Chaos.

"You were trying to connect me to you," Gurathin realised. To run the diagnostic though its processors. It would mean letting Gurathin into its systems too.

A long pause. Around him, the walls groaned, louder. It was old, Gurathin remembered. It was old and decaying. Gurathin chose to ignore it.

"Yes," SecUnit said. "Your augmentations were providing limited useful data."

"Right," Gurathin said.

"They didn’t have the processing power to remove the corrupted programming," SecUnit added.

Gurathin was too tired to take offence. "I would appreciate it," he said, "If you didn’t try that again."

"Can you give me your location?" SecUnit asked.

There had been a schematic. Corridors.

"What kind of ship was this?" Gurathin wondered. He tried to retrieve the memory, came up with nothing but garbled timestamps and jumbled images, wound up together with that unknown code.

"A hostile one," SecUnit said. "You’re three levels below me," and, "Dr Gurathin."

"How do you know?" Gurathin asked. "How do you know I’m three levels down?"

It was hard to think. Hard to concentrate. He could see the split in the ceiling; water-stained walls, thick with dirt from decades of decay, then clean lines, immaculately white; red stains across the ceiling, then not there. Gurathin could hear SecUnit saying something, then his hearing was filled with yelling in that language he couldn’t recognise.

SecUnit said, more urgently, loudly, "Dr Gurathin"

"What?"

"You have been unresponsive for fifty-three seconds," SecUnit told him. If it had been anyone else Gurathin would have argued that he hadn’t, but he didn’t doubt SecUnit’s accuracy. Arada had told him enough times that it was okay to admit it when he knew something was wrong.

"I’m losing time," Gurathin confessed. "Hallucinating."

SecUnit was silent for a disturbingly long moment. Then, "I turned on the lighting system. Describe your location."

"A cupboard." Gurathin said. "No door."

"Something less vague." Gurathin imagined SecUnit rolling its eyes.

"There’s a hole in the ceiling," Gurathin offered. "Water’s coming through it."

"Yes," SecUnit said. "What else."

Gurathin thought of the cold, hard floor and the pungent smell of mould and rot and the tight ache in his chest. He was starting to feel warmer but was pretty sure none of that was what SecUnit was looking for.

"There’s blood on the ceiling." he said. "Blast patterns on the wall."

SecUnit said, "And?"

"There’s a panel behind me, that I’m connected to." Gurathin turned slowly, carefully, so that he didn’t pull the wire out; so that it didn’t hurt so much. "The panel has a bank of switches, a row of buttons below them, dials below that." He ran his fingers over them. "I don’t know the material." Under his fingers he could feel something raised, dots and thin lines. He leaned in closer, rubbed his thumb over the surface. "There’s writing, I think." Yes, he remembered seeing it before. "Could be labels, but I can’t read it."

Gurathin sat back, looked around the rest of the small space. "There’s nothing else." Nothing except the memory of voices, of new corridors, of something watching it all. It was watching him now. There was something pushing at his augments; not an awareness - more basic than that - but still something his augments recognised as a possible threat. Through the link it was trying to make Gurathin could see SecUnit, crouched into a corner of a brightly lit corridor, connected to a familiar-looking panel. There were long, deep gashes in the walls.

"I think I can see you," Gurathin said. "Unless I’m hallucinating again."

SecUnit looked up, directly at him. A Camera. There were bruises on its face. A cut under its eye.

"Are you okay?" He hadn’t thought to ask before; SecUnit had been in his augments and yelling at him and Gurathin hadn’t even considered that it could be hurt too. He knew SecUnit could be hurt. He’d seen it before enough times.

SecUnit scowled. "I’m fine."

Not a hallucination then.

"Would you tell me if you weren’t?"

SecUnit shrugged. "You couldn’t help if I were."

"I’m not that useless," Gurathin argued. He’d kept it alive after the explosion. He’d carried it whole.

"You said you were in a cupboard," SecUnit pointed out. "With no door."

"Ah. Yeah." But there was something he could do. "If I can see you," Gurathin said, "I can follow the connection."

He watched SecUnit frown, and look at the hardwire line, and look back up at the camera; at Gurathin. Over the months since SecUnit had come back to them, Gurathin had seen enough variations on SecUnit’s annoyed expression to understand that this one meant he wanted to argue. But it also knew this was the most efficient way; Gurathin had an in. Anything else would take time.

With anyone else there would have been long explanations, pointless disagreement and emotion. Its logic was, Gurathin thought, one of SecUnit’s better qualities. Except when it decided to do things that got itself maybe killed. Like Gurathin might have been doing now. "You remember what happened last time," it said.

Gurathin rolled his eyes. "Yes."

"Don’t do that."

---

There was a man who was not a man in the corridor, and it was not running. It looked up. System defences were initiated. It shouted. System defences cut off access to connection panels in its vicinity. It ran. A door closed behind it. It ran faster.

---

An alarm was sounding; high-pitched and fucking awful. SecUnit was yelling, "Wake the fuck up, Gurathin," and his head felt like someone was drilling into it.

"No," Gurathin grit out, and the screeching alarm cut out. SecUnit was in his augments, cautiously sifting through running applications. Slowly, his hearing returned, sight cleared; awareness sharpened.

The lights were flickering, making unsettling sizzling noises as they turned on and then off again.

His nose was itching, felt blocked, and when Gurathin wiped at it his fingers came away red.

The ringing in his ears didn’t stop.

"You wouldn’t wake up," SecUnit said. It withdrew from Gurathin’s programmes, but its presence remained. The connection was different. He couldn’t see SecUnit anymore.

"I wasn’t asleep." Fuck, but Gurathin wanted to be out of here.

"No," SecUnit agreed.

The memories were mixed together - the decay of now and the newness of before - but Gurathin was starting to understand. The ship had malfunctioned. It had killed everyone. He couldn’t remember why they’d ever thought it was a good idea to come here in the first place, but that wasn’t the most pressing concern. "Did it work?" he asked.

"Yes," SecUnit said. "I have your location mapped."

It was the first good news Gurathin had heard since waking up in this hellhole. It might have been something to celebrate, but then he realised how cold he was; impossibly, even colder than before. He shifted and ice-cold water washed over his legs. The water level had risen almost up to his waist.

Gurathin looked up at the corner of the room. The fissure had widened.

"SecUnit," he said, then couldn’t think what else to say. He watched water pouring in and wondered if somehow the ship had done this, too.

"Is there more?" SecUnit said testily, "Because waiting for you to finish talking is not a productive use of time."

"I needed a moment," Gurathin said, "to take in the fact that the room is filling with water."

A pause. "I’m going to disconnect."

"What-" Gurathin started, and SecUnit said, "I need to move. I can only connect to you when I find a data point. I’m two floors above you."

Gurathin was not panicking. The room had no door, but he was definitely not panicking. There was time. The water wasn’t that high. He shoved his hands under his arms because it was so fucking freezing and ignored the way it felt like putting his lungs in a vice. He was shivering. He couldn’t ask SecUnit to stay because that would be counterproductive. And embarrassing.

Instead, Gurathin said, "I’ll be here."

"You had better be." SecUnit made it sound like a threat but, in Gurathin’s experience, that was generally SecUnit’s way of showing concern.

The connection went dead and Gurathin missed SecUnit’s presence immediately - had become used to it - and didn’t know how to distract himself without it. He felt trapped in a way he hadn’t before. The disconcerting outline of the ship’s systems loomed large, now, but Gurathin didn’t dare disconnect.

The water level was creeping higher; more water pouring in; the speed accelerating.

He would hear from SecUnit again soon. Of that Gurathin was certain.

---

It was a conscious decision to not set a timer running, to know how long he had waited, alone. Without SecUnit there was nothing to distract him, and Gurathin was beginning to think he should have set a timer after all.

The ship was big - Gurathin remembered that much - had seen the extent of its sprawling, labyrinthine structure on schematics. It would take SecUnit time to get here, and he wouldn’t stop for something as trivial as checking Gurathin hadn’t drowned in the interim. That would only slow it down.

The water was up to his chest now, high enough that Gurathin had to sit up on his knees. Every time he moved, the cold water took his breath away. Wrapping his arms around himself wasn’t helping much, but there was little else he could do to keep his core warm. His augments had given up sending warnings about running outside their recommended operating limits; about approaching a dangerously low internal temperature. Now they just returned empty logs, sending out phantom queries at distracting intervals.

Gurathin tried leaning sideways against the wall, resting his head on the hard metal, trying to keep still, to take strain off his chest. The metal, too, was cold against his skin.

When there was light, he watched the water running down the walls, watched the patterns of reflections over the surface of the water. When it was dark he watched as his mind filled in the blanks, fuelled by malfunctioning programmes; twisting together disconcerting shapes and ominous creaking into nonsensical alerts.

In the spaces between distraction and fear: when SecUnit had been there to talk to - something else to focus on - it had been easier to ignore the flashes of clean corridors, a different time, and people running, being cut down by bulkheads and split apart by decompression.

The waterline was inching its way closer to the system port. Gurathin could only hope it was waterproof. Methodically, he ran his fingers over what Gurathin was certain was writing. He should probably try to make sense of it. He should probably at least try to do something useful; maybe attempt to access the ship’s systems again, find a door, or information. But all Gurathin wanted to do was sleep. He couldn’t concentrate. Everything around him was a mess of sound and imagines that didn’t make sense; hallucinations mixed together with reality.

Gurathin was relatively certain, too, that SecUnit would be pissed if he fried his brain on the off chance he could find an exit.

Against the stain on the ceiling Gurathin watched as a man was pressed against the surface until his eyes bled and his jaw cracked and his skull split open. Artificial gravity, he guessed.

He was going to need to stand up soon, but he couldn’t really feel his legs anymore.

And then, "Dr Gurathin."

Reconnection, finally. He couldn’t work out if he’d been alone for a long time, or if it had been no time at all. Another reason Gurathin hadn’t wanted to start a chronometer running: he didn’t want to know how much time he was losing.

But now, SecUnit was a familiar presence at the perimeter where the connection to the ship met his augments, and it was such a relief that Gurathin had to take a deep breath and code a fix and close his eyes so he didn’t say something ridiculous.

"You know," he decided on, "I can’t swim." Most people on Preservation could. It was another thing that set Gurathin apart.

Through the connection, SecUnit said, “How deep is the water?"

"Nearly at my shoulders." Fuck, he needed to stand up.

There was a deep, dull banging sound close by. "Can you hear that?" SecUnit asked.

Gurathin wondered if SecUnit had the strength to rip its way through the wall. He’d seen constructs in some of Ratthi’s more choice media ram their way through solid stone, which seemed unlikely.

"Yes," he answered.

"Then I’m at the right bulkhead. There’s a manual override."

Ah, yes. The crushing bulkheads. At least there wasn’t a corpse left trapped underneath it. He should have realised; he was in a corridor; he knew that. He’d seen that. He scrabbed at his face. Needed to concentrate.

"Right. Manual override. One that works?"

"There is a ninety-three per cent probability that the mechanism will function," SecUnit said.

"Liar," Gurathin scoffed, then found himself gasping for breath when freezing water crept up to his neck, down his collar. The waterlogged fabric of his sweater was so heavy. He couldn’t get his knees to push up, get himself higher. Gurathin put his hand against the wall, tried to lever himself up. It didn’t work.

SecUnit demanded, "What is it?"

"Legs," was all Gurathin had the breath to say. It was weird to think; he’d never considered drowning before. In all the ways he might have gone: overwork, augment rejection, overdose, gunshot, infection - a macabre litany of his life - drowning had never come up. He was thinking about it now.

"Hold on to something," SecUnit warned.

Before Gurathin had a chance to remind SecUnit that there was nothing to hold onto, there was a sound like metal snapping, and then a mechanism whirring to life, cranking, gear by gear. The lights went out, and in the next instant Gurathin felt himself being pulled underwater. He tried to grab hold of the control panel, but there was nothing for his stiff finger to get a grip on. Then he was beneath the surface. His head hit the floor, hard, and for a moment he was too dazed to think. Then he felt the hardwire rip out of his neck and at the sharp sting of it Gurathin opened his mouth in surprise and wished he hadn’t when his throat filled with water.

As he’d always done, Gurathin fought. He tried pushing himself up from the floor but couldn’t get leverage, tried gripping with his feet, but his movements were sluggish, he couldn’t bend himself the right way to find purchase, and he couldn’t breathe. It was too dark to see anything. Everything was moving too fast. His shoulders slammed against something hard, his back bent, pulled, water rushing at him. He was going to drown. He wasn’t going to get to go home. He wasn’t going to get to see his friends again.

Something clamped, hard, around his ankle and Gurathin lost consciousness thinking; he wasn’t going to get to see SecUnit again, either.

---

There had been a point in his life when Gurathin had learned the trick of waking up having no idea where he was, or how he’d gotten there, or why everything hurt. You don’t try to move. Listen first. Wait. See what you remember.

He could hear SecUnit somewhere above him, close by. He was safe, then.

"I’m connecting," it said, and Gurathin felt it tip his head to the side. It plugged into his port. "You’re awake."

"Kind of." Gurathin tried opening his eyes. Didn’t really want to. He remembered drowning, and then light, blinding, and SecUnit grimacing and dragging him somewhere. It had hurt, and it felt like it had gone on for a long time, and SecUnit had sworn a lot, then he must have been mercifully unconscious.

Now, his legs were lying on a hard floor, the rest of him elevated, held against something warm. The warmth prickled uncomfortably against his skin. He was soaked and heavy. Gurathin didn’t think he could’ve moved even if he’d wanted to.

In his augments, SecUnit was running a diagnostic. It was being weirdly cautious about it, almost gentle, so that this time it didn’t hurt. It didn’t trip any of Gurathin’s defences this time. Or maybe they were all just shot to hell. More characteristically, SecUnit helped itself to Gurathin’s most recent memory logs.

"You were supposed to hold on to something," it said, rifling carefully through his files. With anyone else it would have felt like an intrusion.

"I told you-" Gurathin’s breath caught in his throat and he had to cough, wet and painful, then almost choked when he felt SecUnit rub a hand firmly against his back.

"You inhaled inadvisable quantities of water," SecUnit said.

Gurathin ignored it. "-there was nothing to hold on to!"

This close, this buried in his files, Gurathin could catch echoes of SecUnit’s memories too; more fucking corridors; bulkheads and bulkheads and bulkheads to break through (but not by ramming through them); Gurathin’s silence a staticky void; SecUnit looking down at him. His wet hair was plastered to his face, skin pale and eyes sunk deep and bruised. He looked like shit.

This close, Gurathin could feel the solidity of SecUnit’s arm holding his up, and his palm, flat on Gurathin’s back and massaging upwards. Gurathin would have asked if SecUnit had seen someone do this on one of its shows, but it was kind of making it easier to breathe so he kept quiet. He thought that maybe he could even sleep like this, except that then SecUnit shook him and said, "Don’t go to sleep."

The movement rattled his teeth, hurt his lungs, but SecUnit’s hand was warm relief. Gurathin knew they couldn’t stay like this much longer; knew how much SecUnit must hate this.

"You don’t have to do that," Gurathin offered.

Its hand stopped moving for a moment, then resumed. "I know."

It was an easy thing to give SecUnit higher level access when it requested it.

"Inventive," SecUnit said eventually, picking out a log and helpfully tagging it HALLUCINATION. "With the gravity. Never seen that before."

"It didn’t do that to us." Gurathin hadn’t thought of it until now; all the ways the ship could kill then but didn’t.

"Not enough power," SecUnit said, then started tagging Gurathin’s memories of its hands on him HALLUCINATION too.

Gurathin found himself laughing. Graciously, he retagged it POSSIBLE HALLUCINATION and SecUnit left it at that.

Deeper now, and SecUnit highlighted a series of files; memories Gurathin had thought he’s lost; why they’d come here; who they’d been too late to save. He marked them to read in full later, when he had time to properly consider all the ways he might have fucked up. For now he’d seen enough.

"You didn’t," SecUnit said. "Fuck anything up." It paused. "We didn’t."

Gurathin smiled thinly. "You believe that?"

"Dr Mensah would tell me it was true."

"She would," Gurathin agreed.

"She would tell me we should talk about it."

At that Gurathin did smile. "She would."

But they wouldn’t. There was a lot he and SecUnit didn’t talk about; like SecUnit’s name, or the Corporation Rim, or being in each other’s heads. Bharadwaj had told him it wasn’t healthy, but she was Preservation born and bred and didn’t understand the solace that could be found in the mutual understanding that there was nothing left to talk about.

SecUnit shifted, stopped massaging Gurathin’s back. "Your respiration has improved."

Gurathin tried not to miss the warm touch, held his jaw tightly closed so he didn’t do something stupid like ask for more. He could mostly breathe normally again. If he ignored the shivering and the way every part of him ached he felt much better. As much as he might like to, he couldn’t ignore the threat they were still under forever.

So Gurathin blinked his eyes open, sore and blurry, and found he could mostly see; they were in a corridor again, much like where he’d been trapped. This one was littered with junk, with long black scorch marks licking their way up the length of the walls. Gurathin recognised it from his logs of when they’d first arrived: an entrance buried deep in the ground; a crash site recently discovered. The only way in or out they knew that definitely led back to the outside world.

There was thick white moss lining the seams around the airlock, the panels surrounding it had all been ripped away, wires and processors pulled out.

"The override is jammed." SecUnit’s voice was flat, toneless; the way Gurathin was starting to understand meant it was trying not to cause panic. Trying not to panic.

Gurathin sighed. "Of course it is."

Muted sunlight was streaming in through transparent windows set deep into the airlock, a glimpse of outside, and Gurathin imagined he could feel the warmth of it. He wanted to be dry. He wanted to stop.

"Plug me in."

SecUnit’s hold on him tightened. "That is a stupid idea, even for you."

"I can do it," Gurathin said.

"So can I," SecUnit countered. "Doesn’t mean I’m going to."

"I know where to locate-" Gurathin tried, and SecUnit cut him off, "You couldn’t when you were drowning."

Because it would have fried his brain. He didn’t need to say it; SecUnit knew.

"I’ve gotten a better idea of it now." It was only half a lie. SecUnit had to know that too. But he did know what he needed to do. He knew there was something wrong with his chest, and that he was borderline hypothermic. He’d seen himself through SecUnit’s eyes, and things were not looking great for him. "Then you can get us out," Gurathin added, because he didn’t want SecUnit offering to try to navigate the ship’s system itself. Gurathin’s augments were already halfway to fucked so what was a little more damage?

He watched the way the water was pooling under his elbow while SecUnit remained silent; probably running the calculations, going through every scenario it could think of. There was nothing else.

Slowly, carefully, it withdrew from Gurathin’s systems. "Get out as quickly as you can," it said, unhelpfully, disconnecting, and it was just Gurathin in his own head again.

It pulled Gurathin’s upright, propping him up against the scorched wall. The change in orientation gave Gurathin’s vertigo, and he held on to SecUnit’s arm until the dizziness passed, and SecUnit let him.

SecUnit didn’t offer assurances; there were none to give. Gurathin let go, watched as SecUnit straightened, navigated its way around the junk to the panel closest to what looked like the door locking mechanism. It yanked a bunch of wires further out, twisted some together, pulling some apart. Then turned back to Gurathin.

"I’ll need to move you."

Gurathin nodded. "Sure." It wasn’t like he could move himself.

He expected SecUnit to drag him, like he was certain it’d done before, but instead it crouched down and picked him up, arms around his back and under his knees. It put him down beside the wires, perfunctorily but not ungently.

Then, kneeling down beside him, it held up the connection.

"Dr Gurathin."

Last chance to say no, but what else was there to try? They’d need to get into the ship’s systems whatever they did. This way was just the most efficient.

"Do it."

SecUnit looked him dead in the eye and said, "Don’t die."

It plugged him in but kept hold of the hardwire. Gurathin braced himself, gritting his teeth against the influx of unknown data. This was different from the previous connections he’d made to the ship; processes more multitudinous, stronger defences here at the perimeter than further into the ship. Recognisable from what he’d seen before though. And now that Gurathin had the state of mind to look, he could make out the error lines; corrupted fixed overwritten with more corrupted fixed. This ship was old.

He followed the line of his connection to the panel, avoiding contact with any of the ship’s code, looking for something that might be a door command. But this was all superficial; all he could make out were configurations, hierarchies; the code was too far from anything Gurathin was familiar with and there was no time to decipher it before the system recognised him as a threat. He needed to connect to make this work.

In the corridor, the lights flickered.

SecUnit looked up at the ceiling, then back to Gurathin, or at least, to somewhere over Gurathin’s shoulder. "Hurry up."

Ever patient.

Time to stop avoiding it.

Gurathin connected.

It was like drowning all over again; he couldn’t see the corridor anymore, or SecUnit, or his own hands; he was subsumed by script, pressed down. Gurathin let it hold him, trying to parse it as it tore through his augments. It stabbed, and pricked, and squeezed. It was killing him. He could feel lightning coursing through his nerves, could smell burning. But he could see it. He could see what he needed.

He heard SecUnit say, "I’m disconnecting you," and Gurathin managed to wheeze, "Not yet," and it was a simple switch, all he had to do was flip it. Gurathin could taste blood in the back of his throat. Now, he ran every defence he had; too much all at once but not enough to stop the barrage of inputs and outputs and malware and corrupted programmes. But enough to access the mechanism, to throw it open, to burn all the connections behind him so that the ship couldn’t close the door again.

"Enough!" SecUnit shouted, and in the next instant the ship was gone. Gurathin was gone.

---

"Waking up like this is," Gurathin rasped, "starting to get old." His mouth tasted disgusting. Everything felt very far away.

And there was SecUnit, looming over him. It sat cross-legged beside him, not touching. The hardwire connected them. That would explain why nothing hurt.

"Then stop getting your augmentations fried," SecUnit said.

There was sunlight on his face and soft ground under his back. Gurathin curled his fingers and felt sand. "It worked, didn’t it?"

Above him, SecUnit rolled its eyes. "By accident."

"It was not-" Gurathin started, but then SecUnit glanced down at him, and it smiled, just a twitch of its lips, but enough to know it was messing with him.

Somewhere nearby, Gurathin could hear the thundering beat of a hopper.

"You called for help," Gurathin said. Pin-Lee would be proud.

"You need it." In his augments, SecUnit requested access again. "There too."

It wasn’t wrong; his software was a wreck of half-corrupted code. He thought of Mensah telling him to trust and Arada telling him to accept help when it was freely given, and Gurathin let it in.

But, "No retagging everything as a hallucination."

And there was that half-smile again. "No promises."

.End.