Into the dark places no one dare venture...

I try to be a good mother, friend, big sister, grandmother, aunt, leader, mentor, and soldier. It's not always easy and I don't always succeed. I have to wear several hats at once, and sometimes the colors clash in spectacular ways. Perhaps I wasn't cut out to be a mother, or grandmother and, technically, I'm not really either of those things. But they are both roles I fill. Roles I took on willingly and, while they can sometimes be difficult roles to fill, I have no regrets.

Sometimes, my roles overlap. And sometimes that overlap takes me into dark places probably left unvisited.

In this case, quite literally dark.

Very dark.

I'd been hearing rumors for a while that there'd been signs of excavations down in the deeper tunnels. I knew of the deep vein Lily'd taken to digging into for various rare earths and gemstones. It was a small vein, too deep to be commercially viable, but it was giving her raw materials and that was good.

But Lily's digging couldn't account for all the reports that had come in, and Lily herself had talked about seeing "the Cub" down in the deep tunnels. That meant Aurora was here. And Blue. But could she be responsible for the excavations? Even Krenshar had seemed surprised by the volume of rock being moved, and that led me to wonder about Mother Bot and her kin.

In either case, it meant going into the tunnels to find out for myself just what was going on down there. Unfortunately, that meant turning down help from several people. Belize, Charly, General, and Zade, all offered to go down into the tunnels with me. And in each case, I had to turn them down. It wasn't that I didn't trust them. In a firefight, I'd have been happy to fight alongside any of them. But where I was going, it would take stealth and experience in tactical recon, and that was the sort of thing I did best on my own.

If it was Aurora, then I'd want to talk to her alone. If it was Mother Bot, I'd need to evac quickly and quietly. In either case, it was something I would need to do alone. Help, here, would consist of being ready with heavy weapons on the surface in case I ran into Mother Bot and she decided to send her spawn back up the tunnels after me.

Lily took me down into the tunnels. She was the only one who really knew that section of the tunnels and she was the one person, other than Krenshar and Aurora herself, who could probably get clear of the machines if they came hunting. If they were here, of course.

I'd been pretty deep into the mines before. There were actually dozens on them spread across Hale's Moon, mostly within a hundred kilometers or so of the town. Most of the remote mines were shut down when Weyland Yutani had abandoned the colony, leaving the Replicant workforce, a handful of semi-automated mining vehicles, and a hundred or so Human miners without support. But the ones near town remained in operation, originally with Replicants and a few Humans supporting them, now almost exclusively with Human labor since WY came back and essentially stole our mechanicals.

But now I was going deeper into the mines than any of them were ever working. There was even a fairly obvious break point where the distinctive cuts of the mining machines stopped and the less well defined marks of something else became the norm. In some places, it looked like shaped charge tunneling, in others, literally, like claws.

Lily.

And maybe Aurora too.

There were also other signs. Some smaller tunnels that would have been an easy fit for Aurora, but a tight squeeze for me or anyone larger. They looked like air shafts, interlinking some of the natural cuts and fissures in the moon's structure. Except the cuts were wrong for one of the smaller tunneling machines, which made me acutely aware of just how deep I'd gotten.

Eventually, Lily brought me down to the area where she was working her little vein and seen Aurora nearby. It had been getting wetter the closer we got to it and, to my surprise, there was actually water pooling on the floor of the tunnel where she had been working. Deep penetration from one of the comet hits? Or maybe there was an aquifer down here that no one had known about? Regardless, this was where she'd seen Aurora. The cub. Who didn't keep me waiting long.

I don't know why, but Lily and Aurora don't seem to get along well. Where 'not well' is defined as expressing a desire to kill her for being bad. Be that as it was, Lily took off moments after Aurora showed up, leaving me alone with her deep in the tunnels.

Talking with Aurora is always enlightening, often complicated, and frequently confusing. Part Child. Part Elder. Part elemental force of nature. It was a lot like talking to my grandfather. She was far more than the result of Mindo's experiments, and much as I tried, I knew I could never really understand her. But it didn't mean I didn't love her, much the way I loved her mother.

She'd released Blue. Kind of. She was letting him come and go as he wished, which meant he was going somewhere. From what Aurora was implying, that somewhere was into the warbots that were still down here somewhere under the surface. If that really was the case, it was both reassuring and terrifying.

The war machines were just that. Machines. There was no Ghost in their armored shells. They were programmed to do a job, and that job was to kill people, replicate themselves, and kill more people. While they weren't that powerful from a raw computing standpoint, there was enough there to support a rudimentary AI. If Blue was spreading himself through their networked nodes, he could easily become the machines. While the thought of Blue with real firepower was a bit disconcerting, I'd grown to trust the free AI. I had faith Blue wouldn't hurt us, wouldn't turn those weapons towards us. It wasn't entirely unfounded, of course. Blue'd had multiple opportunities to do us harm and hadn't taken them. He had his own agenda, but it didn't appear to involve the extermination of Humanity.

But the machines themselves? How much of Blue would be left behind on their memory cores? Would supporting a powerful AI trigger a subsequent jump to sentience on the underlying metaframe? It had happened on a couple of university systems over the years. What if it happened here? As simple machines, the warbots would be difficult to fight. But there wasn't any ethical consideration. If they went AI?

Not something I wanted to contemplate.

She said he'd keep them from hurting us. I had to believe that. But she also said she'd seen seventeen of them down here. Lily said something about it too later. Three, three, three, three, three and then two more. But seventeen of what? Those little Wasp units we'd seen so many of? The semi-antro combat machines like the one Nack still kept in Firefly's? Diggers? Rollers? Buddha forbid, Seeders?

Aurora hadn't been specific, but Lily had been as clear as she ever was: fifteen of one model, two of another. I could only hope that neither of those models were Seeders.