We rolled through more corridors than I kept track of. The Primogenitor's terminal adjusted the map according to our position as if it was driven by GPS.

However, our map hindered more than it helped. It indicated doors that weren't there and left out pathways that were.

The corridors looked the same as usual to me. Still the same deathly green tunnels, still the same ghostly lamps shining at us from overhead. At most, the ceilings were higher and the shapes around us more stationary. We didn't move forward.

"What's taking you so long?" Kira asked. She stared through the bubble at the formless dark shapes around us.

"I'm sorry, but it's not my fault. I'm driving as fast as my Captain recommended and I'm following the map as closely as I can. It must be the map's fault. It's garbage!"

"If you say so."

Two combots rolled next to us. Originally, we had six, but I sent out four of them to scout. I told them to watch out for possible traces left by Layla or Ay.

They found nothing, so I told them to return the way they came. That didn't work, so now, they're just supposed to follow the direction of my mindwaves.

"They're getting less biological and more mechanical," Kira said.

"What?"

She pointed at the shapes around us. "You can't see them with your vision."

Maybe that's why she once told me of green air mushrooms.

"When we entered, I mostly saw organisms. Now, I only see machines. We're getting into industrial sections."

At least we didn't drive in circles.

"You probably want a singularity stone, too," Kira said. "These cloud forests must be boring without infrared sight."

She didn't realize how right she was. All this time, I got pushed around by people stronger than me. With a singularity stone, I'd have nothing to worry about.

Ay didn't have the only stones in existence. Were there more here?

"But we can't have all we want," Kira continued. "I'd like to be outside right now."

"You sure you could survive?"

"And how. I'm optimized for survival. I had nothing to do before you found me. Being interested in the human body as I was, I did tests. I held my breath for half an hour or longer. I even stopped my heartbeat at will and survived."

I tried to focus on the corridors before me. Did she enjoy teasing me by showing off?

"Your robots are coming back, by the way," Kira said.

Had I paid attention to my radar, I wouldn't have needed her enhanced eyes.

On my screen, I watched an infrared map of my immediate surroundings. My bubble drove around sinuous paths, accompanied by two blinking dots. Four more dots approached. The combots I sent for scouting surfaced from the surrounding fog.

"Status report," I ordered.

The combots answered that they mapped the station for me. The fruits of their work filled out my screen, allowing me to compare it to what the Primogenitors gave us.

I stopped the bubble car and focused.

The two maps showed close to no overlap. They agreed on the serpentine corridors we had just passed, but that was it. According to the Primogenitor's terminal, I could continue my current path for almost half a mile without detours. According to the robot's map, however, a second trail planned to branch off my current path just outside my line of sight.

That second trail existed on the Primogenitor's map, too. Just that it had been separated by a wall from my path.

I rolled forward.

The robot's map was right. I indeed had to choose between two paths now. I followed the one the Primogenitor's map told me to follow.

I had to test a hypothesis.

According to my terminal, we were just about to hit a small wall with a door.

It was right. Our robots shone on the debris of a door within a skeletal hinge.

I stopped the car and watched the door patiently.

"What are you doing, Professor?" Kira asked. "Thinking about a new scientific theory."

"Essentially," I said.

Just as I predicted. The door before us closed. It can't have been as a reaction to our presence, as they never did this before. They opened and closed randomly.

"Our map is worse than useless," I said. "This space station can't be mapped. Its corridors shift and its doors change when we're not looking. It's intelligent. This space station is alive."

I threw the terminal against the bubble's wall. "We've been scammed!"

"I'm sure they didn't mean it that way," Kira said. "Maybe they haven't been around for a long time. They're afraid of the monster, remember?"

"Are you sure? Maybe they deliberately lied to us. They could have been manipulated by the Plague."

"Absolutely sure." She pointed at her head. "I have the super-memory, remember? The map was reliable when we got it. I think you're onto something with the Plague tho."

I gulped. Did she just imply that the Plague couldn't just brainwash Primogenitors, but also entire space stations? Back when we passed the wormhole, a likely automated Seizer starship attacked its allies. That meant the plague infected computers as well as brains, software as well as wetware.

Were our combots already infected?

I ordered each six to drive around the bubble-car in a circle. They obeyed without hesitation. Or they obeyed to lull me into a false sense of security. Or maybe they really obeyed, but the virus already infected them and was still in the incubation phase.

Did I become paranoid?

Was it even a bad thing to be paranoid in my situation?

"Hey," Kira said, "can you tell the robots to project their observations on our screen? Maybe I can fill in what's missing and find a pattern."

"Sure."

Kira couldn't change the display manually. Hence, I ordered the combots to combine all footage they got and present it as a perpetually repeating slideshow. With her memory, Kira only needed to look at each frame once anyway

"Okay, no pattern found," she ultimately said. "However, I can show you the way back to those aliens. Maybe we can negotiate for a better map."

Suddenly, a combot's hull burst. White sparks flashed from it accompanied by a loud bang.

At my order, the others gave me a scan of the shot.

A three-inch deep gouge dug through the hull at the point of impact.

I ordered the combots to fly between us and the direction of the shot.

One more of them took a hit for us.

"What are you waiting for?" Kira asked.

At that moment, I noticed the door before us had opened again. One more combot died before I gave the order to flee.

We formed a queue. Our bubble-car entered the hole first while the other robots followed in a beeline.

We dashed into more formless mist.

"I'll tell you where to go!" Kira said.

This task demanded my entire focus. Despite this, I couldn't help but wonder about the attack.

I neither heard gunshot noises nor the characteristic thunderclap of a coilgun. It must have been a laser. A laser made of light outside the invisible spectrum, so that we couldn't tell the marksman's location.

"Left!" Kira yelled.

I steered to the left, only saved by my seatbelt from colliding with the screen.

Seatbelts save lives, kids.

I got sidetracked. Still, invisible lasers were scary enough to demand my focus.

"Stop!" Kira said.

I pulled an emergency brake, ordering the bubble to drive with its tracks sideways.

It nonetheless took seconds to stop.

"There's a dead-end before us," Kira said. "I thought there'd be a door!"

She was right about this station being unpredictable.

Another combot blew up.

"It's Layla, isn't it?" I said. "Maybe a mech of hers."

I ordered the combots to shoot, but they had no target to detect. Another laser hit and one more of them went down. Three left.

"Should I get out?" Kira asked. "Maybe I have a chance."

A door opened.

"No need!"

The bubble took off again. I had no pedal to stomp into the ground, so all I did was scream "GO" inside my head as fast as I could. Even so, the acceleration felt meager compared to the Dragonfly during combat situations.

From behind, a green beam punched against our hull's outside. Kira closed it with her hand.

"Don't look at me!" Kira said. "Focus!"

I ignored the mist that streamed in our bubble and focused on the one before me.

"Left!" Kira yelled.

I wheeled to the left prematurely. I'd have almost hit a wall's corner and stopped us in our tracks. Only the AIs' self-correction prevented disaster.

"Are you sure you know where you're leading me?" I asked

"Nothing is sure... Stop!"

Another full brake. Prepared as we were, it wasn't as shocking as during the first time.

"That wall just came out of nowhere!" Kira said.

Something crashed behind us. Another wall materialized into being. Given how only two combots surrounded me, this new wall likely caught the third one and destroyed it.

The new wall disappeared and an enormous hole opened in the wall to our right side.

"Inside, quick!" Kira said.

"What's in there?"

"No idea! Go before it closes."

I drove through the hole. Kira had good foresight, as the hole closed moments after our two combots passed.

After another wall appeared behind us, I slowed down.

"I think we're safe here," I said. "With how chaotic everything is, there's no way Layla's drone could have followed us until here."

"You think!"

"Yeah, I think. Where else should we drive? Don't know about you, but I don't want to drive head-first into a freshly materialized wall."

"Yeah, let's just stand still and wait until one squishes us!"

I ordered the bubble-car to move. "Fine, I'll drive slowly then. Enough time to stop if a wall appears before us."

How did this happen? Utility fog? Walls getting moved out of other walls?

Why did it happen now? Were we approaching something important? The garden of the monster maybe?

A hole appeared in the ground. I dashed towards it.

"Woah, what's going on?" Kira asked.

We fell into another corridor. It was barely ten feet tall, yet the fall in high-gravity wasn't kind to my bones.

"Can you heal me with your free hand?" I asked.

She grabbed mine. "Sure, if you tell me why you suddenly got so excited."

In the new corridor, I watched out for another hole and drove through it.

We landed.

"I think we're getting somewhere important, that's why the landscape suddenly changed," I said. "If it's important, it's likely further down below, near the ring's center."

"Didn't we start near the center?"

"I'm talking about the center of the ring, not of the station. The center of the ring is the hardest to reach from the outside. That's where I'd hide if I wanted to hide."

We plunged through hole after hole.

Eventually, we got into a smooth corridor without any walls, doors, or hatches forming.

"A dead-end!" I said.

Even with enhancements, Kira's arm surely hurt from always keeping that hole closed. Had the hull not been damaged already, I'd have punched it. We had gone down in vain. How should we ever go back to Crick now?

"Crick," I muttered. "That's it."

Crick was our only hope. They had given me a long-range telepathy device and I forgot to use it.

I ignored everything around me. The leaking gas, the hostile architecture, Kira, I blocked all thoughts of it.

"Captain?" I transmitted. "Captain, can you perceive me? Can you tell where my message is coming from?"

My mindwaves vanished in the aether. I didn't have any means of checking if they were strong enough. All I could do was hope and wait that Crick answered, no matter how long it took them.

Suddenly, I got my location in Euphrat beamed into my mind. I was still near the station's inner entrance, near where we docked. However, we had already completed a third or a fourth of our journey to the ring's interior.

"Thanks for the answer, Captain! When we try outdoors, can you please tell me if we're getting closer to the ring's interior?"

I got no loud "Yes" from Crick. Just muffled radio waves, scattered by the distance and partially absorbed by the walls.

Enough for me.

"What are you thinking of?" Kira asked.

"I was talking to the Captain."

"Do you know the way now?"

"Not really. We're going to do trial and error and our Captain will tell us if we're coming closer."

Kira sighed.

"I understand that this is frustrating-"

"Stop talking," she said. "Drive. Just, drive. The sooner, the better."

I wasn't feeling creative. I used my remaining two combots to scan the surrounding area and took the first door that opened. The reasoning behind it was that, if the doors were fresh, they'd stay open long enough for me to return in case they turned out to be dead-ends.

Every time I entered a door, I messaged Crick. I worried that might annoy them. Luckily, they showed no sign of anger.

Eventually, we got into the flow. It took us seconds to communicate back and forth and each trial-and-error got completed in a minute or less.

Suddenly, we had no doors to the left and right anymore. Only a hatch that let us fall below.

And then, we had one more.

And one more.

It became rinse and repeat. Wait for the door to open, fall into a green room and wait for the next door to open.

"Is this where your Captain wanted us to go?" Kira asked.

"I have no idea."

The next hatch opened and, to my surprise, no green room waited for us. Instead, we got an invisible ceiling to fall onto.

The air below lacked the oversaturation of green phytoplankton characteristic for Euphrat. Instead, it showed the colorless hue known from Earth's, Shadowmoon's, or Eden's atmospheres.

Despite the dim light, it meant I finally got an idea of the room's architecture. They were just like how Kira described Starsnatcher's interior and how I remembered the Firefly. Red-and-bronze walls curved smoothly below the ceiling, interrupted by occasional rugose ridges.

The ceiling we stood on dissolved  like quicksand. Even when most of the bubble had passed, the closing ceiling still clutched onto its upper section. Like that, the atmospheres didn't mix.

When we fell, we merely fell five feet or so, despite the room being much taller.

"Put your helmet on," Kira said. "I'm sick of this hole."

"Sure."

At first, I thought I had lost it, but my helmet was right beside my seat. I put it on.

Kira let go of the hull. The bubble's air leaked outside as if we were a popped balloon.

From where we had landed, only one path revealed itself to us: The corridor right before our noses.

Meat-red, round, poorly-lit and long, it reminded me of the dark maw of a humongous serpent.

"Go," I ordered the car and the combots.

I was ready for anything. Layla, the monster, the kidnapped alien, perhaps even Ay himself.

With the lack of ceiling lamps, only our flashlights guided us. Skeletal trees and monstrous fungi lurked in the shadows of our field of vision. They leaned over, striking to attack us. Luckily, our combots detected them in time and shot.

You needed more than predatory plants to kill us.

"Kira-"

"Shut up and focus!"

"I just wanted to ask, what do you think waits for us at the end of the tunnel?"

She thought for a while. "Either a trap or an important room."

To be honest, walking into a trap felt less dangerous than the alternatives.

"Let's assume Mustafa Ay waits for us," I said. "Do you think we could beat him?"

"Not sure. He wasn't aggressive, but he had this aura I described. This aura that made me afraid of him. He knows everything about us and we nothing of him. It's almost like we're only alive because he wants us to."

"What an excellent way to describe me, Kira," said a deep, resonant voice.

I glanced around, trying to locate its source. No-one was there. It was as if it came from the walls, mechanically amplified.

How did he hear us from such a distance?

Kira looked forward, her eyes widened as if she had just seen a corpse. She recognized the voice's source well before I did.

The bubble-car moved forward and our lights shone over a spacious, dome-shaped room. Inside it stood four figures, three human and one alien - a Primogenitor, likely the one they captured.

One of the three figures was Layla. Next to her stood a blonde woman in green armor.

In their midst, I saw him.

He was just like how Kira described with his blue suit covered in heaven motifs and his piercing brown eyes. His neatly trimmed beard and gelled hair gave him a gentlemanly demeanor, further enhanced by his white longcoat.

When Ay looked at us, he only smiled.