[b][u]Omonoi, Generator District Tha-1[/u][/b]

"Now, careful with the lever there. Like on a murena hunt. Try to push it, lightly, very. Only try."

A low, smooth whirring, like that of an escalator band.

"It can go down. Do I push more?"

"Push, slowly. Like you're trying, to halfway. How far is halfway?"

"Twenty centimetres, maybe. A bit less."

"Push it to twenty. Steadily."

The whirring again. This time it lasted longer, with some brief interruptions, until it was cut off by a loud, metallic click. There was a thudding sound, as though something heavy had fallen on a soft surface not far away, then all was quiet again.

"Did anything happen?"

"It sounds like we have access. You can come up."

A bright-blue, shapeless limb slid over the edge of the well and clung to it with its rows of suckers. Its tip flattened itself against the metallic floor and pulled; several more tentacles emerged from under the rim and followed suit, until a wobbly, almost gelatinous sphere rose up behind them - a sphere with round yellow eyes protruding from its sides. E-33-B almost flowed over the corner for the last bit of the way, before slumping to the ground and blossoming into relieved rusty brown stains over its body. Its partner, F-FB-35, was already standing upright in the form most Blurs took when on dry, even soil: four of its lower tentacles, extended at right angles from each other around the beak, were broadened and twisted into thick, sturdy legs resting on semi-circular footpads. Two thinner limbs sprouted from just below its right eye, waving and intertwining idly as they held a scorcher rifle. The local maintenance automata were usually innocuous, but it was always better to be safe than sorry. One never knew when a security drone might appear after the accident at the control central last week.

Or, even worse, an emergency response unit. At least that should now have been taken care of.

Signing for E-33-B to follow, the larger Blur slithered back down the corridor they had come from, around the bend and into the small hallway beyond. Its limbs did not seem to rise from the ground as it moved, but undulated in short waves, pushing themselves forward with a strength impressive for such small motions. It was not very comfortable, truth be told - had F-FB-35 been in a position to choose, it would have used much longer and ampler waves - but it was the quietest and least abrupt way of going about places with such smooth floors, and being quiet was preferable when venturing into the further districts of the massive toroidal habitat. Everything here had been designed with comfort in mind, but this comfort was clearly intended for beings very different from those that made up the Concord. There was little water, and in fact none of the control panels, access terminals or even flow switches were submerged, the air ventilation blew in unpleasant drafts from the most unlikely of angles, and grids emitting wafts of warm, dry air were in every place where one's leg or tentacle could become stuck in them, something Scalders found particularly annoying.

But the worst were the security checks. Whoever had built this place had valued its inhabitants' safety, or else had taken some obscure instinctive phobia to an extreme: almost every major passage, be it between districts, from a conveyor hub to a forum, into a medical bay or even a holo-recreation center, was fitted with more or less obvious scanners; this was doubly true for maintenance facilities. These devices were programmed to monitor the passing of visitors, raising an alarm when unauthorised intruders tried to slip past them. Unfortunately, anyone the Concord could send here apparently looked like a sort of figure the sensors had been installed to deter. Some of the more daring and flexible Blurs had attempted to find out, by trial and error, what shapes would not trigger a reaction, but all they had succeeded at was putting the habitat custodians into a heightened danger regime. A joke popular among the reclamation crews had it that the people who built Omonoi must have had had non-Euclidean bodies, and sometimes F-FB-35, who had seen E-33-B try all sorts of contortionisms to get past a detector safely, came close to seriously believing it.

However, the mechanism they had now finally managed to dislodge seemed to be working, and the electronic eye that had previously blocked the pair's access to the chambers beyond the hall was now covered by an old hazard protective sheen. Why someone would have cared so much about a simple detector as to install a failsafe so elaborate was beyond them, but, as long as they could make it work, they weren't going to twist their heads about it. What they might still find in the maintenance vaults was more than enough of a worrying matter.

F-FB-35 was the first to slip through the doorway, holding the scorcher at the ready. There had already been at least three cases of malfunctioning alarms going off quietly, leading to unsuspecting reclaimers stumbling into squads of the heavy arachnoid drones. There was no sign of the mechanical sentries here, but for at least ten more minutes they could not be fully sure they were safe. It briefly sprouted a small arm from near its rear eye to gesture for E-33-B to follow, but the smaller Blur was already there, having slid next to it by flattening itself against the doorframe. It wouldn't have helped if the sensor was still active, but many of those who had experimented with disguising their form to the machines had been left with quirks like this for their troubles. This wasn't even the worst of it: F-FB-35 had heard of much more extravagant acrobatics among its colleagues.

The maintenance chambers were vast, quiet and mostly empty. The walls were lined with screens, displays and occasional projector, and the bulky steel boxes of assorted machinery stood along them here and there, silent but still blinking with red and yellow lights. There was no waste or debris cluttering the floor, no disjoined cables hanging loosely from the ceiling, no condensed brine dripping over the monitors on the walls. Everything was so clean and pristine that, had it been not for the dry air and the alien shapes of the equipment around them, they could have believed they were back home on Twenty Eight. The differences from the semi-submerged habitat's own generator centers, however small, were everywhere to remind them this place was much more dangerous than anything in the depths of their more organic environment; and still, everything was familiar and calm enough they were at a bit of a loss for what to do while they slithered through the many almost identical vaults of the district.

So, of course, they turned to the small talk of the day.

"C8-FF3 and the others kept insisting that we are doing it wrong, yesterday." E-33-B signed on its right flank, spinning ochre spirals into pulsing faded green fractal shapes. "This is not the segment's main generator control hub, they say. We can't redirect the main current flow to the docking bays from here."

"And you?" asked F-FB-35.

"I pointed them through the blueprints again. They were still sceptical. Said the loose conduits near Tha-1-34 show there's a whole secondary circuit layer down there. They're probably not wrong."

"But that doesn't mean this won't work." F-FB-35 seemed to already know where its partner was headed for.

"Right. Secondary circuits can't just divert power like that. And there aren't any other facilities around 34 that we know of."

"We still don't know nearly enough about this place."

"No. But that's not our fault."

For a moment, both reverted to a neutral dark blue. Then F-FB-35 signed again.

"There are voices spreading. I don't know if you've heard. It's the Domain."

"What about the Domain?"

"Some say we're doing all this for nothing. That, when we're finished with Omonoi, the Domain will just come in and take it. It's no secret we couldn't stop them if they wanted to."

"That's Drifter talk, isn't it?" E-33-B's reply began tinted with surprise, then quickly shifted to disbelief. "It doesn't make sense. Omonoi would be much better suited for the Domain's people as it is now. If they had wanted to, they would already have been here before us."

"Whoever is saying these things knows this." Now F-FB-35's own colours were doubtful, but not as much as those of its companion. "But that is their point. They say the Domain will annex the place with everyone who is inside. Expand their base, so they say."

"Nonsense. They are too civilised to do something like this."

"They did it on Lurs, though."

"Lurs wasn't a sovereign territory."

"Technically, neither are we. Nothing in the system is nowadays, you know this."

"Omonoi isn't anything like Lurs. We are no danger to the Domain, like those Splinters. Besides, if they occupy us for no reason, everyone in the inner system will know they are a danger. They wouldn't risk it even if they wanted to."

"I don't agree with them any more than you do. But Drifters will be Drifters."

E-33-B was about to sign a joke about the inhabitants of Iural, but F-FB-35 gestured at a doorway in the wall to their right side, and the Blurs swerved together, diving into the passage. Beyond was a small room like many others in the habitat, crammed with machinery if compared to the expansive halls they had come from, but still offering a surprising amount of space to turn about in. Experienced reclaimers could not be mistaken here: this was Tha-1 distribution manual control station. No wonder it should be so small - everything here was automated, and this place had likely been used in special cases no more than once every few decades. But it was just what the Blurs needed.

As E-33-B set to work with what should have been the central panel and F-FB-35 remained watching by the door, there was no more time for idle talk. Handling devices meant for limbs utterly unlike theirs was hard enough as it was, without the added threat of drone patrols happening by at the worst of times. But, as both of the Blurs believed, it would all be worth it in the end. Some switches flicked here, and the main docking bays could be repurposed for the distribution of water, enough for everyone and everything. Then Omonoi would flourish.