So, I've been enjoying writing my little vignettes for the follow-up story to my story of Prawa V. For those following, you already know 329. I hope you enjoy its redicsovery. I do have a weakness for 329. It, ultimately, dies, buying time for Freja. But, in the meantime, I am happy to let it terrorise people! Also, I do know this board censors naughty words, which is cool, but I have written Łaska to be, say....expressive! She's the only character who swears in my stories, but, if she swears, you know something is going on. In this instance, she is not exclaiming about a duck.

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We’d walked deeper than I would have liked. The air had that dry, metallic weight to it. Maintained and monitored. The kind of place that hadn’t been abandoned so much as sealed.

Freja led us through most of it. She didn’t speak much. Eyes fixed forward, dataslate tight in her grip. Łaska kept glancing at her, then back at me. She didn’t like how quiet Freja was. Neither did I.

We reached the vault door. It was bulkhead-class, reinforced, built to outlast a war. The panel still blinked faintly. Standby power. I moved beside her. “This is it?” I asked.

Freja nodded.

Her hand hovered over the control, then pulled back. “Wait,” she said.

“Why?”

She hesitated. “If I’m right… this isn’t just a server room.”

She didn’t explain. She keyed the override anyway.

The door unlocked with a sound like pressure releasing from some cold storage. Metal groaned. Then silence. Inside, the dark was absolute.

I found the manual switch. I hesitated for a moment. The lights snapped on in slow sequence, each one humming into life, pushing the dark back a metre at a time. Then it came into view.

329.

Dead centre. Facing us. No effort to conceal it. The paint had blistered from heat at some point, I could still see the war scars along the front plating. Dust settled over it like ash. The cannons didn’t move. The treads didn’t twitch. It looked like a tombstone with a spine.

Łaska exhaled. “Oh, :cuss:.” She held her breath. Her hand lingered over the trigger of her grenade launcher. 

My eyes tracked the chassis. No heat shimmer. No charge hum.

Then it came A thin red beam touched my chest, high on the sternum, just left of centre. A laser targetter. Perfectly still and locked over my heart. I didn’t move. Neither did it.

“Back out,” I said, my hand gesturing, “Now. Slowly”

Freja looked at me. Then at the beam. She didn’t speak. Just stepped backward, one deliberate pace at a time.

Łaska was already moving. Her hands weren’t on her weapon. She knew better than to appear armed around that thing.

The dot held steady on me until I crossed the threshold. Then it clicked off.

I killed the lights. The dark swallowed it whole again. We didn’t speak until we were two corridors clear. And even then, barely. We three knew what it was.