“She’s in the bubble,” Valle whispered, gesturing to the sky.
Grid groaned at a dangerous volume, but gestured for Valle to lead the way.
The halls were curiously quiet, even for late night.  Several times they heard voices and flattened against a wall, but the speaker never came into view.
“She’s helping us,” Grid insisted.  She gripped Valle’s hand tightly, unaware that her talons bit into it.  “She sees us and she’s keeping them away.”
Valle didn’t want to encourage her to think that way, but he didn’t have another explanation, not on hand.  He squeezed back, but the look he gave her was grim.
He didn’t try to tell her he saw little chance that she would come back down the umbilical once they entered it.  She knew it.  It was what she had planned for all this time.
“This is Osah,” Grid mused sourly, as they ascended through the infinite void.  “The vengeful god everyone is terrified of is just an office building.”
“He isn’t any of that,” Valle muttered.  “He’s a committee that’s had thousands of members in five hundred years, and there’s nothing vengeful about what He does.  It’s entirely practical.”
Grid studied him, and clicked her beak.
“Everything about it makes it worse.  When did they tell you?  When they first took you?”
“They left us to figure it out.  I thought they were training us to be zealots, for a while.  When I learned about Veritas, that they were the Vampires, I thought that was true.  But they aren’t, either.  Osah doesn’t recruit them for fanaticism, it’s because they’re cruel, and they’ll do what they’re told.”
“But you wouldn’t.”
Valle watched particles drifting by outside, lit by the ring of lights around the elevator’s handlebar.
“I would’ve,” he said.  “It would always have been one of us, it just would’ve been different.”
“I don’t see it.”
Grid readied her springgun when the elevator reached the bubble, but the antechamber the door opened onto was empty.  It was a small, metal room with pipes intruding from outside, frosted white, and the only door opened with a bio scan.  Valle stepped up to it, and it opened.
There was no one who could have infiltrated the complex except for Valle.  What trust the OSA put in Crucis, to keep him under control.
There was no way to know the size of the entire bubble, but the room into which they entered was huge.  A disc maybe two hundred yards across, walkways radiating from the central tower into which the umbilical opened.  There were touchscreens at intervals along the catwalks, but everything else was cooling equipment.  Arrays of enormous fans blew from above and below, while huge pistons worked inbetween the catwalks to keep the coolant flowing.  
Stepping out from the antechamber was only bearable after an hour in the cold umbilical.  The wind flattened fur and feathers against flesh, the metal, a finger’s width deep in some places with accumulated frost, gripped at hands and feet.  Thankfully the inhospitable environment meant that there were no living guards, though maintenance drones patrolled, undisturbed by the wind.
Clutching the railing, they inched out to the  nearest screen.  As soon as Valle came near, it lit up with the orange pumpkin icon.
Of the options it gave him, he didn’t dare adjust the cooling fans, nor would he risk requesting any kind of report.  He searched for a diagram, a list of names, anything.  Lacking those, he pressed maintenance access and vent cores.
The radial walkway led to a ring around the outer wall of the disc, along which a series of hatches opened into the body of the enormous computer itself.  These weren’t automated like the others, but mechanical seals that required all of the intruders’ combined strength in this cold to shift out of the way.  The radial handle threatened to tear the flesh away from Valle’s bare hands, if he gripped it any longer.
Once they were inside, the air was chilled but balmy by comparison.  Enough of a difference that it made Valle’s head ache immediately.  They both huddled, rubbed feeling back into frozen fingers and toes and ears, before looking around.
The corridors within the computer were tight, pressed between mounts of components and instruments of all kinds.  Circuit boards in slots with LED readouts and handles to remove them; nanoprocessors suspended in a frozen gel; storage devices and power conduits.  Ladders led to higher and lower walkways: it seemed the computer encompassed the entire outer seven feet of the sphere.  Cooled on the inside by the internal weather system, and on the outside by the deep sea.
“If anyone catches us,” Valle whispered.  “just start pulling things out.”
But Grid was in no mood for jokes.  Her jaw was set, and her raptor eyes keenly studying their environment.  She shoved Valle aside to reach something she had seen: a hand-stenciled directory of the levels.  It labeled this level as 4: MEMORY.  Bird and bat met each other’s gaze seriously after noting 2: BIOPROCESSING.
One level up by ladder and another by narrow metal stairs, the Bioprocessing unit was more spacious.  It had no direct access to the cooling disc, but tubes of coolant ran over every surface, along with bundles of wires and thick hoses.  The dome-shaped level was divided into segments, low-ceilinged tunnels connecting them around the edges.
The first chamber clockwise from the stairs was lined on the arc of its ceiling with screens showing fragments of images and data streams that Valle couldn’t make any sense of.  They cast a flickering, multicolored light over a stalagmite of machinery in the center, and a hardwired terminal nearer the inside wall.
The block in the center was lined with vents, which were turned out to spray hot air in billowing clouds.  Valle clutched Grid’s hand, before they set to working the lid off.  It lifted with a whine and a gasp, and its top half retracted into the ceiling.
The human inside was young, strapped into a seat, run through with IVs and chemical drips.  A thick cable connected their occipital joint to the head of their mount.
Grid was breathing hard.  She looked to Valle, and began to reach for the human’s wrist straps, but Valle stopped her with a gentle hand on her wrist and a shake of his head.  There was virtually no chance to get Amarna loose; there was none at all to rescue any others.  The bird grudgingly nodded.  They lowered the column back into place, leaving the human to what could be an eternity of imprisonment.
The next core was also human, a ruined body that must have been damaged in an explosion, possibly crushed under debris.  Much of the head was missing, but the breast still rose and fell with the rhythm of a respirator built into the seat.  The exposed brain was encased in a cylinder of fluid, blood vessels and wires running to it from cables run through the crushed head.
A raccoon-model zoan, both arms withered to tumorous bone, much like the muscles Grid had had replaced in hers, tubes running into their abdomen and pulsing with activity.
And.
Amarna revealed herself as soon as Valle and Grid ducked in to her chamber through the low tunnel.  There was very little left of her.
She was a jackal model, Valle thought.  Her skin was furless, she had no ears.  Her mount was a cone of machinery rising from the floor to chest-level on Grid.  What it revealed was little more than a bust, a truncated thorax held in place by machines that must have provided the function of every organ she lacked.
Her brain was also exposed, adrift in a flared cylindrical tank built into her skull.  Only on her it was a stately Egyptian crown.
Grid ran to her, apparently unperturbed by her state.  Maybe none of it was new.
Grid embraced her captive wife, as much as was possible.  They exchanged hushed words, tearful and indistinct.  
“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” Grid said.
“Goddammit, Ingrid.”
Grid backed up.  At arm’s length, muzzle and beak still almost touched.
“We made it this far,” she said.  “I’m getting you out.”
“I love you, Ingrid,” Amarna was exasperated.  “But you shouldn’t have come.  They stripped my bionics for parts.  I’ll die.”
The hawk motioned to Valle to look at the terminal behind the mount, while she shook her head and studied the plinth of wires and machines that joined her wife to the computer.  Valle grit his teeth and acquiesced.
“I’ve got the Fang’s brother with me,” Grid announced.
“I know.  He seems like an alright guy.  I’ve been running interference for him all night.”
“I told you,” Grid stuck her tongue out at Valle.
The computer let Valle in, under Crucis’s name as always.  He sifted through a huge list of options, regarding record keeping, power management, life support.
The last was what Grid wanted him to look at, but Valle’s eyes fell to an item titled Sanctions Committee.  He dragged it out into a separate window.
“I love the brain tank,” Grid said.  “It’s very you.”
“I asked if it came in blue, but they said it wouldn’t match the room.”
“Would’ve been weird with all the gray and red.”
Amarna’s life support was stable.  Not strong; for all the antibiotics the plinth pumped into her, and the hyperefficient fluids replacing her blood, she suffered some of the worst zoan decay Valle had ever heard of.  Her blood vessels themselves, still natural, were degrading and would need to be reinforced or replaced soon.
A flow chart Valle didn’t know how to read suggested vaguely that the computer was making optimal use of her brain tissue, routing signals through it for far more complex operations and at greater speeds than any but the most costly and power-hungry nanochip could attempt.  When Valle selected a category, listed under opaque code names, a list of related operations scrolled by too fast to read.  He could just catch fragments: Face Recog, Voice Print Analyze, Gait Database.  The Temno computer was for surveillance.
“We’ll get you unplugged and I’m going to carry you home in my own two hands.”
“Wait, Ingrid.  I’m seeing something outside...”
Valle drummed his fingers on the keyboard.  The Sanctions Committee directory beckoned him in its separate window.  He opened it, but continued to look for a way to unplug Amarna from the machine.
Grid sprang a panel open on the plinth with her talons and began to sift through the modules inside.
“Ingrid.”
“Shut up, babe.”
“Ingrid, he’s here.”
Here was something: Isolate Subsystems.  Selecting it brought up a list of systems, some of which were definitely related to Amarna’s artificial organs.
Valle glanced at the other window.  The committee directory housed a long list of other directories and files, titled by their dates.  He selected a recent one.
“No - you’re just seeing Valle, he shows up the same!”
The file Valle had opened was a simple record of the minutes from a meeting of the Sanctions Committee.  A banal meeting, wherein a group of corporate elders decided whether to use Osah’s force against a known “antisocial.”
He didn’t notice anything else about the file, after he saw the names involved.
E. C. Walter, former chair and senior committee member.
He tapped on the name, and was shown a picture of a face he knew well.  Eckhart Carol Walter.