The restraints released hissing away small wisps, and Ashe pulled her wrists free before the compartments had fully opened. Two marshals entered the room soon afterwards and remained near the door, prompting her to follow them toward the corridor.
"Well," Ashe said, pushing the chair back and standing. "It's wonderful to see you both again."
But neither of them responded, they just focused on their duty at hand which seemed to be that of escorting her somewhere.
The corridors they moved through were long and swallowed by weak, failing lighting. Even so, she paid attention as best she could, reading the layout through the turns they took and the sounds things around her made. Eventually the gloomy metal walls gave way to a new set of rooms with windows running along one side. She slowed instinctively to register the difference.
Beyond the glass, the rooms were filled with numerous species of plants. They were cultivated. Arranged in rows along long surfaces, suspended in containers of different sizes, or climbing panels that had been built specifically to support them. The contrast with everything else in that place was so abrupt that for a moment Ashe simply stood and looked.
One of the people moving between the rows looked up through the glass. He was wearing a mask that covered the lower half of his face. He looked at her directly, without any form of surprise, as if seeing them pass through there was no surprise at all. She held his gaze for a moment before one of the marshals placed a hand briefly at her shoulder, urging her to keep moving.
She moved on, but the image of that place stayed with her.
The large room they eventually brought her to was located at the end of a corridor ahead. The marshals stopped at the threshold until one of them made a brief gesture indicating she should continue inside. As she did, she heard them withdraw behind her without a word.
The space here was vast and circular. At its center stood a round table embedded with controls she couldn't classify based on any experience she had, which was little anyway. Above it, suspended in the air, a sphere rotated slowly. It was large, perhaps twice her height in diameter, and it displayed what could only be a planet. Land and water formations moved across its surface in specific distributions which she had no memory of. She felt a cold sense of loneliness as the thought of it slowly creeped into her mind. And yet, she pushed through it, focusing on the sphere as a source of information she could use. She noticed there were green areas marked on a separate layer of the projection. They were small but pulsating slightly which made them stand out from the other layers underneath.
As her mind kept trying to make sense of it, she soon realized she was not alone in that room at all. At the far end, somewhere beyond the spherical projection, she noticed two points of red light fixed on her, watching her every move.
She looked at them for a moment, then walked toward them, more curious than afraid. Up close, the automaton was larger than she remembered when she first saw it beside Moira in the street. It stood perfectly still, except his eyes which were tracking her as she slowly moved around it.
"Am I here to meet you?" she asked, and immediately recognized how that sounded. She didn't take it back though, this world was strange enough anyway.
The automaton didn't respond, instead it continued watching her with that same steady attention.
"He doesn't talk much."
Moira's voice came from somewhere behind her, strong and perfectly balanced as she remembered it. Ashe turned toward her. She had changed from what she had been wearing in the street earlier that day. The pale coat was now gone. What she wore now was simpler, more comfortable, and bearing none of the formality of before. Yet, it suited her better, Ashe thought. Her blonde braid rested over one shoulder as she moved toward the table at the center of the room.
"His name is Cral," Moira added to her earlier remark.
Ashe turned toward the automaton again. "Is it..." she began, and then found that the word she was reaching for didn't arrive as easily as she expected it to.
"Alive?" Moira completed the question. She had reached the table and stood at its edge, looking across the sphere at Ashe with a gentle expression. "I like to think so. But as loyal as he is, he is that cryptic as well."
"So you don't know."
"There is a great deal we don't know about this world." Moira drew one of the chairs from the table and sat, settling into it with ease. She then looked at Ashe directly. "For example. How it is possible for you to be alive with eighty four percent of your organism corrupted."
"I don't..." she began.
"Careful," Moira said. "You want to be very honest in what you say next."
Ashe held her gaze across the slowly rotating sphere.
"I don't know," she said, with the same certainty she would have used to say anything else that was simply true. "And I'm not gonna take the blame for your own ignorance on the topic. I woke up in a pod in a facility I'd never seen before with no memory of anything that came before it." She glanced at Cral, then back at Moira. "And I don't care how many of those you have serving you. That doesn't change what I know, which is nothing."
Something moved in Moira's expression, something Ashe couldn't pinpoint yet.
"Alright," she said. She reached toward the table's surface and moved her hand across some of the controls. "My men found two harmonic seeds in your possession."
"They're not stolen, if that's where this is going."
"I didn't say they were." Moira looked at her with patience. "I want you to tell me about them."
"I found them. There was a cluster of them near the outer wall back at the facility where I emerged."
Moira was quiet for a moment. "You found them," she repeated.
She looked at her for another moment, then reached across the table's surface again. The sphere above them started to change. The green areas she had noticed earlier were now rendered with considerably more clarity, pulled forward in the display so that their distribution across the globe was clear.
"These are areas where we have confirmed the presence of HSM in one form or another. This is where harmonic seeds would be if one were to… find them." Moira explained. "It's everything we have been able to map across a significant period of time".
She let Ashe look at it for a moment, then moved her hand across the controls again. A second layer appeared over the first. It colored instantly in black, the same black she had seen in the holographic rendering of her own body during the assessment. It settled across the sphere's surface in concentrations that were unmistakably connected to the green areas beneath.
Ashe looked at the sphere and immediately understood.
"These are drift signatures," Moira confirmed. "Every significant source of HSM in the world we have been able to identify is surrounded by drift activity to such a degree that makes approach extremely difficult and retrieval close to impossible without significant loss."
She looked at Ashe again across the display, and this time her voice was colder.
"Which is why I am going to ask you again. How were you able to find and retrieve those harmonic seeds on your own?"