Free Heirs of Earth by Sean Williams, Shane Dix

tentatively.
    The owner of the voice paused slightly before answering. “Who is this? How did you get in here?”
    She hesitated also, still wary of outside influences. Every instinct told her to flee, to avoid a relapse. But she knew Rob Singh; she and the good-natured pilot had entrained together in the flight simulators back on Earth. She could trust him, she was sure.
    “It’s Lucia.”
    “ Lucia? When did you get back?”
    His question gave her a sense of relief. If he wasn’t aware of her return, then clearly her escape hadn’t been broadcast, which meant she wasn’t being actively pursued by everyone in the engrain camp.
    “Thor found me and brought me here,” she answered. “I was in a bad way. I hid in here because it seemed safe.”
    Rob chuckled lightly. “I guess you could call it safe. The Dark Room is a good place to come if you’re freaking out. Apparently Peter Alander used to sleep in the one on Adrasteia, back when he was unstable. Others have tried, but they say it’s too empty for them. I’m not partial to it, myself.”
    Only a handful of his words registered. “Peter used to come here?”
    “Not to this Dark Room specifically. This is Rasmussen, not Adrasteia. Adrasteia is gone; has been for weeks now. Peter has never used this particular Dark Room. I haven’t actually spoken to him since he came here, but I’m told he’s a lot better now than he was.”
    The pieces were slowly settling into place. “So that’s where I am now? Rasmussen?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Inside—” Her mind grappled with difficulty at the notion. “I’m inside the gifts ?”
    “You didn’t know that?” he asked, surprised. “That’s why I found you. I was having a poke around on behalf of another one of me, one who died when Sothis took the bullet. He’d been finding anomalies in the Library and noting them in his PID. The records survived the attack, shipped out in a hole ship full of solid-state backups. I inherited them, if you like, and figured I’d pick up where he left off—try to see if I could add anything to his findings.” A small silence encapsulated all the grief and weirdness of discussing the legacy of another version of oneself. “I’ve been looking into areas he ignored, hoping to find something new. But the last thing I expected to find was you, Lucia. To be honest, you scared the hell out of me. I thought you might be some kind of Spinner virus, come to eat me!”
    The self-deprecation in his voice was a welcome relief to the strident urgencies of Alander and Hatzis, and for the first time in what felt like eons, she found herself wanting to laugh. She fought back the urge, though, nervous of any sudden, out-of-character impulses.
    “Can I ask a favor of you, Rob?”
    “Of course. Anything.”
    “Would you mind not telling anyone that I’m here right now? Everything has been kind of strange and overwhelming; I’d appreciate a little space.”
    “I understand. We’re all a bit freaked out at the moment.”
    She followed his voice to its source and found a many-limbed droid gripping the edge of a doorway through which bright light streamed. Still seduced by the warm darkness, it took Lucia a moment to realize that this image was real; it wasn’t virtual. It was the world outside the Dark Room in which she’d taken refuge. She was seeing the inside of one of the gifts for the first time.
    “What’s the Dark Room for?” she asked.
    “No one’s managed to work that out yet,” he said. “It’s a mystery. All the other spindles have a clear purpose: the Dry Dock, the Gallery, the Hub, et cetera. But not this one. It has a bunch of corridors and empty chambers, and this one room, full of darkness. Light is sucked into it, and we can’t find the edges. It’s very odd.”
    Lucia agreed. She didn’t know much about the gifts—only the information that Thor had given her access to on the way back from pi-1 Ursa Major—but that was enough to capture the weirdness