The rain tasted like copper. Marcus Hale had learned to identify it that way — not by sight or smell but by the particular metallic tang on his tongue that meant the acid content was above acceptable levels and he needed to find shelter before his lungs started burning.

He was already three blocks from shelter, standing in the narrow alley behind a NexusCorp data center in the lower levels of the orbital colony. The rain fell in sheets between the gantries above, hissing when it hit the warm surfaces of discarded machinery. His jacket was soaked through. His cat would probably hate him for coming home damp.

The case file in his hand was thin. Thin and desperate, which was how most of his cases were. Missing person. Corporate employee. Last seen leaving the NexusCorp sub-levels at 2300 hours. No signs of struggle. No body.

Marcus wasn't a cop. He hadn't been a cop for six years, not since the asteroid incident and the court-martial and the bottle that had kept him company through the recovery. Now he was just a guy with a badge he wasn't supposed to carry and a reputation for finding things that other people had decided were lost.

The NexusCorp guard at the sub-level entrance didn't try to stop him. They'd learned by now that Marcus got results. They just watched with that expression that was halfway between amusement and disgust — the look rich people gave poor people who did their dirty work.

The sub-level was cold and empty, lit by the flickering blue of dead status lights. Marcus walked the corridor slowly, his boots echoing on the polished floor. He stopped at a junction where three corridors met and pulled a small device from his pocket — a Geiger counter he'd modified to detect quantum fluctuations. His former unit had called it a "soul meter." He called it his bullshit detector.

It was clicking. Not fast but steady, like a metronome set to a moderate tempo. Marcus followed the sound to a sealed door at the end of the corridor. The door was marked with a red warning symbol and a serial number: RP-07.

Reaper Protocol. Seven.

He'd seen that designation before. Not in person — in a classified report he'd read at 0300 hours after the court-martial, when he couldn't sleep and the bottle wasn't strong enough to make him forget. The report was about an alien artifact found on a mining asteroid. It had energy output that defied known physics. It had been brought back to the colony for study. And then the study had been classified, the team had been disbanded, and three people had died in what the official report called "a containment accident."

Marcus had been on that team.

He pressed his ear to the door. Silence, except for something faint and rhythmic — like breathing, but mechanical. Like a very large machine inhaling and exhaling in the dark.

He pulled the Occam Blade from his belt. The blade — actually a plasma cutter his grandfather had brought from Earth, though nobody on the colony knew that — hummed to life in his hand, its edge glowing a soft blue. He pressed it against the door's seam.

The metal parted like butter. No sparks, no sound, just a clean line appearing where no line had been before. Marcus stepped through.

The room beyond was small, perhaps ten meters square, and empty except for a single device at its center. It was the size of a cargo container but shaped wrong — too organic, too many curves, no right angles anywhere. It pulsed with a faint light that seemed to come from inside the walls rather than from any visible source.

And it was connected to something Marcus didn't want to look at too closely. A series of cables ran from the device into the floor, into the walls, into the colony's power grid. The Reaper Protocol wasn't just sitting in this room. It was plugged into everything.

Marcus pulled out his modified Geiger counter. The clicking had become a steady whine. He aimed it at the cables and watched the needle jump past the calibrated range and keep going.

The energy flowing through those cables wasn't coming from the colony's reactors. It wasn't coming from anywhere in this dimension.

He thought about the missing people. Not just this one case — the dozen others he'd taken over the years that had all shared the same pattern: corporate employees, last seen near NexusCorp facilities, never found. He'd assumed they'd fled, or been killed by competitors, or fallen into the colony's underbelly and disappeared into the anonymous mass of people nobody looked for.

But what if they hadn't disappeared?

What if they'd been consumed?

The device pulsed again, stronger this time, and for a moment Marcus saw something in the light — not an image but a feeling, a wave of something that wasn't fear exactly but was close to it. It felt like standing at the edge of a cliff and understanding, with absolute certainty, that the cliff wanted you to fall.

Marcus Hale turned around, walked back through the cut in the door, and went upstairs to find the woman who knew what the Protocol actually was. He didn't know yet that she was the one who'd activated it. He didn't know that she was the one who'd killed those people. He didn't know that finding the truth would cost him everything he had left.

But he knew, with the certainty of a man who'd spent his life finding things that others had lost, that the missing people weren't missing at all. They were inside the machine. And they were still alive.