Sun Stealer seizes control of the six cache-weapons and fires them at Cerberus against Volyova’s commands. The weapons strike the planet’s artificial surface, cracking the crust and exposing the machinery beneath. After depleting munitions, the weapons drift into useless orbits. Sylveste, returning from escorting the injured Sajaki to the medical bay, finds the attack has occurred without Volyova’s authorization. Volyova explains Sun Stealer must have reached beyond the gunnery into the ship’s communications. Though she has failed to stop the weapons, she admits to herself a fatalistic curiosity about what will happen next and a satisfaction in finally being able to fire her weapons.

Volyova and Khouri watch the bridgehead approach Cerberus. Cerberus launches defensive countermeasures: Blisters erupt from the crust releasing swarms of small projectiles. The bridgehead’s rim armaments destroy most of them and the tip punctures through the crust, anchoring itself into the planet. Volyova declares the bridgehead successfully embedded.

Khouri and Volyova discuss the ongoing molecular battle between the bridgehead’s defenses and Cerberus’s automated systems. Volyova deliberately deployed outdated countermeasures first, withholding advanced ones. She estimates Cerberus will surpass her current defenses within a week, at which point she may stop sending the encrypted transmissions of weapons schematics. Khouri proposes letting the bridgehead fail, starving it of upgrade transmissions, as the only means to stop Sylveste.

Volyova sends fist-sized camera drones into the sub-crustal chamber. Sylveste, Pascale, Khouri, and Volyova review footage of enormous, damaged, snake-like tubular machines that glow with silvery phosphorescence, supported by trunk-like structures whose roots form a graphite-colored floor. Sylveste speculates that additional layers exist below.

Volyova covertly withholds the scheduled transmissions to the bridgehead, slowly starving it. Before Cerberus can overcome the defenses, the transmissions resume without her authorization. Sun Stealer has reinstated them.

Volyova accuses Hegazi of helping Sun Stealer breach communications. He denies expertise. Khouri reasons Hegazi could not have arranged it. Volyova nonetheless orders Khouri to lock Hegazi in an airlock. Khouri escorts him there, privately disbelieving his responsibility but acting anyway because, as she explains to Hegazi, she does not like him.

Pascale urges Sylveste to abandon the plan. He refuses. She warns that the same curiosity may have caused the Amarantin’s extinction. He reflects on what he experienced near Lascaille’s Shroud, but the recollection slips away. He promises to discuss it in the morning.

While Pascale sleeps, Sajaki contacts Sylveste via holo screen. His medichines have partly healed his wrist. He proposes the two travel to Cerberus alone in suits, leaving immediately, without informing Volyova or Pascale. He assures Sylveste the suit will navigate and they have a five-day window to explore inside the alien machine. Sylveste agrees and leaves, leaving a recorded message for Pascale.

Pascale wakes, finds Sylveste gone, and brings the message to Khouri. In the message, Sylveste apologizes. He explains that he must enter Cerberus and reveals he has taken Calvin with him. Volyova and Khouri confirm Sajaki’s signal still appears to originate from the clinic. They check, discovering the airlock where Hegazi was held has been filled with pressurized ship-slime. When they breach the door, Hegazi’s remains flow out, his metal and flesh components catastrophically separated.

Volyova concludes Sun Stealer killed Hegazi to eliminate any unpredictable human variable. She reasons Sun Stealer cannot easily depressurize the whole ship due to safety precautions, but warns that he will find other means. A tracked servitor appears, scans them, and retreats. Khouri destroys it. Volyova is more disturbed by the sight of a janitor-rat that dives back into the slime, indicating Sun Stealer now controls those creatures.

Volyova climbs to the bridge alone, encountering holographic projections of long-dead crew members who berate her until she shouts them away. Sun Stealer then appears on the damaged display as a skeletal winged Amarantin. Sun Stealer was, she now knows, one of the Banished Ones. He tells Volyova the Shrouds were not alien technology repositories, as Lascaille was told, but sanctuaries built by the Banished Ones to hide from the Inhibitors at the end of the Dawn War. Lascaille was shown a deliberate fiction, as was Sylveste, which made them easy to manipulate. After receiving important information, Volyova shoots the display.

Meanwhile, Khouri and Pascale reach the clinic and find Sajaki dead, eviscerated by the surgical machinery, with rats emerging from his body. The surgical arm seizes Khouri’s plasma rifle. Pascale destroys the arm. Thousands of rats surge toward them from the corridor. Volyova arrives and clears them with the slug-gun. As the three run, an explosion sends Khouri airborne.

Sylveste regains consciousness in his suit descending toward the bridgehead. The suit informs him they departed the ship 74 minutes ago at 10g acceleration; Sylveste has been unconscious throughout. Approaching the bridgehead’s collision site, he spots a second suit.

Aboard the damaged ship, Volyova tells Khouri and Pascale that Sun Stealer is experimenting with the drive to replicate the high-acceleration maneuver that killed Nagorny. They resolve to leave by shuttle—since it is slower but less likely to be infiltrated—to pursue Sylveste. Khouri and Pascale enter the spider-room and attempt to pilot it, while Volyova prepares to meet them outside the hull.

Volyova descends to Captain Brannigan’s level and warms his frozen brain. She tells him that the ship has been taken over by an alien entity, Sajaki and Hegazi are dead, and the surviving crew are abandoning ship. She fires the needler into his reefersleep unit, destroying its cooling and allowing his body temperature to rise. Before leaving, she accuses the captain directly of having used the Pattern Jugglers to transfer his own neural patterns into Sajaki’s body years earlier, effectively killing the original Sajaki and creating a second version of himself as a backup against possible infections. The captain neither fully denies nor confirms. Volyova departs.

Meanwhile, Sylveste and the suit which Sylveste presumes to contain Sajaki descend through the bridgehead into Cerberus’s interior. They refuel their suits by drawing material from the bridgehead’s walls, then drop through a narrow injection shaft into the vast first interior chamber. Sylveste lands on a fallen crystal slab.