Dragon

In quiet horror, I watched meters flip over into the red, gauges hitting maximum capacity, bars filling, characters on screens going nutso until they were all the same digit, repeated ad infinitum.

One by one, monitors went blank.  Server banks I hadn’t even touched began to spin down, fans stopping, lights fading.  Whole grids of blinking green lights winked out, some in order, others at random.

> >

The last of Dragon’s lights went out.

I stood in a daze as the various machines went still, surprisingly hot as the fans stopped spinning.  All of the server rooms and data banks were utterly dark and quiet.

Drones that hadn’t been close enough to the surface to land dropped out of the air.  They hit the ground, along with one or two members of my swarm, and I flinched with the crashing, as if they were striking me.

> >

The portals were open and I couldn’t close them.  But the lights on the drones were off.  No lenses glowed, the antigrav panels were the only thing that indicated any power at all.  Remote control of some sort?

> >

Fucking Dragon.

Fucking with my head.  Giving me a reality check.  Trying to catch me off guard.  She’d figured out that I had the ability to see her systems, she’d switched off the lights on the panels, put every system into hibernation, stopped the fans, and cut everything down to a bare minimum while the fans had stopped, so they didn’t overheat too quickly.