As they gathered on the bridge, Kyle considered inviting Sari along one last time… but the memory of Yumi held him back. However low the odds were, it was possible she was an Empire plant. Hell, it was possible, albeit highly unlikely, she could even be Yumi herself, uploaded into a new set of implants.

  No… there was only one person outside his old friend group he would be taking along. And she had her own motivations behind this. Granted…. She was insistent on going by ‘Poisseux’ at this point.

  He shook his head, and typed out one last message as he prepared to disconnect.

  ~Sari, this is Kyle. Heading out on our first mission with the newly upgraded ship. Haven’t forgotten about you, might take you along next time, if you’d like. Should be back in a month or two. Have fun!~

  He looked at it for a moment. Pressed send.

  There we go.

  He took a deep breath… and looked around the bridge. Each of the four consoles had been customized; color-coded, decorated; nothing that could hurt someone or go flying in zero-G, but Thor had his chair made up in black and green with a red symbol of Khorne on the back of the chair, while the others were more normal. Mostly.

  He was about ninety percent certain that Thor had slapped magnets of the other five chaos gods on the other consoles, somewhere the users wouldn’t spot them immediately, since he noticed the Dark King symbol on his own.

  It wouldn’t have quite worked, since there were five of them, and six chaos gods; but they had an extra. Poisseaux’s holo emitter. In addition to giving her one of his augment frames so she could walk it around the ship and interact with things if need be… especially the replacement fighter the Empire had paid for… he’d also rigged up an emitter on the bridge she could turn on at any time, positioned like it was just another console.

  And…. yup. Nurgle. Why would a symbol for Nurgle be on a holo-emitter?

  ….It didn’t matter.

  Kyle settled into his chair as the others started coming aboard; and after a moment, the holo-emitter flickered on.

  At first, it showed an image of a silver-haired woman. Then it shifted, and showed a picture of a wrecked starfighter. It cycled through various images until it popped up as a… glowing silver fist dripping with some sort of thick clear fluid.

  He blinked. That…. Was the picture that had been on her old starfighter.

  “...Do you mind if I ask what the whole… image is about?”

  A digitized chuckle. “We’ve shed blood together now, you and I. I’ll tell you when the kids aren’t around.”

  “...Okay then!” He shook his head, as they settled into the consoles, one by one… and he nodded. “Alright, people. I plan on making this trip about two months. If we haven’t found anything in three, we’ll be coming back either way; I loaded over a year’s worth of supplies, but thats an emergency thing, not a plan. If there’s any last-minute things you want, we’ve got a flight window, and places to go. Last chance.”

  They all looked at each other… then at Kyle.

  After a few seconds, Barry spoke up. “All good, Captain Huxley.”

  “Aye Aye, Mastermind!”

  He sighed… and pulled a small lever on the console. The ship shook, and for a few seconds, the artificial gravity fluctuated as they got used to it…. And she started to coast away from the station.

  He didn’t even touch the controls. Poisseux had it in hand. “...Okay then. Set a course for the edge of the system. I’ll go over the whole plan as soon as we’re in the dark…. But we’re heading in the same general direction as last time, Poisseux.”

  The ship seemed to almost wiggle as she moved, the controls being felt out…. And the station… and Ash… steadily shrank on display. The maiden voyage of the Sapper II had begun.

  ***

  As soon as they’d entered Darkspace, and had started following a similar course to last time… Kyle raised a hand. “Full stop. Make a turn towards galactic east, and start accelerating. We’ll work out exact coordinates for our first stop in just a bit.”

  The gravity of the ship, and the acceleration, fought each other briefly, as she twisted, turned…. And started moving once again.

  “There we go. Alright. So. Way back in the day, before the first galactic war, the Empire was lying to everyone about how FTL worked. They arranged it so that the black hole the whole first batch of darkmass came from was inside their chosen territory… and spread further and faster than everyone else.”

  The holo-emitter buzzed. “Tell us something we don’t know.”

  “No. Just explaining my reasons. The Empire was forced to renegotiate territory after it lost the war. But it made sure to keep a corridor that goes not too far from the system me and Poisseux visited before. So. Based on the orientation of where they claimed, and where we found the dragon….”

  He tapped a button. A display popped up in the middle of the bridge. “This star cluster, right here, is mostly inside Empire space. Our lost colony was right on the edge of it, outside. Based on the way the clusters rotate around the galaxy, and the fact that some of the scales I blew off our dragon is millions of years old, it might have been alive when that cluster brushed this other cluster, long long ago. So….”

  He looked around. “These creatures migrate from star to star. Its fully possible this cluster could be the source… or where some of them moved while they were nearby. Either way…. Its worth checking, first, and much less dangerous than the one my mom’s forces are currently getting ready to safeguard… and where the Empire almost killed me.”

  Sherry blinked. “That’s… a whole star cluster. Hundreds of stars. It would take us years to make the most cursory check on our own.”

  “True enough! But. I’ve got a bit of a secret weapon for this… and a bit of help from the Empire.”

  He tapped a button. A display popped up; of a roughly bullet-shaped object, with one flat end and one rounded side.

  “This is a modified comm buoy. I brought thirty-one of them for this trip, and each is equipped with sensors, and I’ve got some foam to spray on them to mimic a meteorite of local composition. So…”

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  He looked around at his friends. “I’m gonna drop one each in twenty-five systems, all set on a course to go through the system over the course of a couple of days. We’re gonna target systems with lots of debris. Big asteroid belts. That sort of nonsense, since the Dragon picked one like that to live. If they don’t find any sign of life? They drop back into darkspace and call for pickup so we can do a good thorough scan. If they do? They stay silent… and we know that system is one we want to check out.”

  Thor looked at the design, then at him. “....So we’ll have to visit every one of these systems to pick one up, even if we don’t find anything.”

  “Actually, no. You see, something crazy happened while I was on the way back from that little trip. The Empire…. Boarded us while we were in darkspace.”

  “...How!?”

  “A tracking device, and really good sensor software and gear. Which… I’ve been able to study, and make my own version of. No guarantee, but I think I can recover those buoys without having to send them back to realspace.”

  Sherry grinned. “....Amazing. Definitely made this thing for surveys. So we spend a day dropping off a whole bunch of comm buoys. They take some time floating through the system. Then a couple days later we pick up the ones that respond… and either send em through more, or check out the ones we didn’t get back. Without ever having to go back to realspace unless there’s something worth looking at.”

  Kyle nodded. “Exactly. In Darkspace, the whole cluster isn’t even a day across. There’s only about seventy systems with tons of debris around them; most of them are binary or trinary systems that keep themselves relatively clean. If there’s nothing worth checking in any of them at all? That’s three cycles of twenty-five stars at a time. And the last one, we have five extras to use on some of the systems with barely any debris, or some of the really weak, dim, stars.”

  They all nodded thoughtfully. The holo-emitter buzzed again. “I’ll set a course for the closest one that looks all dirty, and plan a pattern, least-time of the dirtiest ones.”

  “Thanks, Poisseux. Now, I know I’m the only one who needs to sleep nowadays. But I’d like to set shifts. Both to make sure everyone is familiar with everything, and that we’ve always got someone paying attention. Also, and you might find this fun… I’ve got some nice, kick-ass organic computers that I’m oh-so-slowly growing more of. This ship has as much processing power as an entire server farm back on Ash, and needs it for the sensors we’re talking about. So.”

  Barry and Thor looked at each other, then at Kyle. “We can do a whole combat sim, or village sim, or… even actually load up some saved sim copies of NPCs from the game!”

  Sherry shook her head. “You do that. Me? I’m gonna make my own sim. Always been good at it.”

  Elise leaned forward, rubbing her forehead with her hands. “...And I’m going to actually run and program sims of possible space combat encounters, like a sane person.”

  They all blinked… Thor looked a bit sheepish. “...Yeah, we can do that, too.”

  Kyle nodded. “Perfect. I actually did a bit of that on the last trip, and while we were in Ash. I’ve got some pre-sets, of an Empire Frigate and Destroyer, a few random independent groups, and a Dragon. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for us to try out all of them.”

  He looked around. “Six of us. While things are slow, we’re gonna cycle through five shifts, five hours each. Every day, one of us gets the day off. When it comes time to investigate anything cool we find, we arrange it so all of us come off-shift on entry and then cycle through taking breaks.”

  The group nodded.

  “Alright. I’m up first. We can all relax… its gonna be days before we get to our first target. Lets call it… the Beta cluster. We’ll designate the worlds in the order we visit them. So. We reach Beta-1 in….”

  Poisseux set her emitter buzzing again. “Four and a half days. Its actually not much further than the last place… but this fucker accelerates terribly. Slow as a brick”

  Kyle chuckled. “Is that disapproval?”

  “Not even a little. I compared the specs of this armor with the plasma weapons we encountered, and I give it a better than 90% chance we survive long enough to flee into darkspace even if we get insanely unlucky and an Empire destroyer… or a dragon… is right there when we pop out. In fact, as crazy as it sounds, I think I want to keep my brain in here and just remote control my baby while we’re out.”

  “Not gonna make you take any risks I won’t. Though I will warn you that if we get into some really big areas, like light-minutes, light-hours, either we’ll be abandoning your new fighter or you’ll have to let AI handle things. Feel free to setup your own sim for an apartment, too. Its got the old you programmed in, you can feel like yourself.”

  “Fuck that. I’m gonna make a new me for it.”

  Kyle glanced at Thor. “A pretty popular thing for people after they died the first time.”

  Thor rolled his eyes. “Fuck you, I really meant it. This is just how I was supposed to grow up.”

  ***

  One by one, his friends left him on the bridge; heading to the server room, apparently. As Sherry left, she glanced back at him from the door. “Gonna cook up some fake duck for dinner. You want me to bring it here for you?”

  Kyle nodded. “Sure, thanks. I don’t think I’ve had duck, fake or otherwise, in years”

  And then….. He was alone on the bridge.

  It was bigger than the old one. And while he was alone…. It had the numerous little touches that he hadn’t made, hints that this was a place for people, not just one person. It was… strange. And yet, comforting. Lived-in.

  Well. Not quite alone. He glanced at the extra holo-emitter. “So. Poisseux? Mind explaining?”

  A soft buzz. “I used to pull pranks on people, fairly often. Ranging from little ones… like fixing someone’s door so it wouldn’t quite close, and everyone could hear what they were doing… to this one time I added a bit of hair removal gel to Zeke’s shampoo. You would not believe what he looks like without all the fur.”

  Kyle blinked. “....Good god that must’ve been nasty to clean up. Did it hurt him?”

  “Oh, no. Tons of people with his aug do it to try it out before getting a permanent solution done. Most of his heat and fire resistance is in the fur, and without it he’s almost just a regular, but hairless, guy. The hilarious bit was mostly that it showed us what parts he didn’t wash in the shower.”

  “...Okay. So how does that go with Poisseux?”

  “Well. We used to have this french-speaking dub marine who worked with us. And after I got him a few times, he got me back…. By mixing my soap with a binary adhesive. He put one half in my soap, and the other on my flight controls, in my skinsuit, on my locker….”

  “...Isn’t that stuff damn near impossible to remove without dissolving bunches of skin?”

  “Yup. So…. he had terrible timing. We had a combat op that day. And I was stuck with one hand on my controls, unable to move them, and the other in my skinsuit… adjusting myself. There was this pirate frigate that I couldn’t reach the damn button to shoot…. But I could still fly. So I stuck to his ass, less than ten meters away, so close none of his guns could reach me.”

  Kyle thought for a moment. “...How the fuck did you do that?” It sounded impossible. The slightest move should dislodge you, and a strong engine burst kill you. This had to be at incredibly low speeds, or even in an atmosphere.

  “I am, in fact, a damn good pilot. Even better now that I’m digitized. Anyway. They shot the pirate, I got in, incredibly pissed, the frenchie made a comment about how well I stuck to that pirate, and there were a few terrible jokes as I had just dissolved the binding to the flight controls, I was mad as all hell, slammed my locker shut, and then I got stuck to the handle of my locker with one hand and my skinsuit's ass with the other. For the rest of the week, tiny bits of that binary glue would trigger and I’d find myself stuck to just whatever at random.”

  “....It almost got you killed, but he kept doing it?”

  “There’s the thing. He stopped. In fact, the prank wars stopped entirely after that, since a couple incidents almost got other people killed, too. But he’d used a bunch of it, and I didn’t get rid of it until I replaced all my stuff. Soaps, skinsuit, the whole nine yards. Anyways, they gave me a new callsign. Sticky. Only it was that french fucker who gave it to me, so it was Poisseux. I like to pretend it was for how good I stuck to that damn pirate, and it kinda was, but its only part of the story.”

  Kyle chuckled. “Nice. And what would you give me? My friends started calling me Mastermind when I was like… twelve.”

  “Ehh. We’ll know it when it happens. If I had to pick one now, It’d have to be Crab.”

  “...What?”

  “You stabbed a fucker to death and it crippled you. Stab, Cripple. Crab.”

  “...Maybe hold off on that one for now.”