“We should never have let her near that thing.” If Gaz stood as she spoke, it would give the wrong impression. “Next time it will be me.”

  “Next time? Why would we touch it again?” He clasped his hands and said, “I’m just glad she’s fine.”

  “You said she had someone else’s memories in her storage.”

  “And now I wish I hadn’t said that because you are acting very irrationally.” This time Evan wrinkled his nose at her and leaned in. “You’re acting strange in general.”

  There in the mess, Gaz stilled herself and knew at once Evan had seen it. A plain white table creaked under the weight of her elbows, the edge of the soup at the bottom of her bowl shifted in the direction of Gaz’s seat.

  Why didn’t he just read what he wanted from her? Why not just ask him to examine you? The problem itself shouldn’t have existed in the first place. Her systems were beyond state of the art. Adaptive systems like her should have the general capability of overcoming any fault or external attack, given time. But this…

  He waited for her answer less than a second before he returned to the subject of Alaya. “I think her condition is stable and I do not believe there are any long term negative consequences for her.” The way he said it: flat gaze and deliberate pauses between his words… he was warning Gaz that Evan intended to protect Alaya. Whatever concern he felt for Gaz’s safety strictly related to that mission.

  Or am I misinterpreting what he’s saying? “Right. So she’ll be fine. How long before we reach the Root?” Gaz had three different systems capable of telling her how long before she arrived at the Root, not including the timers she’d set herself.

  “Another three days. Our course looks clear. That’s good news.”

  Routes between areas in the cluster changed by the minute. The one they’d plotted took a little longer to return to their origin, but it skirted the new station they’d destroyed on this mission. The rogue outpost exploded less than an hour after Alaya woke up. And of course there was the PDP station, which while not precisely exploded, had experienced some severe issues related to Alaya and Gaz’s time there.

  And then there were the other oddities.

  “Thank you, Evan.” She bowed curtly to him and left. He didn’t call out to her or try to question her further. Gaz had dispensed with the need to examine the maps of the ship before the refurbishments had finished. She headed directly for Kirk, where she knew she could examine the information she wanted without filters and get his opinion on her impressions of the battle.

  Billions of sensors and data analysis suites in her body and Gaz could not say precisely how she knew there was a second person in the hangar when she stepped in. Instinct told her it was Vora, or rather Kirk-Vora, but instead she discovered Isham sitting next to Kirk’s sarcophagus, facing the room.

  “Hello Gaz. I wonder if you are here for the same reason I am?” He didn’t blink as he looked at her. She suspected he was sim-diving at the same time.

  “I am reviewing the mission recordings.” He raised his hands up as if apologizing. “Our leader is injured and recovering.”

  Implying this would be her job otherwise. And he’s right. Gaz made a mental note to bring this up to Alaya later. “Mind if I join you?”

  “It’s me you should be asking, you know?” Kirk’s image appeared on his retro scene.

  “Should I now?” Alaya had brought him on, out of guilt for what had happened to the dock jockey. But Kirk had proved himself a hard, reliable worker. And with his implants upgraded and his condition cured, he didn’t need AI support. He’s a member of the crew. It was a strange thought. Had they ever really had a crew before?

  “Yes, because I’m sharing my memories with you people!” The face on the screen made a series of exaggerated grimaces.

  “I am very grateful for your contributions.” Isham patted the side of the sarcophagus.

  “Me too,” Gaz had to smile at them, “but I’ve come with trade. You show me yours and I show you mine.”

  Isham’s mouth quirked up, he got it. But Kirk’s digital head just bounced. “Why didn’t you just say so!” A port opened at the base of his suspension tank. “Plug in whenever you’re ready. Share and share alike.”

  Sitting down next to Isham, Gaz plugged into the socket and streamed her consciousness into the same simulation chunk as Kirk and Isham.

  They stood at the end of a bar. Gaz appeared there in the middle of the patrons, the stench of old alcohol leaked between the floorboards and smoke clung to every surface. The air was hazy here, it made Gaz’s nose itch.

  “What is this place?” Gaz sat down next to Kirk.

  Isham leaned around him and said, “It is a “western” bar. Kid has strange ideas.”

  Gaz eyed herself in the mirror behind the shelves of spirits. One time, only once had Alaya commented how she liked the way this engineer looked. Gaz had worn this face ever since. Using that as an anchor, she locked her private memories and thoughts down and picked out the memories of the mission. “Oh well, let’s do what we came her for, right?”

  The other nodded to her and closed their eyes.

  Kirk ran to keep up with the other two, not that his chassis had any technical issues here, but rather he’d chosen a wide arc to give them room and to allow Vora’s enhancements to function. Gaz found it hard to shut out Kirk’s narration in his own head, so she focused on the environment. The patrol flight lifted up away from the side of the Root station when they didn’t find anything to explain the anomaly they must have detected.

  From the EM shadows of the station, Vora watched those ships return to their patrol pattern. It looked off still, an interdiction pattern intended to keep ships out rather than directly intercept them. This is why it had been so easy to spot their patrols. Why would they want someone attacking their station to know how their security routines worked? Madness.

  Automated security on the hull of the station ignored Vora’s presence as she — Kirk — headed for a different airlock. Optics and enhanced EM detectors pinged at the area about him, scanning intensely for other presences. It had felt too easy to Kirk too.

  Gaz really wanted to view this from Alaya’s perspective, or maybe Evan’s. But neither of them would permit intrusion if she asked. Little happened between breaking away from the rest of his team and Kirk receiving the communication from Alaya.

  When Alaya contacted him, he described the “shit as having been real.” Gaz didn’t see it. Certainly the ships up in their patrol routes had converged and changed their courses significantly. But at no point was Kirk ever in danger. He wasn’t even static on their sensors.

  Genuine respect surged through Gaz as the young man took charge of the demolition operation with nothing more than Alaya’s schematics and her instructions. Already in motion before he’d finished receiving those notes, he set his personal AI on figuring out how to do it in the first place.

  Out in in the cloud around the station those ships continued their dance. Kirk’s sensors picked up the Mousehome’s movement from the distance, observed the way the patrol ships changed their dispersal pattern when they picked up the coupe’s movement. A captain aboard an out of control ship or someone just wandering where they shouldn’t have, would have quickly and frighteningly found themselves under scrutiny by a dozen fighter craft. Gaz bet no one had ever gotten that far, but not from how those patrols reacted. Professional pilots running well-rehearsed scramble flights had a kind of murderous synergy to their movements, not unlike a dance. And these people had it to spare. Given proper weapons and half a chance… Gaz and the Mousehome should not have breeched this cordon.

  It was like the owners hadn’t cared if the seed were captured.

  When they reached the Root, Gaz intended to express her displeasure with their leadership. Or at the very least demand additional payment for their failure to provide the assistance they’d promised. She really wanted to make sure Alaya would be okay going forward. Demanding further payment could always take the form of an examination, treatment, and clean bill of health for Alaya.

  Kirk crouched inside of an airlock he’d jammed open while the countdown commenced. Out here with his enhanced optics, it was possible for Gaz to check the degree of warping in the station’s hull. The fires had been burning for long enough to ash some of the interior wood. Gaz hadn’t noticed.

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

  When the explosion shook the station, it sent a proper wave coursing over the skin of the hull. Parts tore out of their moorings, sections of the station simply buckled from within and a piece of the station flipped away, a symbolic egg cracking in the manner of retro sim directors clumsily referencing birth. There was nothing life-giving or affirming about this explosion.

  Gaz had held on to a vague hope she hadn’t killed that many people aboard the station. This explosion was proof of how wrong she’d been. Bodies tumbled out into the void, cast in various orbits and along personal trajectories as their collapsing lungs expelled their death rattles.

  The Mousehome closed in, but was still little more than a fast-moving blip on her optics when a proximity alarm blared. Gaz wasted precious seconds trying to disable the alarm from within the simulation before she cast out.

  The hangar looked normal, except for the emergency alerts and dimmed lighting of battle stations. “What the hell?”

  She linked into the ship’s computer to find a fuck-off big ship having translated directly into the cluster through the use of a novel drive system. Their own computer was still running the drive schematics when Gaz was hit with a particularly nasty logic virus. A few seconds delay and that virus would have hit their ship AI unimpeded. Their attackers would have had control over the Mousehome moments after. Gaz was incredibly lucky she was connected directly to the conn right then.

  As it was, Gaz forfeited control over most of her external systems, shutting them down in case she lost actual control over them and they turned on her. It was a pseudo-morphic virus, the kind of thing MilCas would have been very interested in examining. Much like Gaz herself. Despite its complexity, the virus attacking her could not adapt as quickly and thoroughly as Gaz herself could. Defensive anti-intrusion measures soon cleared the last bits of hostile code out of her system and she returned to observing the battle.

  In the second and a half she’d lost, their attackers launched a full battery of anti-ship missiles at them. Traditional navies, sea navies, would sweep their ships around and attempt to catch their opponents in a “broadside:” a full battery from half the ship’s canons. Such a positional maneuver was meaningless in space, though often batteries were kept in separate chambers. Their attacker, a Cabalon-class warship — the kind of thing corporate fleets used as their flagship — unleashed all of its space and time bound missiles. Anything that might not reach the Mousehome was left in its chamber. It was the void equivalent of a broadside.

  Mousehome was dead. Everyone aboard was dead. Maybe Kirk survived, but there was no point in calculating the odds. They had less than a minute to respond and they possessed neither the PDC or anti-missile lock systems to avoid that mass of explosives. And their shields? Gaz chuckled.

  Whoever sent this flagship — Nelissan Arms according to the register — had delivered a fatal blow.

  “Well played.”

  Gaz sat back against the wall of the hangar and relaxed. In a way, she was glad Alaya was recovering. She didn’t have to know how the Nissa situation had gotten them killed. Hopefully in the next life, Gaz’s relationship with Alaya would be a little less cursed. Maybe in the next life Gaz could be completely honest with her. It’s a cute wish.

  She turned on every sensor, gathered them to her and watched the 37-strong flight of missiles coming toward her. They’d flown for less than a second before Gaz had downloaded their schematics for review. Marachon Enterprises “Death Eagle” class interceptor missiles. With another thirty brains worth of computational power and a few day’s warning, Gaz and the others might have been able to hack them. Their flight control systems were idiotic-simple. Exactly the kind of system which typically revealed its flaws in testing. And these had been thoroughly, repeatedly tested in the field and live.

  So much of her attention had been turned toward the missiles, Gaz caught the targeting EM ping a few miliseconds late. Still, with her senses connected to the full power of the Mousehome’s optics, she enjoyed a front seat to a full spectrum view of a steady fire contained pulse weapon.

  One second the void was its usual black. The next a great red disc had swallowed a portion of the heavens. And the those missiles headed for them were devoured whole by red light. Incredible energy flowed off the pulse weapon, even in the Void. Mousehome’s hull rose half a degree in temp and a few of their optics burned out.

  But that was a good deal better than the ship’s hull rising several thousand degrees and every optic aboard melting. When the red-light ended, nothing but vaporized plasma remained of the missiles and their payload. Sensors struggled to detect a trace of them in the wake of the beam’s emission.

  In the distance, the missile’s source almost shuddered. She knew she was projecting her own emotions on that ship, but that captain probably felt exactly what Gaz had moments before. She — or he — had just lost their ship.

  When the beam’s light returned to the sky, it had a different orientation relative to the Mousehome, as if the beam were smaller and dimmer. Gaz knew what was coming, she’d heeded the infoNet broadcast her first few seconds in the cluster. The captain of the Cabalon had clearly not read the warning before activating his novel drive and teleporting in-cluster.

  This time the red light didn’t envelop its target. Instead it sheered off a portion of the attacking ship. In the following seconds, dozens, maybe hundreds of small vessels — all of them loaded out for salvage — translated in using drives similar to the Cabalon’s. Those drives were new, something Gaz would have to look into once they were clearly out of danger.

  Mousehome continued her trajectory as the ship who’d attacked them floundered in the void without its drive or power station. That red beam had surgically disabled the ship while the scavengers set about tearing it apart.

  “What just happened?” Isham opened his eyes and peeked at Gaz through one lid. “Were we attacked?”

  “Yes.” It was almost too funny to answer with a straight face. But Gaz could control the entirety of her systems. “They didn’t read the manual.”

  “Nelissan Arms is not going to give up attacking us.” Isham spoke from his seat around the wooden table in their shared simulation. This time Kirk was not in charge of designing it, Gaz was.

  “Maybe, maybe not.” Gaz sat up with her back straight and her shoulders down. Alaya was still recovering, but her condition was green across the board. “If it gets too expensive for them, you know they’ll stop.”

  Evan tossed a virtual data packet at both Isham and Gaz in the form of a dart. “Read this prospectus, but then delete it.”

  Gaz’s AI scanned the abstract and regurgitated it for her and then set about re-reading the whole thing. “This looks like a corpo schematic of NA.”

  “Where in the hell did you get this?” Isham’s voice sounded tilted for the first time since they met him. “This is… is there something darker than black?” Gaz could almost see his circuits frying the data from his brain. “I don’t want to know this.”

  “Nelissan Arms is not a closely held corp. Nor are they so poor losing their flagship and its crew means all that much to them. Based on net worth, I’d say we can expect the next Cabalon-scale attack in a week.” He leaned back and interlocked his hands behind his head. “In a way this is nice. We know what they’re willing to throw at us.”

  “Everything?” Here in the simulation it was a measure harder to modulate her voice and keep the tension and fear concealed.

  “I would say it’s pretty close.” He held one hand out to Isham. “Indeed. Knowing too much about them and their affiliates is dangerous.” He motioned to Gaz. “On the other hand, there is a hard, financial limit to how far they will pursue you. If they were ideologues we’d all be screwed. But in this case they are in it for the profit.”

  “And for revenge.” Isham nodded, his expression souring.

  Kirk looked around at the table. “Who the fuck is Nelissan Arms?”

  No one else had translated in using a skim drive, a new development out of Jupiter just hitting commercial use. They were another in the line of trans-light systems which, in this case, would create a security headache for any reasonable person running such a team. They would need to get the Mousehome’s sensors updated to account for the tachyon burst which preceded such a ship’s arrival. For now, life in the cluster sounded great to Gaz. Maybe they could spend their bonus from the Root priests on upgraded sensors. No surprise, but the skim drives had already arrived in Riggon cluster and at least one small fleet of the anarchists used them.

  When Alaya woke, Gaz briefed her in simulation about what had happened. “That’s not entirely surprising.” The skim drive seemed to irritate her more. “You’re telling me there’s a pseudo-teleportation drive out there capable of bringing a ship how close to another with little warning?”

  Alaya grumbled over that discovery for a day, spending a good deal of that day diving into Nets and conducting research. When they met back up in sim a day before returning to the Root system, Alaya had several discoveries to announce.

  “The good news about the skim drive is this: the tachyon particle bursts happen in a steady stream based on how far the ship travels, how massive it is, and its trajectory. In short, once we can detect them properly, the skim drive won’t be a threat at all.” That was good news, Gaz had more or less discovered the same thing. The next announcement was new to her. “I’ve decided to keep the weird memories clogging up my storage. I think I can use them. It does mean I’ll need to offload some stuff I was going to review, mainly data from the Rogue station. Anyone wanna review it?”

  No one else volunteered, so Gaz spoke up. “I wouldn’t mind.” Maybe it was creepy, but she liked the idea of reviewing data Alaya had been holding. It felt… intimate to Gaz.

  “Alright, it’s big so we should meet up to share it.”

  Gaz wasn’t going to comment on keeping the memories Alaya had gained from the seed. In her place, Gaz might have made the same choice. What concerned Gaz was not knowing what those memories contained, whether the memories themselves had enticed Alaya into keeping them.

  The rest of their meeting involved minor planning and details about the Root priests. Alaya and the other agreed with Gaz’s proposal to bill the Root priests for failing to send their promised asset. They’d almost abandoned the mission then. Gaz was glad they hadn’t.

  Unlike the Rogue station, the Root growth had gone on full alert. Ships bristling with weapons flew hostile patterns for several clicks out. This was very different from when they left. Their hails were answered by the Root system’s control. “In bound ship, designation Mousehome, what it is your purpose in the Root space’s control zone?”

  “We’re here dropping off a package.” Alaya contacted Gaz. “What’s going on? They’re being weirdly hostile.”

  Gaz stared at the pattern, astonished at how different it was from the graceful, gentle curves of the Rogue’s defensive perimeter. The unsettling feeling returned in force. “See what they say and proceed with caution.” She left her position in the conn and went to find Alaya in the hangar. They could control the ship from virtually anywhere. In the time it took Gaz to walk, the Root flight control system had still not cleared them for docking.

  “They’re still waiting?” Slow time made everything take forever for Gaz. But she wanted it for the processor cycles and the chance to react in case the priesthood did something hinky.

  “Incoming ship, Mousehome, you are clear for docking. Preparing a fighter escort for you.”

  Alaya let out an unnecessary sigh, shaking her head as she did. “I was sure they were about to open fire on us.”

  “We still have something they want.” Hearing the words spoken aloud, Gaz understood how precarious their position had become. One good reason not to send an asset to help them: total deniability. And the benefit of not having to pull that asset before they blew the Mousehome out of the void.